Christ's mediation with the Father

It's not a line between two points, but rather like the circle representing the middle term in a venn diagram. By being in Christ we are in the Father. Such an understanding of mediation makes much better sense of the fact that Christ taught us to pray, "Our Father": he didn't tell us to say, "Lord Jesus, please tell your Father for us..." In fact, the linebetweentwopoints conception puts the Father in a hostile position. The use of the first understanding of mediation by Protestant critics of the Catholic practice of honoring the saints belies a lack of intimacy with the Father.

Comments

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...

If the universe is eternal and determinism is true, then...

...in that case it would be possible in principle to retrodict the past ad infinitum. The present would either contain an infinite amount of information or the universe would be cyclical, albeit (methinks) in a manner analogous to the plot of the Lorenz attractor.

The Human Question

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