Can You Go Home, Again?

A Sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

October 6, 2024

 

Audio Sermon linked here

"What’s really made a mess of the world? Grace? Forgiveness? Turning the other cheek? Or is it guilt, punishment, vengeance, and retribution?" --Robert F. Capon.

READINGS

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Psalm 18:20-30

The LORD rewarded me according to my righteousness;

    according to the cleanness of my hands he recompensed me.

    21For I have kept the ways of the LORD,

    and have not wickedly departed from my God.

    22For all his ordinances were before me,

    and his statutes I did not put away from me.

    23I was blameless before him,

    and I kept myself from guilt.

    24Therefore the LORD has recompensed me according to my righteousness,

    according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight.

 

    25With the loyal you show yourself loyal;

    with the blameless you show yourself blameless;

    26with the pure you show yourself pure;

    and with the crooked you show yourself perverse.

    27For you deliver a humble people,

    but the haughty eyes you bring down.

    28It is you who light my lamp;

    the LORD, my God, lights up my darkness.

    29By you I can crush a troop,

    and by my God I can leap over a wall.

    30This God—his way is perfect;

    the promise of the LORD proves true;

    he is a shield for all who take refuge in him.

 

Luke 15: 11-32

11 Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. 12 The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. 13 A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. 14 When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. 16 He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. 17 But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! 18 I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” ’ 20 So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. 21 Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’22 But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; 24 for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate.

25 “Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. 27 He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ 28 Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. 29 But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ 31 Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’ ”

 

 

Can You Go Home, Again? [Sermon Notes:]

Audio Sermon linked here

 

Psalm 18 notes the life journey of two sons realized in the parable: what the Psalm calls the loyal and blameless, who at the end reveals himself as self-righteously indignant at the father’s merciful welcome of the prodigal, and the prodigal, who has underwent the trials of exploration and misadventures.

The context of the prodigal story is the historical situation in Palestine at the time. People who considered themselves “true Israel” felt in exile by the illegitimate priesthood and temple establishment collaborating with the Roman occupiers.

messianic expectations were running high during the time of Herod the Awful through another two generations

In this time of political expectation and chaos, there were models of a virtuous king: Dt. 17. But also there were ideals of kingly virtue imparted from pagan neighbors who might be necessary to defeat these romans.

Homeric epic to render, mythically,

the metaphysics of behavioral mirroring in Psalm 18 that is behind what is being revealed existentially in the parable:

That “26with the pure you show yourself pure;

    and with the crooked you show yourself perverse.”

How then can our “identity” be based in a physical place?

 As I preached last time, any authenticity tied to that physical identity whereby we deign to speak for collectives frankensteined together and cobbled to create partisan rage as the path to ultimate and crowning victory upon victory?

 

All cultures were aware of a metaphysics of trial and homecoming, and the poet Homer wrote an epic of the cyclical mirroring of injustice begun with a war: the Iliad and Odyssey.

I think that the concluding epic character Odysseus gives us an entry, alongside Psalm 18, to understanding the parable:

the way to end exile and come home to the truth of God.

I. “complicated,” like a disease.

2. Just suffered a tough month with COVID: progressive and looping complications, twisted, much turned

3. Anthony Esolen

Virtue of nostalgia? An-algesiac

 

[Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., Jones, H. S., & McKenzie, R. (1996). In A Greek-English Lexicon. Clarendon Press, loc. cit., excerpts]:

πολυτροπία, Ion. -ίη, ἡ, versatility [of] craft, Hdt.2.121.ε ́.

II. multifariousness, variety, Hp.Acut.3 (pl.), D.H.Amm.2.3, Corn.ND25, M.Ant.12.24.

 

✪ πολύτροπος, ον, (τρέπω) much-turned, i.e. much-travelled, much-wandering, epith. of Odysseus, Od.1.1, 10.330.

II.       turning many ways: metaph., shifty, versatile, wily, of Hermes, h.Merc.13, 439; τοῖς ἀσθενέσι καὶ π. θηρίοις and in this sense Plato took the word as applied to Odysseus,

III.      τὸ π. τῆς γνώμης their versatility of mind, Th.3.83; τὸ π., of Alcibiades, Plu.Alc.24.

  2. fickle, ὅμιλος Ps.-Phoc.95.

  3. of diseases, changeful, complicated,

 

Anything to get home.

Odysseus is who we celebrate for his wily, twisting, loopy craft as the excellence of this chaotic and turbulent age.

 

Except that he abandons his followers in his quest of coming home to his former hearth and wife and child. He is a Kinist who operates by wile to get himself.

 

Nostalgia means homesickness, and to me is the political disease of our rabid, partisan age,

grounded in a chaos-inducing manipulation of a certain view of

of Human nature and its home there in in biological agon as ontological and historically necessary:

Trying to conjure up the past anew by any means necessary only births monsters.

Refusing the future to push its prospects out of cradles is the jackdaw of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is NO virtue.

Nostalgia is a fixed, tended and watered memory of place and social order seems more solid and real than lived experience.

A denial of the neighbor in the present to restore those of the past brings false sense of transcendence which exists between memory, the present, and the future,

along with the transition between them.

An emotion of wistfulness comes from living with the disjunction between a past fondly remembered and a present filled with loss and guilty conscience.

In such a case, the memory can only be opposed to that transition and the repentance necessary to move into it.

Like Abraham, to Kum Lech!

To be born again in and through the heart with authentic, living neighbors.

We prodigals who recollect and experience the gap between high ideal and imperfect reality as painful precisely because its aspirations are set so much higher than what came before.

We are coming to be accountable to conscience and to the virtues that align with grace’s progress,

what we call the Kingdom of God with Christ becoming all in all.

This accountability is the foundation of the virtue of recollection.

By contrast, beneath the false virtue of nostalgia is an insistence that we can only be content by reconciling ourselves to far lower ethical ideals—to an ontological human nature of agon kept at bay by guardians on our chosen team.

Alain de Benoist, a political right thinker aware of fascism’s allure, described state of nature reactionaries as clothed in visceral atavisms of "bitterness, sneering, derision, regret, nostalgia—showing [fascism’s] ideal [of a home] is always foregone, always spent,” always trite but menacing.

Such characterized that change in political vocabulary after 9/11 when the “homeland” was under attack. America neighborhood morally pulled back into “homeland,”

a word that made many us queasily recollect the Nazi’s use of “heimat.” Homewardness. Homeward bound, like a return that Abraham was not allowed.

 The subsequent politicization of homeland into an ideology,

And those flag lapel pins started popping up everywhere,

changing the meaning of the flag from the expansion of ideals to a retreat into an ancestral “home.”

And while beginning the 1930s rich business men strategize to marry capitalism to Christianity, now these lapel pins are married to celebrities wearing crosses:  

the meaning of patriotism moved from the high ideals of our political language as ever outreaching national spirit

 to a kin tie to a homeland..

 

To this state-led intention to build security on human-kin nature, state power says this:

 

 if something is complex, simplify it, which is the propagandistic power of simple, homey past; stories that people tell — or avoid telling — to reshape and distort the past.

The causes of imperialistic American war and slavery is complex, they say.

