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RAPTURE TWO

This post was republished to O'NEILL'S PHILOSOPHY PAGE at 8:00:49 PM 10/13/2008

THE RAPTURE

 

 

What is the  Rapture?

To understand it you have to understand a few basics of Christian belief. First we know that Jesus died for our sins, rose from the dead on the 3^rd day, and that, after spending 40 days on earth among his disciples, rose as a body into Heaven, where sits on His throne. Remember, Jesus is in Heaven in his body and therefore Heaven has to be the sort of place in which bodies can live. At the end of time, when God decides it is just right, this bodily Jesus will come back to earth and re-establish his Kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years, after which time he will finally defeat the forces of Satan, this world will end, and the saved will join Jesus in Heaven. Those who rejected Jesus go to Hell  with Satan.

Some Christians, but by no means all, believe that the way Jesus comes back is described by Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Thessalonians.   Here is a critical but accurate account, followed by the passage from Paul. This account, written by an Eastern Orthodox sister, is quite hostile to Protestantism, but does tell you how more mainstream Christians, especially Orthodox and Catholics, see things.  

Reprinted From Orthodox Life Vol. 45, No1 - January - February 1995

WILL YOU MEET THE LORD
IN THE "RAPTURE" OR IN REALITY?

Then we which are alive and remain
shall be caught up together with them in the clouds
to meet the Lord in the air...
(I Thess. 4:17)

When we put together the concept of being caught up into the clouds to meet the Lord in the air together with the idea of an instantaneous transformation, the result is spine-tingling. We will suddenly one day just blast off into space... The hope of the Rapture is a very practical force in my life... It motivates me to win as many to Christ as possible before it is too late. I want to take as many with me as I can. Although I grieve over the lost world that is headed toward catastrophe, the hope of the Rapture keeps me from despair in the midst of ever worsening world conditions.

(Hal Lindsey, The Rapture)¹

 

Then, when the Antichrist is about to come, there will be many false christs and false prophets... So if the righteous were not sober-minded, even they would be deceived. But, behold, I have foretold these things to you; you have no excuse, for it is within your power not to be deceived...

...at the Second Coming He [Christ] will appear in a twinkling of an eye. And as the eagles, that is, the vultures, swiftly converge on a corpse, so to all the saints, who soar in the heights, will come where Christ will be and they will be snatched up into the clouds as the eagles.

(The Explanation by Blessed Theophylact of The Holy Gospel According to Matthew, ch. 23, verses 23-28)²

Whether our end comes during the reign of Antichrist or before, it is a certainty that the earthly life of each one of us will end. For all those who consider themselves to be Christians there is an expectation that if they have believed in Christ and have been faithful to His precepts they will in some manner meet the Lord and remain eternally in His presence.

As the culmination of Christian faith it is crucial that we understand first what Saint Paul was referring to by the phrase to he caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, who in fact are those who will meet the Lord, and finally how one must truly prepare for this meeting. The differences in approach, attitude and belief between Protestant and Orthodox teachings on the Second Coming of Christ, our resurrection, and our means of sanctification as reflected in the above quotations reveal the great abyss separating the two faiths. Examining the Protestant-inspired doctrine of the Rapture allows us not only to develop an appropriate Orthodox Christian response to preparation for the reign of Antichrist, but also to soberly prepare for our own death. We will realize that the hope of "meeting the Lord" rests not in a simple proclamation of belief in Christ and acceptance of Him as Saviour within a community of like-minded "believers," but that the power of a discerning Orthodox Christian and his hope of meeting the Lord rest in the sacramental life of the true Church, in the worthy partaking of the actual Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, for it is through this partaking that we in reality meet the Lord, now and forever.

As outlandish and sensationalistic as Hal Lindsey's above comments may seem to some, they tap into a very strong current in American religious thought - apocalypticism and prophecy belief. Memories of the FBI's fiery confrontation in Waco, Texas almost two years ago with David Koresh, a Bible-quoting prophet of the apocalypse and his Branch Davidian followers still linger in our nation's consciousness. According to Gallup polls 62% of Americans believe that Jesus will literally return to earth, and there is a thriving audience eager to keep abreast of the latest insights of self-professed biblical interpreters as to how current historical events, i.e., wars, earthquakes, world financial crises, etc., portend the imminent return of Christ to rescue "believers" from the disasters brew ing on earth.³

The Rapture is just such a scheme for rescuing believers. It was a belief first espoused by John Nelson Darby, a 19th century British Plymouth Brethren preacher, and had a heavy influence on such prominent American Protestants as the evangelist D. L. Moody, founder of the Moody Bible Institute, C. I. Scofield, compiler of the Scofield Reference Bible, and the popular evangelist Billy Sunday, not to mention his present-day counterpart, Billy Graham. Indeed, Wacker claims, "it was the unique version of premillennialism nurtured by Darby and brought to these shores after the Civil War that helped form the doctrinal core of virtually all fundamentalist and many evangelical churches."⁴

While there are a number of variations in the details of the doctrine, (chiefly concerning when the Rapture will occur with respect to the Tribulation) as Lindsey notes, all who literally interpret the Bible believe in the fact of the Rapture. The doctrine of the Rapture is based on an interpretation of I Thessalonians 4:17 and refers to the coming of Christ for the Church in which He will instantly snatch up all living believers to meet Him in the air and translate them into immortal bodies without experiencing physical death.

A major reason for the popularity of this doctrine is that in a book on the Rapture you will not find much discussion of what happens to a person after he dies. Wacker observes, "Prophecy belief... allayed the fear of death. Hope for the resurrection life always had been an integral part of the Christian message. But this version of premillennialism offered a more radical promise: that the saints who were alive in Christ at the time of the Rapture would be spared the sting of death entirely." In his book The Rapture Hal Lindsey fairly gushes out the words, "The truly electrify ing fact is that many of you who are reading this will experience this mystery. You will never know what it is to die physically."⁵

All who believe in the Rapture are premillennialists, that is, they believe that Jesus will return to earth and set up a 1,000 year earthly king dom followed by a final judgment where all unbelievers will be condemned. This idea of a 1,000 year earthly kingdom is known as chiliasm (from the Greek chiliasmos, a thousand years) and was condemned as a heresy by the Orthodox Church in 381. Formally it is based on a misinterpretation of the twentieth chapter of Revelation which speaks of the souls.. who lived with Christ a thousand years (20:4). Archbishop Averky in commenting on this verse writes:

From this it is clear that these saints who participate in the thousand-year reign of Christ are reigning with Christ and per forming judgment not on earth but in heaven, for it speaks here only concerning their souls which are not yet united with their bodies. From these words it is evident that the Saints take part in the governing of the Church of Christ on earth, and therefore it is natural and proper to appeal to them with prayers, asking their intercession before Christ with Whom they reign.⁶

