Is God a practical joker?

[coberst]

Is God a practical joker?

 

But love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement.—Yeats

 

The rose in the midst of the thorn and sex in the midst of the anus.--coberst

 

One might think of God as a great practical joker. S/he creates a species that considers it self to inhabit an area between god and animal. Humans then seek to repress the animal side of its nature and to inflate the imagined god like part of its nature; its aspect that is in various situations considered as soul, or consciousness, or mind, or…

 

Jonathan Swift is perhaps the most famous of authors to parody the human eccentric behavior in attempting to repress recognition of our animal body. If there is a God s/he must be a very witty practical joker. Can you imagine the delight s/he must enjoy while observing humans contending with the problems relating to the pitching of the love mansion among the eliminating portals of the human body?

 

Psychoanalysis is about the nature of repression; the essential characteristic of the human psyche.

 

There is a constant conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. Societies repress the individual and the individual represses the self.

 

Neurotic behavior, dreams, and various “Freudian slips” provide us with e-mails from the unconscious that elude the conscious repression mechanism. These behavior characteristics are meaningful because they manifest the purpose of the unconscious that remains hidden from consciousness.

 

The conscious mind strenuously disowns and resists the rumblings of the unconscious. The conscious self disowns and resists its human nature.

 

Neurosis is the label given to these human phenomena of conflict between the conscious and unconscious self. All of us are neurotic to one degree or another. When this neurosis interferes with “normal” human behavior then, and only then, does it require outside interference by society.

 

Universal neurosis is the analogy of “original sin” for theological doctrine.

 

“The most scandalous pieces of Swiftian scatology are three of his later poems—“The Lady’s Dressing Room”, “Strephon and Chloe”, “Cassinus and Peter”—which are variations on the theme:

Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia, %&@*$

Aldous Huxley explicates, saying, “The monosyllabic verb, which the modesties of 1929 will not allow me to print, rhymes with ‘wits’ and ‘fits’.”

 

Swift’s metaphor for humans as Yahoo’s, which are excrementally filthy, is even more in tune with his overall parodying human eccentricities when it comes to recognizing the nature of the body.

 

It appears to me that logical positivism, more appropriately called logical empiricism, is philosophy’s attempt to separate completely the human mind from the human body. Logical empiricism travels on the back of a system of symbolic logic whereby a scientifically codified set of symbols is developed which permits ordinary human language to be converted into a system of symbols for the purpose of analyzing conscious thought for its truth value. Anything that does not fit into this ‘symbol system epistemology’ is rejected as meaningless.

 

As best that I can understand it logical positivism is a philosophy that attempts to define meaning as being confined to empirical observations modified somewhat by rational processes, which does deposit some characteristics to the observed data.

 

I am a retired electronics engineer and while working I took courses in Symbolic Logic from the philosophy dept of a local university. This was 35 years ago and my thoughts might be a bit foggy but this is as I remember it to be.

 

Symbolic logic was proposed as a means to readily analyze complex arguments for their validity. There were standard symbols available for application to phrases and sentences. Since this mode of truth telling (logical positivism) comprehended all meaning as being consciously constructed necessary and sufficient definitions, meaning was fairly easily discovered.

 

Then by manipulating these symbols in prescribed algorithms one could ascertain the validity of the very complex arguments. This made computer generated analysis a piece of cake.

 

coberstakaDutchuncle

[enorbet2]

Your thread is a lot cooler than I expected even though I heard that evidence of The Joker was that many men begin losing the hair on their heads by age 30 only to see it reappear at age 60 in their ears! :evil: Who else has the timing for a 30 year punchline?

 

What is interesting in your thread, at least to me, is the interest in consciousness as self. Why do we essentially disappear when we sleep and immediately upon awaking, reconstruct a sense of self that for all intents and purposes is identical to the one that went to sleep?

 

I saw a fascinating experiment on some Science Channel documentary about the hemispheres of our brains. IIRC, People were placed in front of a desk which had a dividing strip isolating one field of vision entirely from the other. They were then shown two different pictures of objects simoultaneously and asked to duplicate with a crayon drawing what they saw. Since text is processed on one side of the brain only and eyes are cross-connected one picture was essentially ignored....almost. One example showed a picture of an orange on the left and a watch on the right. More often than not, there was unconscious cross-linking where for ecample the test subject would indeed draw a watch but with an orange crayon. When asked why they chose the odd color elaborate stories were constructed by the subject.

 

Is this the kind of thing you mean in how we try to deny our nature as a kind of animal, or even minimizing altogether our physical form?

[coberst]

How can we, the “man on the street”, Tom & Jane, gain an insight into the meaning of this dread of death? A dread so strong that we kill to prevent that death and that we are so dedicated to repressing that dread that many things we do is done in that behalf.

 

I suspect most of us have experienced the feeling we call ‘claustrophobia’. I have experienced that feeling and I am confident that I would do almost anything to stop that experience. I suspect that it was the dread of death that caused the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps to tolerate such terror as daily existence must have been.

 

I suspect that dread of death is the reason that ‘water-boarding’ is such a popular form of torture. Torture is, I suspect, an effort to induce that same dread that we experience in a claustrophobic episode. I think that we might properly use the metaphor ‘dread of death is claustrophobia’ or perhaps ‘dread of death is water-boarding’.

 

The ‘curse’ is anything that lies about the creatureliness of wo/man. Any effort to make a lofty spiritual character out of sapiens represents an ‘occultism’, i.e. an ‘occult’ is anything that attempts to make supernatural the creatureliness of humans, which is the constant preoccupation of human society.

 

Jung and Adler recognized from the beginning that Freud was wrong in his dogmatic insistence regarding wo/man’s innate instincts of sexuality and aggression; however, they also recognized that Freud had correctly diagnosed and emphasized wo/man’s creatureliness.

 

Freud “reflected the true intuitions of genius, even though the particular intellectual counter-part of that emotion—the sexual theory—proved to be wrong. Man’s body was a “curse of fate”, and culture was built upon repression—not because man was a seeker only of sexuality, of pleasure, of life and expansiveness, as Freud thought, but because man was also primarily an avoider of death.”

 

Not sexuality, as Freud theorized, but the consciousness of death is the primary repression. Freud recognized the curse early and dedicated his life toward exposing it. However, he missed the correct scientific fact that was the source of the curse; this being the repression upon which society is constructed.

 

Becker theorizes that Freud’s mistake is reveled in one key idea, which emerged in his later writings. “Death instinct” was introduced by Freud in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. This theory was an attempt to patch up his libido theory, which he was very reluctant to reject. The death instinct was “a built in urge toward death as well as toward life”. He theorized that the death instinct was an instinctive urge to die, which was redirected outward into the desire to kill. Wo/man defeats this instinct by killing others.

 

Psychology has rejected Freud’s death instinct theory for a simpler one. Killing represents a symbolic solution that results from a fusion of animal anxiety with the death fear of the human animal. Rank says “the death fear of the ego is lessoned by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed.”

 

 

Quotes from “The Denial of Death”; Pulitzer Prize winner for nonfiction by Ernest Becker.