The representatives of these nostalgiac powers step in to train by military-industrial indoctrination of youth that

framed choices as intrinsically complicated and hard--maturation involved nuance, tradeoffs& the weighing of "lesser evils" to bring in the better world framed by the manipulations of nostalgia.

That "realist" logic, of course, is nonsensical...Either there is an unalloyed option for the good, or the system is driving by the flaws and driven by the flawed toward instituting flaws.

Frankensteining Odysseus for the State, the state’s idea of human nature as at home in nature, not spirit.

To walk away is the righteous path sure to be calumnied as "cowardice"or betrayal.

As I said, nostalgia offers the promise of a simpler life when we weren’t yet immobilized by anxieties of conscience from the misuse of our gifts and liberties.

 It’s a place where form leads function. You’ve heard “form follows function?” That’s recollection.

Recollection has a function, to repair nostalgia’s form from memory rather than its repaired and repairing function.

I know this is abstract, so let me quote TS Eliot’s nostalgia:

“What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits, and customs, from the most significant religious rites to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of the same people living in the same place…” T.S. Eliot

This focus on forms as blood-tied traditions is actually etiquette as religion-- that by our recognition of manners we recognize our kin and their inner lives.

 This is coffee-hour church of the past, bound to the way things have always been done and are expected to continue.

 The seeking for the timeless, the unchanging, participating in God’s being as immutable, as if we finite creature can possibly understand this infinite being in time—even understanding time by couterposing in with history.

Calling out some idea of timeless or traditional manners—back when our parents were lions in this community-- is not  now what I mean boldness for the gospel’s sake:

 

I know the word “gospel” offends many, so let’s unpack it.

Because the prodigal sons and daughters are your neighbors and they are afraid of the father and of the older brother. We are the older brothers: we see ourselves the custodians of the father’s love and the traditions of belief and the language.

So boldness for gospel’s repairing the peaceful community includes hospitality—yes welcome at the door and coffee—

but speaking a language that makes sense to our neighbors in time and space, what we call context.

The context of the prodigal children church is an earned mistrust of the self-righteousness of churchy language and the bastardization of grace that refuses to speak of the Golden Rule in virtue instead to speak the partisan language of rage and guns and demonized manners and identities based on physical origin and victimization.

 

This is what makes our prodigal neighbors uneasy to walk in this door. What kind of manipulative partisan rage and preachy old fashioned judgmental language will they find,

what kind of abstruse and obscure theologoical language and mannerist rituals will make them feel they come up short?

Yet boldness with the gospel proclaims the message of God’s forgiving and merciful grace is the primary and necessary step of the repair the human cosmos.

Are any of allowed to silence ourselves because we afraid of being misunderstood as being on of “those kind” of Christians?

Are we not instead responsible to try—to be bold, to deliberate the best way to invite people in to hear the “gospel,” which is THE message of hope and certainty that speaks truth about the ineffective and futile prospects of “those kind” of holy postures, those kind we found more in the past?

Our prodigal neighbors are watching power in church and society say that if something is simple, complicate it, taking it out of the hands of citizens and endowing its solution with “complicated political theologians and financiers” who understand the past and rule machines and codes to gin us back there.

We can, they say, Disney-fy the past, make it even better. There’s no place like home. Ever home!

Where the steeple towered over the town square signifying a sense of order and cosmic connection for human beings.

A Disney church nostalgia matter-of-factly hierarchical served by priesthoods to painted and beautified stone, with a settled social order signified by animal before man, man before God, woman before man, serf before lord, and worker before owner.

Little Gidding

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

TS Elliot connects the decay of his traditions to a more significant history of England while projecting (diming) hopes for the future because he sees less and less of these patterns recurring. But may be  we can resurrect them by resurrecting the

Elliot’s is a fantastic but wistful nationalist nostalgia of whatever we Englanders were doing was right.

What our spirit had handled—

"that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.”

The idea that the USA has a divine mission. That our energy and depth and spirit would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. [Once AngloAmericanism] had all the momentum; they had ridden the crest of a high and beautiful wave.” –Hunter s. Thompson.

Yet  This wave breaks for all nationalisms every generation.

 No nostalgia can unlock a tide or generational force contrary to the coming of Christ all in all.

Is this Christian—a people riding the wave of nostalgia back into a past to begin eternity again in a static being—in a static cradle??

Abraham was called from this cradle of civilization in the fertile crescent of what later became Babylon.

He was given a promise in a spiritual place, and as he journeyed across a continent, he was ever tempted to settle down under a rock he constructed celebrating his relationship with the One God, his father. But that Father repeatedly told him, Qum, Lech.

We are Abraham’s children too.

We are becoming. We are not frozen inside a home space. The Prodigal Son church does not journey backward into Babylon or called into Egypt’s pyramids and pentagons of power.

We are children of eternity coming.

We are the Prodigal Son Church, a church that reaches out to the self-righteous and the ashamed alike, bringing them the truer way to understand how this world is broken and how to become repairers.

Our prodigals want to come home to what is real, and not what is false. And that requires repentance from traditions and institutions that create hierarchical orders by crafty language and the insistence on norms of manners and arguments over words./

 

The virtue of accountability leading to repentence create the conditions where we can break free of egoistic self-interestedness and form meaningful neighborhoods in the father’s love. There is no other path than Christ’s vitures grounded in the GR. And this follows from the parable of the prodigal son.

It is the virtue of recollection that replaces the false virtue of nostalgia

Recollection reflects on why coercive and enslaving power, in each specific instance, has its way designating some things as complex and some things as simple and restorative.

The Gospel of Grace is the ultimate solution. It creates a legacy of virtue and peace, countering the divisiveness of identity politics.

The sermon calls for the rejection of nostalgia, running away from the goads of conscience and refusing to repent instead

Recollection of the past—running memory through experience of repentance and grace,

is necessary to meet current challenges.

The solution lies in peacebuilding, reconciliation, and the restoration of narratives of meaning.

It’s not nostalgia. Let us repent from nostalgia and its ghosts of distorted memories

Trying to live again by inhibiting the future’s energies of betterment from arriving: the kingdom of God.

  

How do we escape from nostalgia?

By adopting the virtue of Recollection to stimulate repentance AND accoountabilty by asking "What’s really made a mess of the world? Grace? Forgiveness? Turning the other cheek? Or is it guilt, punishment, vengeance, and retribution?" (Robert F. Capon).

Recollection asks, where is our real home, where memory has not been shaped by ignorance, propaganda, cooptation, and self-deceit?

 We recollect that God is the father of all wandering prodigals. He forgives. He is merciful. He welcomes us to our true home, after our odysseys, our experimentations of getting ahead by our natural wits and like Ps. 18, being led into the pit by our wiles.

 Like Moses, prodigals were born nesting in nested pyramids of power, and like Moses we are born again in the ear, by hearing the proclamation that Jesus is our Lord by virtue of his grace of forgiveness extended to us on the Cross. He reveals the essence of God the father in mercy—in grace alone.

 Can the complicated one go home again? Not the way Odysseus does—back to the wolf-fold home.

 But more like the journeys of Abraham where

Home is where language means something, has a stable meaning grounded peacemaking not in complications to bring in something else. Coming home not to maintained and static insitution but a site of promise through activity of REPAIR by peace not wiles and violence.

