AskPhilosophers.Org is Hit-and-Miss

It is the rare teen adult who, like John Galt in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," can just walk away from one's parent and never look back.

I don't like the website called AskPhilosophers.org. Generally speaking, the answers are so full of humanist values they have little to no objectivity. Last Friday's answer didn't even come near the question as far its conclusion went. I wanted to respond, but only the "panelist philosophers" may do that. So I am responding here, to the metaphysics, the epistemology, and the ethics brought up in the question.

Q: "Do your parents have the right to impose their worldview on you, simply because they paid for your upbringing and education? What if their worldview and values offend you deeply - do you owe them anything more than you would to anyone else who had offended you, simply because they may have sacrificed financially for you, when you were a child and had no identity that could clash with theirs?"

Response from Oliver Leaman, who teaches at the University of Kentucky:
"It depends what is meant by 'impose'. Parents are entitled to provide what they think is appropriate guidance for their children, and of course if these views are regarded as dangerous or deplorable by the state then there will be some official way of intervening despite the wishes of the parents, and that is appropriate."

I do not disagree with the ethics. Metaphysically that "appropriate guidance" is not "imposed"; it is lawfully negligent for a parent or caretaker not to "appropriately guide." Epistemologically, it is not a matter of entitlement, and if children and parents alike understood that, then children could be partners in their own upbringing by asking things like: "Dad, are you allowed to let me do this or that?" Or, "Mom, I want to do something you told me you don't want me to do. But if take certain steps and precautions, and I understand the consequences, can you then allow me to do it?"

One example from my own family comes to mind. My sister, in the fifth grade, wanted to start using make up. My mother never used much beyond rouge and lipstick. She was not opposed to her dauther being a "modern young lady," she just didn't have the knowledge to teach my sister how "not to go out looking like a whore," as she uncharacteristically was forced into saying. (She never uses such language.)

It was a typical mother-daughter argument, and went on for a couple of weeks as I recall. Then my mother had an inspiration: if my sister would go to a young girls' "finishing" type of school where she would properly learn the techniques of makeup, among other femininely things, she would be allowed to wear the make up.

My sister had a fit and for some time, perhaps a week, threw tantrums, cried, yelled, and said no. She could figure out on her own, she said, how not to look like a whore. My mother continued to insist, and eventually my sister gave in.

In today's world many, but certainly not all, daughters would just wear the make up, spiting and cursing their mothers, or do it behind their mothers' backs. That is sad, because it demonstrates no bond of respect has been made, neither by the parent toward the child, nor by the child reaching out for adult and parental advice. The parent is not respected enough for the child to bother looking for it because the parent looks at respect as an entitlement, instead of something earned for being a good, loving, and morally and legally responsible parent.

What happened with my sister was remarkable. She not only learned proper make-up techniques, she learned how to use patterns and a sewing machine to make her own clothes, which she continued to do right through college in order to save money and still have nice and fashionable clothes.

But that wasn't all. I remember her telling my mother it was the best thing my mother ever made her do. It was obviously because, as with all people, not just children, there is so much that she had not known she did not know, and after learning it, discovered what she learned was all of the things she had wanted to know.

My mother was right in her decision, from the point of view of a responsible parent who only wants to make the best right decisions. But it was also legally as well as morally right, because if my mother had lost that argument, she would lost all the rest that came later. It was not an "imposition" to decide a finishing school was best; it was the appropriate guidance of an adult who knew her proper, authoritative role as parent was at risk.

But to get back to the rest of Oliver Leaman's answer:
"Children may come to feel that their parents' views are not ones they wish to assume, and I dare say that they owe their parents a duty of respect..."

Hold the presses. A duty of respect? We all know that many parents are drug users, drunks, and are sexually promiscuous, yet who could at the same time be the whistle blower of the Harper Valley PTA.

