Penalty

As long as our society has a penal system, I think any politician who gives the order to go to war, for whatever reason, should be sentenced to jail. At the very least, he should stand trial. Think about it - if someone kills only one person in self defence, he must face up to his actions in a court of law. Why should a man who orders the death of thousands go free with no questions asked?
A man can give such an order with absolutely no risk to himself, and even if it becomes clear, after the war is over, that his (I use the masculine pronoun for simplicity) reasons for starting it were wrong, he can simply shrug his shoulders and say "I was wrong", and then move on with his life. And probably a quite confortable life at that.
To be honest, I do not think punishing crimes is the best way for a society to fight it, but as long as we have that system, it should be consistent. In my opinion, murder is always morally wrong. I cannot think of a single instance where it could be considered completely right, though in some instances, as in the defence of one´s own or someone else´s life, the use of deadly force is understandable.
I said in the beginning that I think a man should be punished for starting a war even if it is considered to be a fair war for noble reasons. I say this because I think such a decision should not be taken idly. If you truly feel such a thing is absolutely necessary, you should also be prepared to face the consequences. A terrorist who plants a bomb believes his motives justifies his actions, and he knows that if he gets caught, he will be punished. He is prepared to face those consequences. The same should be true for a statesman.

Definitions

It occurs to me that in these writings I am utilizing two different definitions of God, sometimes clearly separate and sometimes mixed with each other. The first definition is the traditional one as God, the entity that I as a person believe in. I will not remove the use of God in this sense from my posts, even though they often muddle the clarity of the philosophical ideas I set forth. For that, it is a too important part of what I wish to say.
The other use of the word God is as a purely philosophical element. When used in this way, the word God (though somewhat misleading, I admit), sums up the ideas of a universal constant, holism and spiritual substance. To many readers, any article dealing with God in the first sense will sound utterly absurd, while one dealing with God in the second might still be very interesting. It is therefore important that the reader keeps these two different definitions in mind when reading any post on this site, to avoid misunderstandings.

Atheism, presupposition and religous prejudice

I was myself raised an atheist. In some ways this could be a disadvantage, as it makes my relationship with God maybe a bit less natural and relaxed than it would be if I had been raised in a religous tradition. On the other hand, I feel it is also an advantage to me in my philosophical labours, as it enables me to take a fresh look at the nature of the devine, perhaps making me somewhat less prejudiced than I would have otherwise been.
A note on this before I go on. Most atheists see themselves as religiously neutral, but this is in fact a misconception. My country is predominantly atheist, but it is an atheism firmly rooted in a culture and an environment heavily influenced by protestant christianity. That is why "Protestant atheist" would be a more fitting label on my nonbelieving countrymen than simply "atheist". I know many Indian atheists see themselves in this way, as Hindu atheists. It is only because of the tragic war between atheists and christians in the west that our atheists are unable to extend the same generosity.
I think many atheists (including my earlier self) fail to see how much their thinking relies on ideas that were concieved in a religious context. The humanistic morality is firmly based in the teachings of Christ, and could not have existed without them. This makes it somewhat of a contradiction when atheists accuse religion of doing nothing but cause war and trouble. Indeed, the very idea that war is wrong stems from the same phenomenon they are critizing for causing it.
Now, to the point. There are a number of presuppositions behind my philosophy, not the least of which is the existence of God. These presuppositions are based on faith, and would be hard to make a good argument for, though I will try, if challenged. Anyway, apart from these presuppositions, I try to be as logical, analytical and objective as possible. The whole goal of this blog is to present a complete and logically consistent philosophical system based on a few basic assumptions, in keeping with classical philosophical thinking.
The main problem with this is that my own philosophy will also say that such a thing is impossible. Human logic is a limited faculty, and can never claim to completely describe the whole of reality, as I am trying to do on this blog. This is actually scientifically proven by Quantum mechanics. On the smallest level, nature acts in a way that is entirely incomprehensible to our logical mind. It can still be described mathematically though, and mathematics are concieved by human logic, but it seems impossible to base philosphy on mathematics!
So, admitting that what I am attempting to do is impossible, I still attempt to do it. This is because I see no other way of doing it. Even though I can not hope to give a complete description of God and the workings of the universe, I can make a description that is as complete as possible, which is the next best thing. One of my favorite thinkers, the scholar, critic and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, critized the enlightenment philosophers on these grounds, suggesting that the only way to publish valid philosophy was in the form of fragments - short pieces that all held, and admitted to hold, only a fraction of the truth.
I agree with Schlegel, but why should a fragment be small? This blog is an attempt to create a very large and thorough fragment, which in my opinion would be even better than a small one. I cannot hope to completely unravel the mysteries of the universe, but I can try to completely unravel them as seen from one angle. Together, a host of such angles would come closer to the ultimate goal.