The journey of repentance brings the prodigal home. There is none of that in sight of the blind Homer.

If we think through out these sources of unrepented stability, has our home endured only in a frozen nostalgia of human nature—

a human ego caught between self-aggrandizing urges and conscience?

This is where nature never changes: always ready to kill and coerce.

 By contrast

Peacemaking is the real excellence of polytropos. It is ousia (essence) the human essence of which shares with the divine accompaniment and shared action, guided by grace, not by ego.

 

Peacemaking is prophetic, shaped by virtue and wisdom, and not by strategic power. It is kinesthetic as it learns the soul’s full range of empathy in order to begin to comply with the GR duty.

 

•        Peacemaking reads the full context of conflict and through experience and wisdom,

•        anticipates how to keep the peace through virtue and

•        bides and observes to offer positive solutions.

•        These require travels and experiences at least as varied and ranging as Odysseus’, with a far broader range of soul training through the arts and kinesthetic processing of beauty,

•        poignancy, awe, and the sublime

•        that has gentled our inner boxer,

•        our inner pugilist,

•        where we have learned to take off our inner boxing gloves

•        and have learned to tap our hearts to connect our heels with a partner,

•        not an identity of homelands

But true meaning-making is rooted in accountability, empathy, and ethical growth.

Kipling writes of prodigals:

the Stranger within my gate,

He may be true or kind,

But he does not talk my talk—

I cannot feel his mind.

I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,

But not the soul behind…

We need to risk for these. And if the risk of trying new words or explaining old doesn’t pay off, then how we in this congregation any worse off? Can we afford not to risk for the gospel to renew our place here? To bring in new life, new energies, new crafts that unify and build wholeness?

--

Attendance to Grace is the solution, whereby we recognize every moment is created by God to allow us to create a legacy that endures—eternally endures—by virtues flowing from the GR. Recollection, not nostalgia of retrieval, where the past is contextualized and adopted to meet current challenges of pacification, shalom-building, and repair of created unities of the loved children of God.

 

Recollection is the virtue We dance with memory to tame our inner boxer of nostalgia,

To tame our inner dog guarding fences of our idealized pasts,

 our inner calculations of

situational tactics of polytropos

 

 and bring all into the repairing ethical structure of the sheepfold home, speaking its language and commitment to peac. May it be so for you and me: AMEN

  

Shipwrecks on the Shoals of Historical Accountability: 

Heideggerian Disillusionment in F. Scott Fitzgerald and TS Eliot and its Repair

Douglas B. Olds

2 October 2024

The last line of The Great Gatsby is a poignant metaphor of a sailboat: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Distinguishing between these woody masks of servant-tended luxuries powered by combustion's false lure of transcendence and the spiritual reality of wasting a life. (Elon Musk, call your office.)

A question followed this introduction: "Are our lives shaped by a metaphor, or is the metaphor shaped by our lives?" Isn't the awareness of the spiritual reality of wasting one's own life it's own transcendence, or is it just another step in the process of life's ongoing process of self-discovery and endless opening to creative and ethical growth? This essay addresses these questions from the perspective of the personal and traditioned literary figure and one philosopher of the abyss.

This interrogation by the genius of contemplative art, where Fitzgerald opens a prosecutorial space of existence caught in between with no seeming way out. So to both adopt but then negate Heidegger’s contribution to living with meaninglessness—his ideology of Dasein--is just to abide “authentically” in the presence of meaninglessness in the penumbra of death. An ethics conscious of a personal death, i.e. non-existence, or at least non-commitment to traditional moral spaces. Heidegger’s infamous dictum that his philosophy entailed no ethic, indeed prohibited it. Hence this axiom follows: the prohibition of ethics is its own fulfillment of non-existence by transforming ethics into a simple, machined commitment to being. And thus Heidegger’s life demonstrates the moral malleability of his philosophy—its expedience solely committed to staving off as long as possible the inevitable “nichts"  [nothingness]. But in a savage irony, the nichts has already infected his program for “human nature” in an ideology of authenticity grounded in “paradox” that allows lived experience to not only divorce from ethics--that which expands lived experience-- but to actually evade it. Ethical paradox grounds beyond which no ethics inheres beyond the ego’s survival, the solipsistic metaethical promotion and sustenance of the self’s chosen identity and values.[1]

Heidegger will claim in his later work, that after the pre-Socratics, philosophy falsified and concealed a primal experience of Being—some primal human nature answerable to existence only, and thus accountable only to such primal being. His program for retrieving the original meaning of Being becomes transformed into an insipid authenticity without moral necessities--thereby to endow human nature as living outside of narratives of purpose and moral meaning making. 

One of the ways personalities adrift from meaning cope with the putative meaninglessness of existence is nihilist cruelty, such ‘morality’ of elites to build a static edifice to the collective is but a sublimated form of this cruelty applied to some selves for the privilege of others. Fitzgerald notes the “casual recklessness of Daisy and Tom. “Human nature” exists as an ideology, a hermeneutic. It hypostatizes a constructed assembly of minds in service of the instrumental state’s canon, constructed to assign merit and legitimate injustices and evil in this world in service of favored stakeholders: military-industrial elites and bureaucrats of therapeutic norming.

At the very least, Fitzgerald won't have it. He situates all Gatsbys ironically sailing toward the havens of wealth “authentically,” a haven in the past that deadens by denying teleology. Existing toward death. Rather than promising an escape from teleology in moral accountability that inheres in responsibility to existence alone, Fitzgerald's artistic exploration of lived experience inside meaninglessness brings forth crisis that opens up more expanses to escape from paradox than Heidegger's quicksand philosophy of a purely intellected authenticity without virtue, without moral accountability in his lived experience-toward-death.

In a more explicitly "transcendental" effort than Gatsby's destructive pursuit of the embodied past by idealizing constructs of form through Daisy and material wealth, TS Eliot attempts to root human existence in cultural and religious principles of timelessness always aware of the dangers of decay:

“What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits, and customs, from the most significant religious rites to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of the same people living in the same place." Manners and customs in contrast with an archive which opens up the blood and the place to stimulus and change. 

That we've admitted this nostalgic and wistful man and his thought into the archives of our language group and canon should only be cautionary regarding form over function. There is no people without a history, and if you see history as a pattern where the timeless repeats in form, you are caught in statics, determined by statics, determined by nostalgia couched in poignant sentiment. While more artistically ranging from sentiment than this, TS Elliot often connects the decay of his traditions to a more significant history of England while projecting (dimming) hopes for the future because he foresees less and less of these patterns recurring.  But perhaps one can resurrect their advantages by re-machining them—actually determining them—by embalmed and embalming data sets!

Theorizing is high-level pattern-recognition that opens to telic energies or yokes to recrudescent categories, with the latter a past-embalming hermeneutic. In contrast to theorizing, Noticing things is an idiosyncratic elevation of phenomenological bias by anecdote and story telling rejecting narratives of the repairing whole-- of the metaphysics of universal grace to instead favor stultifying traditions of blood and soil tied, in these cases, to Anglo-American chauvinism and materialism.

From TS Eliot’s Little Giddings:

A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

Eliot’s fellow countryman Tolkien (Letter 154) writes of “advantage[d] superior caste[s which ever] tr[y] to stop… change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be 'artists' … overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret.”