Fr. Seraphim Rose forcefully refutes the notion of the Rapture and a millennial kingdom saying:

The Second Coming of Christ will be unmistakable: it will be sudden, from heaven and it will mark the end of this world.There can be no preparation for it save only the Orthodox Christian preparation of repentance, spiritual life, and watchfulness. Those who are preparing for it in any other way who say that he is anywhere here who preach that Jesus is coming soon without warning of the great deception that is to precede His Coming: are clearly the prophets of Antichrist, the false Christ who must come first and deceive the world, including all Christians who are not or do not become truly Orthodox. There is to be no future millennium. For those who can receive it, the millennium of the Apocalypse is now; the life of Grace is the Orthodox Church for the whole thousand years between the First Coming of Christ and the time of Antichrist. That Protestants should expect the millennium in the future is only their confession that they do not live in it in the present -that is, that they are outside the Church of Christ and have not tasted of Divine Grace.⁷

A brief discussion of the Rapture will show how valid Father Seraphim's last words are. For instance, how does one become one of the believers taken up in the Rapture? One is made worthy by simply (verbally) accepting Christ as his Saviour and trusting that his sins are washed away by virtue of Christ dying on the Cross - the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. As Billy Graham writes, "You do not have to do some wonderful thing to be saved. All you have to do is accept the wonderful thing Christ has done for you. After you have this assurance in your heart, tell other people about it. Also show by your daily life that Christ has changed you for His own glory."⁸

Precious little else seems to be necessary to be taken up with Christ and accorded the blessings of eternal life. According to Lindsey, "We need not fear being judged by the Lord for the result of substitutionary atonement is we can't be condemned. The significance of all this as far as achieving victory over the flesh is concerned is that it gives us the right motivation for living for Christ. We don't have to walk in fear of being condemned and disowned for our sins. Satan just loves to get the Christian focused inward upon his sins and failures. Our motivation must not be duty, obligation, or fear of rejection."'

The Protestant path to sanctification then involves no sense of struggle with sin, hence no need for real repentance, and no need for the Sacraments in order to be united with Christ for eternity.

Furthermore, the Rapture is an eschatological doctrine, one that by definition should be concerned with death, judgment and the future of the soul. Yet books dealing with the Rapture devote very little space to these topics. There is little discussion about heaven or hell, indeed one cannot help but come to the conclusion that Christians who accept this doctrine are completely disassociated from the heavenly realm. From the beginning Protestantism has been so bound to the sensual world and the rational mind that it cannot accept the notion that one, for example, can pray for the dead or petition the saints in prayer. Lutheran scholars writing to the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1580 stated:

Therefore it is necessary for the living to pray for the living; and consequently, they can accomplish something. For we also pray for one another; and we are convinced, or rather, we per ceive by reality that our prayer shall be heard. Therefore, this example cannot properly be applied to the saints who have died. For the saints, when they die, even if they indeed live in the pres ence of God according to the testimony of Christ, yet it does not follow from this that they know specifically each thing that was done by us on earth...

Given this Protestant preoccupation with the carnal, it should be no surprise then to read Billy Graham's idea of what the world to come will look like:

It boggles the mind to try to imagine the kind of earth it is going to be when God eliminates the devil and sin. Our minds are staggered at the thought of 'Christ on the throne.' The great southward moving Sahara Desert of Africa will bloom and blossom. Mankind will be able to grow new foods; land that today is useless will grow twelve crops a year. The urge in man's heart toward immorality will have vanished. In that day the great drive in man will be a thirst for righteousness. It takes a great deal of faith in these days of despondency to believe this, but it is the clear teaching of the Bible.¹¹

This vision is no more than a projection of an earthly kingdom and reflects how ill-prepared Protestants are for the real life after death, and hence why so many are eager to accept any doctrine that lets them think they can avoid it.

The Orthodox Church on the other hand is rich in information about the afterlife. Let us first consider how Saint Paul's words from Thessalonians (from which the idea of the Rapture is derived) are interpreted in the light of Orthodox Tradition. This moment is most definitely understood as the Second Coming of Christ and is immediately followed by the Last Judgment when all mankind will be assigned to their eternal resting places in either heaven or hell, depending on how they have conducted themselves in this life. At this time all people will be resurrected, and their souls reunited with their bodies; however, not all are going to be resurrected to glory. The New Testament mentions two different kinds of resurrection by use of Greek words that translate to "resurrection" and to "resurrection-from- out-of." Saint Theophylact of Bulgaria writes, "Whereas all men will be resurrected, but all will not have the... (resurrection-from-out-of). Indeed the sinners remain down on earth, awaiting the Judge. But the saints and the just, when they are gloriously resurrected, are caught up in the clouds, high in the air, in order to meet the Lord coming from the heavens to judge the world. For it is said: Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air ( I Thess. 4:17)."¹² How does one become one of those caught up? St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain states, "It should be noted that the glory and Grace of the Holy Spirit which the souls of the saints receive even while they are here... this same glory will cover and clothe their bare bodies in the resurrection and make them to be caught up to heaven."¹³ Saint Nicholas Cabasilas is even more specific:

Those who have the body of Christ within them will rush to Christ with an irresistible motion in order that they may receive their proper place. Accordingly Paul, as he shows that this rush cannot be restrained, called it a carrying up [rapture], for he says, we shall be carried off in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air... So they will move from one table to another, from that which is still veiled to that which is already manifested, from the bread to the Body. While they still live the human life Christ is bread for them, and He is their passover for they pass from here to the city which is in heaven... This earthly banquet brings us to that Body. Apart from it we cannot receive the Body, any more than it is possible for one to look at the light whose eyes have been gouged out... Accordingly, those who depart this life without the Eucharistic gifts will have nothing for that life. But those who have been able to receive the Grace and preserve it have entered into the joy of the Lord.¹⁴

So those who have worthily partaken of Communion and guarded that Grace will stand to glorify Christ at the Second Coming and will be in His presence for eternity. And what does it mean to worthily partake of Communion? St. Theodore of Studium admonishes us: "He who defiles his flesh is not a member of Christ; he who is rancorous is not a member of Christ and is unworthy of Communion; and neither is he who nourishes any other passion a member of Christ. Therefore everyone must examine himself and thus not be impure and rancorous. When he is cleansed and corrected through confession, then let him partake of the Body and Blood of Christ."¹⁵

In contrast to Protestantism as we said, Orthodox Tradition is full of material on the life to come. How vitally important it is for us to heed St. Theodore's words on struggling with the passions and living an earthly life of repentance becomes apparent when we consider what the Orthodox Church teaches on the soul after death.