These are not parents who whom children owe a "duty of respect" when it comes to accepting their moral values. It is true that while living under the roof of a parent, a child (or anyone else) must respect the rational requests to do certain things, and sometimes those "things" may resemble the "duties" of Cinderella the stepsister. She gave her mother the respect owed of someone who put clothes on your back and food in your stomach. Beyond that, all she wanted was to get out of that family and never look back. Cinderella certainly didn't owe a "duty of respect" to her stepfamily's values.

But, because of Professor Leaman's advice about a "duty of respect," he continues in the same vein, saying, "...so they should take seriously the option of adopting those views, but they are not bound to do so."

Cinderella should have taken seriously the option of adopting the views of her stepfamily? Not in a million years, and that would have been clear from the first time her step-mother or a step-sister invaded her own right to a "duty of respect."

Children know what values of their family they cherish and hold dear, if any, and which they despise and rebel against. Unfortunately, most children do not understand that they have the option of changing their own lives for the better, to get rid of the influences of their nurturing. They become neurotic, sometimes psychotic, sometimes alcoholics, wife and child abusers, and sometimes they become mass murderers on their school campuses.

It is the rare teen adult who, like John Galt in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," can just walk away from one's parent and never look back. But they must be taught to do so, if we do not want generations forever being mentally and emotionally harmed by some so-called "duty of respect" for people whose values and actions they cannot respect.

"Surely no-one has the right to impose views on us;" Leaman concludes, "in most religions even God invites us to share his worldview, he does not oblige us to agree with him."

Misogynist or alcoholic fathers, and cheating mothers, do not "invite us" to become like them, yet children who are admonished or counseled to accept their parents failings while having to live with the chaos, the immorality, the conscientious objections they will have, and the possible physical harm and emotional anger, do not owe their parents "anything more than you would to anyone else who had offended you."

But "philosophers" such as Leaman, who's answers to life's questions often give our discipline a bad image, continue to create the twisted people who make up a twisted society that has thousands of girls posting fights with other girls on U-Tube, who create populations of prisoners whose ranks are growing faster than the general population, and who create the legislators who craft the laws that attempt to control every little aspect of all our lives so that in the end one doesn't know whether he/she is coming or going, acting morally or legally but immorally, or morally but illegally.

The idea of any sort of "duty" to anything but what one chooses to be "dutiful" toward is slavery on both a moral and a psychological level. AskPhilosophers.Org is similar to the short answers to the questions of life we get from the likes of "Ann Landers," but often less honest, and in a hit-and-miss style, because philosophers are expected to be "deep thinkers," not to throw off quickie answers about altruistic "duty."

The answer to the younger questioner should have been, "No, you do not owe anything to people whose world views offend you except the respect of treating them like humans who have the right to be wrong. After that, walk away from them if you need to."

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© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

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Cosmology and World Views--A Primer

World Views, Including Metaphysical Naturalism

Speaking generally, what is commonly referred to as a "world view" used to be called "cosmology." Cosmology still exists, as a field in astrological metaphysics, and as a very specialized branch of general metaphysics. Because it is metaphysics, any statements about the world, the universe, and life and its meaning, are cosmological statements.

"Where Hawking sees science as writing God out of the picture, others take a different view. Physicist Paul Davies, for example, has written that the beauty and order of the laws of physics themselves suggests there must be something behind those laws, something driving the mathematical beauty and order in the universe." http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/intro/cosmo-frame.html

Even as the purview of astronomers and physicists, as the paragraph above demonstrates, when the subject arises of how the universe came to be what it is, God winds up in the picture.

In Cosmology and Religion we read in the first sentence: "There is an ongoing battle in the United States between Young Earth Creationists and the scientific community over the teaching of evolutionary biology." This shows that cosmology is about more than astro-physics.

We also read that, "Catholics outnumber Young Earth Creationists by a large factor, and the Catholic Church has no objection to either Big Bang cosmology or evolutionary biology, which they regard as the mechanisms used by God to create the Universe and the living things within it. (See the text of a talk by Dr. George Coyne, SJ)" [It is non-Catholics who are determined to inject creationism and the resultant cosmology into the public sphere, breaking--sometimes purposefully, sometimes only incidentally--the separation of church and state.]