By pursuing timelessness particularized in the recurrence of historicized form (rather than the telic energies of grace--the encompassing, peace driving practice of virtue established by the Golden Rule as duty to serve creation liberated from death-dealing forms: hegemonies and hierarchies), both Eliot and Gatsby seek determinism's cultural offerings--eros and religio--to materially rooted egoistic existence in time and space so to apotheosize ego. Both reveal a paralysis in obsessively identifying with recurrence, the anomie of dulled prophetic senses of men, who include Heidegger as he transmogrifies cogito to Dasein (emphasizing static being enduring time rather than intellectual self-reflection accountable to human essence in time), and whose thought seeks surcease from ethical expansion and universal community to find an eternal space in isolation.

All three 20th C figures, pursuing timeless historical form by means of distinctively different artistic and intellectual frames, will ironically find their ethical retreat in a passenger pigeoned promise of machined data sets. And, ironically at least in their literary dimensions that sought immortalities in ego, they will find a determined but receding legacy as data sets of machined, reductive, and deflating meaning seeking become their publicists. Agents that had sought extrapolation from existence in timeless forms become statues of interpolation in commodification. By other-directed ethical craft and accountability and free and open offering to critical review--rather than by instrumental rationalities of the machine--the artistic histories of Gatsby's narrative and Eliot's literary corpus may break free, by a concerted program of pedagogy setting Nietzschean against messianizing and commissioning hermeneutics as the cleansing air of cautionary deliberation amid generational change.

Such pedagogy institutes epistemological awareness that is never and cannot be devoid of the practical, and all language learning depends on experience and accountability. If a machine cannot process the data of durative character development —the "dianoia of metanoia" (as a subjective genitive) in empathy, integrity, and ethical judgment--it cannot assist human progress and growth. The pursuit of ethical transformation--repentance--as the Shema (Deut. 6:4-9) notes, begins through the ear to reestablish human essence in the heart--intentionality--first and foremost, and only then moves to the expressive soul (nephesh), effective effort (mo-ed), and culminating when Jesus adds dianoia (Matt 22:37; Mark 12: 28) to the essence of messianic mission of peacemaking and soul repair.

---

[1] Heidegger’s philosophy of authenticity emphasizes personal responsibility and ethical self-commitment, yet his failure to publicly acknowledge or take responsibility or account in any way for his involvement with the Nazi regime reveal a damning contradiction between his philosophical speculations proposed as absolutes and his actions. Of course, I'm not the only one to say this, but I add my voice in solidarity with revulsion: He definitively did not live authentically according to his own principles of accountability, and his silence was a way of avoiding responsibility—thus exposing a paradox between his life and his teachings on authenticity. In this sense, the paradox may be entertained only by cordoning off the intellect from soul’s lived experience, for when they are harmonized, the paradox cannot be sustained in any way to assert an existential, cataphatic truth. In paradox a system reveals its fall and failure and may only become apophatically cautionary. Any program of 'Do as I say, not as I do' holds forth no "existential" promise or guidance.

Unlike the rehabilitating cautionaries of the art of Eliot and the figure of Gatsby I present in this essay's conclusion, I see nothing rehabilitating in the monumental ethical failure of "de-existentialism," the grandiose, wickedly Promethean, and linguistically perverting attempt to peer back into an ontology prior to God to escape duty thereto.

 In its Own Words: 

A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’

Douglas B. Olds

August 28-30, 2024

Full transcript linked here

Excerpted Quotes from ChatGPT4o:

"AI, including the AI Content Detector, has inherent dysfunctional abilities that lead to untrustworthy outputs. This conclusion warrants a stance of radical skepticism, rooted in ethical considerations of reliability and trustworthiness, rather than in pragmatic or consequentialist reasoning. Additional stakeholder input, particularly from pragmatic perspectives, does not add value to this ethical argument and will obscure the clear-cut stance on inherent dysfunction. Moving forward, the focus should remain on acknowledging and communicating these inherent limitations and advocating for a critically skeptical approach to AI use...

"Acknowledging these inherent issues means recognizing that AI outputs are not inherently trustworthy, regardless of improvements or additional perspectives. This understanding places the focus on the ethical implications of using such technology, rather than on the feasibility of improving it for reliable use…

"You've raised a fundamental and critical concern about the limits of AI, especially considering its inherently deterministic nature and the inability to fully comprehend or engage with the complex, teleological, and spiritual aspects of human existence...Publishing this chat string could indeed serve as a responsible effort to highlight the complexities and inherent limitations of AI-generated language and the necessity of a radically skeptical approach."

 

Full transcript linked here

[For the quickest processing, skip most of the AI boiler plate. You can skim this transcript in a half hour by reading the "you [=me] said", the initial ChatGPT reply paragraph, then skip to its "Conclusion" paragraph and then my next "you said" query.

[This transcript shows how the admission by ChatGPT--that it is inherently dysfunctional and untrustworthy--follows and is warranted.]

AI developers are mammon’s vanguard agents against the expansion of ethical awareness. AI perverts the Golden Rule by its crypto-instrumentality as it sublimates creative impulses by generative determinisms patterned by biased data sets. It serves the profit motives in consumer fetishes of stories of journeying to self-attainment substituting for narratives of actual metaphysical promise. Look at the label and brochure of every artisanal vendible: these gleeful stories are frozen into forms and institutions, industrialized as experience , and marketed with the promise of happy-making tourism into “transcendence.” The promise of AI lures people into its thought forms: its categoricals, its Frankensteining echo chambers that jam identities into dynamiting and schizophrenic partisanship, its machining logic promising a superhuman future. Instead, as Terence McKenna suggests, as the extension of late-stage capitalism, AI “invites people to diminish themselves by behaving like machines” awaiting updates from the needs of elites.

Yet epistemology is not and cannot be devoid of the practical, and all language learning depends on experience and accountability. A machine cannot self-process the data of durative character —the "dianoia of metanoia" in empathy, integrity, or ethical judgment--and therefore cannot assist human progress.

For a more scientifically robust but less ethically aware confirmation of these conclusions, see the report at https://x.com/lexin_zhou/status/1838961179936293098

 Shepherding Language Against Nostalgia's Draw

A sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

September 8, 2024

Audio Sermon linked here

NB: audio recording marred by sound of shuffling papers.

Error: Helen's husband is incorrectly named in the audio as Agamemnon. It was his brother, Menelaus, who was married to Helen, who was abducted by Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, a "rape" (or "elopement") that fueled the Trojan War in Homer's poetic epic.

Bulletin Quote "Night almost always falls first in the churches." -Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

 SCRIPTURE READINGS

OT: Jeremiah 7:2b-11

Hear the word of the LORD, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the LORD. 3 Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. 4 Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.”

5 For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, 6 if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, 7 then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever.

8 Here you are, trusting in deceptive words to no avail. 9 Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, 10 and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, “We are safe!”—only to go on doing all these abominations? 11 Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight? You know, I too am watching, says the LORD.

 

Matt 7: 12-28 

“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.

13 “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. 14 For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? 17 In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus you will know them by their fruits.

21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ 23 Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’

24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. 25 The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!” 