Answer to lost momentum

An answer to the post called "Lost momentum":
I cannot say that beauty lies in deviance from perfection, only that this is the way it seems. Neither me nor anyone else alive has ever witnessed perfection, and so have no basis for comparison. It is my notion of perfection that is flawed - thinking I know what perfect music is like. Beauty lies in deviance from what we see as perfection, which is normally a set of laws for what music, or other forms of art, should be like. These ideas are flawed. Perfection is utterly unknowable.

Semantic note

As God is unity, God cannot have a sex. The splitting of species into sexes is a consequence of resistance. The sexes are always attracted to one another, trying to become one. This is the true meaning of sexual intercourse, procreation being rather a side effect. Anyway, you will often see me refer to God as Him. I do this because "it" seems derogative and impersonal, while the sexed pronoun seems friendlier and closer. It is my opinion that in most cases, men should refer to God as "Him", and women should refer to Him as "Her", except in cases where you want to stress either the femine or masculine side of God to make a point.

Spirit

Though God emanates through all physical objects, His, and the world´s, true nature is spiritual, non-physical. The physical world itself is born from resistance. There is some support for this in modern science, though this will be speculation based on current knowledge of the universe. I have read, in one of the excellent works of popular science by Dr. Michio Kaku, that the Big Bang was caused by a tendency in the universe to seek a lower state of energy. This is what makes gravity work. You gain energy by removing yourself from an object of great mass, and this "tendency" to seek a state of lower energy pulls you back towards the object. This collapsed the 11-dimensional universe that existed before the Big Bang, and created our familiar 4-dimensional one.
This primal universe is described as being devoid of mass, space, and time! Much like the way I envision God, actually. All things united. Nothing parted into beginnings, ends, places or objects, just oneness. This is the perfect state of things, and the state we still can reach within our minds through meditation or other spiritual practices.

Note: There is an inherent paradox in what I just wrote that must be adressed. Gravity, is a force pulling things together, in other words it is a force working for unity. But I just stated that gravity is caused by resistance, which is the "enemy" of unity! Actually, it is the energy present in the object which pulls it towards the larger object. The tendency to reach a lower state of energy seeks annihalation, no energy. God turns this into good by exploiting the tendency to pull objects together.

Lost momentum

Lost my momentum on account of stumbling upon a contradiction that may topple my entire philosophy:
It is my firm opinion that, although it always seems like great art and music achieves perfection, it´s true beauty comes from deviations from perfection. In a sense, the closer something is to being perfect without actually being perfect, the more beautiful it is. A tone struck slightly off key, a beat missed by a hair, a slight imbalance in a character´s pose - these add excitement and life to the work. In art, perfection is death.
If God is perfect, which He must be, this means that beauty is actually born from resistance, i.e. evil. This does not harmonize well with the idea that God is beauty. This paradox demands some thought.

A consequence

I might live up to the conequences of my own article on the ideal book, and publish articles from this blog as a wiki instead. A wiki will serve perfectly as an interactive book in the way I imagined it.

God is unity

As recognized by the Ba`hai faith, one of the most basic, defining principles of God is unity and oneness. If all were one, then no suffering would exist. In fact, disunity is one of the most prevalent manifestations of resistance in the universe. If someone were to approach you, trying to become your freind, and you were to resist this persons advances, then this resistance is the main cause of the disunity between you.
Any situation can be analyzed in this way to guide you towards the morally correct course of action. If you think about this, you will see that your ideas of what is could will most often coincide with what constitutes the state of higher unity. Love seeks unity, hatred seeks disunity. Creation puts things together into greater whole, while destruction tears things apart. And so on.
All things unite in God, and in God all things are united. To become good people, we must seek to unite things, not only physical objects and beings but also everything within ourselves. Our ideas and emotions. All paradox, all polarity, all duality are  illusions. All is one.

A description of God

I`ve been putting this off, put I think it is time to start to describe God as I see Him. In my contemplations around the devine, I have come to believe that there are certain words or principles which describe Gods basic nature. I shall try to write one article on each of them, but it should be said that this list will not be, nor could it ever be, neither comprehensive nor entirely presise, as God is unknowable and unexplainable through language.
First and foremost, God is good. I think this fact would be agreed upon by most religions, at least the larger ones (including Buddhism, if you count their impersonal first principle as "God", which I do in this case). The problem arises when we try to define what "good" means.

