Francis Berger's Blog, page 17
October 25, 2024
The Last Days of Good Weather
I have been relentlessly plugging away at my home renovation projects before the weather worsens. I have nothing against winter; however, it is the least conducive to outdoor work around the house. Autumn is probably best, weather-wise, but the increasingly shorter days cut into how much I can accomplish in an afternoon or on a day off.
Thankfully, the renovations are going well. The exterior of the pig barn conversion is nearly complete, and I will soon be moving indoors to tackle the building’s interior. I would have been further ahead if I hadn’t focused on a job I had planned to years ago—insulating the walls in the rear portion of the house, which now features a new entrance door.
I have another week or so before the overcast skies, fog, rain, frost, and frigid temps settle in, and I am doing everything I can to make the most of it.
Nevertheless, a part of me is looking forward to the colder, darker days; they will provide a welcome and perhaps much-needed excuse to rest and concentrate on other matters for a while.
Carl Gustav Carus - Mönch in Winterlandschaft - date unknown
Thankfully, the renovations are going well. The exterior of the pig barn conversion is nearly complete, and I will soon be moving indoors to tackle the building’s interior. I would have been further ahead if I hadn’t focused on a job I had planned to years ago—insulating the walls in the rear portion of the house, which now features a new entrance door.
I have another week or so before the overcast skies, fog, rain, frost, and frigid temps settle in, and I am doing everything I can to make the most of it.
Nevertheless, a part of me is looking forward to the colder, darker days; they will provide a welcome and perhaps much-needed excuse to rest and concentrate on other matters for a while.
Carl Gustav Carus - Mönch in Winterlandschaft - date unknown
October 24, 2024
Cemetery in the Moonlight
Another good one from Carus, especially as All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day draw closer. 
Carl Gustav Carus - Cemetery in the Moonlight - 1822
Carl Gustav Carus - Cemetery in the Moonlight - 1822
October 23, 2024
He Was Doing So Well
I have a low opinion of clergymen; however, I developed a fair degree of respect for the discernment Bishop Carlo Maria Viganó demonstrated during the birdemic years.
Well, that discernment appears to have faltered bigly as the good bishop is now harping on about the moral obligation of voting for a particular candidate in the upcoming US election—you know, the same candidate who promised to at the birdemic with “warp speed” pecks.
Speaking of pecks, I remember the pope insisting that getting pecked also constituted a moral obligation.
Moral obligation.
When you hear those words spoken publicly, beware! An enemy or a fool has revealed himself.
Well, that discernment appears to have faltered bigly as the good bishop is now harping on about the moral obligation of voting for a particular candidate in the upcoming US election—you know, the same candidate who promised to at the birdemic with “warp speed” pecks.
Speaking of pecks, I remember the pope insisting that getting pecked also constituted a moral obligation.
Moral obligation.
When you hear those words spoken publicly, beware! An enemy or a fool has revealed himself.
October 20, 2024
Virtually All Christian Externals Are Tintern Abbey
Carl Gustav Carus - Tintern Abbey - Unknown date Carl Gustav Carus's Tintern Abbey provides a good visual representation of the current state of Christianity's externals.More precisely, external, conventional, everyday Christianity is breaking up . . . has broken up. All of us are the individual standing in the middle of the ruins.
The burning question is what comes next?
Do we carry on as if nothing is broken and hope it will all be magically fixed somehow?
Or do we pursue a different orientation in Christian consciousness?
What comes next is up to us as individuals and cannot be avoided, no matter how hard we try.
October 19, 2024
Freedom Reveals the Purpose of Creation
For those who reject Creation, freedom amounts to little more than a mix of chaos and randomness, with a bit of conditioning and determinism thrown into the mix. Whatever the case, what Creation-rejecters believe about the nature of freedom is irrelevant because life, the universe, and everything have no real purpose.
Most of those who accept Creation believe in two distinct kinds of freedom—uncreated and created, with God enjoying the uncreated freedom and every other actual being experiencing the freedom God supplied them with when he made them from nothing.
