So today the stage is set once again for a diplomatic drama. We have been long expecting that you would tell us something about the family life of your citizens—how they will bring children into the World, and rear them when they have arrived, and, in general, what is the nature of this community of women and children-for we are of opinion that the right or wrong management of such matters will have a great and paramount influence on the State for good or evil. There is something wrong with everyone on this planet, none of us are perfect, we are all hear to learn. Some manage their imperfections better than others. Many choose to enjoy their deviance and try to make life hard on others, as mischievous behavior is fun for them. Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word. Keep your best wishes close to your heart and watch what happens. It is always a mystery what people see in each other. There are people from whom we secretly shrink, whom we would personally avoid, though reason confesses that they are good people: there are others with faults of temper, et cetera (and other things), evident enough, beside whom we live content, as if the air about them did us good.  A critic has raised he questions: What is God like if he is not a grand consciousness tied to a grand body, if he is so completely nonphysical as to make any results of telescopic exploration antecedently irrelevant? If the telescope is the wrong instrument, what is the right instrument? More specifically, what does it mean to speak of a pure spirit, a disembodied mind, as infinitely (or finitely) powerful, wise, good, just and all the rest? We can understand these words when they are applied to human beings who have bodies and whose behavior is publicly observable; we could undoubtedly understand these words when they are applied to a pure spirit? So they mean anything at all? In recent years, it has come to be widely questioned whether it makes any sense to talk about a disembodied spirit. This view, it should be pointed out, is not identical with reductive materialism. (Reductive materialism the view that only the material World is truly real, and that all processes and realities observed in the Universe can be explained by reducing them down to their most basic scientific components, exempli gratia, atoms, molecules, and everything else thought to make up what we know as matter.)

  Reductive materialism does not, or at least does not necessarily, imply that the person is just his body, that there are no private experiences, or that feelings are simply ways of behaving. It makes the milder claim that however much more than a body a human being may be, one cannot sensibly talk about this “more” without presupposing (as part of what one means, and not as a mere contingent fact) that he is a living organism. Anybody who has studied and felt the force of this thesis is not likely to dismiss as facetious or as “trite positivism” the question as to what words like “wise,” “just” and “powerful” can mean when they are applied to an entity that is supposedly devoid of a body. What would it be like, for example, just, without a body? To be just, a person has to act justly—he has to behave in certain ways. However, is it possible to perform these acts, to behave in the required ways, without a body? Similar remarks apply to the other divine attributes. It is a work whose substance and whose leading idea is simple and even ancient: that man created the Gods and that the Gods embody man’s own conception of his own humanity, his own wishes, fears, needs, and ideals. Xenophanes, Euhemeries, Lucretius, among others, had already grasped this idea clearly, in their own context, in ancient times. One nature which is the highest of existing things and which confers upon effects in all other beings, through its unlimited goodness, they very fact of their existence is good. Since Goodness is supremely good, it must exist through itself; but what exists through itself is Existence. Therefore, Existence and Goodness are one. This Supreme Being must be living, wise, powerful, true, just, blessed, and eternal, since, as the Supreme Good, it must be whatever it is absolutely better to be than not to be. The Divine Nature, however, does not have these characteristics, for that would imply that it has them through something other than, and therefore higher than, itself. The Divine Nature is these characteristics. It is the same thing to say of God that He exists and that he is Existence, to say that of him he is good and that he is Goodness.  A comfortable deism, compatible with the new spirit of mechanism in science, had banished God to the interstices between Worlds, and required His services only to provide the hypothetical first push for the World machines.