Cosmology, being metaphsyics, deals with a combination of nature and the supernatural. However, in Christianity's beginnings, "The early Christian tradition expresses a profound ambivalence regarding the natural world."

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/bron/PDF--Christianity/Burton-Christie--Early%20Christianity.pdf

In the medieval ages, "The people, the bulk of Europe's population, were especially critical. They did not understand the fineries of theological thought. Nor did they understand Church government. They complained about the un-Christian lives of the higher clergy. [ ] To make matters worse, none of the people understood Latin. If and when they bothered to attend mass, they heard strange words uttered while the clergy conducted rituals and ceremonies which they clearly did not understand. If the Middle Ages was the age of Christendom, or a Christian Kingdom in Europe, then just what did it mean to be a Christian? [ ] The people began to recognize their need for their own Gospel -- they sought their own Christ, not the Christ manufactured by Rome." The History Guide Lecture 3

The Reformation, the creation of this protestant movement, was the peoples' attempt at creating a cosmology of their own. They understood the world in which they lived through different eyes than that of the Roman Church, though they did not understand Latin, could not read English, had no English Bible because it was outlawed, and they certainly didn't understand astro-physics.

There is, however, reason to take the astro-physics out of cosmology. "The Bible was written to show us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." - Cardinal Baronius (1598), a quote cited by Galileo.

The Cardinal's cosmology included a creator, but he accepted the physics of "how the heavens go" because how they went was in his "God's plan".

It is almost a lost cause for creationists to hope astro-physics will lose its place as the dominant force in cosmology. There has been much more made of astro-physics than of religion in cosmology, in the era of modern science. But in the era of modern evangelical movements, the wall of separation between church and state is crumbling, like a brick wall too-long covered by vines whose tentacles have broken the mortar. Tentacles such as "faith-based initiatives" backed by government funds, the approval of sharia-compliant takaful insurance, and Muslim demands for time to pray five times a day during working hours are destroying the Constitution's mandate that government "make no law respecting the establishment of religion.

"Establishment" has two definitions; the one we are most familiar with means "creation", but the other means "that which exists," as in "The establishment called the Protestant Church..." A synonym is "organization," as in "faith-based organizations." When government gives funds to "faith-based initiatives," or upholds the right of Muslims to place their work on the backs of non-Muslims five times a day or to have approved takaful insurance that will be used to finance jihadism--then the government has made laws respecting the current establishments of religions. There is no parsing in the Constitution over which definition of "establishment" is meant. The cosmology of astro-physics could lose out to evangelical establishments of religion if they begin to gain the same ground as Islam and faith-based establishments.

According to the American Policy Center, the United States is only two states short
of obliterating what is left of our government's policy of protecting the separation of church and state. [see The Last Thing We Need]

My opening statement about cosmology sometimes being equivalent with "world view" probably made a few people laugh out loud, believing I was either naive or misinformed. The standard sort of cosmology since Galileo has been of the following nature, if not of the pre-eminant level set by the Massachusets Institute of Technology; some of it has been of the standard we could call "bunk":

"Observational tests of the standard cosmological model during the last decade have ushered in a new era of precision cosmology. The standard model is specified by the size, spatial geometry (open, closed, or flat), and composition of the universe as well as the nature and statistical properties of the small-amplitude initial fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies and large scale structure in the universe. Astrophysical cosmology focuses on measuring the parameters of the standard model and studying the formation, evolution, and properties of cosmic structures. These structures include not only galaxies and the larger structures in which they congregate but also the supermassive black holes at their cores and the gas between galaxies." http://web.mit.edu/physics/research/areasofresearch/astrophysics/cosmology.html

That is what astrophysical cosmology focuses on. It is why the work of Galileo to demonstrate the truth of the work of Copernicus is called the "Copernican Revolution." That revolution set the western world on its ear, challenging the idea of Earth as being at the center of the universe, and changed the whole concept of what we knew of the world, and metaphysically of our place in it.

It is the concept of "our place in the universe" that gives rise to the equivalency between cosmology and "world view."