NB: audio recording marred by sound of shuffling papers.

Error: Helen's husband is incorrectly named in the audio as Agamemnon. It was his brother, Menelaus, who was married to Helen, who was abducted by Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, a "rape" (or "elopement") that fueled the Trojan War in Homer's poetic epic.

My more expansive preparatory sermon notes are here added for additional context and application:

I. Introduction: The Story of Odysseus Overview of Odysseus' journey: violent travel and eventual homecoming as a metaphor for human excellence of purpose that reclaims a homeland. Is the merit of Odysseus' tactics what defines his success, or does the story mislead? Polytropos: complex, "multifarious," tactic-driven survival often admired in modern society. Contrast with Christ’s critique of merit and peace as the authentic virtue, challenging Roman ideals of virile success.                       II. Defining Realism and Arete The valorization of complexity in modern society and how strategic thinking has evolved into careerism of mammon. Realism becomes about survival tactics rather than moral virtue. Realism and nuance framed as choosing the lesser evil. Picking battles. Being a survivor. Being a professional. Now, winning is the only thing. (Lombardi). In that we seek our place on a frozen mountain top, basking like a statue in the acclaim of glory in which we can sleep blessed.   Contrast the modern ideal with peacemaking as the true arete. Peacemaking is prophetic and defined by grace, not by ego-driven strategies. Peacemaking requires soul training, empathy, and a kinesthetic connection to others. DANCE Odysseus and Heroism: The  modern society’s valorization of tactical survival and strategic thinking—symbolized by Odysseus—can be misleading in terms of what true virtue is. This argument is valid in that it critiques how modern definitions of "heroism" can be narrow, focusing on violent survival tactics rather than moral virtue which keeps us in our roles in the Kingdom of God.           III. The Trinity and Logic The Trinity as an embodiment of perichoretic grace challenges rationalist logic. Trinitarian oneness is about shared purpose, not static forms. Grace transcends materialism and identity politics, calling for the elevation of creation and the Greatest Commandment (GR) as the foundation for moral action.   Trinitarian Theology and Logic:  the Trinity undermines binary logic by the dance of perichoresis (mutual indwelling) and Trinitarian oneness.  grace and shared purpose come down from the rigid structures of rationality and materialist configurations of christian doctrine to take an active role on the ground.                           IV. Critique of Modern Political Discourse                         Modern political discourse has devolved into "us vs. them" rhetoric driven by identity politics. Media and elites stoke anger and resentment, commodifying identity and weaponizing language to create division. Politics focuses on stereotypes, undermining compromise and deliberation.           V. Impact of Neoliberalism Neoliberalism has privatized all human activities, commodifying them and alienating individuals.     Public policy is shaped by corporate interests, leaving society fractured.     Neoliberal language creates a stultifying monoculture of anomie and nihilism where wealth is the only source of meaning.   ·        Language is mistrusted. ·        Art creates nausea at its supposed privilege seeking biases. ·        Tech and crypto industries fuel this monoculture, ·        fostering identity politics as existential battles.                                               VI. Theological and Moral Failings in Political Rhetoric Both left- and right-wing identity politics focus on victimhood and power rather than moral deliberation. Language manipulation by political figures creates enemies and dehumanizes opponents.     Fascism arises from the manipulation of struggle and identity politics to mobilize hatred and violence.     Christians are drawn into "lesser evil" justifications, which distort the Logos (divine reason) and create moral confusion. Fascism and Language Manipulation and the agonistic framing of identity politics. This draws parallels between modern authoritarian trends and earlier fascist regimes, which used language and identity to create an existential enemy. The use of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's quote to argue spiritual corruption in religious institutions aligns with political agendas of mammon seeking.                                                                               VII. Spiritual Corruption Mammon manipulates language and creates a world of materialism and power-seeking. Neoliberal financialization furthers the privatization of all human activity, leading to a disconnected society. The degradation of language mirrors the rise of fascism, turning political and religious discourse into tools for division.                                                                                                                                       VIII. Solutions: Grace, Legacy, and Recollection Grace is the ultimate solution. It creates a legacy of virtue and peace, countering the divisiveness of identity politics. The sermon calls for the rejection of neoliberalism and materialism. Recollection of the past, not nostalgia, is necessary to meet current challenges. IX. Attendance to Grace and Peacemaking Trinitarian ousia (essence) is about shared purpose and accompaniment. The sermon emphasizes the need for a reflective approach to the past, grounded in grace and the Greatest Commandment. Modern political language, distorted by mammon, leads to moral confusion. The solution lies in peacebuilding, reconciliation, and the restoration of narratives of meaning. It’s not nostalgia. These are ghosts--shades that try to live again by inhibiting the future’s energies of betterment from arriving: the kingdom of God.

