This starts the notebook that was begun in September 2018.
To see why things don't work is immensely useful.
The homily is the preeminent form of preaching precisely because it is structured by the liturgical year and is in service to the liturgy.
The testimony of the Holy Spirit is recognized first and foremost in His actions in and through the Church.
Calvin's argument that the pictorial kind of image is only to entertain fails to account for the pictorial (and not historical) images of the ark of the covenant and of the Temple.
The iconographer must, by means of the visible, paint the invisible.
This is the thing with tradition: great trees that grew for centuries can be cut down in an hour, and the cutting cannot be undone. All one can do is replant.
"Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good." Chaput
The two pillars of intellectual greatness are rigorous abstraction and humane tradition.
rites as 'marking the Way' like signs that mark treacherous spots at fords (Xunzi 17.11)
God is love (1 Jn 4:8,16) and love is from Him (4:7), such that God's love is primary and principal (4:10); God is unseen but is known by His abiding in love (4:12).
(1) Love admits of more and less.
(2) What admits of more and less does so insofar as it approaches or recedes from what is as such (a maximum).
(3) Therefore there is love as such.
(4) Love is a simple (pure) perfection.
(5) What is a simple perfection is in itself immeasurable.
(6) Love as such is immeasurable.
The act of the first mover is love.
Confucian rectification of names rightly recognizes that society and practical life are built on classifications.
"...those natures which are not susceptible of highest degree are not perfections." Leibniz (DM 1)
Commensal, mutualistic, and parasitic relations between ecclesial and state institutions.
HoP is good for teaching that interpretation is an evidential process of approximation, and thus can be right/wrong and can also come in degrees.
Being gentlemanly presupposes a framework within which giving respect gets respect.
In the Eucharist, our gift to God is transformed by God into God's gift to us.
The Eucharist is in the fullest sense a sacrifice because it is address, oblation, consecration, and commemoration all at once.
Calvin explicitly assimilates the eucharist to baptism (Institutes IV.17.14), which is why his account of the real presence in the Supper always sounds like the real presence of the Spirit in baptism.
religious attributions
admit of universal causal argument: deity, preternatural
admit only of local causal argument: tutelar
beyondgrave attribution complexes
(1) chiefly tutelar: Hades, Osiris
(2) tutelar-preternatural: Ma'at, Grim Reaper, Angel of Death
(3) deity-preternatural: Death in a death cult
(4) deity-tutelar-preternatural: God as Judge
inworld vs beyondgrave attributions
superpersonal, at-least-personal, and impersonal tutelars and 'HADD'
agency detection -> tutelar attributions
abstraction -> preternatural attributions
? -> deity attributions
Obviously Descartes argues that deity attributions can derive from nothing except God causing as to have them
Essay Toward a More Complete Philosophy of Religion
(1) Limit and Beyond
--- (a) Religions ritually tend to focus on boundaries/thresholds.
--- (b) Otto on the numinous
--- (c) kinds of beyondness-attribution
(2) Tutelar Attributions
--- (a) agency-candidate detection
--- (b) design arguments
--- (c) the Democritean account?
--- (d) tutelar separation
--- --- (1) difficulty of equation (Greer)
--- --- (2) argument from evil
(3) Preternatural Attributions
--- (a) abstraction
--- (b) abstract entities
--- (c) interaction with abstract entities
--- --- (1) subjective
--- --- (2) exemplar
--- --- (3) directly causal
--- (d) concrete indefinites (partial abstractions)
--- (e) allegorization
--- (f) Neoplatonism
(4) Deity Attributions
--- (a) There is no obvious psychological derivation for deity attributions (failure of Lockean account).
--- (b) The Cartesian Argument
--- (c) The Traditionary Argument
--- (d) A Mediation Argument (tutelary-preternatural mediation)
--- (e) Global Cause Argument
--- (f) relation to ontological argument
(5) Interaction of Attributions
--- (a) examples in polytheistic contexts
--- --- (1) preternatural tutelars
--- --- (2) Neoplatonic
--- (b) examples in monotheistic contexts
--- --- (1) Christ
--- --- (2) Sri Guru Granth
--- (c) examples in popular arguments
--- (d) examples in philosophical arguments
(6) Inworld vs Beyondgrave Versions
--- (a) Death as another threshold
--- (b) NDE's and senses of presence
--- (c) Beyondgrave attributions cut across all three.