"The ancient Greeks introduced the concept that the Earth is a sphere at the center of the universe. The moon, sun and stars are all imbedded in transparent spheres which rotated around the earth. Heaven and God were viewed as existing at an extremely great distance from earth. They were even beyond the outermost sphere, which contains the stars." Religious Tolerance.Org

In An Apology of Raymond Sebond, the philosopher and author Montaigne, (1533-1592) who popularized the essay in his book "Essays", which is still widely influential today, wrote:

"Presumption is our natural and original disease. The most wretched and frail of all creatures is man, and withal the proudest. He feels and sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and rivetted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, the most remote from the heavenly arch, with animals of the worst condition of the three; and yet in his imagination will be placing himself above the circle of the moon, and bringing the heavens under his feet."

This is what is meant when comparing cosmology to "world view." If Montaign did not weld together the construction of the world as "the worst and deadest part of the universe" by using his metaphysical (world) view of it, it would not have been a cosmological statement. Cosmology, therefore, is no more than welding together one's metaphysics with his/her understanding of the construction of the universe. This view can of the construction of can be totally hidden, implicit, but it must be there to be called a "world view."

So, world views do not always contain references to the construction of universe, though by necessity a world view is always about the meaning of existence, whether one takes the objective view, as in "God made it," or whether one takes the subjective view, as in "The world is a rotten place to live."

When a person speaks about the meaning of existence, be it only his or her own existence, the existence of a village or of a nation, or the existence of existence itself, it is always implicitly or explicitly cosmological.

This is the reason that a reader can perceive an author's cosmology, i.e., his/her world view and thereby his/her metaphysics--and often the author's epistemology--if the reader is astute enough to perceive it. With Montaign's piece, his world view (through the eyes of an earlier author, Raymond Sebond,) is clear.

As "The early Christian tradition expresses a profound ambivalence regarding the natural world," one might wonder when this changed. It changed when "Abelard, Aquinas and Dante helped to construct a world view which placed Reason and Faith at the center of man's quest for truth." The History Guide Lecture 3

"Although Thomism -- as the thought of Aquinas is known -- was eclectic to the core it can be said with certainty that the greatest influence upon his thought was the philosophy of Aristotle whom Aquinas simply referred to as 'The Philosopher.' [ ] Aquinas studied Aristotle like no other man had before or since and he used Aristotle to justify his entire thinking. Aquinas' theory of knowledge is not a vision of divine truth -- you might expect that coming from this very Christian saint. Rather, his theory of knowledge is a sober statement of how men know the world. Man is a rational animal and the world can be understood by human reason. A being endowed with reason, man can understand the universe. But as an animal, man can know only that which he can experience with his senses. This is Aristotelianism to the core." The History Guide Lecture 28

Aquinas told the Christian world that "God plays. God creates playing. And man should play if he is to live as humanly as possible and to know reality, since it is created by God's playfulness. The enunciation of these theses - fundamental in Aquinas's world-view -" was taken immediately to heart. The first recorded instance of a man climbing a mountain just because it was there took place less than two years after Aquinas told men to love the world they lived in, even though he also told them in the Summa Contra Gentiles they must seek heaven after death because "it is not possible for man's happiness to be in this life."

But he set the future of the Christian world view, of man's place in the physical universe, as the direct opposite of seeing and feeling himself "lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and rivetted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, the most remote from the heavenly arch, with animals of the worst condition of the three..."

This change in attitude is one reason the Christian world view is so much different than the Muslim world view:

"The key to the Muslim worldview is the word 'Islam' itself. It is an Arabic word, a kind of verbal noun which Muslims love to tell you means 'submission' (similarly, 'Muslim' means 'one who submits'). Its importance lies in the fact that it defines how Muslims understand the relationship that God intends should exist between Himself and man. The verb form is typically used of a person laying down his arms in defeat; he 'makes peace' or 'submits.' This same idea comes out in the principal synonyms for God and man used in the Qur'an: Rabb ("Lord") and 'abd ("slave"). Five times a day Muslims must address God in prayer as 'Lord of the worlds,' in the words of the first Sura of the Qur'an, and prostrate themselves to the earth as His 'slaves.' http://www.cbn.com/spirituallife/onlinediscipleship/understandingislam/What_is_the_Muslim_worldview.aspx