There will be a Last Judgment of all men at the Lord's Second Coming where each will receive either their reward or punishment, but previous to this, each person at their death will go through a particular judgment and pass through the toll-houses. We find in the book, The Soul After Death:

After our redemption by Jesus Christ, "all who have openly rejected the Redeemer comprise the inheritance of satan: their souls, after the separation from the body, descend straight to hell. But Christians who are inclined to sin are also unworthy of being immediately translated from earthly life to blessed eternity. Justice itself demands that these inclinations to sin, these betray als of the Redeemer should be weighed and evaluated. A judging and distinguishing are required in order to define the degree of a Christian soul's inclination to sin, in order to define what pre dominates in it - eternal life or eternal death. The unhypocritical Judgment of God awaits every Christian soul after its departure from the body, as the holy Apostle Paul has said: It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment (Heb. 9:27).

For the testing of souls as they pass through the spaces of the air there have been established by the dark powers separate judgment places and guards in a remarkable order. In the layers of the under-heaven, from earth to heaven itself, stand guarding legions of fallen spirits. Each division is in charge of a special form of sin and tests the soul in it when the soul reaches this division. The aerial demonic guards and judgment places are called in the Patristic writings the toll-houses, and the spirits who serve them are called the tax-collectors.¹⁶

The Orthodox Lives of the Saints contain numerous accounts of how the soul passes through the toll-houses after death. One such account of the Soldier Taxiotes (Lives of the Saints, March 28) is as follows:

When I was dying, I saw Ethiopians who appeared before me. Their appearance was very frightful; my soul beholding them was disturbed. Then I saw two splendid youths, and my soul leaped out into their arms. We began slowly to ascend in the air to the heights, as if flying, and we reached the toll-houses that guard the ascent and detain the soul of each man. Each toll-house tested a special form of sin: one lying, another envy, another pride; each sin has its own testers in the air. And I saw that the angels held all my good deed in a little chest; taking them out, they would compare them with my evil deeds. Thus we passed by all the toll-houses. And when, nearing the gates of heaven, we came to the toll-house of fornication, those who guard the way there detained me and presented to me all my fleshly deeds of fornication, committed from my childhood up to now. The angels who were leading me said: 'All the bodily sins which you committed in the city, God has forgiven because you repented of them.' To this my adversaries said to me: 'But when you left the city, in the village you committed adultery with a farmer's wife.' The angels, hearing this and finding no good deed which could be measured out for my sin, left me and went away. Then the evil spirits seized me and, overwhelming me with blows, led me down to earth. The earth opened, and I was let down by narrow and foul-smelling descents into the underground prison of hell.¹⁷

In an era when we hear so often that Christians who profess a belief in the Trinity are "all the same," whatever particular denomination they happen to belong to, our analysis of the Rapture makes it abundantly clear that this truism is simply not so. How, for example, do we account for these differences in eschatology between Orthodox Christianity and Protestantism?

While the specific doctrine of the Rapture is relatively recent, it is sim ply a symptom of the Protestant disease of vanity of the mind. A vainglory validated by their doctrine of sola scriptura (relying solely on the Bible as an authority), which allows for private interpretation of the Bible and replaces the mind of God, as expressed through the Church Fathers, with the mind of man. Saint Simeon the New Theologian writes of the dangers of private interpretation, "Especially do those who have gone astray in ignorance corrupt the meaning of divine Scripture and interpret it according to their lusts. For them the power of divine Scripture is inaccessible... One who has the whole of Divine Scripture on his lips cannot understand and attain to the mystical divine glory and power concealed in it if he will not fulfill the commandments of God and be vouchsafed to receive the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth Who might open to him the words of Divine Scripture as a book, and show him the mystical glory which is within them and might at the same time show the power and glory of God."¹⁸

Sister Anastasia
Conclusion in next issue.

Footnotes:

1. Lindsey, Hal. The Rapture, New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1985, p.46.
2. Theophylact, Blessed. The Explanation by Blessed Thee ph ylact of The Holy Gospel According to St. Matthew, Vol.1, House Springs, MO: Chrysostom Press, 1992, p.208.
3. Wacker, Grant, "Planning ahead: The enduring appeal of prophecy belief," Christian century, January 19, 1994, p.48.
4. Ibid., p.49.
5. The Rapture, op. cit., p.43.
6. Averky, Archbishop. The Apocalypse of St. John: An Orthodox Commentary, Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1985, p.198.
7 Rose, Fr. Seraphim. Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1983, pp.214-215.
8. Graham, Billy. Approaching Hoofbeats: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Waco, TX: WORD Books, 1983, p.205.
9. Lindsey, Hal., Combat Faith, New York: Bantam Books, 1986, p.176.
10. Mastrantonis, Fr. George. Augsburg and Constantinople, Brookime, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1982, p.270.
11. Graham, Billy. Angels: God's Secret Agents, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1975, p.139.
12. Rallis, George, "Two Different Kinds of Resurrection in the New Testament," Orthodox Life, March-April, 1983, p.15.
13. Ibid., p. 17.
14. Cabasilas, St. Nicholas. The Life in Christ, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1974, p.146-148.
15. St. Theodore of Studium, "That We Must Communicate in the Most Pure Mysteries with Pure Thoughts," Orthodox Life, March-April, 1969, p.30.
16. Rose, Fr. Seraphim. The Soul After Death, Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1993, pp.65-66.
17. Ibid., pp.75-76.
18. Rose, Fr. Seraphim, "How to Read the Holy Scriptures," Orthodox America, March, 1989, p.11.

[BACK]

Here is the passage from Paul; it is from I Thessalonians 4:13-18

 

Those Who Died in Christ

 13But ^(AD)we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who ^(AE)are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do ^(AF)the rest who have ^(AG)no hope.

 14For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, ^(AH)even so God will bring with Him ^(AI)those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.

 15For this we say to you ^(AJ)by the word of the Lord, that ^(AK)we who are alive and remain until ^(AL)the coming of the Lord, will not precede ^(AM)those who have fallen asleep.

 16For the Lord ^(AN)Himself ^(AO)will descend from heaven with a ^(AP)shout, with the voice of ^(AQ)the archangel and with the ^(AR)trumpet of God, and ^(AS)the dead in Christ will rise first.

 17Then ^(AT)we who are alive and remain will be ^(AU)caught up together with them ^(AV)in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always ^(AW)be with the Lord.

 18Therefore comfort one another with these words.

1 T

MORE ON THIS TOMORROW

IDENTITY

IDENTITY TEMPLATES

Here we will discuss a variety of templates or frameworks for thinking about identity. 

