SelfAdoration.com

If a lion can stalk the earth as lord of all he surveys, why can’t you?

While our Christian friends are celebrating Easter, let’s talk about resurrecting the god you’ve been trying and failing to crucify since you were a child…

I don’t love the idea of self-sacrifice in Christianity, but I am all over the idea of redemption-writ-large, by which I mean secular redemption, redeeming your life while you’re still alive to reap the benefits.

And: Who do you know of – anyone, anywhere – who talks about redemption for the living as an attainable ecstasy? That’s why you should be listening to me.

This is egoism in action, remaking your world the way you want it.

The video illustrates pellucidly why the idea of agape as self-sacrifice is incorrect. The love expressed this way is entirely egoistic: I am rearranging the universe to more closely reflect my values. This is the way I want things to be.

I love the way it shows things changing over time, too. That’s good art. This is the comedic form at its finest, redemption as new ideas are cultivated through time.

Fine print: Stipulating that what you’re doing is actually good and that you’re not betraying your own interests in someone else’s behalf, this kind of thing can be a self-loving expression of benevolence. I think the video dances that line perfectly: I’m doing the right thing by particular people (and animals) I know and trust to do the right thing in their turn. Fully-conscious benevolence is potentially an everybody-wins transaction. Dial back either consciousness or benevolence, not so much. As with everything else, it’s the motive of the actor that matters. But I really love the idea of each one of us husbanding a better world for himself. Big things are made of little things over time.

I think it’s a great film, a perfect philosophical short. Anti-egoists might see what the protagonist is doing as charity, while anti-anti-egoists might call it a self-sacrifice, but all I see is his own self-interested desire to make his home a better place.

Voluntary. Self-initiated. Persistent even in the face of personal doubts and public scorn. And yet he is rewarded over time by the relationships he is cultivating.

This is Egoism In One Lesson in three minutes. Wonderful.

I like to personify my thinking. I do this anyway, in the silence of my own mind, playing out my conjectures like a 4D movie – like the set of long-term transactions that human relationships are. But I like to do it in persuasion, too, because I think it is a very effective way of understanding the transactional impact of ideas.

So: I give you Pammy and Dan:

I’ve written more about this phenomenon, actual selflessness, notably in Man Alive and How you came to be enslaved — and how you can free yourself.

Another short clip from the interview I did last August with Anthony Johnson of The21Convention:

Mind what goes into your mind:

What animals (and ‘artificially-intelligent’ software) do is not intelligence but pattern-matching, a cargo-cult-like analogue to inference with respect to proxies. They don’t know if their proxies are rational (proportionate to all known facts) since they don’t actually ‘know’ anything. This is why your dog scratches at the kitchen floor before laying down, because he can never discover that ceramic tile cannot conceal snakes and bugs. It’s why he barks at doorbell rings coming from the television.

Bring me your cleverest dolphin and I will show you how easy it is to fool, compared to an 18-month-old toddler. The toddler is also largely an animal in his cognition at that age, but both the dog and the dolphin lack the human brain, so neither one can ever develop actual intelligence, informed discretion, free will, reasoning and choosing in proportion to thoroughly-understood facts in abstract notation systems. No animal but the human animal can do any of these things.

I’m very fussy about terminology, because that’s how distinctions are made. Using the word intelligence to describe pattern-matching is an error, in my opinion. Conflating the two phenomena definitely is, regardless of the terms used to describe them. There is a bright-line distinction between informed discretion in human beings and trained behavior in animals that seems to emulate/replicate/simulate the end-consequences of informed discretion.

A picture of a girl is not a girl, and a simulation of intelligence is not intelligence. In this respect, every branch of science devoted to equating human intelligence with animal cognition – more importantly, devoted to ‘proving’ that human intelligence does not exist – is itself a cargo-cult, an elaborate doctrinal structure making vast, incomprehensible claims about a specious proxy.

Sounds like religion, don’t it? Acts that way, too.

Poetry is leadership is dance, and they will prove that to you if it takes them all afternoon.Prabhu B Doss / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

I had a killer first quarter, secular arguments about marriage, chastity, life and death — and about the nature of secular arguments as such.

Some highlights:

• A happy, working family will be led by the father. Marriages work when the husband asserts his leadership responsibilities, and they fail when he abdicates on that role.
• Chastity rules! Sex outside of the active pursuit of marriage will impair your chances of finding (and keeping!) your ideal perfect spouse, and indiscriminate sex will gradually grind your self away to nothing.
• You can go to church, but leave god at home. If a moral proposition is actually true and useful, it can be proved rationally, butressed by evidence that can be examined in detail by any observer. I am demonstrating this notion by means of the secular proof of everything that matters. Meanwhile, we go to church to be regularly reminded of the values and virtues we live by, and this is what I am endeavoring to do. You could help.
• Poetry is leadership. We flail about aimlessly because we have thrown away the map by which human civilization is guided: Poetry.
• Alleluia! True redemption can be yours now – in this life, not one you’re hoping for in the great beyond.
• Consequently, you can live with no fear of death.

Philosophy, science and academia won’t touch this stuff, and religion can’t prove its claims. I’ve got the true goods, a moral philosophy that is demonstrably consonant to the nature of the uniquely-human life, but you must prove that proposition for yourself.

The silence that has greeted Man Alive and the ideas undergirding that book has been deafening, but that’s hardly surprising. What do people do when they first encounter a truly new idea? I should be grateful to be, at least until now, unassailed by stones, unsurrounded, unhounded by bearers of torches and pitchforks. But I am saddened, too, because two more years of your life are gone, and you have yet to begin the process of becoming most (more…)

I can’t give you either absolution or the promise of an afterlife, but I can show you a path to real redemption in this life. Seems like a fair deal to me.

Come and see the service live or stream it at will afterward.

Meanwhile (or anywhile), take note of these videos, referenced in the service:

Why your face is gonna freeze like that

The Men of The21Convention

The Joy of Chastity

And here are three Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie stories that also inform the argument: Reflecting His Radiance, A canticle for Kathleen Sullivan and The Desperation Waltz.

And one more movie: You cannot rip off the band-aid until you admit that you have wounded your self

Anthony Johnson of The21Convention had me out to Orlando last Summer, where we did a taped interview. This clip is from that session.

Why an #atheist #church? Because regardless of what you believe, you need to be reminded regularly of the need for and the benefit of moral #philosophy. This is the value every church offers, I just serve it up without the smoke and mirrors.

Want to donate space, talent or funds to The Church of Splendor? Please do!

This week’s service: The Power of Poetry.

It makes girls swoon and boys fight, and it drives every quest for the next frontier: poetry. And yet it is mocked everywhere, most especially in academic mock-poetry, and it is ridiculed and shunned by the people who need it most: Men.

When men surrendered poetry, they surrendered everything that has ever mattered in Western civilization: Love, family, art, civility and ultimately civil order itself. The people who are not poets are brutes. And it shows.

No doubt you have other things to do with your time, but I challenge you to find anyone who will challenge you quite as thoroughly as I will. I most certainly have not surrendered my poetry, and I aim to show you what I can do with it.

This is the homily from my first service for The Church of Splendor with all the church business cut out. This is a philosophically ambitious argument about moral ambition, an equally-opportunisitical offender, a thoroughgoing take-down – and rebuilding – of everything.

If you value rethinking everything from the ground up, you should give me half-an-hour of your life. I promise to repay it a thousand fold.

To see the whole service, go here.