That explanation of the Muslim world view is very familiar to the Christian world, but I didn't like having to take it from the website of Pat Robertson, whom I despise. However, all the Muslim sites I could discover paint a very different picture of Muslim cosmology from the one the west sees, with Muslims prostrating themselves five times a day, forcing their women to cover themselves, and with such anecdotal Muslim quotations coming to light, such as, "Muslim women are happiest under their husbands' boots."

On the contrary, Muslim writers paint a rosy picture of Islam, wherein "Islam originale is not a religion that breeds the miser, the cruel, the coward, the intellectually indigent, or the depraved; it is the religion that nurtures the benevolent, the compassionate, the brave, the enlightened, and the pious. In short, it is the religion of the emancipated spiritual elite." Intellect and Reason in the Islamic Worldview Babak Ayazifar

After reading that piece by Ayazifar, I wondered how seemingly most of the Islamic world can appear so miserly, cruel, cowardly, intellectually indigent, and depraved, to western eyes. It may have something do with Islam's inclusion into their world view a concept known as shura:

"Shura is basically a decision making process -- consultative decision making -- that is considered either obligatory or desirable by Islamic scholars. Those scholars who choose to emphasize the Quranic verse: "..and consult with them on the matter" (3:159) consider shura as obligatory, but those scholars who emphasize the verse wherein "those who conduct their affairs by counsel" (43:38) are praised, consider shura as desirable."

What shura translates into for Islam is the doctrine that public opinion is a process of consultation, and what the majority of Muslims believe becomes the "truth," of their civilization, "truth" which we would call "dogma" in Christianity, but it comes from the bottom up, not from the top down. Shura is the principle reason Islam does little to stop those Muslims we call terrorists; public opinion of jihad is virtually acceptable to all of Islam, and Muslims see the point of it. They also see Muslim law in it.

The world view, the cosmology, of Metaphysical Naturalism (MN) can be summed up by:
--its doctrine that individual sovereignty in politics is the only starting point in determining freedom, and that its antithesis, "the common good", begins instead from the sovereignty of "the people": and that who "the people" are is always controlled by who is in political power, leaving the individual out of the picture completely;
--the doctrine of laissez faire capitalism as the concomitant right of individual sovereignty, in economics;
--the doctrine that existence (as opposed to "this present universe") has existed always and infinitely in time--not as a supernatural creation where there was once nothing--and that this doctrine is the default position of the fact of reality itself;
--that the mind and the soul are born tabula rasa and as that they perish with the body, and are formed as the sum of all the experiences of one's individual existence, including the epistemic rationality behind the logic one chooses, logic by which to obey the laws of existence in order to control nature as he/she finds it--and therefore that men have free and libertarian will--as its doctrine of metaphysics;
--and that force against other men is acceptable only in a moment of self-defence, as its doctrine in ethics.

As for scientific naturalism (SN), it would seem to be opposed to MN in most aspects, except the aspect that in metaphysics supernaturalism does not exist. Justice seems to take a back seat to compassion, if justice can be administered without punishment that is also retributive, punishment that "teaches" the convicted person nothing.

SN naturalism believes the soul can only be supernatural and therefore believes it does not exist, and that what we seem to perceive as the soul is merely the emotional reaction of the chemicals and electricity, i.e., the physiology, of the human being, and that anyone who believes he has a soul is mistaken.

In politics and economics I can only surmise that they must be "compassionate", which leaves out the possibility of individual sovereignty and capitalism, which require "rugged individualism" and the proper use of one's mental and physical capacities. Since not all men are created equal in these respects, the "compassionate" reaction is to attempt to level any playing fields, bringing the more endowed down to the level of those less endowed. This is hardly compassionate to those who are more endowed, so compassion cannot be the standard by which SN assigns to any doctrine, including that of justice.