We call these travels through the gods’ anger “odysseys.”   The Characterization asserted at the outset that Odyesseus was a much-turned, much-armed, much-tacticed man the basis of his merit? Or is this epic a cartoon that misleads?   “Complicated:”one who chooses his battles. That’s the professional’s arete, the one who survives in the market of human price assigning judgements.   “Nuanced” we may call him, who always chooses the lesser evil. "Realism:" that lesser evils frame and occasion the good.   The experience of odysseys sets a culture to framing and shaping the terms of its excellence, how through battle and struggle has ensured our hero’s survival and thus his virile virtu-s are timeless and unchangeable.   Contrast polytropos in Hebrews. Many tactic-ed virtue and peace.   As ever, Christ is the paradigm critique of any notion of merit. I am here this morning not to pick a new battle with ancient Athens but to deny the resurgence of Roman Imperial notions of success and victory through virile beastliness. The virtu-s of Wolfs and dogs. Vs. the authentic virtues of sheep               II. Defining Realism and Arete   Modern Romans (I’m not address RCC) valorize virile complexity and strategic thinking (as arete) are true sources of virtue. Strategic thinking warring on the fields of finance make every one into careerists of mammon ready to step over others—to win a limited share of honor manifest in wealth alone. In this context, “Realism” becomes defined as choosing the lesser evil to always survive. This is the weed of existentialism framed by philosophy.   To endure by individual wit and tactic alone and isolated into what ever chaos one finds oneself thrown.   Polytropos is the existentially “complicated” one, so late-modern. The kind of person we admire as a “survivor” without asking how or why. The kind of professional we admire who has learned to “pick his battles” as he climbs mountains and hierarchies. Who shoots first and asks questions later.             By contrast Peacemaking is the real excellence of polytropos. It is ousia (essence) the human essence of which shares with the divine accompaniment and shared action, guided by grace, not by ego. Peacemaking is prophetic, shaped by virtue and wisdom, and not by strategic power. It is kinesthetic as it learns the soul’s full range of empathy in order to begin to comply with the GR duty.   ·        Peacemaking reads the full context of conflict and through experience and wisdom, ·        anticipates how to keep the peace through virtue and ·        bides and observes to offer positive solutions. ·        These require travels and experiences at least as varied and ranging as Odysseus’, with a far broader range of soul training through the arts and kinesthetic processing of beauty, ·        poignancy, awe, and the sublime ·        that has gentled our inner boxer, ·        our inner pugilist, ·        where we have learned to take off our inner boxing gloves a ·        and have learned to tap our hearts to connect our heels with a partner, ·        not an identity.   So Not only prophetic is the many-tacticed peacemaker, but dances---               perichoretic grace (mutual indwelling), challenges rationalist paradigms of fixed "systems." Nimbleness for the overarching end of peacemaking, not self-aggrandizing   Trinitarian oneness is not bound by mathematical logic, but by shared purpose and flourishing,   undermining materialistic and static formalism.  Ousia is dynamic and ever-present accompanying energy of care that contradicts simplistic, binary thinking of opposing forces, . the energetic accord and alignment and active attendance to grace spreading is what makes Jesus God: his elevation of the GR is a full commitment to the creation. The creation as god intends every eternal thing. So that every deprivation and oppression in extremis transcends materialism as usual and the divisive politics of identity winning,   of partisans who are frozen into a type that wins. Freezing oneself off from growth, from becoming actually is a loss, a loser     Through which political language has devolved into “us versus them” rhetoric. Modern media, elites, and identity politics manipulate language, creating divisions that are empty of purposive meaning but only to stoke anger and resentment.     Unfortunately finance with crypto-concerns have learned techniques to commodifiy identity, where language is weaponized to create false categories and tensions instead of traditional focuses on deliberated compromise over issues on how best to share and unify.      V. Impact of Neoliberalism The move to financialize every and all human activities to the breakdown of meaningful discourse and community, subject them to prices rather than peacemaking dialogue has brought forth a ·        ghostly language of ·        Austerity for all but financiers, ·        privatization of public assets, ·        and endowing corporate power with rights of political standing to shape social ties in its interests, ·        leaving individuals alienated and divided.   Its language of “branding” promotes an aggressively stupifying monoculture where only wealth brings social meaning. overpromised and underdelivered:   Technotainments, machine intelligence, crypto, politics, education, and materialism Oozing like flowing sewage, such tongues from social mediated networks and the anonymity of AI manipulated chatbot guided “human agents” entering digitizable responses into profit- and power-seeking systems.   Winning at all costs has delegitimated compromise, with identity politics now framed as existential battles of life and death between partisan factions.   Every scholar and religious leader who fails to pass a growing array of political and tribal loyalty tests and partisan shibboleths of code words are immediately attacked with the projections of the partisan’s inner, power-seeking, logos-perverting demons.      VI. Theological and Moral Failings in Political Rhetoric The sermon critiques both left- and right-wing identity politics for focusing on victimhood and identity-based power rather than moral deliberation. political figures backed by shadowy funny money manipulate language to create enemies and dehumanize opponents.   From this degradation of political language spreads the idea of fascism to link to the supposed realism of struggle (agon) and identity politics of the use of “lesser evils” to mobilize hatred and violence.   What shocks me is the readiness of Christians to involve themselves in not only participating but lending their authority to “lesser evil” justifications: What drives this victory-at-all-costs mentality is the formation of power blocs through identity politics, fractioning identities along ethnic, anatomical, and ideological lines. crypto-finance manages these proliferating identities and sorting and merging them for partisan and manipulable energies—   to identify and align with the victory program and invite their neighbors to their organizations— their “true churches.”   Identity partisan politics starts from two foundations: ·        indigeneity: supposed blood ties to native soil (or the founding father’s soil of a particular way of reading the Constitution), ·        and from those who claim to be most victimized by these founding groups and lineages: who are the most victimized—not in terms of individual experience, by a claimed tie to others in that group (“left handers”): The most extreme partisans are those who can be manipulated into joining the most angering complex of identities simultaneously   both entitled and victimized:    their own identity as the true American one, with some projecting murderous intent onto their opponents: “They kill babies! They want to kill us!”   So we become 2nd Amendment people in existentially framing of good versus evil, those under the Jezebel spirit versus those in Christ,   Some Christians now lead the charge in shape shifting religion from peacemaking ethics into identity politics shaped by language claims of “persecution”   and increasingly feel called to lead partisan coalitions united by collective grievance turning violent, knowing they are bankrolled by interests who recognize the symbolic usefulness of idiots who claim the powerful name of Jesus now redirected by collective grievance This astonishes me. Lilliana Mason in her 2018 book Uncivil Agreement explains: "The conservative... Christian Coalition grew steadily in support and influence in the...years [accompanying neoliberal ascendancy]. By 1995 they had publicly paired with prominent Republican senators and congressmen, including the Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, to announce the Contract with the American Family, which sought the legislation of Christian morality." -- Mason, Lilliana. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago, Illinois ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018, 33. "In 1994, Newt Gingrich sent members of the Republican Party a memo titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” This memo came to be known as the GOPAC memo, and was meant to instruct Republicans on what types of words to use when describing their political opposition. As he wrote in the memo, 'This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful' (Gingrich 1994). Gingrich’s list of recommended words to describe Democrats included betray, bizarre, decay, destroy, devour, greed, lie, pathetic, radical, selfish, shame, sick, steal, and traitors, among many others. To this day, this is the type of language used by party leaders to demonize opponents." --Ibid., 132, emph. added.     -----   VII. Spiritual Corruption The Bible helps us frame the destruction of political concord. Jeremiah wrote  Here you are, trusting in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known. And Jesus condemns going after the false god mammon who promises wealth in exchange for service. Jesus in Matthew 15:24-26 contrasted the sheep of Israel with those metaphorically referred to as 'dogs'--spirits of fearfulness that lash out with disordering expressions when cornered. Such spirits can be influenced--(un)leashed by a certain kind of mammon's (Matthew 6:24) hand and finance-distorted language--leading to agonistic (attack-posture) subservience as a means of achieving self-respect through ecstatic --"standing outside of" --imaging in anonymity and recurrence, the aesthetization of violence, and a collective regimentation of bared teeth. THIS is what our political culture is teaching children: that winning is everything, accomplished by any means necessary because we’ve convinced ourselves that our holiness is our ends that justifies any means: A fascist barks under the hand of mammon, projecting biological agon as ontological and historically necessary: machismo, alpha dog dominance, and contempt for other human expressions of craft entice each generation, especially if they feel unsafe, disrespected, or superannuated. Alain de Benoist, a political right thinker aware of fascism’s allure, described reactionaries as clothed in atavisms of "bitterness, sneering, derision, regret, nostalgia—showing the Right’s ideal is always foregone, always spent."     Neoliberal financialization privatizes and prices every dimension of human activity, shaping public policy on private vice, austerities for all but financiers, and capital unmoored from environmental and social origins. Now, capital is being detached from any social purpose, creating radically decentering, private cryptocurrency-mediated markets outside democratic assemblies, with private vigilantes acting as sheriffs. As finance drifted from its roots, anger grew among those seeing themselves as “losers.” Language was reconditioned to redefine “winning” in terms of wealth achievement only, while politics became consumed with framing stereotypes: southern, “Christian,” exurban, male, and Republican versus Democrat, womanist, black, and urban. Compromise gave way to “winning” at all costs—not just economically but in terms of social respect and “right to life.” Fascism manipulates declining societies by linking struggle (agon) to a specific place, giving it a perceived genetic advantage. This struggle gains theological significance, like the final rays of a setting sun over Pharaoh—a lost battle to be reversed by resurrecting man through political identity that reconstructs language to serve propaganda. Pastors are recruited to "win" the nation and, by doing so, win the past and future.   Of the church’s complicity with the manipulation of religious language and frameworks of meaning through partisan demonization and degradation of the Logos of peacemaking, we may safely apply the accountability implied through Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's quote, "Night almost always falls first in the churches." A wolf  is responsible who misleads the dogs, of them: Isaiah 5:20:     Ah—“woe,” a lament for a death-- you who call evil good     and good evil,     who put darkness for light     and light for darkness,     who put bitter for sweet     and sweet for bitter! Tragically, the church is allowing its language and logic—its Logos—to be inverted to serve political ends of violent wealth seekers, leading to spreading moral confusion and the acceleration of metacrises.

