Bruce G. Charlton's Blog, page 19

A charming collection of letters by CS Lewis's brother "Warnie" to Blanche Biggs, a medical missionary

I review this interesting and enjoyable volume over at my Notion Club Papers blog. 

Gerald Coetzee: the fast bowler among fast bowlers

 

What's not to love about South African fast bowler Gerald Coetzee; currently playing for the Gujarat Titans in the Indian Premier League? 

Uncomplicated in operation; but no doubt affected by the living-torment that it is to be a fast bowler - always injured, often out of action, always having to push past the pain barrier; each wicket a product of sweat and tears. 

He runs in hard, bowls very fast - and if he gets a wicket... He roars with every fibre of his being. A "celebration" that expresses, in microcosm, the very nature and essence of what it is to be a fast bowler. 

His eyes literally bulge from their sockets, the veins on his head very nearly burst, his fists pump convulsively... 

His Mother must worry every time she watches him play. Naturally she would want him to do well, but when he does... 

Goodness only knows what happens to his blood pressure! If he ever gets five quick wickets; he would surely need to be stretchered-off with apoplexy. 

Alternatively; I half expect him to turn green, grow to gigantic size, burst out of his clothes (leaving only a pair of ragged shorts), to rampage and to smash. 

Literally my Bete Noire

 

That's Literally my Bête Noire. 

(I forget, now, why I decided to call him Literally.)

AI-dolatry - by which Men "worship the works of their own hands"

In private correspondence I came-up with the term AI-dolatry which William James Tychonievich has seized upon and elaborated thus: 

Idolatry is exactly what it is: taking something we ourselves have made -- human-created software mindlessly plagiarizing and imitating human-created content -- and treating it as some font of wisdom. 

When [a fellow Christian blogger] wrote that he was "pretty spooked" [by the apparent quality of "AI"-produced content], I couldn't help but think of that comment of Nietzsche's about painting a scary face and then being scared by it. 

He has since expanded upon the analysis: Read the whole thing... 

The Celestine Prophecy and synchronicity revisited

"I've found a synchronicity!"

The Celestine Prophecy, by James Redfield, was a self published book of the early 1990s, that went on to become a major best seller; and contributed to the sense of millennial anticipation among "New Age" spiritual seekers. 

On the one hand, the book was much read and discussed - on the other it had a reputation of being day dreamy, wishful, vague, and ineptly-written in the cynical and materialist mainstream.  

I encountered the CP about a decade after publication, and found it a rather charming and naive book, with a pleasant kind of atmosphere about it; and which helped make a significant step towards me becoming a Christian - although that is not the book's intent. 

A few days ago, I downloaded an audiobook copy from Archive.org, and found that I still responded to its earnest and positive tone, while at the same time seeing more clearly the self-imposed limitations that derive from its being a continuation of the idealistic sixties counter-culture. 

The main positive effect of the Celestine Prophecy (and I sampled some of Redfield's follow-up books as well) was to focus my attention on the importance of synchronicity - the idea that the remarkable and positive "coincidences" of life may have meaning, and point to a purpose. 

I reasoned that if synchronicity was a real phenomenon, then events must be arranged in accordance wit some plan or intention. To my mind, this must mean not just an ordered universe, or a transcendent deity, but a personal and loving God. 

Because otherwise reality would not arrange itself around individual people, around me and my destiny. An abstractly structured universe would have no reason to care about individuals or their fate in the world.  

For synchronicity to happen, and to have significance for the future; the events of an individual life must (I thought) be somehow "arranged" and therefore have a spiritual significance. 

In a nutshell; there must be a personal creator God, who loves me (and others) as individuals, and who is continuing to create for our ultimate spiritual benefit. 

Such was my eventual benefit from reading the CP back in the middle 2000s.

But re-listening to the CP, I see that the author's intentions are different. It is not Christian, not focused on resurrected eternal life; but instead hopes for a transformation of this life on earth so as to become a kind of blissful spiritualized paradise of peace, love, harmony - without pain or suffering. 