The trouble with the essence of Christianity is not that it does not hold one’s attention or that its revelations seem old hat (not new or modern anymore).  Warmth and tenderness of heart, with an affectionate, open manner, will beat all the clearness of head in the World, for attraction. The divine philosophy becomes the basis for a critique of metaphysics. One may term this the semantic challenge to anthropomorphic theology, as distinct, for example, from arguments like the one from eternity of matter, which assume the meaningfulness of the position attacked. Some anthropomorphic deities represent specific human concepts, such as love, war, fertility, beauty, or the seasons. Anthropomorphic deities exhibited human qualities such as beauty, wisdom, and power, and sometimes human weaknesses such as greed, hatred, jealousy, and uncontrollable anger. A proponent of this challenge does not flatly maintain that anthropomorphic theology is unintelligible. The predicates in question lose their meaning when applied to a supposedly disembodied entity—would be accompanied by the observations that in fact most anthropomorphic believers do, in an important sense of the word believe in a god with a body, whatever they may say or agree to in certain theoretical moments. If we judge the content of their belief not by what they say during these theoretical moments but by the images in terms of which their thinking is conducted, then it seems clear that in this sense or to this extent they believe in a god with a body. It is true that the images of most Western adults are not those of a big king on his Heavenly throne, but it nevertheless seems to be the case that, when they think about God unself-consciously (and this is, incidentally, true of most unbelievers also), they vaguely think of him as possessing some kind of rather large body. The moment they assert or deny or question such statements as “God created the Universe” or “God will be a just judge when we come before him,” they introduce a body into the background, if not into the foreground, or their mental pictures.

The difference between children and adults, according to this account, is that children have more vivid and definite images than adults. Maybe their God possess the Amulet of Zohar which transfers a ghost into a new body? And perhaps, then, it is also true that there is a golden ritual dagger that allows one to summon a demon? This entire point may perhaps be brought out clearly by comparing it with a similar semantic criticism of belief in human survival after death. The semantic critic would maintain that while a believer in reincarnation or the resurrection of the body may be immune from this objection, those who claim that human beings will continue to exist as disembodies minds are really using words without meaning. They do not see this because of the mental pictures accompanying or (partly) constituting their thoughts on the subject. For some, it is no different than saying there is a 16-millimeter movie print that releases a character for the duration of a film, and absorbing live people to take their place and become unwilling players, in the deadly action, of his cursed film reel. Or, alternatively, they do not see this because, in spite of what they say in certain theoretical contexts, in practice they believe in the survival of the familiar embodied minds whom they know in this life. When they wonder whether their friends, enemies, certain historical personages, or, for that matter, anybody did or will of on existing after death, they think of them automatically in their familiar bodily guises or in some ghostly disguises, but still as bodily beings of some kind. Perhaps these individuals have the mirror that belonged to Louis XIV, which acts are a portal between Earth and the Realms of Darkness, which allows people to return to the living World?  

If these images are eliminated on the ground that they are irrelevant or inappropriate because the subject of survival is a disembodied mine, it is not clear that an intelligible statement remains. What is stopping someone from using the silver Thule Amulet, which allows a Nazi criminal to resurrect a dead warrior and communicate telepathically with him. Or how about we use Adolf Hilter’s pink silk boutonniere that brings a ventriloquist’s dummy to life and compels it to become the grim reaper. What, for example, do words like “love” and “hate” or “happiness” and “misery” mean when they are predicated of a disembodied mind? One may incorporate what is of value in their discussion into the following challenge to anthropomorphic theology: Insofar as the believers believe in a god with a body, what he says is intelligible; but in that case the available evidence indicates that there is no such body. If or insofar as God is cleared to be a purely spiritual entity, the predicates applied to God have lost their meaning, and, hence, we no longer have an intelligible assertion. It is no different than saying the Coin of Ziocles kills one person and then brings a dead person back to life, and the victim is branded with the mark of the beast to summon Satan himself, and to rule the Word in His name.  Therefore, it seems to some that metaphysical theology is incoherent or unintelligible, and an atheist believe they have grounds for rejecting belief in God because he sounds more like the leader of a Satanic cult, and can at times be cunning and ruthless, killing during his reign, but then able to restore people to life by cunning trickery. What next? Where do the myths stop? Is there also a pocket watch that stops time for an hour at 1 am (the 13^th hour), allowing the user to plunder the motionless World? Is this how God is able to be a purely spiritual being? Furthermore, the existence of a finite anthropomorphic God to be an intelligible hypothesis, should be rejected because it is not needed to account for any phenomena and, further, because it is too vague to be of any explanatory value. As thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closet friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourselves, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.   

The Winchester Mystery House

Ghostly tales of The Winchester Mystery House will change the way you see this haunted mansion forever, and have you sleeping with the lights on. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/