Created-freedom believers hold to the idea that such freedom is still authentic even though it is inherently inferior to God’s uncreated freedom. How could it be otherwise?
After all, belief in created freedom immediately elevates God to an entirely separate category of being, to the point that any comparison of God’s freedom and human freedom is immediately declared a category error.
When asked why an absolute God would bother with Creation in the first place and what he wanted to achieve with it, created freedom believers tend to spout on about God desiring that his creatures “get to know him” or explain Creation as God’s ultimate expression of love.
Why an absolute, utterly self-sufficient God would be interested in creating creatures that can “know him” remains a mystery. The love explanation also runs into some headwinds when one understands that the absolute God was perfect before he created and had no need for love of any sort.
The volume of work dedicated to addressing such questions with supposedly coherent, logical answers is enormous—yet the volume of work also reveals an overarching question that very few consider or contemplate.
Why does the purpose of Creation require so much explanation? Why does it require arduous logic and philosophical struggle to “get it.”
Why did God make the purpose of Creation—getting to know him and expressing his love— so laborious to understand?
Well, because he’s in a category all his own, and at the end of the day, you can’t expect to ever “really” know him.
I posit that the purpose of Creation is only difficult to understand if one insists upon placing God’s freedom into a category of its own and relegating the freedom of every other being to just another aspect of God creating from nothing.
Take away that assumption—that is, place the essence of God’s freedom in the same category as all other freedom—and the matter of God desiring that we “know him” and Creation as the medium through which he “expresses his love” immediately becomes more accessible and comprehensible.
Most of those who accept Creation believe in two distinct kinds of freedom—uncreated and created, with God enjoying the uncreated freedom and every other actual being experiencing the freedom God supplied them with when he made them from nothing.
Created-freedom believers hold to the idea that such freedom is still authentic even though it is inherently inferior to God’s uncreated freedom. How could it be otherwise?
After all, belief in created freedom immediately elevates God to an entirely separate category of being, to the point that any comparison of God’s freedom and human freedom is immediately declared a category error.
When asked why an absolute God would bother with Creation in the first place and what he wanted to achieve with it, created freedom believers tend to spout on about God desiring that his creatures “get to know him” or explain Creation as God’s ultimate expression of love.
Why an absolute, utterly self-sufficient God would be interested in creating creatures that can “know him” remains a mystery. The love explanation also runs into some headwinds when one understands that the absolute God was perfect before he created and had no need for love of any sort.
The volume of work dedicated to addressing such questions with supposedly coherent, logical answers is enormous—yet the volume of work also reveals an overarching question that very few consider or contemplate.
Why does the purpose of Creation require so much explanation? Why does it require arduous logic and philosophical struggle to “get it.”
Why did God make the purpose of Creation—getting to know him and expressing his love— so laborious to understand?
Well, because he’s in a category all his own, and at the end of the day, you can’t expect to ever “really” know him.
I posit that the purpose of Creation is only difficult to understand if one insists upon placing God’s freedom into a category of its own and relegating the freedom of every other being to just another aspect of God creating from nothing.
Take away that assumption—that is, place the essence of God’s freedom in the same category as all other freedom—and the matter of God desiring that we “know him” and Creation as the medium through which he “expresses his love” immediately becomes more accessible and comprehensible.
October 17, 2024
Comments Open Again
Comments are back on.
Valleys and Mountaintops
Mortal life is about spiritual learning.
Peaks and valleys.
Mostly valleys. Rocky valleys.
Carl Gustav Carus - Pilgrim in a Rocky Valley - c. 1820 Yet the valleys serve a purpose.
Without them, we would likely not contemplate let alone comprehend what we may have experienced during our brief and intermittent ascents to the peaks. 
Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog - c. 1818 Note: I have reopened comments.
Peaks and valleys.
Mostly valleys. Rocky valleys.