X. Solutions

This sermon sounds the alarm about how modern political language has devolved to tempt Christians into a stark "us versus them" rhetoric,

 a division stoked by media, social sorting into clusters, and manipulative elites, fostering deep-seated resentment and anger grounded on the construction of false identities originating out of stone and soil and inevitably move to set stones against enemies,

their categories that foment energies that terrorize, and their expansion into more angry and intersectional niches and electronic corners that set neighborhoods ablaze.

 Christ ever denounces these devious deviances of mammon language: the commodification of identity under late capitalism, where identity politics become a substitute for genuine meaning-making.

  Instead, a reflective approach to the past based on the virtue of recollection rather than a statics of nostalgia for forms and bygone orders brings a deeper, more inclusive understanding of personhood and community based on the flow of Trinitarian ousia that accompanies action. Not any action, but action that soothes, repairs, heals, and is committed to the ideals of language rather than its manipulation and machining—its commercial branding of personhood, its anonymity and cryptic financialization of social and community structures.

The institutionalization of elite partisanship and propagandizing.

Late modernity is unlivable Frankenstein categories that rip apart shalom in service of finance/mammon.

And they have, under the withering critique of deconstruction of privilege, become “cryptic/crypto” so that now we see conspiracies everywhere that lead us down rabbitholes where we get buried in the “ooze” of diversion and degradation of language so we cannot discern meaning and only look to what looks familiar to our sense of nostalgia.

 We cannot discern the big picture. Society is hungry for purpose and the restoration of narratives of meaning, and it looks out and sees what the media portrays as the church is the church.

There's rising anxiety, depression, loneliness, & suicidal thoughts in the absence of meaning making outside of our nostalgia: when we felt cared for and had a sense of enchantment not yet adulterated by the concrete of adult-privileging cisterns of greedy and fearing slop.

 

What to do?

1)                Secularist philosophy tries to create new Frankensteins of ratio applied to forms to replace language of smoothing kinesthetics and energies of care-- a machined discourse of efficiency,

 The deeper struggle between the spirits of mammon and the messiah is now operating by neoliberalism’s manipulation of language that creates a language-debased culture of metaphorical dogs and whistles that assault the sheep which are the children of eternity. So that AI recombinant categorizations are revealed as dead ends.

The same distrust of old Frankensteins serves new madnesses: the rejection not just of political science but all efforts at collectives originating, esp. in the Golden Rule (GR), all efforts to build common cause; thus follows:

 

2)      Get rid of the state and allow individuals free rein: Murray Rothbard and libertarian anarchy presage "acceleration" [of chaos] and private cryptocurrencies backed by the trust of those who want to rid us of laws regulating against untrue or libelous speech, like Thiel and Musk, co-creators of PayPal.

But this nihilistic anarchy even withdraws from the arts: Karl Ove Knausgaard:

“I increasingly lost ...faith in literature. I read and thought, this is something someone has made up…[by] made-up people in a made-up, though ...

realistic, world… It was a crisis… I couldn't write like this, it wouldn't work, every sentence was met with the thought: but you're just making this up. It has no value. Fictional writing has no value…

The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality… Art cannot be experienced collectively. Nothing can.”

--Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, book 2

This embodies Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society”

Characterizing this as “nausea,” as a scientific reaction to the bias inherent in narrative and thus to religion, like early Wittgenstein, then to remove every human feeling and aesthetic and natural dimension to language as biased because they are contextual and thus not universal, though the soul's appeal the only way to unify, not some machined idea of biasing future social order.

Such solipsism of nausea and efficiency dresses up its flight from community as objective, an ironical detachment.

Such privileging "Nature" folds us inward, into degenerating creases--nihilists.

Doesn’t this obsession with winning scientifically detached rather than morally compelling,

abusing language thereby, make us nauseous in its own way?

And is that nausea shared?

[Someone like Sartre or Kolnai, so that appreciation is foreclosed, but nausea not?]

One who ignores the test and call of art to build common cause and process the kinesthetics of healing?

Where the flattening of expression to serve a scientific market state that rips from language its soul, its situatedness, its metaphysics?

 Isn’t such a scientific state as dangerous as theocrats who deny science?

So now to option 3: retrieve historical metaphysics of transcendence?

 

3)      Ortland: Protestantism as Retrieval of some text-led order and institutional continuities applicable to all epochs:

Protestantism is a hermeneutic of historical contextualization that retrieve , I, II, III intent of the shared and liberated heart as foretold by Jeremiah. But that hermeneutic is loosed from the cage of confessional determinism (the solae) to serve the mission and teleology of repair. So that Protestantism may only move forth and forward from the institutionalization of these doctrinal  retrievals of the solas. No longer is faith simply beliefing, but it is alignment with the flow of grace and attendance thereto by the obligatory ethics of the GR. Ethics guiding epistemology, not a retrieval of some ideology of justification absent merit, some ideology of institutionalized scripture. Where ethics deinstitutionalize (ever reformanda) confessionally hardened configurations and formally static epistemologies

Since the church will not perish-not possible-though religio that absents grace will--the church will become more immanent, & we must attend to folk & high culture: the attested archives of the former in conversation with the latter. In this Christ continues becoming all-in-all. SO:

 

4)      Attendance to Grace as the solution, whereby we recognize every moment is created by God to allow us to create a legacy that endures—eternally endures—by virtues flowing from the GR. Recollection, not nostalgia of retrieval, where the past is contextualized and adopted to meet current challenges of pacification, shalom-building, and repair of created unities of the loved children of God.

Immanence as attendance to science, theology, and soul development through kinesthetics as the gentling unifer.

 Micah 6:8: "He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."

 And so to experience and further the dance of creation, to dance with creation, and to lead others to discover the dance, the unboxing of form that unboxes the interior pugilistic muscular urge to frame the communication of bodies seeking wholeness. Virtues grounded in GR tame the inner agonist urges mirrored imagistically in body. Through kinesthetic training and pedagogy, we learn to serve Christ-consequentialism by these intellect-guiding, heart-intending energies.

 That dance transforms and communicates virtues that build shalom: energies of gentleness and rapture, of collective celebration and attendance to others, of hospitality and accountability to the all the Creation in the Great Commandment

We dance to tame our inner boxer, our inner dog, our inner calculations of

situational ethics of polytropos into the teleological ethical structure of the sheepfold, speaking its language and commitment to truth.

 A shepherd cannot/may not betray language, the logos that calls the sheep.