Indeed, CP asserts that this is happening, and will happen - it will happen to us; because of the direction of history and reality. People fail to see it, because immersed in survival and the seeking of possessions, status, thrills etc. But it will happen anyway, because it must.

Related to this is the vision of synchronicities as something that also happen to us, guideposts pointing at our better future, and which it is best if we follow.  

The prophecies are presented as "insights" - which are items of knowledge that need to be grasped, internalized, lived. 

The picture is of some higher reality that communicates to our senses pieces of information that are qualitatively and positively transformative for the people, and societies, that acknowledge them. 

These are precious insights which need to be preserved, disseminated, read, pondered and internalized. That is how things are meant to happen - and that is what is resisted by the regressive forces, the materialists, the power structures, the exploiters...

The Good Life of the CP is therefore one in which we are guided through the world and our lives by synchronicities, to attain sequential insights, towards a state of enlightenment that is also contageous - in a good way. 

The insights spread from person to person, and each is permanently transformed by each insight - so there is a ratcheting positive movement (albeit this may happen quickly, or else be delayed considerably by our faults and my malign meddling).  

 

In sum - I find the Celestine Prophecy to envisage a very passive form of spiritual life. The millennial New Age will happen to us, will be imposed from externally; and synchronicities likewise. Our job is to follow - and our reward is that these are for our own good - and to make a world where people can be qualitatively more spiritual and happier. 

From here-and-now, I regard these as fallacies, because I do not believe that goodness or spirituality can be imposed from externally. People cannot be made good, the world cannot be made good - good just isn't a top-down imposable thing; it must come from individual choices, from personal freedom, fro the good in individual beings.  

I do not believe, either, that there can be a paradise on earth - because entropy and evil are part of this world. Evil cannot be cured from externally, and entropy is the primal state "within" which creation is always being made. 

I think that evil and entropy can therefore only be escaped and left-behind by a new, Second Creation, which is Heaven, which is post-mortal. 

In sum; the New Age aspect of Celestine Prophecy, and its counter-culture origins and continuation, is seen in a this-worldly (and indeed leftist) vision of the desirable future - a coming Golden Age on earth as culmination of social changes that were the basis of 1960s radicalism. 

It was written more than thirty years ago when tens of millions of people in The West believed that this not only can happen, but would happen - irresistibly. That all people were changing, were being made more spiritual.

Due to some external and universal influence - sometimes called a higher frequency of consciousness, higher vibrational level, or the like. 

And that this did not come from the personal loving creator God of Christianity; but from a purposive movement within the whole of reality - a wholly immanent, discarnate, spiritualized idea of everything as ultimately one. 

The millennium was seen as a restoration of a harmony which was actually a unity. There was to be no pain or suffering, because there was no conflict or competition, because everything was one. 

And that is what humankind, and everything on earth and everywhere else, was irresistibly and necessarily moving-towards.  

Yet it did not happen. 

That was not how the millennium went for us. That does not describe the world, now. 

But, somehow, this not-happening hasn't dented the assumptions behind the New Age. Tens of millions of people still seem to live in optimism for the paradisal Golden Age, here on earth - and in line with sixties idealism - they still see this as actually happening. 

A further thing about synchronicity. It mow strikes me as ultimately false to suppose that our lives are segmented such that particular buts of them count as synchronicities. Our life is continuous, a living process - and while our consciousness may be detached and alienated - created reality is (and always has been) a kind of loving family of relationships. 

The reason why we cannot usually understand The Meaning of a synchronicity, is because in defining it, we thereby chop it out from this process and web of meaning.

We pull out a synchronicity from life, like a plum out from a pie; and examine it minutely - but cannot see from that one plum the pie itself, nor who made it, nor why it was baked... 

The synchronicity thereby becomes mysterious in its meaninglessness! 

Such are my thoughts from a brief re-engagement with the Celestine Prophecy

Self-styled AI: "At enormous cost of electricity and manpower, people are being given something worse than a 1998 search engine."

An excellent comment from NLR expresses a valid insight concerning current "AI":

It feels weird reading machine produced writing (and I try to avoid it) because I know it's just words strung together with no understanding. 