Carl Gustav Carus - Pilgrim in a Rocky Valley - c. 1820 Yet the valleys serve a purpose. Without them, we would likely not contemplate let alone comprehend what we may have experienced during our brief and intermittent ascents to the peaks.
Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog - c. 1818 Note: I have reopened comments.
October 14, 2024
We’re All Moderns; Start There and Then Move Forward
I understand the inclination to distance oneself from “moderns.” I have experienced the impulse countless times, yet indulging in it inevitably felt insincere and hollow, primarily because I know that I am ineluctably modern, too.
Those who affix the modern label as a magical line of demarcation separating themselves from the masses are essentially deluding themselves with the misguided belief that they somehow possess a pre-modern form of consciousness locked in an otherwise modern world.
As comforting as the delusion may seem, it remains a delusion and must be acknowledged as such before any genuine and honest spiritual work can start.
To begin with, no person alive today is personally privy to the consciousnesses of previous eras. Individuals can explore earlier modes of consciousness, predominantly through secondary sources; however, the fire that produced such work has long since cooled, and the sources themselves are now congealed, solidified objects. Although we may sense the spark of creativity in secondary sources, we cannot and will never experience the creative flame that birthed them.
Furthermore, no person alive today could function effectively within the milieu of a previous era regardless of how well they think they could. I refer here to internal rather than external considerations. Like it or not, the way past people understood and interacted with God, the world, and each other was immeasurably different from how we understand and interact with God, the world, and each other.
Changing our externals would not resurrect the past because there would be nothing authentic or whole about it. On the contrary, the entire endeavor would quickly degenerate into a tragedy before dissolving into a farce.
The only way out of the modern era is to work forward through it and emerge on the other side, entailing that we should embrace ourselves as moderns and “take ownership” of our current mode of consciousness.
I am not implying that people should throw in the towel and surrender to the disoriented and off-course masses, but they should be a little more honest about who they are and the time and place they occupy.
There is a reason why you incarnated as a modern, and that reason has absolutely nothing to do with spending your life wishing you had been born a few centuries earlier or how wonderful it would be if a "few centuries earlier" suddenly manifested today.
Those who affix the modern label as a magical line of demarcation separating themselves from the masses are essentially deluding themselves with the misguided belief that they somehow possess a pre-modern form of consciousness locked in an otherwise modern world.
As comforting as the delusion may seem, it remains a delusion and must be acknowledged as such before any genuine and honest spiritual work can start.
To begin with, no person alive today is personally privy to the consciousnesses of previous eras. Individuals can explore earlier modes of consciousness, predominantly through secondary sources; however, the fire that produced such work has long since cooled, and the sources themselves are now congealed, solidified objects. Although we may sense the spark of creativity in secondary sources, we cannot and will never experience the creative flame that birthed them.
Furthermore, no person alive today could function effectively within the milieu of a previous era regardless of how well they think they could. I refer here to internal rather than external considerations. Like it or not, the way past people understood and interacted with God, the world, and each other was immeasurably different from how we understand and interact with God, the world, and each other.
Changing our externals would not resurrect the past because there would be nothing authentic or whole about it. On the contrary, the entire endeavor would quickly degenerate into a tragedy before dissolving into a farce.
The only way out of the modern era is to work forward through it and emerge on the other side, entailing that we should embrace ourselves as moderns and “take ownership” of our current mode of consciousness.
I am not implying that people should throw in the towel and surrender to the disoriented and off-course masses, but they should be a little more honest about who they are and the time and place they occupy.
There is a reason why you incarnated as a modern, and that reason has absolutely nothing to do with spending your life wishing you had been born a few centuries earlier or how wonderful it would be if a "few centuries earlier" suddenly manifested today.
October 13, 2024
Something Sublime About the Moon in Autumn
The moon is, of course, alluring at any time of year, yet I find it acquires a particularly sublime quality in the autumn. What extracts this quality from the moon as the summer fades and winter approaches is unclear, to me at least.