Philosophers, at least since Descartes in the early 1600s, have tended to define identity individualistically. We recall that for Descartes the self was an isolated “thinking thing” living in a body of which it could not be certain and in a world about whose reality it had profound doubts. Descartes’ self was then both isolated and primarily intellectual/psychological: identity meant one’s thinkings and feelings and perceptions and whatever it was that held them all together, inside one’s head, so to speak. 

John Locke made this Cartesian sense of identity even deeper and more difficult to get past when he brilliantly reformulated identity in what seems like very 21st century terms, as both consciousness  and as  self-consciousness. By “consciousness” Locke means the everyday ongoing awareness that we generally have and that only shuts down entirely when we fall asleep. Many of us -- perhaps most -- live most of our waking lives in an internal dialogue or running commentary, similar to  the voice-over in a documentary. But there is another thing going on at the same time. Not only are we aware but we are aware that we are aware. The running commentary is directed to someone, namely to that constant presence we are to ourselves whatever that presence might be. 

This awareness/self-awareness is very different in many ways from Plato’s idea of the soul, but it also shares things with that idea. Like the soul, conscious identity is often thought of as constant in some sense: we think, without thinking about it much, that we are the same person we were in Mrs. Bulfinch’s pre-school, or in St. Sciatica Academy; we are a little weirded out by baby pictures and films of our very early life because it is hard to see ourselves in those relatively anonymous creatures but people almost never really doubt that the images of themselves as fetuses or infants they are shown are really images of them at a very early or pre-age, age. So, without examining the issue much we assume that we have been who we now are right from the get-go. 

At the same time, however, our idea of our self is radically different from Plato’s idea of the soul in the fact that we see the self as developing or growing or becoming other than it once was, although never entirely so.  Americans as a culture believe, and seem to always have believed, in the possibility of reinvention through the development of our inner selves. We believe that in some sense there really  is an American Idol, America’s Top Model, The Apprentice. We love makeovers, especially extreme ones. We are a people who lived with a frontier, with unexplored and open territory(even though it really wasn’t), and we still believe that we can uproot ourselves, either literally or metaphorically, and become better versions of ourselves. James captures this perfectly when he says on one hand that we can make things true by acting in certain ways, and on the other that we can will things true when the evidence if lacking, if the things we will to be true are beneficial (read: make us feel better about ourselves and the world).

Plato does not believe this at all. He defines true learning as a form of remembering, not of acquiring something new. He loves the soul and reason not because of their power to control and shape the world -- our view -- but because they cannot change and have little interest in changing the world, except to run it in a more orderly manner according to unchanging principles. This is also the impetus and hunch behind some conservative, and, somewhat surprisingly, some liberal political and social positions. Conservatives want to believe in a changeless something called “family values” and in the “traditional family” of husband, wife and children living together in a home they own. Many Americans actually believe that this has been the historical pattern for all or most of American history and that it has only recently come under attack and pressure. The story, without going into detail, has really been more complex and nuanced than this, and many of the very people who embrace such values are themselves single parents, divorced, or otherwise living outside this ideal. We often have even more egregious fantasies about traditional American patriotism and loyalty to country, forgetting or never knowing that Americans have, traditionally, been skeptical of unquestioning patriotism, resisted military service, and used national crises to garner personal profit.

In the same way some diehard liberals tend to be romantics in the sense that they believe that there was a time when, for example, Native Americans lived in perfect or near-perfect harmony with nature, respecting and loving the environment. This belief covers over the fact that many Native American tribes exterminated all the large domesticable animals in their environment, used very destructive farming techniques, and left their land littered with trash. Many tribes were also, by our modern standards, extraordinarily violent, given to pointless torture and humiliation; they held slaves, made theft and rape into manly virtues, and imposed all heavy labor on the women of the tribe, who had very few rights. Liberals also sometimes believe that human beings are naturally good and benevolent, and that if we just lifted the inequalities imposed by society we could all live in harmony.

Both these visions of stable values and unchanging identities, “authentic” pure selves hiding beneath the surface of human corruption, are very Platonic and have always remained an element in our own belief system. But to return to my earlier theme of change, we Americans tend to believe that even bedrock values are connected to change. We are an Oprah/Joel Osteen culture in which anyone can remake themselves as an authentic individual who embraces eternal values. We believe in therapy, twelve step programs, Bible study, altar calls, being born in the Spirit and life coaches. Self-help books are routinely best sellers. We diet, we exercise, we go to leadership retreats, we are forever making ourselves “better”.

And the ultimate key to self-improvement is, following Locke, always a change in consciousness, in how we see ourselves, in how we as individuals think and feel about ourselves. As long as we can learn how to have a changed consciousness, a changed, improved, perfected, inner sense of self, we can change outer circumstances. We are routinely inspired by people whose inner attitude overcomes physical and other disabilities. Blind people who sail, legless people in marathons, deaf people dancing, enchant us and make us feel that for us, as well, anything is possible. And these people succeed because they think  and  feel the right way. As James says they change the outer world because of inner attitudes. They create new truths.

So, even though we are Platonists in believing that there are unchanging values, and believe that we have always been the same person we also believe that the person we have been, and are, is the everchanging consciousness we have of ourselves, a consciousness that can change how it thinks and feels and thereby alter life in a fundamental way. Plato might think that we can grow closer to eternal truths by inner training, intellectual work, but we tend to believe that we can create new truths by acting in the world, and changing our thinking, not to mimic eternal models, but to express more of our individual inner selves. 

There is another feature of consciousness that is crucial and that we did not discuss in class. When Locke talks about being conscious he also means that we have an identity because we can remember who we are across time. We are aware that we are the same person today that we were yesterday, and that even though we change that change is always a function of maintaining a steady sense of conscious identity from day to day and from year to year.

The two keys for Locke are awareness and memory. He says that even if we could migrate the consciousness - our immediate awareness of who we are - from one body to another we would be the same person if not the same physical individual, because we would have the same consciousness with the same memories, and the same sensed continuity between those past memories and the present ones.

So, Locke speculates that my  consciousness can move from body to body and remain the same. Conversely, the same body can be home to different consciousnesses. Consciousness and its memories are so important that Locke argues, in the section you are asked to read, that even if someone (we call her X) were to get drunk and do something terrible, such as getting into a car, driving across campus and striking down the President of the University, that person could be considered responsible for the act if and only if we could prove that she had not blacked out. Locke argues that X can never successfully defend herself by making the black-out claim, however, because he says that there can never be conclusive evidence that this or that individual blacked out from drinking too much. We all know that people often black out from drinking, but to use that defense to avoid responsibility for an individual act requires that we prove that this instance was one where someone blacked out, and there is just no way to prove that. So, says Locke, we convict X because she could be lying about blacking out, and we have no way to prove that she isn’t. We do not convict her, according to Locke, because she should have known better than to take the first drink, or the second, and so forth. 