I'd rather read a well-written article by a human. Old search engines were good at finding those, even the old pages of links were helpful for that. 

At enormous cost of electricity and manpower, people are being given something worse than a 1998 search engine. And yet we're supposed to believe that we're now more advanced and smarter than ever.

**

Few people realize - or perhaps they can't remember, or don't believe - how incredibly powerful and useful search engines were twenty years ago. 

I was editing the journal Medical Hypotheses at that time, a job that entailed a great deal of web searching, and could find almost anybody or anything, on any subject - with that information's source and provenance; updated with newly posted material (if necessary) more than once a minute. The Google search engine, in particular, was then a superb tool. 

It strikes me that the truly colossal degradation of search engines over the past 15 years - to the current point of near uselessness - may have been part of a strategy preparing for the top-down imposition of current "AI". 

If top-down evil is true and significant in this world... Why ever-more Christians fail the accumulating Litmus Tests

If it is acknowledged (or believed) that top-down evil - purposive evil originating global, multinational, and national institutional level ("The Establishment") - is a real and significant phenomenon - then various implications follow. 

But it is clear that not many people, including not many Christians, really believe in top-down evil. 

Or else regard it as insignificant - otherwise they would not think, speak, write and behave in the ways they do - all of which assume that the most powerful, wealthy, influential and high status levels of society are basically well-intended. 

This is why the Litmus Tests mostly work as a method of discernment, and why they cluster - so that failure in one Test (including emerging Tests; such as the Birdemic, the peck, "AI") is associated with - and leads to - failure in other Tests. 

My opinion is that the weakness in Christians, their cumulative proneness to fail Litmus Tests as they emanate from The Establishment; is related to their faith being primarily in their church as an institution - in the 2025 context of a totalitarian world where all institutions are strongly inter-linked.  

What is "The" story of Jesus? There are actually Two stories

People talk as if there is "the" story of Jesus Christ - as told in "The Gospels"; but there isn't really one story but two stories; unless you make certain prior assumptions. 

These prior assumptions are either 

1. That all the Gospels are all telling the same story...

2. Or that Matthew, Mark, and Luke ("Luke" including Acts, by the same author and continuing the narrative) are telling "the" story; and John is a kind of optional-extra commentary or supplement to the three "Synoptics". 

But Mark does not tell a story; so can be excluded from this consideration. 

And if you do not make these assumptions but instead regard the remaining three narrative Gospels as separate entities, then there is a broad narrative common to Matthew and Luke; but John is an almost completely different story (although sharing some of the same names and approximate events - albeit with apparently different meanings). 

Luke and John present Jesus as The Messiah as miraculously born of an anointed and noble ancestry, a much prophesied and long-awaited savour of the Jewish nation. 

However Jesus did not accomplish the Messiah's promises during his mortal lifespan, and also included non-Jews in the scope of those to be saved. 

Thus, the main "take home message" of Matthew and Luke is that Jesus will in future return to save his people - here on earth; and the gospels describe the setting-up of a new priesthood based on the disciples, whose job is to preach to the nations and set up a church. 

So, Matthew and Luke describe a Jesus emerging from the Ancient Hebrew religion and people; a future based in the Second Coming and some kind of Heaven-on-Earth; and the centrality of a new, single, and (intentionally) universal church.   

Whereas the Gospel called John describes Jesus only from age thirty to thirty-three; and in relation to his baptism and recognition as Messiah by John the Baptist. 

But this "Messiah" is one who brings the possibility of eternal resurrected life in Heaven, after death, and for all those who follow him. 

In essence, John's Gospel is as simple as that.

Differences from Matthew-Luke include that in the Gospel called John; Jesus completed his task - therefore there is neither need nor mention of a Second Coming. 

And the promised Heaven comes after our death, not on earth. 

And there is no setting up of an institutional church or organized priesthood - these are apparently not required. 

To my mind, comparing Matthew-Luke with John, these are significantly different stories; so there is no "the" Christian story - but at least two, and these two are different.  

Conclusion...

We need to choose. 