To conclude: every civilization, every nation, every state, every religion, cult, brotherhood, sisterhood, fraternity and sorority, and every individual, such as Dante, de Sade, Aquinas, Einstein, Mao Tse Tung, Hitler, every Pope, Bush and Obama have their own sense of life. Each sense of life is directly attributable, implicitly, unconsciously, or explicitly and consciously, to what is believed about the nature of nature, i.e., the nature of the universe, of the existence of the supernatural (or not), of the existence of any design in the universe, of the nature of existence itself, and of the purpose of the life of man.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

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Faith; Science & Candidates; PC Fixes Anti-Gay Agenda; Free Speech

The Irreconcilability of Naturalism with Faith

by Curtis Edward Clark

Not one person on Earth needs formal training to make a judgment about the world he/she lives in, in the sense with which this article deals. We all make those kinds of "world-view" judgments everyday of our lives.

Theology, alike with physics, requires more formalized education with which to conclude such "world-views." As a matter of fact, physics accepts almost no "world-view" that is not its own, naturalistic and unassuming of a supernatural presence in the structure and origin of existence. Theology accepts almost no "world-view" that does not assume a creator’s existence; and theology also assumes the intelligibility of the universe solely on the basis of that creator’s existence.

Without the influence of religion, science seeks the intelligibility, the cosmos-from-chaos, through individual thinking and peer review; yet one man may uniquely stand against all his fellows in science and be correct yet shunned, until one day the world discovers he was correct, in which case the “Copernican effect” http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/jupiter_satellites.html alters forever the cosmology of the civilization which accepts the logic, i.e., the line of reasoning; or the scientist stands alone until the world beginning with his peers disproves his theories convincingly.

Theology (proper) seeks to make cosmos-from chaos only from theories of the "faith-based" humanities, as opposed to physically or mathematically provable scientific concepts. Where no explanation of the cosmos results from such faith-based theorizing, religion joins reason to faith, "insofar as is possible" to do so, [Boethius] to create a dogma, a papal bull, or some other form of edict which is taken as policy and as gospel truth, until a proper theological explanation can be rendered. All theological explanations presume the existence of a creator.

The Copernican effect shook the foundations of the Roman Church. Dogma and papal edicts had to be radically changed because of the effect this naturalistic scientific idea had on doctrine. Scientific naturalism is epistemic and the logical metaphysical concomitant for most or many scientists is metaphysical naturalism, which is defined as denial of the existence of the supernatural, and thus of a creator.

Naturalism "holds that the universe requires no supernatural cause and government, but is self-existent, self-explanatory, self-operating, and self-directing" through the cause-and-effect nature of the elements on the Periodic Table interracting with each other. No such effect as "gravity", for example, can exist without being "caused" by such elements interacting as they will by their own scientifically defined nature upon the same defined nature of other elements.

But epistemic naturalistic science does not presume or deny the existence of God. The epistemology of it naturally leads to the search for demonstrable proof, either empirical or mathematical. In the scientist's personal life, God may be a fact, and in fact for some scientists it is fact. But for purposes of peer review using proper standards of math or of physics, any theory or other demonstrable proof of science must be naturalistic in its epistemic foundations. Continued at Irreconciled Naturalism, Faith, and Populist Education

Poll: Americans are much more likely to vote for a candidate that will tackle science issues

"Science Debate 2008"

"In November, 2007, a small group of six citizens - two screenwriters, a physicist, a marine biologist, a philosopher and a science journalist - began working to restore science and innovation to America’s political dialogue. They called themselves Science Debate 2008, and they called for a presidential debate on science. The call tapped a wellspring of concern over the state of American science.
Within weeks, more than 38,000 scientists, engineers, and other concerned Americans signed on, including nearly every major American science organization, dozens of Nobel laureates, elected officials and business leaders, and the presidents of over 100 major American universities. See who here. Among other things, these signers submitted over 3,400 questions they want the candidates for President to answer about science and the future of America.
Beginning with these 3,400 questions, Science Debate 2008 worked with Scientists and Engineers for America, the AAAS, the National Academies, the Council on Competitiveness, and the other organizations listed to craft the top 14 questions the candidates should answer. These questions are broad enough to allow for wide variations in response, but they are specific enough to help guide the discussion toward many of the largest and most important unresolved challenges currently facing the United States."