But then he adds something interesting that tells us a great deal about his theory of personal identity. He says that when X faces God in the final judgment, God will know for certain whether she really blacked out and could not remember her act. And if He determines that X really blacked out, that is that she did not remember doing the act, then it must mean that this was not an act for which she could be held responsible. In a sense, because she genuinely cannot remember doing it, it is an act done by her body, but not by her as a person. So, God would not hold X accountable for that sin!

Consciousness and accurate memory that establishes its continuity are therefore central to Locke’s idea of identity. Any theory, or way of talking and thinking, that contradicts that view or makes it seem irrelevant and off the point, wil threaten the position.

Freud and the tendencies he represents are a profound threat to their model, in which the free consciousness chooses to change its direction and can do so, with effort. Freud’s hunch is that human identity is like a very old city, such as Rome, in which different civilizations have laid down new street patterns, employed new architectural modes and techniques, used space and light differently and so on . In a real city, however, most of the past layers are built over and have disappeared. There are ruins, and old buildings, but they are marked as such and coexist in the same time and space as the modern city. Freud says that human identity is such a city but with this twist: none of the older layers have completely disappeared. They coexist as ghostly presences inside the current buildings. Nothing has really disappeared. There are no ruins but several cities from different periods coexisting, one built directly on top of the other.And so current identity cannot be made up of consciousness and its memory of itself as a single series of events. Every conscious event has its ghost or shadow; that is, every thought and feeing of which we are aware might represent, in some indirect way, another thought or feeling that it is both expressing and masking at the same time. And perhaps we cannot trust memory: what if our current consciousness seems as coherent as it does because we have, for whatever reason, forgotten important things, and forgotten that we have forgotten them?

For example, what if we have forgotten our infantile eroticism, our primitive pre-moral delight in organ pleasure, in creating pleasing friction on sensitive tissues in the mouth, the anus, and around the genitals?  What if our childish desires for the breast, for mommy’s warm sensuous presence, are also purposely forgotten? If any of this is even remotely plausible what it means is that the consciousness we experience is neither simple nor transparent, but an overlay on a complicated series of past desires which, even though forgotten, still influence our present. 

Let me use a simple, homely analogy: everyone agrees that a dog or cat who has been absued or neglected as a pup or kit will exhibit character traits that echo this early maltreatment. Fluffy might be uneasy around large men or people with big hair; Rover might get his back up and growl at children. I had a dog who freaked out completely whenever she saw homeless people. She would panic, pulling and bucking to get away, her eyes wild. Otherwise she was a sweet, loving creature who was supremely at home with people. I had another dog who I found as a stray puppy. He never allowed anyone but me, and very gradually the woman I married, to touch him. He lived until he was 14 and in all that time we were the only two humans who ever petted him. 

Thus both dogs were shaped by their respective pasts, whatever they were. The animals did not seem to be aware of those pasts, and perhaps could not remember them, but their current awareness was sharply determined by those pasts, and they were who they were because of those events over which they had more or less no control.

The question that Freud, and later thinkers such as the evoluitionary anthropologists, and earlier the sociologists, raise, have to do with the degree to which any individual consciousness is formed by often unfelt and unseen forces that seem at times to determine or force choices in ways that the individual cannot help. Such choices, however, often feel as if they are freely made.

So the question you need or want to ask yourselves is this: is my identity entirely my own, as extensive as my consciousness and just as transparent? Am I the sum of my remembered and experienced thoughts and feelings, and are the choices I make as consciousness really my own? 

Or might I be the plaything of deeper forces - evolutionary selection and adaptation, the unconscious and its desires, class conflict, gender roles, that have been assigned to me by anonymous movements among large numbers of people? If this is true at all, to what extent am I may own person? Am I responsible for my actions, or can I relax and realize that whatever I do I cannot help doing? Or are the answers subtler than these alternatives seem to allow?

Think about these things. I will get back, by tomorrow, with some ways to connect these questions to the question of this paper: how do I connect my identity to the current financial upheavals and especially to credit derivatives? 

Look for more soonest.

 

THE RAPTURE

The image I provided is one of the best one-page summaries of the Rapture out there. All thanks to the Tract Society.

For more information and resources the Wikipedia article is not bad, far more accessible and well-written than their stuff of finance. 

Also, go to the following site: Rapture Ready, which is mighty strange and cumbersome but informative and fully committed to the dispensationalist premillennial position(which is heavily leveraged, considering how much each sinner owes God but not, so far as I can tell, a derivative, unless we consider being saved by Christ's death a derivative of that suffering). Anyway the URL: http://www.raptureready.com/time/rap31a.html

USING INVESTOPEDIA

Dear Students

I have found that Investopedia, a website run by Forbes, is the best place to get simple information about the more sophisticated moves in finance.

Please Google their site and look up Leverage, Hedging, Futures, and then read the associated articles listed at the end of each of these short pieces. You will find yourself very well informed.

ECONOMIST ANALYSIS

Download economist_analysis_of_collapse.pdf

SECOND OCCASIONAL PAPER

The Second Occasional Paper

 

The second Occasional paper will be due on Wednesday, October 22^st. It will be at least 5 pages long, preferably longer to do justice to all it needs to cover, and will include the following:

1.     An exposition of what a derivative, and especially a credit derivative, is, based on materials I have made available and on additional materials you will uncover. We will discuss derivatives in class on October 17^th.

2.     An explanation of the Rapture as that is represented in the flyer I found n MTA bus 728 in Los Angeles and passed on to you. I will make additional copies available if you have lost yours. I will try to post in online as well. We will discuss the Rapture in class on October 8^th.

3.     A response to essays # 1, 3 and 6 from Section V, “Self and Freedom”, from the class book. We will discuss these essays in class beginning October 8^th , and have a full discussion on the 10^th and 15^th.

The paper can connect all three themes or it can leave them separate. My hope is that you will be able to incorporate the financial issues and Rapture into your thinking about your identity. 

DERIVATIVES

The Barnyard Basics Of Derivatives

by Andrew Beattie (Contact Author | Biography)

 

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When people think of stocks, bonds or Treasury bills, they can usually come up with a clear picture in their minds, and probably some examples as well. When the word is "derivatives", most people are lucky if they can conjure up anything but an indistinct fog.

 

Derivatives are generally placed in the realm of advanced or technical investing, but there is no reason why they should remain a mystery to common investors. This article will use a simple story of a fictional farm to explore the mechanics of derivatives.

 

The Definition

Derivatives are financial products with value that stems from an underlying asset or set of assets. These can be stocks, debt issues, or almost anything. A derivative's value is based on an asset, but ownership of a derivative doesn't mean ownership of the asset.

