phillip

The obsoletion of man.

With God fittingness is necessary because God must be perfect.

Why do my worst tweets perform the best?

Europeans have a native appetite for the universal.

@brxndtwiggins goat

Genuinely disturbing.

Existence is either no real predicate or the only real predicate.

The Holocaust had the strange effect of preserving Jewry.

God is a cause who exists beyond His effects. This means He is essentially nowhere within the causal chain—not at its beginning, nor at its end. Causality is a true but intractably limited way of understanding Him. Revelation enables a new way of understanding God, through aseity and grace. This does not mean, however, that such an understanding cannot be rationally defended ex post.

@philliplede @coltraine14n88 Scheeben points out that since all we know of God from reason comes from created effects which are caused by God acting as one principle, and for this reason we can not know of the Trinity strictly from reason

The Trinity is a stumbling block for the low IQ. I agree with Ramon Llull.

I think we will be sad when Trump dies.

We have exchanged “freedom and law” for “power and might” in our propaganda. We don’t need ideas; we have aircraft carriers. Not only does the White House no longer feel the need to conceal its “realist” attitudes from the American public, it will campaign on them—out in the open.

@coltraine14n88 St. Thomas fixed the standard for what natural theology can prove and so Llull, in hindsight, is regarded as a controversial figure. Llull claimed we can prove the doctrine of the Trinity from natural reason.

@philliplede An IQ gate too. Llull is a fascinating figure as well. I come across him in connection to early "Christian" Kabbalah because his symbology and mysticism parallels that of the Jewish tradition (although I think it's overplayed).

One might posit that a monadic God can be self-giving, albeit only insofar as the world is given. If the world is given as an emanation of the Good, as in Neoplatonism’s doctrine of the One, then the world is not contingent and thus is not selflessly given. Consequently, we discover that the One cannot be selfless or gratuitous. A Christian emphasis upon love is therefore essentially bound up with the doctrine of the Trinity.

Here is a primitive argument for the Trinity: The world must have begun, as evinced by the fact that every finite sequence of events requires an actual beginning, and every ordered series of efficient causes requires a first efficient cause. I know St. Aquinas disputes whether reason alone can demonstrate the temporal beginning of the world, but I think there is sufficient evidence for it. Even if this is not the case temporally, it is true ontologically: the world is continuously sustained by some creative act, and this, at least, can be demonstrated by reason. Without such a necessary foundation, the contingent world would not exist. Without relying upon revelation, then, we can maintain that God created, or creates, the world from nothing—as only that which exists outside of time could have created (and time is the measure of motion and change). If God created from nothing, then He could not have acquired His actuality from the act of creating. God does not become more actual by creating, since the act of creating presupposes the created. God is immutable, and immutability is one of His perfections; therefore, He cannot become more or less actual through the existence or non-existence of creation. This follows from God’s immutability, which is an aforementioned condition of His capacity to create a mutable world. If the God who does not create the world is the same God as the one who does (modally), then creation must be a selfless and gratuitous act. If creation is selfless and gratuitous, then selflessness and gratuity cannot be accidental to God, but must belong to His essence. It is impossible, however, for a merely solitary, monadic being to be essentially self-giving and gratuitous. A being can only give itself if there is another to whom it gives itself. But because only God exists necessarily, this other cannot be another being alongside God. God must therefore give Himself to Himself as Other. He must differ from Himself relationally while remaining essentially identical to Himself. The Son of God is this Other of God: He is God, but He is selflessly given by the Father. If the Son is selflessly given Himself, then He must give Himself back, for He does not receive Himself merely as a “gift,” but as the act of “giving.” For instance, one might receive a gift from another and store it away; but if one receives the act of giving from another, one must oneself give what one possesses, since the act rather than the object has been received. The Son, being absolutely simple, has only Himself to give, and therefore returns Himself to the Father. The selfless act giving shared by the Father and the Son is not something external to God, nor something added to Him. This mutual love of the Father and the Son is what we term the Holy Spirit. Therefore, if the world was created, as can be demonstrated at least in the ontological sense, the Trinity is not arbitrary—but a sufficient (or at least fitting) condition of God’s aseity and immutability.

Was talking with my Protestant grandfather and one of his arguments against Catholicism was that St. Peter could not possibly be the head of the Church because he’s seen stumbling far more than St. Paul. He would then, in the same breath, argue we are elected by grace and not our works.

“I” do not properly exist in any other world. If I imagine myself under different circumstances, I do not even imagine myself. I am this self as such—not a bundle of facts uttered in the right order.

We could not be more presumptuous than to stand before God and demand “better” conditions for our existence, forgetting that it is only by such conditions that we came to exist at all. It is only this actual state of affairs, protested though it may be, that grants us the power to entertain any counterfactual. How, then, can we denounce God as unjust? Justice commands only one law: that what is owed to beings be conferred. But what is owed to non-being? Nothing.

Joseph de Maistre offers a theodicy, noting that what is demanded of men in the social order cannot be demanded of God in the general order. “What still deceives us often enough on this point is that, without our perceiving it, we cannot prevent ourselves from ascribing to God our own ideas about the dignity and importance of persons. In relation to ourselves, these ideas are quite just, since we are all subject to the order established in society.” “But when we carry them into the general order, we resemble the queen who said: ‘When it is question of damning people like us, you can well believe that God will think more than once.’” “Elizabeth of France mounted the scaffold; Robespierre followed a bit later. By coming into the world, the angel and the monster both subjected themselves to all the general laws that rule here.” “No words can describe the crime of these scoundrels who caused the purest and most august blood in the world to flow. Yet, in relation to the general order, there is no injustice; this is still a misfortune attached to the human condition, and nothing more.” Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues

How strange it is that conservatives, ever belated, rush only to the body of the last institution to fall—or rather, the last institution to be slain by their despised opponent. By the time conservatives have begun defending something, it has already died—and passed on to the next life. The most they can do is dig a grave and set a stone to mark the corpse. The world is the soil beneath a great fig tree, and conservatives chase after a harsh south wind, in each case attempting to rejoin fallen fruit to bare branches. They hope to re-attach that first fallen fruit to its branch and end man’s exile from Eden. Instead, they arrive as gravediggers: embittered angels of history, coroners of the past, and despisers of the future.