Steven Colborne's Blog, page 79

I’ve been busy…

How was your week, dear friends? My new blogging schedule has been keeping me busy! I’m really enjoying being more organised about when I blog and what I blog about. It’s funny, I thought that as I blogged more often I might run out of ideas, but on the contrary, by God’s grace (and through your comments and interactions) I’ve got plenty of content ideas to keep the posts flowing in the coming weeks.

The week in review

For my Monday Music post I shared a beautiful Christian video meditation on a well-known passage from the book of Philippians. The response was amazing, but of course all credit goes to Jonathan Ogden who created the video. You can watch it here.

On Wednesday I shared a Q&A with my friend and fellow blogger David Robertson. David shared about perennialism (his chosen spiritual path), and also about the sate of Christianity and religion in general in China, where he lives. You can read the interview here.

In my Thursday Theology post we got stuck into the various different types of determinism, which is the idea that what we experience is the result purely of cause-and-effect chains from the past. I offered a critique of this idea. You can read the article here.

This week’s Friday Philosophy post looked at the ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes and his rebellion against polytheism in favour of monotheism. He believed that religion should be more about rational thinking than simply subscribing to traditionally held beliefs. You can read the post here.

On Saturday I shared my new song! It’s a riff-driven rocky number with lyrics about the immense power we are giving to robots and artificial intelligence in the digital age. You can listen to the song, entitled ‘Machines Taking Over the World’, here.

Please note that this was an unusually busy week on the blog! I normally post three times a week. I try to make sure I post only once a day at the most, as I never want my followers to feel bombarded. If you have any feedback, I’m always open to making changes to the schedule, so let me know!

Some Random Thoughts to Round Off the Week

This week I reached the 1000 follower milestone! Woohoo! Thank you so much

Listen to my New Song!

I’m delighted to bring you song six of the T.E.N. Project. In case you’re not already aware, I’m releasing ten songs over ten months, with each song released on the tenth of the month at 10am. Each song is available on Bandcamp for one month, before being taken down to make way for the next release.

This month’s single is entitled Machines Taking Over the World and is a riff-driven heavy rock song that sounds a warning against the increasing power and prevalence of machines and artificial intelligence in the digital age. I recently wrote an article on this subject which you can read here.

Here are the lyrics to the song:

Calling up the companies, automated systems

Smartphone addiction, digital biology

Waiting in the hold queue, talking to the robots

Slave to an unknown algorithm

There is power in being free (x4)

Machines, machines, taking over the world (x8)

21st century, the death of all privacy

Anything is just, with a digital morality

Moving very quickly, out of all control now

Racing towards total technocracy

And it’s driving me up the wall (x4)

Machines, machines, taking over the world (x8)

You can listen to the song on YouTube (embed below) or on Bandcamp, or whenever you visit my blog via the audio player on the right hand side of the screen. For full details of the T.E.N. Project including a competition to decide the name of the album (and receive a great prize) check out my Music page.

Enjoy the song!

A God Unlike His Creatures

In today’s Friday Philosophy post we’re looking at another presocratic thinker. Each week we look at one meaningful idea by a philosopher from history, and offer some reflections on that idea. This week the spotlight is on Xenophanes of Colophon and his thoughts about the divine.

Who Was He?

As with many of the presocratic thinkers, we don’t know exactly when Xenophanes lived. What we do know is that he is mentioned in works by Heraclitus, who says he was a contemporary and critic of Pythagoras, so we can assume that Xenophanes lived around the same time (c.570-475 BC). We only have fragments of his thought that have come down to us mainly via quotations from other ancient Greek philosophers.

Xenophanes was a poet and freethinker, perhaps influenced by Thales as he shared that philosopher’s disgruntlement concerning the human traits that were associated with the Homeric gods. Xenophanes wondered why anyone would want to worship gods who carried the immoral and disgraceful traits of flawed human beings.

What’s the Big Idea?

Rejecting the Homeric gods, Xenophanes had at least some concept of a single deity who was ‘in no way like men in shape or in thought’ but who was ‘causing all things by the thought of his mind’. He had the aim of propagating a religion that was more focused on rational thinking than on traditionally held beliefs.

Xenophanes presented theological contributions in favour of the notion of divine goodness, and some say he was the first monotheist in the Western intellectual tradition, although it’s difficult to decipher precisely what he believed from the fragmentary evidence. He showed some signs of being a pantheist (pantheism is the belief that God and nature are one and the same).

