Ideas for Adding to the Site

None of these should be taken as expressing definite opinions. Some are half-baked and may lead nowhere.

Some of them, along with some not listed here, are scattered across the site in the form of comments on what "I hope at some point" to do.

I will deal with them in no particular order, if and when they seem useful enough to justify the time spent on them.

About

Commentary on the Bible (or at least on the N.T.). (Maybe start by collecting the comments on specific passages scattered through the site.)

1 Creed

1A Creation (including Cosmology and Ontology)

Turing on implications of Godel.

Curves and angles. Do evolved and designed viability look different in general, or is one a subset (e.g. round vs square, analog vs digital)?

Does the genome code for form and behaviour? Can it? (Sheldrake)

Glory.

"Religion should play no part in politics." (And improve the confusing "Religion" page.)

Cicero defines religion as "the cultivation of the gods" (cultus deorum, De Natura Deorum 2:8). By this, Christianity is not a religion.

Conservatism.

Dangers of labelling a conjunction of beliefs with one word. N-space of political positions.

Blond defines conservatism's aim as: "a stable, organic, just society that seeks to create a culture that is good for all its participants and a country that looks after all of its citizens".

Conservatism and reaction. Conserving natural growths by removing artificial structures.

A temperament may be adventurous (keen on change or risk) or cautious (not so keen). An opinion may be conservative (approving the status quo), progressive (approving the current direction of change) or reactionary (deploring both). Temperament affects opinion but need not determine it.

Gradualism re the legit, radicalism re the illegit.

Positive role of habit.

Superiority of the new should outweigh the cost of transition.

Elaborate on the integration of habits into Subjects.

Building the World. Add one realm at a time and describe what new phenomena become possible.

Subtlety as supreme deontic principle? Integration (unity in diversity)? Property as diversity of culture?

Ethic of consequences. Beyond the dilemma: good deeds vs good outcomes; but how? Factor in the degree of confidence in the outcome? "Virtue Ethics"?

Principles for judging actions. (1) The proximate trumps the remote. (2) Commission trumps omission. E.g. terrorism vs collateral damage.

Action vs reflection, wide vs narrow. AGIL.

Emergence. Statement of Law(N+1) presupposes terms of Law(N). Multi-inception, seed, reproduction.

Refinement/edification in all modalities. Individuation?

Randomness of human action. Humanity as work-in-progress vs Fixed Nature.

Organic weal as basis for higher modalities? Genome? Without the higher modalities man could not survive (see Lorenz)?

Supplicating God ("prayer").

The sabbatical principle.

Economy: Rationality, Money, Growth.

#A Dims of national (combined gang/victim) fiscal stance: debt (red vs black), restraint (consume vs invest).

#B Dims of gang fiscal policy: borrowing (tight vs slack), current spend (high vs low), (capital spend vs tax cuts).

#A is function of #B, e.g. tax cuts lead to victim invest that partly offsets lost gang invest but partly boosts consumption.

Selling vs donating body parts.

Caveat Emptor vs Utmost Good Faith. Hard bargaining.

They say that 25% is a monopoly, e.g. wrt sectors of the global arms industry.

Representation:

Representing is not resembling.

Selling votes.

If we are to vote, let us vote for one we know personally, i.e. indirect representation. PR for electoral college?

Humour. Amusement is joy in newly discovered possibilities, e.g. newly observed connections between words and meanings.

Leadership.

Neomasculinism. Quintus Curtius and Roosh V have over-reacted. Sam Aalders seems pretty accurate.

Apparently an amoeba remembers. This may bear on the list of "realms".

Divine guidance. e.g. seeking confirmation.

Creed/Creation/Standards/Agape.htm (1) mentions "faith" and (2) fails to relate agape to the agapeic modality.

In Creed/Creation/Culture.htm, expand on the Cultural Mandate, maybe via examples.

1B Defection

Satan.htm implies that angels (and their "world") are accessory to us (and ours). A traditional doctrine, maybe inferred from Heb 1:14. But maybe they are selves, and their world is their home as Earth is ours, and their service of us is stated as a (relevant in context) fact, not as a definition.

The selfishness scale. The pass mark. Amos 2-3. Thou art the man.

"Conservative" Statism:

Civil liberties. "Staying alive is not the only good", as I heard someone say on the BBC. Portillo (contra the claim that saving lives justifies govt snooping): "In WW2 we sacrificed millions of lives for freedom".

GRAP. "Governments routinely abuse power." Portillo on the need to restrain govt knowledge. 

Safety nets make people careless.

The welfare state usurps altruism, thus encouraging the people in self-indulgence.

We would like to protect folk against bad luck (including innate disability) but not against their own bad conduct (including negligence such as under-insurance). Sadly the latter is an inevitable consequence of every attempt to achieve the former.

