Re: Religion

Are not all religions based on some specific means by which the human species regulate and control themselves - to "pull oneself up by the bootstraps"? And it becomes a barrier to seeing the world as dumb emergence (dumb here should be understood as appealing to its unconscious randomness). But it should be noted that "religion" once worked at the level of society (the king as instantiated god-head) and later (though necessarily coexisting such as Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens) at the individuated subject (one's personal struggle, or one's salvation). 

If the emergence of a technology of control evolves coextensively with societal evolution (the collective becoming-human), then there exists some moment (y) that is contingent on some moment (x) where f(x) is defined as a partial mapping from (x) to (y). B is a set that contains (y) and f(x) is the smallest possible union of the set A and the set B. B containing a bijection of what could be objectively reasoned as an alpha group structure vs a collective non-hierachical structure.

 Despite that religion is defined here as some "control mechanism" does not imply that "religion", which is the techne of "god", is necessarily negative. Since, is not food or treats a means by which we control dogs; and that control we assert produced an animal which is well tempered for a variety of human uses? Instead, it opens up the larger set of possible roles for the expression of being-human - explicitly, religions are both potentially positive and negative forces; the set of positive forces (P) is equinumerous to (Q) as (Q) is ~(P) assuming symmetry between positive and negative forces so that for every potential force (r) there is an inverse of (r) which is (s) where t(r,s) = 0 since t = (r+ s) and s = -(r). Though a specific culture may be more predisposed to certain tendencies, it does not necessarily follow that there is only one "pure" dominate strategy for the application or production of a religion. Anecdotally, it seems more likely that monotheism has this tendency to extreme violence and other virulent methods of cultural control and production. This does not imply that a "pantheistic monotheism" like Hinduism is thereby better - i.e. the cast system and religious violence that the government is partially tacit in "tolerating". It is important to explicate that "religion" seems to have consistent structures (note that consistency merely indicates there is at least some limited form of comparable, abstracted, or higher-level interpretation that can coherently be mapped onto each religion's domain of meaning). Take the rise of "monotheism"; it was contingent on the "need" to transcend the jaded and increasingly diluted pantheism of Hellenism (possibly due to the over acceptance of "foreign" gods and the rising awareness of the logically weak explanation of natural forces as produced by a multitude of vagrant gods). This may not be a strong root to tie the randomness of its acceptance by Rome as a state religion, but there must have been some, if not a legion, of reasons Hellenistic pantheism stopped being fertile soil for the continued production of culture, and specifically, a techne of being religious (defined as a rubric for the structuring and thereby the understanding of the world). Monotheism is just the next logical step in a series of potential understandings of the world and ourselves - in this case, as an individual intimately connected to a single transcendence - a single authority for the production of culture. And it must be noted, the ascendance of monotheism was a long time coming (now think how long various earlier forms must have endured); the moment where monotheism becomes the dominate religion (and/or world-view) was when it had reached some critical mass within a given culture and this tertiary (where primary is defined as the set of all coherent practices at a given time, and secondary, the set of dominate practices) culture was subsequently appropriated. The moment when the members of the union of the set of dominate practices (A) is greater than the disjoint of (A, B), defined as g(A n B) = Y, where the set (B) is the coherent set of minor practices (coherent, meaning logically falling within a domain of practices which are produced by a significantly large enough collective of people who would consider these practices to be part of the same domain, and since this criterion is contingent on the subject's heterophenomenological perspective there is some margin of error; however, the precision of which may be generally unattainable or inherently unstable). This union, defined as h(A,B) = {A U B} = Z, (Z) is then a subset of (A) and j(Z, B) or {Z n B} = W, is defined as the practices in (B) heretical to the practices in (Z); thereby, (B) either becomes a proper subset of (Z) so that (B) is fully contained in (Z) or (B) becomes a threat to the cohesion or stability of the dominate practices (A). A dominate culture comprised of coherent practices are defined as being stably propagated through multiple generations (i.e. the Catholic efficiency and bureaucracy of the late Roman state and the Catholic control of the dogma through which they lend authorship - the Bible is not a stable text, the pages may stay the same - the content the same but the concepts produced and followed is continually constructed by the church, whether a specific pastor's "reading" or the "party-line").

Need another note book

Gleaming
Trite tirade
Glistens
Gossamer beads of insight
String distant sprouts
Of meaning

And like the breaking sun
Sober clouds of afterthought
On winds of cold reason
Spread
A broad chasm
Between what was once
One congruent continent of meaning

Puppy dreams

Sam twitches in a full on run.
Is he alone or part of a dream pack?
What is his place in the pack?

Paws still look big for his young legs
Pads still delicate but becoming coarse with life
He awakes to curl into a ball and begins soring

Evening

Crimson gold
Tendrils of purple

Seething slowness
Of the setting sun

Dark eastern sky
Coating the milky blue western haze

And in a moment

Night raps
Smothering hues

Trees become black roots
Absorbing the dimming light

Lights turn on as eyes on the back of the strip mall
White block and red eyelashes
The red metal egress door gapes
As the world turns facial
And my book becomes the world

Riffing on cheap, diluted "insight" - Tangled thoughts on the first early spring, warm day

Pure intensity zones
The world that lasts alone
Serenity which has lost its home

Empty like twilight
Trees black against blue star light
Cerulean dreams punctuated by cloud night

Despite what it seems
It is never what it means

This semiotic machine
Hole from whence we lost

This liar of hope to transpire
Into a world to inspire
That insatiable desire - to transcend
This semiotic mire

This intensity plateau
We cannot know

From whence we come
Nor the hope we come home
To the god in heaven
Or the satan to end him

"Won't you come with me?"

Lost in a story
Of that which bore me
Into this skin and pain

Which sprouted the growth
Of that never ending hope
Of empty void
Of ending in suns
Of becoming undone
The set of all ascending

Pure intensity zones
That lurking fire
Of angelic desire
That semiotic machine
Put between you and me

I had to clean that table because it was too dirty to use. The places you use, while being used, are cleaner than the rest of the table which is covered by: Beer Beer Beer Dust Dust Dust Beer Beer Beer, a message we all intimate.

Pure intensity zone
Transcendent meme
Without a message to intervene
Between the oneness of being
Pure intensity

Pretty soon our conversations will be indexed by the footnotes we use, and, projected onto our irises, displays of the comments and quotes we choose to transcribe our desires. We will be fully subsumed by the semiotic machine (which we mutually produce), the entering of a singular machine or a production of a stable universe that melds two worlds at the seam where they become pure energy. Stability is a return to the void - to become the seed for the next expansion which will occur at some minimum point of instability. We end this by creation.