My Reflections

The ancient Greeks are well-known for their polytheistic beliefs, so if Xenophanes was among the first to posit the existence of a single deity causing all things then this is a significant departure. Monotheism is a belief that I have embraced as it makes sense to me that there is a single being with aseity (that is, self-existent being) who is omnipresent and the creator of all things.

Of course, most of us these days come to our understanding of God from the Holy Scriptures of our chosen religion, and certainly within some branches of Christianity there is a tendency to downplay rational thinking about God in favour of having a childlike faith in what is revealed in the Bible. Many Christians see rational thinking as a kind of idol and argue that simple faith and relationship with Jesus is true religion, and we don’t need to spend time pondering questions about the nature of God – we just need to be obedient. For others, Christianity is a combination of faith and reason.

In any case, Xenophanes seems to have opened a door for critical thinking about the nature of God among freethinking philosophers in Ancient Greece.

Next week we’ll be looking at a big idea by another presocratic philosopher, Heraclitus. If you’d like to receive an email for each new post, please consider subscribing. Thank you for reading!

Determinism and the Nature of God

Often technical terminology can be headache-inducing, so I usually try to avoid it. But philosophical terms can be helpful if they encapsulate something profound and meaningful that relates to our lives and our understanding of reality. I believe that determinism is one such term which can provoke us to think deeply about the relationship between God and creation.

In this article I will offer some brief and simple definitions of a few different types of determinism, and hopefully they will help you to assess where you stand on the issue.

Scientific Determinism

This is the idea that events unfold in accordance with strict scientific laws, and that one event leads to another. Every event occurs due to a series of causes that preceded it. Many physicists believe that every event we experience can be traced back to a causal chain set in motion with the ‘Big Bang’, when time itself came into existence. There is no free will in this view; only cause and effect.

Theological Determinism

This is the idea that God has predestined all events to occur and that He has been responsible for every event throughout the course of history. The idea is similar to scientific determinism, except that here God is the originating cause of all events, rather than chance or purely physical processes. There are two main types of theological determinism:

Hard Determinism

People who take this position believe that God’s omniscience is not compatible with human free will. God is the cause of all events, so there is no room for free will.

Soft Determinism

In this view determinism is compatible with a specific meaning of freedom, which is that one’s behaviour is caused not only by prior events, but also acts of the will such as choices, decisions and desires.

What are we to make of all this?

I believe the most important consideration here is one that is often overlooked in theological discussions surrounding determinism, which is the nature of God. Here are a few important questions that I invite you to consider:

Did God set the universe in motion and then sit back and watch it unfold at a distance, only intervening at certain times? Or is God an omnipresent being, pervading all of creation and affecting change wherever it occurs in the single eternal moment? Is God distant or involved? Is God boundless or somehow embodied? Is God limited in any way?

Of course, for many scientific determinists, these questions about God won’t even arise, for they see no ‘evidence’ that God exists. But for the theists among us, what we understand about the nature of God will lead us to our conclusions concerning which type of determinism, if any, we embrace.

What are your thoughts on determinism? Feel free to leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this post please consider sharing and/or subscribing. Thank you for reading!

Interview | David Robertson

Greetings all! Once in a while I’m going to be interviewing people who have inspired me, either in the blogosphere or in the world at large. This is not something I’ve done before, but I’m delighted to kick things off with one of my favourite bloggers, David Robertson, who always writes fascinating posts on his blog, A Perennial Follower.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the interview!

1) Your blog is entitled ‘A Perennial Follower’. Could you please explain what this means and why you chose the title?

Thanks for this opportunity first of all, Steven. It’s a great idea to do a Q & A between bloggers.

So I chose the title of my blog primarily because of the word “perennial” in it. I am a strong believer in the concept of a perennial philosophy. Which in essence is not the idea that all religions are pretty much the same, differences certainly exist. But rather it’s more the idea that all religions stem from the same Ultimate Truth about reality. That truth is that something greater than the universe exists, God, you could say. Virtually all cultures have identified this, labelled and tried to understand it, which is how there are so many differences among religions, they all tend to have the same essence. Moreover, there are ways, most notably through the various mystical traditions, of coming into union with this Ultimate Reality.

I consider myself a follower (albeit a layman) of this philosophy and tradition, so I named my blog thusly, as I wanted to share its ideas and its potential benefit for humanity, which aren’t very well known, despite how ancient and timeless they are.

2) Who have been your biggest influences on your spiritual journey?