--- --- (1) Tutelar: Hades, Osiris, Angel of Death
--- --- (2) Preternatural: Death
--- --- (3) Deity: God as having power over the realm of the dead
(7) Kinds of Meeting
--- (a) inspiration (suggestive)
--- (b) revelation (saturated)
--- (c) miracle/wonder
--- (d) union
(8) Basic Responses
--- (a) Address (speaking)
--- (b) Oblation (giving)
--- (c) Consecration (setting apart)
--- (d) Commemoration (remembering)
(9) Rites and Rituals
--- (a) performatives
--- (b) symbolic representation of liminal and superliminal (allegorization)
--- (c) liturgical knowing
--- (d) Neoplatonism
--- (e) Neoconfucianism
(10) Institutions and Practices
--- (a) initiation and adeption
--- (b) community loyalty (Royce)
--- (c) liturgy and semiotic economy
--- (d) askesis
(11) Religion and Civilization
--- (a) Politics (civil religion & theology)
--- (b) Aesthetics
--- --- (1) Greek drama
--- --- (2) iconoclasm
--- (c) Ethics
(12) Religion and the Religion-like
--- (a) proper mode: Cicero and Aquinas on religio
--- (b) disenchantment mode
--- --- (1) Hopi disenchantment rituals
--- --- (2) Santa Claus
--- --- (3) Feuerbach
--- (c) as-if mode
--- --- (1) Santa Claus
--- --- (2) State Shinto
--- --- (3) Irish Murdoch
--- (d) fictional mode
--- --- (1) symbolic representation
--- --- --- (a) Aslan
--- --- --- (b) Crystal Dragon Jesus tropes
--- --- (2) imaginary religion (e.g., Jedi)
--- --- (3) religion imitation
It is remarkable that philosophers assume that abstract entities are inert, given that nobody normally talks about them as if they were.
When people talk about Confucianism as a religion, it is clear that the elements they take as religion are not particularly derived from Confucius himself, nor even from ruism generally, but from ancestor veneration.
Nonpopulist regimes tend to depend on economic incentives overwhelming other incentives; they tend to fall by assuming they automatically will do so.
contrast counterfactuals vs intervention counterfactuals
Christ, rising from the dead, through the eucharist (Luke 24:30) makes us to rise in heart (Luke 24:33).
narrative participation in pilgrimage, tourism, souvenirs
Composition fallacies conflate wholes/parts in Boolean and in Classical Squares of Opposition; but the inference goes through if there is a bridge principle.
civil rights as artificial armor for the juridical person
"My loved one is the abbreviation of the universe, the universe the elongation of my loved one." Novalis
"Love is the final goal of world history, the unum of the universe."
Every hegemony manufactures an acceptable rebelliousness in order to defang dissent.
Actual reasoning about conflicts of interest involves counterfactual reasoning about causes of distortion in judgment. But there's also a set of distinctions applied to this (evitable/inevitable, serious/nonserious), and these seem to posit a rational spectator as a reference point.
testimonial drift vs testimonial selection
-- the two elements of testimonial drift are memorial and communicational
A church building should be designed in such a way as to recognize the importance of sacraments, of icons, and of relics.
Nietzsche's point in TI VI.7 that men were considered free that they might be judged and punished is right insofar as freedom is a precondition for rational judgment and punishment, but defective in that it makes it impossible to understand why anyone would have ever conceived of the latter to begin with, because it is specifically this kind of judgment and punishment that is concerned, and not, for instance, merely retaliatory feeling.
the referential & acousmatic aspects of poetry
We experience the expressiveness of music in three ways: in the feel (e.g., tempo or sharpness of beat), in the imagination, and in the reason; and each aspect has different features -- associative, interpretive, etc.
Rejection, and often major revision, of free will requires the rejection of common conceptions of causation. This is recognized by Spinoza, Hume, and Nietzsche, but is regularly overlooked by those who want to have their cake and eat it too.
holiness of life as expressiveness (the life expressive of the divine)
The sacraments are divine holiness arousing human holiness through holy signs established by the holy promises of God Most Holy.
Sacraments are not merely signs of holiness but signs expressing holiness, communicating holiness.
hypermetacognition as a means for imitating genius?
While Journet associates the doctrinal power with Christ as King and the sacrament power with Christ as Priest, it seems better to regard them as each different expressions of the union of Prophet, King, and Priest in Christ.
character : Priesthood :: Gifts : Prophethood :: juridical status or rights? : Kingship
Christ ascended and in session as the proximate exemplar cause of the Church
-- the Church Triumphant as complete exemplate, the Church penitent as completing exemplate, the Church Militant as beginning (incipient) exemplate
-- Israel in OT as seminal exemplate
Locked room mysteries play with interpretation: under one interpretation of the room, the thing was impossible; under another, it was possible. But in the best locked room mysteries, both are in a sense true.
Arousal theories of expression are a poor fit for hymns.
music as a way of dancing without dancing
the last Oracle of Delphi (to Julian the Apostate):
"Tell the emperor the Daidalic hall has fallen.
No longer does Phoebus have his chamber, nor mantic laurel,
nor prophetic spring; and the speaking water has been silenced."
"If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly, if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all." C. S. Lewis