The ideal book

A book on philosophy is a book exploring ideas. Ideas are spiritual artifacts, and as such do not have beginnings or ends. Thus, a book on philosophy should not have a beginning nor an end either. Always when you start to explain a philosophical idea, you suddenly realize that there is some other idea which needs to be explained for the other person to understand what you are trying to explain, so in the end any starting point you choose will be more or less arbitrary, and not the actual beginning of the idea you are trying to explain.
Therefore, books on philosophy should be published as interactive electronic books, with a multitude of smaller articles arguing single points. Each of these articles should be furnished with a link to other articles which explain, supplement or expound upon the ideas presented in it. The book would in the end be more like a web, that the user could move through in any order he wished, its secrets revealed organically as questions arise within the reader, than a novel which starts at one point and ends in another. The book should open on a randomly selected page, or on a randomly selected one of several pages chosen as good starting points.
Such a book could also be infinitely expanded, which is also good because no idea ever actually ends.
As a matter of fact, it might be extremely interesting to read a novel published in this fashion as well, where the reader decides the order of the telling.

On priesthood

Ideally, a priest, or any other form of religious specialist, serves the role as a guide, not a preacher. A guide helps people reach their own understanding of God, rather than impose his own as a preacher would. All knowledge of God is stored deep within each and every one of us, but some people spend more time pondering on His excistence than others, and so gain a more intimate knowledge of His will. This does not mean that such an expert will allways be right in his views on the devine, but it puts him in a position where he can more easily pont people in the right direction, making it easier for them to figure things out on their own.

In the end

it does not matter which God you believe in. God stays the same no matter what you believe.

The moral choice

This post regards the origin of religion. Where does morality come from and why should we follow it? Most people take this for granted. An action is either right or wrong and thats that. Most of agree that under most circumstances, killing another person is wrong. The question I want to answer is why? Why is this wrong? Why is anything wrong?
I`ve only managed to come up with two possible answers to this question. The first is the scientific answer, rooted in biology, and states that we act morally because we have evolved to act morally. If killing people of your own tribe was allowed, then it would be impossible for the members of that tribe to cooperate, and as a result, the tribe would weaken. In other words, morality is a form of social control mechanism rooted in our biology, part of our nature as tribal animals.
So, in the end, if each of us behaves morally, it benifits all, including ourselves. This means that all morality can be traced back to self interest. Killing someone will have negative social repercussions both on society and the murderer himself. Even if he isn`t caught, he will always have to live his life with part of himself hidden, because society does not approve of his actions. In a broader sense, killing contributes to social instability which in the end would lead to a weaker society compared to more stable ones, making it and everyone in it weaker and poorer.
This kind of morality works for all moral statements I have heard. It can be infinitely extended to include more people and more species. Cutting too many trees harms the ecosystem which we all need to survive, for example. So, this is indeede a complete and sound basis for a moral construct, and is in fact the way most people today instinctively think about morality. But this kind of morality has many flaws.
First, it puts the burden of proof on the side of good. An unwanted but very real effect of this way of thinking is that all actions are right until proven to be wrong. Cutting down a tree is not wrong in itself, but is perfectly fine until someone can prove to you that cutting that tree harms the ecosystem in some way.
If we could think that cutting down a tree, any tree, is in itself a morally wrong action, then the one who wishes to cut that tree must be the one to prove that cutting the tree is really necessary to him, for his survival or some such reason. But this way of thinking cannot be grounded in evolution. It is indeed benificial to our evolution to cut down trees!
The other major flaw in this way of thinking is that it is frankly, cynical. Compassion and love, which is more or less uniformly agreed to be the emotional basis of morality, seem entirely absent from this rational weighing of arguments and facts. You might say it is open to discussion wether such a bloodless way of thinking truly is morality at all!
So the alternative to this way of thinking must be to say that some things, some actions, are just wrong in their very nature. Much of western society and morality is based upon such a notion in fact. Take the American declaration of indipendence, which states that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." We find similar ideas layed down in the UN`s declaration of human rights, and various other documents central to the shaping of euro-american civilization.
Through extention, these ideas could also come to include members of other species and societies, even plants. So, this also forms a complete and sound basis for an all-encompassing moral construct, while solving the problems connected to the biological approach sketched above. Problem solved, right?
No, we are left with our original question. Where do these rights come from? Why do we have those rights? It seems someone just decided we have them, and now we do. In our day, we take these rights for granted, we take morality for granted. If a moral statement cannot be explained through biology, then thats just the way it is. We learned that certain things were right and certain things were wrong as children, and it`s just always been like that.
That is not enough for me. I must ask why. And there can only be one answer. To those who wrote the american declaration of independence, the answer was self-evident, though people prefer to ignore that fact. Morality must, in the end, come from some non-physical source, some excistence that transcends the simple physical reality we see around us every day.
Morality must come from God.