I’m quite into the big thinkers who have shaped my way of looking at the world. Since there’s countless examples of incredible inspirational people who make me want to better myself, I’ll stick to those who have shaped my outlook, spiritually speaking.

My first big influence was Karen Armstrong, who writes incredibly eloquent historical books on religion that reveal their value to the world. Her book “The Case for God” basically woke me out of my atheistic slumber by presenting me with this whole new way of seeing and understanding religion and God.

This for me, laid the foundations for my future influences, the next big one being Aldous Huxley, but mainly just for his book “The Perennial Philosophy” which provided me coherently with the concept of the perennial philosophy. (Although I do love his other work too).

Another major influence for me has been Alan Watts. He introduced the wealth of knowledge the Eastern religious traditions provide, particularly Taoism, Buddhism and Vedanta, as well as showed a way of living that brought me more in tune with the divine and the present moment.

More recently, Jordan Peterson has become a big influence. He has some of the most profound work I’ve read and listened to in recent memory. I’ve actually just finished his somewhat mind blowing book “12 Rules For Life” – perhaps the greatest so-to-speak “self-help” book I’ve ever read. He offers a profound look at humanity by delving into psychology, biology and (most interesting for me) mythology. He’s very much in the tradition of thinking established by Karl Jung.

3) Many of my readers are Christians, and you live in China. What are your observations about Christianity, and religious life in general, in China?

Good question, and luckily enough I feel as though I’m in a position to answer it quite well. My fiancé’s mother and grandmother are both Christian, so I have gotten a little bit of insight into how Chinese see the religion. It’s quite fascinating, China’s understanding of Christianity is very… peculiar. I think it’s because it isn’t very widespread in the country.

[image error]David and his fiancé, Jill

For example, Chinese (generally) see Catholicism and Christianity as entirely separate things, and have this huge misunderstanding that Catholics only worship Mary and not Jesus at all. Which I found quite hilarious until I realised how widespread this belief is.

My fiancé’s Christian relatives are also Biblical literalists, and because they don’t have access to the wealth of knowledge us in the West have of Christianity, their understanding remains quite limited, and I haven’t come across any who are aware of the depths of the religion. There also seems to be a bit of a fusion of Chinese traditional religious practices/rituals with Christianity, which appears quite alien if not overly superstitious to an outside observer. But with that being said, both her mother and grandmother seem to get the core message of Christianity right – work towards the Good and be kind to one another.

Religious life in general is more prevalent than one may initially think. On the surface, it appears that there is none, with Communism superseding any chance of religious expression. But just dip a bit below the surface, and a multitude of traditions are observed, from Islam, to Buddhism, Daoism and Christianity. There’s also the traditional ancestor worship practices and beliefs that remain quite prevalent too. I personally think that one day there will be a big renewal of religiosity in China, and there are some rumblings of that already on display.

4) What’s the meaning of life?

This is the toughest question, one that I guess I can’t really answer sufficiently, because I myself don’t really know. But I’ll have a shot.

I believe that the absolute ultimate purpose of life may be to come into union with ultimate reality, to transform oneself into a godly person, expanding oneself until they are one with God. Experiencing the infinite and merging with it.

But recognising this may be only for a few people with that particular inclination, there is another purpose for our lives, which is similar, but more in tune with how most of us conduct our daily lives. I think that is finding one’s true meaning, true passion for life, as long as that brings the betterment of all of us, in line with the ultimate Good. Finding your role in God’s plan, so to speak, and pursuing it truthfully and always with the goal of bringing more good in the world. I believe everybody has the potential for that, can find something they can bring to make the world a better place, and by that give life meaning.

5) In terms of your writing, what are your ambitions moving forward?

My key ambition moving forward is writing novels and non-fiction books that help show people the value of religions and mysticism in the world. I want to do my part in showing how the ancient wisdom of our ancestors is still relevant to this world and that we shouldn’t just dismiss it.

So to pursue that, I’m currently in the beginning stages of a second novel. After sending the manuscript of my first to an editor, who gave me some brutal but very useful criticism, I thought I’d put that one on the back-burner and start something fresh.

Regarding my blog, I’m very much enjoying sharing ideas and engaging with others, and I wholeheartedly want to keep expanding it and using it as a platform of communication.

I would really one day like to make a career out of writing, so I can give my full attention to developing ideas and spreading the value of religion to those who have perhaps given up on it all too readily. So hopefully this is the path that I’m meant to be on, because it is my passion, at least as far as productive ones for society go.