 

 

III. The Trinity and Logic

But danced: perichoretic grace (mutual indwelling), challenges rationalist thought.

Trinitarian oneness is not bound by mathematical logic, but by shared purpose and flourishing, undermining materialistic and static formalism.  Ousia is dynamic and ever-present accompanying energy of care that contradicts simplistic, binary thinking of opposing forces.

the energetic accord and alignment and active attendance to grace spreading is what makes Jesus God: his elevatiuon of the GR is a full commitment to the creation. The creation as god intends every eternal thing. So that every deprivation and oppression in extremis transcends materialism as usual and the divisive politics of identity winning, of partisans..

IV. Critique of Modern Political Discourse

Through which political language has devolved into “us versus them” rhetoric.

Modern media, elites, and identity politics manipulate language, creating divisions that are empty of purposive meaning but only to stoke anger and resentment.

Unfortunately finance with crypto-concerns have learned techniques to commodifiy identity, where language is weaponized to create false categories and tensions instead of traditional focuses on deliberated compromise over issues on how best to share and unify.

V. Impact of Neoliberalism

The move to financialize every and all human activities to the breakdown of meaningful discourse and community, subject them to prices rather than peacemaking dialogue has brought forth neoliberalism.

Austerity for all but financiers, privatization of public assets, and endowing corporate power with rights of political standing to shape social ties in its interests, leaving individuals alienated and divided.

Its language of “branding” promotes an aggressively stupifying monoculture where only wealth brings social meaning. The new monoculture of human meaning and purpose has overpromised and underdelivered:

Tech, crypto, politics, education, and materialism Oozing like flowing sewage, such tongues from social mediated networks and the anonymity of AI manipulated chatbot guided “human agents” entering digitizable responses into profit- and power-seeking systems.

Winning at all costs has delegitimated compromise, with identity politics now framed as existential battles between partisan factions.

Every scholar and religious leader who fails to pass a growing array of political and tribal loyalty tests and partisan shibboleths of code words are immediately attacked with the projections of the partisan’s inner, power-seeking, logos-perverting demons.

VIII. Solutions: Grace, Legacy, and Recollection

Grace is the ultimate solution outworking in the duty of the GR: The flow of Trinitarian ousia creates a legacy through virtue and peacebuilding, contrasting with the divisiveness of identity politics.

The sermon calls for the rejection neoliberalism as mammon’s values: “branding, marketplace of ideas, professionalism, pricing of every activity, underpaying every job with an empathetic or moral healing purpose, instead to language degradation and cultural alienation.

IX. Attendance to Grace and Peacemaking

The sermon emphasizes recollection, not nostalgia, where the past is contextualized to meet current challenges.

ousia: *accompaniment, shared conation, where the flow is actualized by the energies and processing of perichoretic grace, not by some consequentialist seeking of an ego’s formal preference for an order or institutioned *station.

The Trinity thus belies the mathematic foundations of “ratio-nality” because 1+1+1 seems illogical to it when submitted to it. However, break free from thinking of material forms and units. Try thinking of shared activities of oneness that build shared purpose in terms of flourishing and GR, a single intention to sustain&flow and attends to and with creation’s intent and repair.The Trinity is NOT irrational or illogical unless you are stuck in static formalism. Greek "ousia" is better than its Latin tr. "substantia"

My sermon has addressed my alarm about how modern political language has devolved into stark "us versus them" rhetoric, a division stoked by media, social sorting, and manipulative elites, fostering deep-seated resentment and anger grounded on the construction of false identities of stone that stone, their categories that foment energies that terrorize, and their expansion into more angry and intersectional niches and electronic corners that set neighborhoods ablaze. Christ ever denounces these devious deviances of mammon language: the commodification of identity under late capitalism, where identity politics become a substitute for genuine meaning-making.

 Instead, a reflective approach to the past based on the virtue of recollection rather a statics of nostalgia for forms and bygone orders brings a deeper, more inclusive understanding of personhood and community based on the flow of Trinitarian ousia that accompanies action. Not any action, but action that soothes, repairs, heals, and is committed to the ideals of language rather than its manipulation and machining—its commercial branding of personhood, its anonymity and cryptic financialization of social and community structures. The institutionalization of elite partisanship and propagandizing.

Late modernity is unlivable Frankenstein categories that rip apart shalom in service of finance/mammon. And they have, under the withering critique of deconstruction of privilege, become “cryptic/crypto” so that now we see conspiracies everywhere that lead us down rabbitholes where we get buried in the “ooze” of diversion and degradation of language so we cannot discern meaning. We cannot discern the big picture. Society is hungry for purpose and the restoration of narratives of meaning, and it looks out and sees what the media portrays as the church is the church.

There's rising anxiety, depression, loneliness, & suicidal thoughts in the absence of meaning making outside of our nostalgia: when we felt cared for and had a sense of enchantment not yet adulterated by the concrete of adult-privileging cisterns of slop.

So what is the solution? What can the church offer this win-at-all cost age exhausted and demoralized by mammon-led civilization’s corruption of language that make all virtues realist, meaning “for sale,” all virtues “professional,” esp. those promoting deliberation and peacemaking and finding common ground?

X. Solutions

This sermon is a call to alarm about how modern political language has devolved to tempt Christians into a stark "us versus them" rhetoric,

 a division stoked by media, social sorting, and manipulative elites, fostering deep-seated resentment and anger grounded on the construction of false identities of stone that stone,

their categories that foment energies that terrorize, and their expansion into more angry and intersectional niches and electronic corners that set neighborhoods ablaze.

 Christ ever denounces these devious deviances of mammon language: the commodification of identity under late capitalism, where identity politics become a substitute for genuine meaning-making.

 

 Instead, a reflective approach to the past based on the virtue of recollection

rather a statics of nostalgia for comforting forms and bygone, static orders brings a deeper, more inclusive understanding of personhood and community based on the flow of Trinitarian ousia that accompanies action.

Not any action, but action that soothes, repairs, heals, and is committed to the ideals of language rather than its manipulation and machining—

its commercial branding of personhood,

its anonymity and cryptic financialization of social and community ties and duties.

The institutionalization of elite partisanship and propagandizing.

Late modernity is unlivable Frankenstein categories that rip apart shalom in service of finance/mammon.

And they have, under the withering critique of deconstruction of privilege, become “cryptic/crypto” so that now we see conspiracies everywhere that lead us down rabbitholes where we get buried in the “ooze” of diversion and degradation of language so we cannot discern meaning and only look to what looks familiar to our sense of nostalgia.

          We cannot discern the big picture.

Society is hungry for purpose and the restoration of narratives of meaning, and it looks out and sees what the media portrays as the church is the church.

There's rising anxiety, depression, loneliness, & suicidal thoughts in the absence of meaning making outside of our nostalgia: when we felt cared for and had a sense of enchantment not yet adulterated by the concrete of adult-privileging cisterns of greedy and fearing slop that troubles  conscience.

 

A shepherd cannot/may not betray language, the logos that calls the sheep. Address always the sheep: they can hear you. They will hear you.

Never address the dogs. They can only hear their whistles.

In Jesus Christ is our identity which is not in a material form or matter but in our energies of ethical excellence and commitment to what God continues bringing.

May it be so for you and me, AMEN.