In my view monotheism in all its iterations is in the process of chiming it's own death knell.
Why do you say this?
Because the new war lords in western society are called Billionaires and without a functioning creed there will be no Magna Carta.
What is a creed?
US Meanings from Miriam Webster : Creed - a formal statement, summary, or system of core beliefs and guiding principles.
What do you mean by monotheism?
A belief in a central authority.
Yes indeed, being "uprooted from meaning" results in populations becoming subject to meaning makers. Arendt's argument for the public square was to promote a meaning making that promoted pluralism in a society rather than versions of atomized Individualism, which Arendt saw as a breeding ground for tyranny, insisting instead that genuine freedom requires a shared, public world sustained by active citizenship.
To go further into a sense of belonging, the purpose of belonging is security, feeling safe, being supported, and other multiples of wokeness, a symbol within the meanings of awake that entered the language of whitey from a population on the receiving end of attitudes that still see black people as runaway and dangerous slaves. Stay awake!
Invariably when life has a price in dollars and cents, the dream is found in the security of property, an exterior castle with iron gates and a moat, a picket fence, an ice machine and a swimming pool the neighbors can envy. An understanding of freedom that chains a mind to the security of the sort of bread and circus power structures that bury alive a couple of Vestal Virgins every time Hannibal crosses the Alps.
Yeah though I walk through the shadow of doubt I will reach the divine presence within.
Saint Teresa of Avila wrote guide books for her brothers and sisters. In her book, Interior Castle, a soul took a journey through seven mansions, it followed along miles of corridor visited hundreds of rooms on its way to heaven and the book earned Teresa a Doctorate from the Pope of Rome.
Prayer, Teresa had always claimed was both a vocal and mental training encapsulated by the Lord's Prayer. Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum, adveniat regnum tuum........ etc.
And here we are, all these years later still trying to retrain the mind to better accept the interior castle and the big wide world, this time with words like cognition, neuron, axon, dendrite, synapse, gilia, systemic collapse, DNA methyltransferases, methyl globs, gene start buttons...... etc.
In these days, the idle, of whom there are many, squander the rewards of convenience by forgetting the frequency with which our bodies replace our cells. Every cell in your body is regularly replaced except your inner ear hair cells, your eye lens cells and the neurons in your Cerebral Cortex. The same inner ear hair cells, the same eye lens cells and the same neurons in your cerebral cortex last a lifetime.
A cerebral cortex is the Top End, it manages those areas of the mind which are considered "higher functions." A cerebral cortex has four lobes, the highest of the high lobes being the Frontal Lobe, which apparently is the master of thinking, problem-solving, planning, personality, and voluntary movement.
The process of teaching, or training the brain, is essentially a chemical process that revels in the plasticity of the brains capacity to strengthen and polish up new chemical connections. It's a continuous adaption, new connections benefit from being polished, and like the eight times table unless they are polished they may be quickly lost.
And hark the Herald Angels sing, if it's that simple, we can reproduce it, make it obedient, plug it into the electric, put it to work and make money out of it.
When Saint Teresa lay dying her final word were thusly: "O my Lord and my Spouse, the hour that I have longed for has come. It is time to meet one another." Not to be a Debbie Downer but there is a chance that meeting her spouse didn't happen for our most favorite Barefooted Carmelite.
Should we think of prediction as top down, see it as the past making assumptions about the present. Or should we think Saint Teresa of Avila's Inner Castle and explore prediction as the outside dominating the inside.
There's a good chance none of this makes sense to anyone.
Prediction is what happens next. You wake up in the morning and the top part of you, the most recent, the youngest bits of your brain, sigh before accessing your more mechanical, more ancient capacities like hearing, sight and smell.
Your Top, a relative juvenile, 3 to 4 hundred thousand years old, knows how to get from it's bed, to the kettle in the kitchen, and on the way there, as an upright and decent male you'd pop outside to point Percy at the Banana Tree - boy pea is very good for the general wellbeing of Banana Plants.
Your older self - which goes back to those happy years we all spent as air-breathing fish experimenting with furriness, a less imaginative time perhaps dominated by matter of fact mechanical senses, such as hearing, sight and smell - has information for you. It's quite obvious to them that not only has the Banana Tree disappeared, no sign of it ever having existed, but in the kitchen the kettle along with a packet of strong breakfast tea are nowhere to be found.
Go ahead call this First Monday in September an example of systemic dissonance, the first step into a dystopia of confusion, sadness and possibly some sort of retardation. Or venture into the Inner Castle, re-write the narrative as a message from God.