 

We will look at some examples.

 

The Future of Healthy Hen Farms

Gail, the owner of Healthy Hen Farms, is worried about the volatility of the chicken market with all the sporadic reports of bird flu coming out of the east. Gail wants a way to protect her business against another spell of bad news. Gail meets with an investor who enters into a futures contract with her.

 

The investor agrees to pay $30 per bird when the birds are ready for slaughter, say, in six months time, regardless of the market price. If, at that time, the price is above $30, the investor will get the benefit as he or she will be able to buy the birds for less than market cost and sell them onto the market at a higher price for a gain.

 

If the price goes below $30, then Gail will be receiving the benefit because she will be able to sell her birds for more than the current market price, or what she would have gotten for the birds in the open market.

 

By entering into a futures contract, Gail is protected from price changes in the market, as she has locked in a price of $30 per bird. She may lose out if the price flies up to $50 per bird on a mad cow scare, but she will be protected if the price falls to $10 on news of a bird flu outbreak.

 

By hedging with a futures contract, Gail is able to focus on her business and limit her worry about price fluctuations. (For related reading, see A Beginner's Guide To Hedging.)

 

Swapping

Gail has decided that it's time to take Healthy Hen Farms to the next level. She has already acquired all the smaller farms near her and is looking at opening her own processing plant. She tries to get more financing, but the lender, Lenny, rejects her.

 

The reason is that Gail financed her takeovers of the other farms through a massive variable-rate loan and the lender is worried that, if interest rates rise, Gail won't be able to pay her debts. He tells Gail that he will only lend to her if she can convert the loan to a fixed-rate. Unfortunately, her other lenders refuse to change her current loan terms because they are hoping interest rates will increase too.

 

Gail gets a lucky break when she meets Sam, the owner of a chain of restaurants. Sam has a fixed-rate loan about the same size as Gail's and he wants to convert it to a variable-rate loan because he hopes interest rates will decline in the future.

 

For similar reasons, Sam's lenders won't change the terms of the loan. Gail and Sam decide to swap loans. They work out a deal by which Gail's payments go toward Sam's loan and his go toward Gail's loan. Although the names on the loans haven't changed, their contract allows them both to get the type of loan they want. (To learn more, read An Introduction To Swaps.)

 

This is a bit risky for both of them because if one of them defaults or goes bankrupt, the other will be snapped back into his or her old loan, which may require a payment for which either Gail of Sam may be unprepared. But it allows for them to modify their loans to meet their individual needs.

 

Buying Debt

Lenny, Gail's financier, ponies up the additional capital at a favorable interest rate and Gail goes away happy. Lenny is pleased as well because his money is out there getting a return, but he is also a little worried that Sam or Gail may fail in their business.

 

To make matters worse, Lenny's friend Dale comes to him asking for money to start his own film company. Lenny knows Dale has a lot of collateral and that the loan would be at a higher interest rate because of the more volatile nature of the movie industry, so he's kicking himself for loaning all his capital to Gail.

 

Fortunately for Lenny, derivatives offer another solution. Lenny spins Gail's loan into a credit derivative and sells it to a speculator at a discount to the true value. Although Lenny doesn't see the full return on the loan, he gets his capital back and can issue it out again to his friend Dale.

 

Lenny likes this system so much that he continues to spin out his loans as credit derivatives, taking modest returns in exchange for less risk of default and more liquidity. 

 

Options

Years later, Healthy Hen Farms is a publicly traded corporation (the ticker symbol is (obviously) HEN) and is America's largest poultry producer. Gail and Sam are both looking forward to retirement.

 

Over the years, Sam bought quite a few shares of HEN. In fact, he has more than $100,000 invested in the company. Sam is getting nervous because he is worried that some shock, another case of bird flu for example, might wipe out a huge chunk of his retirement money. Sam starts looking for someone to take the risk off his shoulders. Lenny, financier extraordinaire and an active writer of options, agrees to give him a hand.

 

Lenny outlines a deal in which Sam pays Lenny a fee to for the right (but not the obligation) to sell Lenny the HEN shares in a year's time at their current price of $25 per share. If the share prices plummet, Lenny protects Sam from the loss of his retirement savings.

 

Lenny is OK because he has been collecting the fees and can handle the risk. This is called a put option, but it can be done in reverse by someone agreeing to buy a stock in the future at a fixed price (called a call option). (For more insight, read the Options Basics tutorial.)

 

The Happy Ending

Healthy Hen Farms remains stable until Sam and Gail have both pulled their money out for retirement. Lenny profits from the fees and his booming trade as a financier.

 

In this ideal tale, you can see how derivatives can move risk (and the accompanying rewards) from the risk averse to the risk seekers. Although Warren Buffett once called derivatives, "financial weapons of mass destruction", derivatives can be very useful tools, provided they are used properly. Like all other financial instruments, derivatives have their own set of pros and cons, but they also hold unique potential to enhance the functionality of the the overall financial system.

 

by Andrew Beattie, (Contact Author | Biography)

Andrew Beattie is a freelance writer and self-educated investor. He worked for Investopedia as an editor and staff writer before moving to Japan in 2003. Andrew still lives in Japan with his wife, Rie. Since leaving Investopedia, he has continued to study and write about the financial world's tics and charms. Although his interests have been necessarily broad while learning and writing at the same time, perennial favorites include economic history, index funds, Warren Buffett and personal finance. He may also be the only financial writer who can claim to have read "The Encyclopedia of Business and Finance" cover to cover.

More on Plato

The key idea in Plato, which the Cave, the Sun and the Line are all designed to clarify, is that there are levels of human knowledge, and that as one moves up the scale knowledge becomes more dependable. Recall that Descartes finds his most trustworthy beliefs at the "bottom" of his doubt, when he has given up hope in all other beliefs. Plato works in the opposite direction. As he purifies his beliefs, he "rises" up a kind of ladder of certainty. The assumption behind this is the same as what motivates Descartes: both guys believe that there is something call human reason that operates somewhat independently of the body and that works better only when all the bodily distractions such as smells, tastes, feels and looks are either discounted or eliminated entirely. For both the ideal knowledge is that in which only the pure mind, pure reason, is involved, and when what is known is just as pure – in Descartes' case, the world of the senses is known most truly when we know it as pure, mathematically describable extension, the purely abstract property that has to do with the fact that for a thing to be a thing at all it has to occupy space.

