October 2022

We all have justify our lives, don’t we? Well, not really to God.

Conditional love is this: X is good, and therefore and because of that goodness, I love it.

Unconditional love, specifically God’s, is the reverse: the entirety of X’s goodness is due to my willing this good to X, to infusing goodness into X, to my love for it.

I’m sure there is conditional love in God, too. He may delight and rejoice in your goodness. But the main kind of love works differently: whatever goodness you have, you have it because God willed it to you. This love is unconditional because the conditions themselves are part of what God gave you.

It follows that you can ask God for anything you want in prayer without worrying about being a sinner. God gave you your virtues. Your vices and flaws are not positive existences but privations, absences, lack of the good that ought to be there but is not. So the whole of you is from God. And God by His nature is a gift-giving creator. If He gave you your existence and life, your essence, your powers, what else wouldn’t He give you?

Of course, God doesn’t have to respond to prayer, it’s His decision, but He likes it.

There is a less formal and more substantial sense of love which is interpenetration of souls — union, mutual indwelling, etc.; thus, God enjoys more communion with a saint than with a sinner and hence loves the saint more. God is in the state of greater communion with X than with Y and so loves X more.

It irritates me when people dismiss near-death experiences by saying that they are due to “hallucinations of a dying brain.”

A healthy brain is a good thing, right? Yet it does not give us experiences of infinite love, vast knowledge and superior rationality, and astonishing beauty.

A sick or dying brain will give us intense pain, suffering, madness, mental retardation. Schizos and people whose brains are being consumed with flesh-eating bacteria do not meet a being of light brighter than a million suns radiating pure love. They meet only misery.

The evil of decaying flesh cannot conjure up the good of the vision of God.

And what exactly is the evolutionary advantage of being filled with divine light upon death?

This “dying brain” theory of NDEs is so implausible as to be completely beyond any belief.

If you want to reject these people’s stories, why not say that they’re making it all up to profit from selling books or something like that? This opinion makes no sense, either, but it is much less silly.

John Harsanyi:

But we simply cannot afford educational policies and other social policies that would artificially discourage the ablest people, and often also those with lesser ability, from reaching their full potential, which is now done by many schools in the United States and in many other Western countries.

Government schools sacrifice gifted children to their egalitarian god, while at the same time promoting every manner of vice and perversion.

Uniformity of good, diversity of evil — that’s your government at work.

And people call libertarians dangerous.

To lose weight, eat little, exercise a lot. For eating, fast every other day; it’s hard at first, but your body will adjust. For exercise, alternate between cardio and weight training every day.

This will work, and it’s the only thing that will work.

Weight loss is about calories: if you burn more than you take in, then you lose weight.

What you eat is important for health, but how much you eat determines your weight.

You can make losing weight more efficient by changing when you eat, too. Intermittent fasting can help here.

Humans naturally love each other; God in His pre-creation natural state does love anyone other than Himself. If love is superior to disinterestedness, are humans by that fact superior to God?

No. The essence of natural love is human incompleteness. A man is one person within the global division of labor, and needs his fellow men in order to prosper. He requires a woman. A couple in its turn requires children to complete the family. These unions make one happier.

Most of the pop songs on the radio talk about conjugal love. Well sex, but still love between a man and a woman. Nobody sings songs about capitalistic good will. But it is equally important.

God, on the other hand, is already perfect and has no need for external things to complete Himself. Natural love is a means to an end; God has already attained the end, and so has no use for the means. Hence God is straightforwardly superior.

Charity is not natural love at all. It is not due to any natural incompleteness. It changes nature itself, raising man into deiformity or likeness of 3rd-level God.

Consider the following argument:

When I awoke from the surgery following my accident in ’75, the surgeons told me I had died on the table 4 times. I can assure you that all the tales of lights, tunnels, loved ones waving one on or back, etc., are pure balderdash; there is nothing.

My reply would be this:

But you didn’t die. If you had, you would have had an after-death experience.

What you didn’t have was a near-death experience. But those are given solely by the grace of God. God is not required to give one to you.

The soul stayed in your body and, when you were unconscious and near-dead, was so constricted by the body that you experienced nothing. Yet this does not entail that “nothing” after all prevails.

God created angels, foreseeing that some of them would fall, in order to start a war between the good angels who accepted the grace and us humans on the one hand and demons who rejected the grace on the other, whose purpose is to foster charity in the hearts of men.

The demonic threat is the crucial incentive because charity is needed to win the war. Do or die.

If God loved only Himself as He does by nature, there would have been no creation at all. But why isn’t it sufficient that He love? Why must the creatures love too? Well, charity is a metaphysically higher relation than mere disinterested self-sufficiency. Why should God settle for a worse world when a better one is possible? In addition, by its nature, charity is not unrequited love but mutual friendship, so everyone must participate.

It’s true that this superior state of affairs can only come as a result of a terrible war fraught with suffering including for the 2nd-level God (the Son). But that is the price God is willing to pay.

Hence the command to all to cultivate charity.

Ohio elections 2022:

Issue 1: First, even if the Ohio Supreme Court decision was somehow wrong, I don’t see why the proper response to it is to change the constitution to take the power from the Court and give it to the legislature. It seems like an overkill.

Second, if the accused is a danger to society, judges can already deny bail. (In such a case I don’t see why career criminals should be able to buy their way out of jail, anyway.)

Their power to set excessive bail which the accused cannot afford and so must stay in jail awaiting trial seems like a way around the constitution. The purpose of bail should be to make it more likely that the accused will attend trial and not run away. It should not be an alternative means to imprisoning people.

So I think we should vote no.

Issue 2: I don’t see why we should let non-citizens vote. Keep the foreign riffraff out of our politics.

Yes on this one.

Fleischacker (2004) claims that “diminishing marginal utility… does not hold for all goods”: “if I am putting together a stamp collection, the stamp that completes a certain set may well be more valuable to me than its predecessors.” (107)

Nope. Each stamp is one good; the completed collection is another good.

Now perhaps each stamp is different and may be enjoyed for its own sake and differ in utility.

But perhaps the stamps collected are not allocated to different uses that can be ranked on the value scales. Each stamp is a mere means to the collection. For the latter, each stamp is submarginal, so the entire collection is the marginal unit.

In such a case each stamp has the same subjective utility: zero. Rothbard of course makes this point in Man, Economy, and State (73-4) with the example of the eggs needed to bake a cake.

Leftists who encourage transgenderism believe this to be a some sort of bold, courageous, defiant making of one’s own identity.

If so, then they should heed their Bible, too. Jesus argued that at the end of the world the angels will separate the sheep from the goats; the sheep will go into eternal life, and the goats, into the unquenchable fire of hell.

Guess what: the goats have an identity, too. It’s an ugly, evil, insane identity, but there is it.

Not all identities are created equal. You had better be very careful what kind of identity you “craft” for yourself because if that identity sucks in an objective way, you will suffer horribly as a result.

Freedom is a bitch.