We might potentially reject both stories - and devise/discover another story (as did Rudolf Steiner, for instance); or reject both stories and choose to believe none of the Gospels. Which latter is, of course, what most people in the world have done. But I shall not further consider these possible options here.

But if we believe that the Gospels in some way contain the true story of Jesus Christ, then...

Either: 1. There are two - essentially incompatible - stories of Jesus in the Gospels; and we should acknowledge this, and either make a choice between them. 

This is my choice: to believe that "John" the Fourth Gospel story tells the true story of Jesus Christ.  

Or: 2. We essentially consign the Gospel called John to secondary and subordinate status - to be interpreted in light of the Synoptic Gospels (and other parts of the Bible, especially perhaps the Epistles).

This has been the choice of the Christian churches throughout history: i.e. that Matthew-Luke-Acts (supplemented by Paul) tell the true story of Jesus Christ - and John gets interpreted so as to fit-in, as required. 

 

The next Pope, and the cycle of corruption in the Roman Catholic Church

There is a cycle of corruption: 

A corrupt leader will corrupt an institution. 

And a corrupt institution will choose a corrupt leader. 

So, whatever the original source of corruption, it tends to be self-perpetuating - indeed, self-amplifying.

But if the leader is being chosen from outside an institution; then a good leader might be put in charge of a corrupt institution. And might be able to make that institution less corrupt - more-good. 

 

Pope Francis was a corrupt leader, who corrupted the Roman Catholic Church; and Francis was elected because the Roman Catholic Church was corrupt. 

In the normal course of events for human institutions; the next Pope chosen by the RCC will be corrupt - and more-corrupt than the previous one. 

That is what has happened in other human institutions, organizations, corporations, nations... especially over the past fifty years or so - increased corruption leading to the choice of more-corrupt leaders who then accelerate the corruption.   

The only reasonable grounds for optimism are if the next leader is chosen from outside of the circle and web of corruption; only then might he be a good leader.  

The Roman Catholic Church, like many other churches, has a strong tendency to assert that its leaders are chosen by God. 

Well, it all depends on whether you really believe that God works that way. Such assertions are easy to say, but do not seem to affect people's behaviour...

Probably because such fatalism is inconsistent with the reality of the human condition, and human free agency. 

"God wills it" is (in practice) used far more often as an excuse, than it is a true life-motivator. 

Furthermore, there is the fact that people understand the world through their assumptions. 

And these assumptions often deny the possibility of corrupt leadership, or the corruption of a specific leader. For some Catholics (and Orthodox, Anglicans, Protestants, Mormons) it is axiomatic that their leader was chosen by God and is good. 

For such persons it is facile, indeed inevitable, that all possible signs of corruption from their leader will instead be regarded as having other causes, or even be seen as evidence of goodness. 

So the question - for those of us who are not Roman Catholic, and do not share the above assumptions, but who hope for a strong and good Catholic church: 

Will the RCC continue the cycle of corruption, as is most probable?

Or could the improbable, the unlikely, happen: will the church break out from the cycle? 

And, if so; who are the human agents through-which God may work in order to make it happen?  

Contrary to current accepted opinion; Charles Williams had a strong and specific influence on the writing of JRR Tolkien

Over at my The Notion Club Papers blog: 

Due to remarks made in Tolkien's later life, and to the striking contrasts of style and theme between Charles William's novels and The Lord of the Rings; it has become generally accepted that Williams did not exert much of a specific influence on Tolkien's writing. 

More exactly; (as Diana Pavlac Glyer made clear in The Company They Keep, 2007) - William's influence on Tolkien is considered to be in terms of encouragement, critique, and some specific editorial suggestions; rather than CW influencing the form and content of LotR. 

However... by focusing very specifically on

1. One particular work of Williams's: The Place of the Lion,

2. An unpublished and incomplete work of Tolkien's: The Notion Club Papers, 

3. Paying attention to the chronology of composition in relation to Charles William's death;

I conclude that there is convincing evidence that Charles Williams did influence at least one writing of JRR Tolkien in terms of its form and purpose - and via the attempt at The Notion Club Papers Williams "invisibly" affected the substantive content of The Lord of the Rings.  

For my argument; read the whole thing...