For Plato, the truest thing about the world is the pure Ideas or Forms that really exist as objects of thought and that provide the template or model for all things that exist in the world of time and space. This might seem like an odd notion, and it is, but what Plato really means is that the pure mathematical relationships we can think are for him more real than dogs and Subarus. Why? He believes this because while dogs and Subarus change and disappear over time, and are limited in time and place, pure ideas have to be thought just as they are thought – they force us to think them in a single way (for example, all triangles on a plane surface enclose 180 degrees of arc), and these ideas never change no matter who thinks them, or where, or when, and they never get used up no matter how many times we use them, and they never go away or disappear – they never die or break down, as dogs and Subarus sadly always do.

 

Plato lived in a time when people had much less control over the environment. Life we short, travel was limited, everything was more difficult. He really valued those elements in his life that he could acquire with little effort (ideas), that were durable, that were easily portable and that that could never be used. Everything else in his world was, relatively speaking, undependable and, in a world where things were hard to come by, and where there were many fewer things than we have, we cannot really blame him for favoring the few things he could depend on.

 

As far as beliefs go, Plato thought that there were objective truths and standards. Good was as pure and timeless a reality as the idea of a triangle. He thought that of we thought Good the right way there was only one way to think it, and that if we knew, and lived in, this idea, we would apply it accurately to every situation that called for a judgment about the Good, whether that good be moral or aesthetic or legal. He is one of the people who instituted the idea that there are really objective moral values that do not depend on culture or gender or ethnicity, and that hold for all people under all conceivable circumstances. He differs from the religious believers in the fact that he believed that these absolute standards are not given to us by God in a revelation, in a sacred book, but that humans can figure out the rules by themselves, using reason, and therefore do not need God.

Look for more later today or early tomorrow. Ciao!

Various Notes on Plato, James and Moore

JAMES, MOORE, PLATO

1. For James, truth can be made or willed. In the first case, we create a new truth that did not exist before -- a relationship, a friendship, MADD, Hockey Moms for Sarah, etc., by exerting ourselves in the world with the assumption that the world has room for new realities and is the sort of place that welcomes and sustains them.The idea here is the reality is not fixed. 

2. His second idea is that there are important truths that we do not create -- they are not that sort of thing -- but to which we assent, and make true, in the sense that, in the absence of conclusive evidence one way or the other, we will them to be true, and not only do will them true but, according to James, we must  so will them in order to live a properly human and moral life. If we fail to will these beliefs then we are refusing to bet on the better possibility, namely that there are perfect and eternal things, and to fail to bet on the better possibility, the one that gives our life more meaning, is to take a definite position -- namely, that in the absence of conclusive evidence, we are choosing to act as if there were evidence that the worse thing is true, and for James this is positively counter-intuitive, not something we have a right to do!

Plato: Plato has a somewhat different take on the situation. Let's make it as clear as possible. For James we can only know what we can directly experience and think about, and we cannot really think about things that occur beyond the limits of our eyes and ears and hands. There is, for James, no dependable "sixth sense"; there may be evidence that some people experience the presence of the dead, or of spirits and angels and even God, but all this evidence is inconclusive because it remains within the limits of physical experience, and we are smart apes not made for knowing anything beyond what these physical media can tell us. 

If, therefore, we see dead people as the kid did in the movie, this is not proof that there are dead people to be seen, but only that we have the experience of seeing dead people. It's the same when we feel the presence of Jesus as our savior. We feel his presence; we might even see him -- but in seeing him we are having he experience of seeing him, and all this proves is that we had that experience.  

BUT THERE IS, AS JAMES KNOWS, NO CONCLUSIVE WAY TO PROVE THAT OUR FEELINGS AND SIGHTINGS ARE OF A DIVINE OR A DIVINELY SENT BEING.  IT WOULD BE A GREAT THING IF THERE WERE A LOVING GOD AND HE SENT HIS SON TO SAVE US, AND IT MIGHT BE A BETTER WAY TO LOOK AT THE WORLD THAN THAT SUGGESTED IN THE HANDOUT ABOUT PEOPLE BEING POINTLESS ACCIDENTS. BUT STILL, THE BETTER, MORE HOPEFUL HYPOTHESIS HAS NO IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE. IT MIGHT BE TRUE BUT THEN AGAIN IT MIGHT NOT. WE CANNOT TELL, 

JAMES SAYS TRUST THE SENSES AND THEN TAKE LEAPS OF FAITH WHEN THEY OFFER INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE. BUT NOW WE SEE , READING DESCARTES, THAT EVEN INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE CAN BE 100% MISLEADING. 

SO, IS THERE SOME WAY TO GET BEYOND THE UNDEPENDABLE SENSES? IS THERE SOME WAY TO ELIMINATE THE NEED FOR LEAPS OF FAITH ON ONE HAND, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF BECOMING A SKEPTIC, ON THE OTHER?

PLATO'S SUN, CAVE AND LINE SUGGEST THAT THERE MIGHT BE.

DESCARTES' AGREES, BUT OFFERS A SOMEWHAT DIFFERENT PATH, OF WHICH MORE LATER.

DESCARTES HAS A DIFFERENT TAKE: SEE THE DESCARTES BLOG ENTRY.

WHAT FOUNDS CERTAINTY IS NOT THE EXISTENCE OF PURE IDEAS BUT THE KNOWLEDGE THAT I AM A THINKING THING WHO CANNOT BE DECEIVED ABOUT THE FACT THAT I AM THINKING. SEE THE DESCARTES BLOG ENTRY.

OK - NOW WHAT DOES G.E. MOORE BELIEVE? Essentially he believes that when a guy like Descartes exercises systematic doubt that calls all his sensory beliefs into question and even doubts that there is a world at all in which he lives, or any other beings like or unlike himself in it -- it could all be an illusion -- he is always already doing two things. First he is assuming that the world that Moore details, the one in which I was born and cannot fly and have things closer and further from me and so forth - that very same world that D entirely doubts, albeit hyperbolically -- must already be assumed to be real in order to be doubted in the first place! And it remains there always as the place in which the doubting goes on, entirely unchanged even at the depth/height of D's doubtings.

Doubting alone cannot change anything and does not make the world disappear. Even if the skeptic can "explain" this it is still true nonetheless.

Second, when philosophers also say that they doubt that other people have any more solid experience of the world, and write books for others to read about the unreality of the world in which the books are printed, distributed and read, they are conveniently forgetting two things - without the world they are doubting no one else coudlr ead their book, and, in putting the book out there they are also assuming that there are people, consciousnesses, to read it, and so doubting people also does not work. 

Let's see how Moore might deal with Plato. Plato does not deny that we experience things through our senses, but he does deny that these things and the way we experience them are ultimate things or accurate perceptions. There are, he believes, much truer accounts of what worldly objects like wombats and ipods are; they are really "copies", or changeable, limited and imperfect versions of an idealized, or ideal, version of themselves that exist as pure ideas. It in turn is no more than the concretization of much more abstract ideas which, because they do not change and have to be thought in one way rather than another, seem to have already-established and unalterable characters and therefore to be more real than things whose characters change over time and depending on how we perceive them. 

