Vision
Our growing minds are infinitely plastic. Every new child begins to absorb information from its environment as soon as it begins to grow.
The traditional Christian life aims for the vision of God 'face to face'. Thomas Aquinas calls this final perfect state of human existence beatitude. Aquinas 608. For Christians, the vision of God is a post mortem experience.
If the Universe is divine, however, we experience God in life. Every thought, word, feeling, action, every experience, is experience of God. This God appears to us not only as heavenly bliss, but also as war, murder, rape and famine.
We use theology and religion to come to terms with the divine. When the divine is invisible, the possibilities of persistent error, fraud and corruption enter religion. The touchstone of truth becomes the will of those in power. 'In power' here means 'to be able to deny life to dissidents'.
This project began within the Roman Catholic Church. The most dangerous feature of this Church is its repression of theology. There is a firm and clearly documented Party Line in Roman Catholic theology, and all who expect a welcome or a living from the Church must clearly toe this line in both thought and deed. Denzinger, Infallibility - Wikipedia, McGregor: The Party
Here, we take the view that a just society can be run in the external forum without constraining the internal forum. We allow qualified freedom of speech; there is no reason why we should not allow total freedom of mind. All this requires is a common view both on how to act, so as not to violate the sovereignty of other people, and on how to deal with people who act outside this constraint. We see it as the task of theology and religion to develop and criticize models of action within the constraints of individual freedom. Australian Government | Department of Immigration and Citizenship
Theology must embrace the physical world. It is our channel of communication with God. Our chosen disciplines, physical theology and natural religion reflect this attitude. We can all agree on this. All information (including the Bible) is encoded physically. We can all agree on this. Prisons and bullets encode information too, and it would be an improvement if we could do without such manifestations of error in human communication.
Error seems to be closely related to narrowness of mind. The Roman Catholic Church holds itself bound by ideas that were current thousands of years ago. So women cannot be priests, full stop. There are many other equally absurd and irrelevant restrictions like the ban on masturbation: a mortal sin in my day. Mortal sin - Wikipedia
Such fixed views can cause great pain and twist people out of shape. Even the idea that pain is meritorious is a distortion of reality. Pain is a cybernetic thing, a signal that that have gone too far in some direction and need to be brought back inside the space of normal operation (if possible). The pain I felt and the evil I see from narrowness of mind motivates this work. Suffering - Wikipedia, Pain - Wikipedia
Restricting the bandwidth of communication is a source of error, just as large bandwidths are best for error free communication. The most revolutionary theory of the last century, from an engineering point of view, is Shannon's mathematical theory of communication. Shannon showed that communication error can be defeated even when the physical link is very noisy. The key to error control is a dimension called entropy which we measure simply by counting individuals of whatever sort. Claude Shannon
Shannon defined information as that which resolves uncertainty and used entropy to measure uncertainty. The information we receive when uncertainty is resolved is equal to the entropy of the uncertainty. Trying to pick one in a million is a much more uncertain task that picking one in ten. We need six decimal digits of information instead of just one to specify a given choice. Khinchin
Error in communication arises when one symbol is confused with another, tit instead of tat. Tit and tat are easily confused because they are so close together; we avoid confusion by placing symbols far apart, and Shannon saw that a 'packet' of symbols is itself a symbol. As symbols grow more complex, the entropy of the space they occupy grows exponentially, putting the symbols further apart and so less likely to be confused.
The entropy of any symbol space (and so its power to void error) is maximized when the letters in the symbolic alphabet are equiprobable. In an abstract space where we are all modelled as complex symbols, human entropy is maximized when we are all equal. Since the information carried by a point is equal to the entropy of the space in which the point resides, the increase in the entropy of the human race increases the meaningfulness of each one of us.
So the vision is to argue that broadmindedness is safe, and all those who would imprison us and themselves for our mutual safety are mistaken. Many feel that it was necessary to repress our natural instincts in order to create civilization. This view may be reflection of our Christian past, which has been run on the premise that we are all guilty of at least original sin, and most are sinners from birth to death. Our vision is not so pessimistic.
It seems that the opposite to repressive civilization is not chaos. The world that we see is incredibly complex and worked out in infinitely fine detail, the only control being natural selection. Those things that do not work do not exist.
We are not inherently evil. We have been tried in the crucible of billions of years of survival. This means that the range of our possible responses covers the total spectrum from love to murder. To prevent murder, we need to prevent situations where the only option seen to be viable is the death for somebody.
Such situations will be a mixture of mental and physical conditions. What is to be lost if the only alternative to starving to death is to go to war with a reasonable chance of plunder and survival? Condemning the plundered party to starvation. By preventing the physical condition, we render the mental condition superfluous. If there is enough food to go round, why bother murdering the neighbours to get more. The same for oil, and everything else.
Many others have this vision. This project is simply a small contribution to a tide of opinion which may raise global levels of human cooperation to the point where war need no longer be seen as necessary and we can devote our full attention to the question of sustainably creating the resources for our survival. It has been said that there will not be peace on earth until we are attacked by some powerful outside force. Well, that situation is here: there is a serious and growing clash between our consumptive desires and the ability of the Earth to deliver.
(revised 1 January 2012))