For compete questions and answers from both candidates, see The Questions and Answers--A Side by Side Comparison

Court Clears Minister Who Wed Lesbian Couple
PCUSA OKs Changes to Faith Document, Removal of Gay Condemnation

"Three years after conducting a wedding ceremony for a lesbian couple, the Rev. Janet Edwards was acquitted Thursday on charges of violating Scripture and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)'s constitution.

"A 2000 decision by the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission, the denomination's highest court, held that clergy could conduct services blessing same-sex couples but could not present them as marriages and that the services should not resemble weddings.

"Although the charges against Edwards contended she "knowingly and willfully" performed a ceremony that was "contrary" to the PC(USA) constitution, Pollock of the regional PJC said the prosecution offered no evidence that Edwards violated Scripture when it listed eight biblical passages defied."

Can anyone answer this question: "Why would a religious order have a Judicial Commission to decide whether secular laws were broken?" If secular laws are broken, is it not the business of the secular admisistrators of law to bring action?

"The Permanent Judicial Commission (PJC) of the Pittsburgh Presbytery ruled unanimously 9-0 to clear the minister on the grounds that she could not have performed the ceremony since the church and state define marriage as between a man and a woman."

It was not just the Presbyterian Church's Constitution the Commission considered, but also the definition of marriage as presented by the state. Since the state does not define marriage as anything but between a man and a woman, the Rev. Edwards "could not have performed the ceremony." for continuation see Presbyterians Work on Removing Anti-Gay Agenda

The Looming Crisis over Free Speech

In a lecture today, October 6, 2008, "Dr. Eric Daniels examines the state of free speech in America and finds that it is under serious threat. From campus speech codes to anti-discrimination and harassment law, fromcampaign finance to commercial speech, Americans today enjoy less andless freedom in communicating their ideas. Today's colleges and universities have become a hotbed of censorship, producing generations of Americans who have accepted suppression of speech as the norm. Daniels argues that the emerging crisis is a result of the lack of aproper understanding of individual rights, especially property rights. Only by understanding the proper basis of rights can we act to secureour freedom of speech and to protect the rights that give rise to it. Where: 101 Morgan Hall, University of California, Berkeley. For more information on this lecture, please e-mail media@aynrand.org."

Note: I will be the featured speaker at the Center For Inquiry (CFI) meeting, October 16, 2008, in Portage, Michigan. The topic is "Atheism as a 'Religion' Protected by Courts According to the Establishment Clause" CEC

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The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of the
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The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM, The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:

© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

The Single Intelligible Object--Repost

Repost of Blogger from 9.3.08

The Academy's Blogger of 9.01.08 on the subject of "world views," specifically that of the Atomist Lucretius as he described his own view in his historic poem "On the Nature of Things," allows us to take up the subject again, this time from other perspectives than those of Atomists.

"It is because atomism [naturalism] views matter as independent of God," I wrote, "that atomism was demoted by St. Augustine from the predominating world view, a view that held sway for nearly 1000 years. St. Augustine turned it into the skeptical position against theism. All men have a world view that for each, in some way, is his explanation of the meaning of existence, of the world." http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/08/atomism-is-incompatible-with-judeo.html

The purpose of the mind of men turning to thoughts of the meaning of life is to summarize it, and the briefest summary is the one that describes everything in the least possible words. A definition of a word in a dictionary is the meaning of a word, in the least number of words.

"A definition must identify the nature of the units, i.e., the essential characteristics without which the units would not be the kind of existents they are. But it is important to remember that a definition implies all the characteristics of the units, since it identifies their essential, not their exhaustive, characteristics..." Ayn Rand; "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology"; p.42

It is that idea that creates the need to describe the world in which we live, not as a single word, which would leave out so much of the essence of existence and our emotional reaction to it; but the fewest number of words which describe that essential characteristic, as a single intelligible object, as any dictionary definition turns the concept(s) described by a word as a single intelligible object.