Plato therefore believes that people who study the deeper realities, those revealed in higher mathematics and theoretical physics, and who study the even deeper reality of the ultimate Good, can figure out, even in this changeable world, what is morally right and politically just. Plato believes that there is an objective truth to which reason has access, and that if we know enough we can make true decisions. He would oppose James's will to believe because it is based on less-than-rational evidence. Plato did not much trust the passions as guides to belief because he thought that the body's desires are superficial and blind us to deeper truths. What might look or feel good to the body might be repellent to reason.

For example, the liter of vodka that makes me feel great at a party, or the handsome face that turns me on, ˆseem good but might not really be good. The passions are not to be trusted, they are like shadows.

But as we noted in the earlier blog entry Plaro ain't no religious believer. He does not appear to believe in a personal God or in a sacred book, although he does believe that human beings have undying souls. However, the souls are immortal not because God created them but because they are made of reason, and reason never dies. To mimic a current use of alnguage, Plato is spiritual but not religious.

 

Moore would say that this world, the world of the senses,  is much more real than Plato allows. Granted that there are scientific accounts of ipods and tacos, chemical and physical analyses that tell a deeper truth about them, but these are analyses, not the things we experience, and even to say that they are "really" nothing but collections of spinning packets of energy imbedded in dark matter is not necessarily to tell more truth about them. It is, rather, to give an account on a different level and for different purposes, not to give an inherently better account. 

We also need to note that even highly sophisticated scientific accounts are ultimately based on sensory evidence of a highly regulated and instrumental sort. The CERN supercollider in Switzerland, which just started up last week, and which some fear will create a black hole that will swallow the earth, can only be "read" using the senses.

Plato, however, believes that there might be, or is, an even more abstract world of pure mathematical forms, many of which cannot be visualized, that depict the real structure of the universe. Moore would probably reject the position because even mathematical objects and thinking are part of consciousness and are therefore part of everyday experience.

James takes a slightly different approach. He really, deeply believes that all of reality is contained inside lived human experience, and that the only reason to try out Descartes' radical doubts would  be if we had serious reason to fear that we were getting reality wrong in significant ways. For example, when we see major investment firms and insurance companies and banks collapsing around us, it is clear that Cartesian doubt is in order. Somebody, or some crowd of folks, got sometng about reality badly wrong, and we have a serious impetus to find out the truth. In this case we have every reason to be skeptical, and to doubt everything the guys running these companies tell us. But if it's a matter of fixing a transmission, or getting to Muscoy, we need not be quite as doubting, unless we have a serious reason to be so. Just because some of our earlier beliefs proved false is not good reason to doubt all of our beliefs. It is just not necessary or practical, and so James would bar it.

When things get interesting for James is when we encounter important beliefs, beliefs that matter, for which the evidence is sketchy, or which do not have any correlate in the real world. The first case is the God case, the second is the love case, and in both, in different ways, James says it is legitimate to create truth, something neither D nor P would allow and which Moore never takes up as an issue.

See my other entries for James and belief.

Your Beliefs – PHIL 100

You are going to test one or more of your most treasured beliefs using the ideas proposed by the four philosophers we have read.

Roughly put, James suggests that we make things true by acting as if they were, say to create a relationship or to make into a winner or to get Sarah Palin elected. But he also says, more to your point, that we can will to believe that certain propositions are true or false. In this case it is not exactly a matter of making something come into being – although there is that dimension to the will to believe – but it is more a decision to act as if a claim were true even if that claim's truth cannot be fully established by the evidence. For example we might will to believe that O.J. Simpson is not a murderer, even though the evidence is not entirely conclusive one way or the other; or, we might will to believe that a fetus is, or is not, a person at the moment of conception even though there is no objective evidence to warrant either claim. I mean that there is nothing in the look of the zygote that compels either judgment. But, says James, in such cases we must follow what he calls our "passional nature", our feelings, and choose the belief that makes life more hopeful, and better. He says we have an obligation, first to choose when the issue matters, and second to will that the more optimistic claim be true, because choosing the less optimistic one goes against our obligation to make the best of life.

This sounds grand, but let's be a little Cartesian, a little skeptical. What if our passional nature leads us to will to believe, for example, that African Americans are unsuited to the Presidency, and that we think that believing that makes life better, because it makes the whole electoral process that much simpler. Or let's say that we are led by our passional nature to believe that there is no God but Allah, and that this belief requires that we fight against all of Allah's enemies, represented most significantly by American culture. Or, our passional nature leads us to will the belief that we are in the end times, that Jesus is about to rapture all convicted believers and that, therefore, we can forget about global warming and environmental responsibility, and also that we need to reoccupy the site of the Garden of Eden (Iraq). Does James provide fail-safes against such moves? Or should he?

Descartes would recommend that we submit our beliefs to rigorous testing to see whether they are true. He might not go so far as HyperDoubt but he would I think suggest that we test our claims using experience, reason and what we know about science. What would this do to religious belief, to faith? Descartes believed we could prove God's existence using reason and experience so we did not really need faith. Do you agree?

G.E. Moore remains silent on this issue. As a philosopher of common sense he, unlike Descartes, does not really think we can doubt basic truths about our experience because in order to do this sort of doubting we always have to assume, whether secretly or openly, that the very world we are doubting really does exist so we can doubt it. If we did not already believe this there would be nothing we could pretend to doubt. Even more, if we really did not believe that our experience was accurate we would also never really believe that there were other people to read and discuss what we wrote. So the very fact that D published his stuff indicates that he really believed that there was a world in which manuscripts could be type-set, printed as books, and that these books could be distributed, sold, and read, in a shared real world that he claimed to doubt!

But Moore says nothing about belief in God, or in love, or in ethical values, but suggests that the world we inherit from our culture is roughly right. However, in our world, is there a minimum we all believe, and if so, does that necessarily include God or agreement about moral and political issues? I mean we all believe in Nebraska and that cars have transmissions and that there was a Beijing Olympics last August, but do we all believe, as unquestioned common sense, that there is a loving personal God, or that true love matters, or that the environment is worth protecting, or that you should not shoot caribou from airplanes or be able to carry concealed weapons? How to decide such issues?

Plato would suggest that if you are wise enough and educated enough and spend enough time learning the basic rules by which this world is run, that is, if you dig down into the most fundamental principles on which reality is built, you will find models of what is Good and True, models you can use to decide about caribou and concealed weapons and the death penalty, because there really are objectives truths, and we can know them. He is not a religious believer and does not think there is a sacred book that reveals God's truth but does think that Reason can know ultimate truth without any help from God.

More later.