Thanks again for the opportunity Steven! It’s been a lot of fun.

Be sure to check out David’s blog and if this interview has piqued your interest in his writing, consider subscribing. Thank you for reading!

Be Anxious For Nothing

Good morning, folks! For today’s Monday Music post I’d like to share a beautiful piece of creative work from a Christian musician based here in the UK. Jonathan Ogden describes himself as a ‘creative missionary’, and aims to reach people with the Christian gospel through a variety of music and art projects, all of which demonstrate real talent (and hard work!).

Check out Jonathan’s amazing artwork here: http://typographicverses.com/

Check out Jonathan’s band Rivers and Robots here: https://riversandrobots.com/

The specific piece I want to share today is a video by Jonathan based on Philippians 4:6-9. The video is presented in such a way as to help viewers meditate on the words of this passage of Scripture – a passage which will be familiar to many of you. It was filmed during a trip to New York City and I think it’s really quite beautiful!

Weekly Review | Cold Snap?

Every Sunday I write a more personal post reflecting on my week and also looking forward to the week ahead. For my full posting schedule, which includes regular posts about theology, philosophy, and music, click here.

In the UK this week we’ve experienced what weather forecasters having been calling a ‘cold snap’ – a short spell of uncharacteristically cold weather. Why anyone would describe a few days of snow as a ‘snap’ is a mystery to me, so if there are any knowledgable wordsmiths reading who can offer an explanation, let me know!

As the cold weather hit, my boiler broke. I was without hot water and heating for a couple of days, and under about 8 layers of clothing I still had freezing fingers and toes, and didn’t feel like reading or writing or doing anything much – all I could do was watch the snow pile up and wait for the boiler repair person.

Experiences like this should make us count our blessings, and I was so grateful for the shelter, clothing, and electricity which meant that I could still make cups of tea and heat up some food. It turns out that a frozen pipe outside the building was causing the fault with the boiler, and apparently very many people were having the same problem. By Friday afternoon I was back up and running, and having a hot shower on Friday evening was pure bliss!

This Week’s Posts

In my Thursday Theology post this week I looked at the way technology is increasingly impinging upon what I called our ‘biological freedom’. I looked at the example of sex robots, questioning what they will mean for sexual morality, and I also suggested that implants and other invasive technologies will become increasingly prevalent in the coming years, leading to difficult decisions for Christians.

In my Friday Philosophy post I continued my sweep through some of the big ideas associated with the presocractic thinkers, focusing this week on Pythagoras and his fascination with numbers. This gave me a chance to briefly state my own theory of meaning, which in essence is that no word or number has intrinsic meaning, but instead that meaning arises due to God creating impressions in our awareness.

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New Song Out on Saturday 10th March

For those of you who aren’t aware, I’m in the midst of a songwriting and recording project, and am releasing ten songs over ten months. I’m currently finalising track seven; a heavy rock song entitled ‘Machines Taking Over the World’, which will be available to stream for free on Saturday.

 

The Week Ahead

It’s going to be a busy one! As well as my scheduled posts, on Wednesday I’m going to be publishing an interview with one of my favourite bloggers, and then on Saturday I’ll be posting again around the single release.

I’m currently reading ‘When Jesus Returns’ by David Pawson, an interesting book that I’ve just started so I’m looking forward to making some inroads into that in the coming week. What are you reading at the moment? Please let me know in the comments.

If you have any prayer requests, feel free to leave a comment or email me via the Contact page. Please know that even if you don’t give me a specific request, every Sunday afternoon I spend some quality time in prayer and I always lift up my blog followers to the Lord, asking for His blessing and favour over your lives in the coming week.

Have a wonderful week, and thank you so much for reading!

Reality as Numbers

In this week’s Friday Philosophy post we’re going to stay with the ancient Greeks and look at an idea by a man who we all know from mathematics lessons. Pythagoras of Samos lived around the mid-sixth century BC (we don’t know the exact dates) and like Thales who we looked at last week was a presocratic philosopher.

Who Was He?

Pythagoras was a mystic and religious thinker as well as a philosopher and mathematician. We know him best for his famous theorem relating to right-angled triangles but it’s actually likely that he didn’t invent the theorem as there is evidence that it was known both to the Egyptians and Babylonians around the same period.

We don’t have any of his writings, but in a similar way to Socrates who followed him we have the writing of his students to whom he passed down his ideas. A random fact about Pythagoras is that he founded a kind of religious cult that had a veneration for beans.