It could simply be the longer nights, or the increased prevalence of lonely, ghostly clouds in the night sky serenely framing the moon or diaphanously veiling it. Whatever the cause, the quality is undeniable—a quality that Carl Gustav Carus appeared to not only sense but also took great pains to capture in his paintings.
Ruins of the Eldena Monastery with cottage near Greifswald in Moonlight - 1819-1820 
Schloss Milkel in Moonlight - 1833-1835
It could simply be the longer nights, or the increased prevalence of lonely, ghostly clouds in the night sky serenely framing the moon or diaphanously veiling it. Whatever the cause, the quality is undeniable—a quality that Carl Gustav Carus appeared to not only sense but also took great pains to capture in his paintings.
Ruins of the Eldena Monastery with cottage near Greifswald in Moonlight - 1819-1820 Schloss Milkel in Moonlight - 1833-1835
October 11, 2024
Among the Most Lethal of Spiritual Errors
Is the supposed Christian principle that Christians are not exempted from the duty of obeying authority even when the authority is glaringly bad or evil.
The driving force behind this festering lump of spiritual nonsense is the supposedly noble belief that all authority comes from God. Yes, all authority, even the evil kind.
Since all authority emanates from God, a good Christian should not overly concern himself about humbly submitting to evil authority because, you know, God’s in control, and there must be some mysterious reason why He chose to put evil in charge.
Reasons justifying submission to evil authority include submitting to the office or law rather than the evil individuals occupying the office or enforcing the law, trusting in God (because at the end of the day, there must be some good yet mysterious reason why God allowed evil to become authority), and plain old being humble and showing humility because who are we to question the authorities that God has permitted into power.
This sort of absolute inanity can only arise from the utterly muddled assumptions that Christians regard as necessary and core.
Chief among these is the misguided conviction that everything, even the worst of evils, ultimately serves God’s divine purposes and providence.
Why? Because God is omni-everything.
I think that all Christians, myself included, are slaves; that is, we live in an anti-God and anti-Creation totalitarian world in which we all must submit to evil authority to some degree to survive physically.
Now, we can merrily obey the evil authority while thinking everything is as it should be because it’s all part of God’s plan -- or we can recognize this de facto situation and repent our involvement with it.
The path Christians take depends heavily on the assumptions they hold, particularly when it comes to matters like the origin, quality, and purpose of freedom.
As far as I can tell, most Christians do not understand or believe in freedom as a spiritual principle.
If they did, they would not work so hard to discover ways to unburden themselves of it, which is yet another lethal spiritual error.
The driving force behind this festering lump of spiritual nonsense is the supposedly noble belief that all authority comes from God. Yes, all authority, even the evil kind.
Since all authority emanates from God, a good Christian should not overly concern himself about humbly submitting to evil authority because, you know, God’s in control, and there must be some mysterious reason why He chose to put evil in charge.
Reasons justifying submission to evil authority include submitting to the office or law rather than the evil individuals occupying the office or enforcing the law, trusting in God (because at the end of the day, there must be some good yet mysterious reason why God allowed evil to become authority), and plain old being humble and showing humility because who are we to question the authorities that God has permitted into power.
This sort of absolute inanity can only arise from the utterly muddled assumptions that Christians regard as necessary and core.
Chief among these is the misguided conviction that everything, even the worst of evils, ultimately serves God’s divine purposes and providence.
Why? Because God is omni-everything.
I think that all Christians, myself included, are slaves; that is, we live in an anti-God and anti-Creation totalitarian world in which we all must submit to evil authority to some degree to survive physically.
Now, we can merrily obey the evil authority while thinking everything is as it should be because it’s all part of God’s plan -- or we can recognize this de facto situation and repent our involvement with it.
The path Christians take depends heavily on the assumptions they hold, particularly when it comes to matters like the origin, quality, and purpose of freedom.
As far as I can tell, most Christians do not understand or believe in freedom as a spiritual principle.
If they did, they would not work so hard to discover ways to unburden themselves of it, which is yet another lethal spiritual error.