Noble lie, necesary evil, the Ticking Bomb, weighing (frequency * severity) vs (loss of integrity). Deception justified in rare cases albeit a high price to pay?

How sin infiltrates the modalities e.g. self-serving lies.

Antiencroachment League constitution

Pre- and post-election coalitions: which is more honest?

Political mobility and the Alternative Vote. The Establishment seeks to keep minorities from becoming majorities, to entrench the status quo. "Loony candidates".

Curbs on abuse of power, e.g. separation of powers.

Regime enriching itself is a minor problem. Regime impoverishing their victims (e.g. by incompetence) is a major problem.

If the prevailing gangsters insist on interfering in families, the least harmful interference is to register marriages and support them e.g. by tax relief.

Political elite (and therefore the sheeple) vs the cognoscenti. All 3 panelists on Talking Politics 20080105 agree that Iraq-Pak are naturally (bastard) feudal and that the West should work within that, not try to impose a western-style democracy that will not be appropriate for generations if ever.

"Reasonable doubt" is empty. The correct answer to "Is he guilty?" is "x%", and the correct penalty is a function of x and of the 100% penalty. Criminal vs Civil is an accident of history.

Satire. Sin is to be swamped but never eliminated, unifying tragedy and comedy?

Eloquent despair is not profundity.

"It is precisely this shared predicament which makes them so very worthy of our compassion."

Will Self, A Point of View (BBC), 20-Feb-2015, of fictional characters' illusion of choice when in fact the end of their story has already been written.

1C Restoration

The supreme question: how can I be in the right? (Paul)

Does my creed fail to express the Kurios Christos?

"Recognition of God's friends is impossible (irrelevent? cultish?)." Each group maintains standards?

The "within you" ("among you") in Vulgate, Luther, Calvin. Kant accepts it from Luther I think at the end of Religion 3.2.

Forgiving others. A form of adaptation contingent on reorientation?

2 Specifics

2A Past

Attitude-Heresy (cogniframe?) matrix.

Pietism. Revise the treatment.

Credit Crunch caused inter alia by Clinton's attempted social engineering.

2B Present

Examples of recalcitrant Attitudes (Humanism etc) leading to violation of modal standards.

Popular showbusiness pursues the pragmatic object (achievement), in the form of audience ratings, rather than the semiotic object (clarity).

The pursuit of achievement encroaches on sportsmanship (pursuit of beauty through competition). The quality of game has suffered, even as technical excellence has risen.

The natural musical scale consists of frequencies with simple ratios between them. Much modern art music has abandoned the natural sclae, pursuing an epistemic question ("what is possible") rather than a cosmetic one ("what is beautiful").

Having ceased revering God, folk have begun to revere other things "The Nation" or "The people" is one of these. When I compare the pious emotion with which politicians speak of "democracy" (or "the will of the people") with the inherent absurdity of the idea, I am reminded of the prophets' mockery of the worship of wooden idols. But football is the most popular object of reverence, and obituaries now mention football clubs more often than any other kind of reverence group.

Strands of modernity: criticality (good), physicalism (bad). Need to disentangle them.

Black Swan.

Short termism.

"Conduct disorder".

Political Correctness. Its dimensions.

"The criminal base has grown" (Farage).

Bias against Christianoid (let alone Christian) groups when awarding (local?) government grants.

Proportional Representation. With mass communications, viewpoints rather than geographical areas are now the natural constituencies.

At least 2 types of dirigism: egalitarian, nationalist. Each has degrees of extremity.

The adversarial method. On 29-Jun-2014 on BBC's The Andrew Marr Show (18 mins in) Keir Starmer (DPP of England 2008-2013) said "I don't think this case was determined by, as it were, the rates of pay of super-clever lawyers." Maybe not, but obviously some cases are, or the lawyers would be paid less and super-clever folk would move to other occupations.

In English prisons officer-inmate ratio is 1:2.

Varieties of "Islamism": Islamic traditionalism / Koranic literalism (which could be "schizo-doulic"), Islamic politics ("life is Islam"), Islamic imperialism (forced conversion).

"I read our national poet too much, and his vocabulary seeps into mine." (Daniel Hannan, BBC Week In Westminster 25-Jun-2016, when presenter Helen Lewis said to him "if you want to talk about people being included by politics, can you stop saying countrymen". (I love it, but it is probably not making an important point, and I am unsure what the point is.)

Sentencing is unduly influenced by motives instead of consequences.

"Closure" and "justice for".

2C Future

Distinguish tactics from aims.

Appendices

Cosmology precedes Ontology but assumes concepts from it (e.g. Realms). (Sequence of Apppendices, and sequence of links from the Creed's "Standards" page.)

Other

Some material from some of the landing pages may be worth incorporating somewhere under the Main Page. (Duplicate? Reference?)

Elaborate on the relationship between Docetism and Biblicism.

Back to Forthcoming Changes.