What’s the Big Idea?

Pythagoras believed that the ultimate nature of reality is number. He came to this conclusion after studying music and deciphering that the intervals between musical notes could be expressed as ratios between the numbers one to four.

A fascination with numbers characterised a lot of Pythagorean thought, and there was a mystical element to his thinking. Numerology became something of an obsession for the philosopher and he believed, for instance, that the number 10 is the perfect number because it is made up of the sum of the first four integers (1,2,3, and 4).

My Reflections

Numerology has had a major influence down through the ages, the most obvious example of this being Nostradamus, who used numbers in his prophetic writing. But it’s also interesting that some Christians, even those living in the present day, have an obsession with trying to read significance into the numbers we find associated with certain events in Scripture.

I find the whole concept of numbers very interesting. While I was writing my book The Philosophy of a Mad Man I spent some time thinking about numbers and words, and why they have meaning. I believe that they can best be understood as impressions in consciousness that God imbues with a certain regularity. For instance, if you look at this number – 5 – what you are looking at is merely a mark on the page which has no inherent meaning. What gives the number meaning is God creating an impression in your awareness as you read.

So I share with Pythagoras a fascination with numbers, and I believe that although numerology can sometimes be overly superstitious, if we take time to study why numbers mean what they mean, that study can reveal some deep truths about the human mind and its relationship with God.

Next week we’ll be looking at a big idea by Xenophanes, another presocratic thinker. If you don’t want to miss out on that, consider subscribing. Thank you for reading!

Christian Morality and AI

The world in which we live today is so different in many ways to the world that the authors of the Christian Scriptures inhabited. This being so, Christians must continually reinterpret the moral lessons of the Bible so that we can heed their guidance in the 21st Century.

One area that presents a problem in this respect is our growing reliance on technology and artificial intelligence. The inventions of the digital age present us with scenarios that are unprecedented in human history, and pastors and theologians need to respond. In this short post I will reflect a little on some of the new moral problems Christians will face in the coming years.

It may make Christians feel deeply uncomfortable, but it’s likely that robots capable of sexual intercourse will be widely available before long. Some people might regard these as elaborate sex toys, but the question arises: If a married person engages in intercourse with a robot, have they committed adultery?

It would seem obvious to me that such an activity would be adulterous, but such a perspective is necessarily subjective as there is no guidance on this issue in the Bible. Perhaps the Catholic Church could score a few points here, as they could argue that the magisterium exists precisely to provide clarity on issues such as this where guidance is not explicitly found in Scripture.

This is one example of a wider issue which is that new inventions are increasingly blurring the line between what is biological and what is technological. We see this in the area of genetics and genome editing, one issue being whether or not it’s morally acceptable to tamper with genes if such tampering will lead to the eradication of certain diseases, for instance.

In the coming years, every Christian is going to face difficult moral decisions concerning the extent to which they allow technology to infiltrate their biology. Electronic implants are already widely available for a variety of purposes, and it might not be long before we find ourselves under pressure to yield to invasive technologies that compromise those aspects of our lives where we currently enjoy biological freedom.

What do you think? Is the church ready to deal with such issues? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. My new single entitled ‘Machines Taking Over the World’ will be released on 10th March 2018.

Monday Music | Flamenco

Are you familiar with flamenco music? As a child I took classical guitar lessons, and while practising for my grades some of the music we could choose to learn was of the flamenco style. The technique involved is quite unique.

Classical guitars (which have three nylon strings and three steel strings, unlike other acoustic guitars which have six steel strings) are also known as ‘Spanish guitars’, which is fitting as flamenco music originated in Southern Spain, in the Andalusia region.

This style of music is incredibly difficult to play! You will see from the video the level of expertise involved. Really, to become a flamenco guitarist requires complete commitment over a lifetime.

Three Facts About Flamenco Music

(Courtesy of Synkroniciti)

Flamenco is a musical tradition that flowered into dance. The dancer embodies the anguish and beauty of the singer’s voice, the rhythmic anxiety and ferocity of the guitar.
Flamenco favours the emotional palette of the mature dancer and it is not unusual for a flamenco artist to dance well into their fifties and beyond.
The duende, or soul of the dance will not give itself easily to the dancer who has not experienced the difficulties of life. The Roma people of Southern Spain, who spawned the tradition, experienced a great deal of persecution.

Please enjoy the video, and let me know what you think in the comments!