What follows is a very brief condensation of my book, The Search for the Single Intelligible Object. The purpose of the book is to address the need for such a description, and to explain the naturalistic, objective description of a world which neither knows about us, nor cares about us, and can become anything we have the capacity to turn it into. Or, we can become whatever we let it makes us become, for better or worse and usually for the worse, by ignorning thatexistence has no cognizance of us, and by believing that we cannot over come genetic predispositions, and environments, and a "world we didn't make.

But to do so is a return to Plato's Cave, to astrology, the "reading" of cards and tea leaves and spilled toothpicks on the kitchen floor. It is a return to the belief that there is a wrathful intelligence in the universe, rather than one of justice and truth, and that it is us.

I
The Single Intelligible Universe

Imagine, for a moment or two, floating way away from Earth. Float away to the outside of the universe itself, outside of all known and unknown existence, and then look at the universe as the astronauts on their way to the moon saw Earth, as a whole. Except that instead of seeing only one-half of the global universe at a single moment, there is no "dark side of the moon," so to speak. You are able to turn the universe over and over in your hand and examine it in minute detail as if it was a snow globe. You are able to look into any part of it of which you are aware. The examination, and the detail you discover, will be determined by your own capabilities.

Those of us who are least aware of the concept of “cosmology” easily understand what it means when it is explained as an awareness of the universe, an awareness one has when one “holds the world before his mind as if it were a single intelligible object.” To which it must be added, “While holding the universe in one's hand and mind, he decides what his place is or is to be, in that universe as he comes to understand it.”

Aurelius wrote, “He who does not know what the world is does not know where he is, and he who does not know for what purpose the world exists, does not know who he is, nor what the world is. But he who has failed in any one of these things could not even say for what purpose he exists himself." Such a conscious examination is formal cosmology, not in the science of physics which deals with very different questions and information; but in the sciences pertaining to formal Philosophy. Sometimes that "science" is quite simply the meditations of people who find the time to think about the world, because it requires a deeper thread of thoughts, and deep thinking is the science of philosophy.

Deciding, i.e., evaluating, one’s place in the world in which he lives, means: holding before his conscience (as if in his hand, as well) the evaluation of one's judgment of his world, for the mind does not operate in a moral vacuum, but is attached to its moral center of judgment. Deciding what one’s place in the world "is or is to be" means looking, sometimes deeply, into one’s conscience, because that is where the real results of evaluations take place. The conscience is the one place where one cannot lie to oneself about who and what one is, and where he is.

Conceiving of the universe as a single intelligible object and then trying to perceive it in metaphysical terms [the theory of everything that exists,] and placing oneself in that universe, leaves us with a "sense of life." The human mind cannot not think in metaphysical terms; it is the first science of Philosophy without which the mind would not be conscious. The mind works in strict terms of philosophical principles whether or not one has evaluated them or is even conscious of them.

“Holding the universe as a single intelligible object," William Watson wrote of it using, not epistemology, the philosophical science of proving the truth of what we believe, but by using literary aesthetics, another philosophical science, in “Dawn on the Headland.” His words ring with an emotional truth, a truth that scares some people and comforts others:

Yet I know that I dwell in the midst of the roar of the Cosmic Wheel

In the hold collision of Forces, and the clangor of boundless Strife,

Mid the sound of the speed of worlds, the rushing worlds, and the peal

Of the thunder of Life.

There is, for those not frightened of it, an exciting and moral challenge in dwelling “in the midst of the Cosmic Wheel.” For those who find the words chilling more than comforting, they may, after understanding the sense of life, the cosmology, found in metaphysical naturalism, discover instead the excitement of that moral challenge, and find it uplifting. It is a challenge often posed in the questions and answers of theology.

Religions have cosmologies.

“The term ‘Logos’ in Christian theology marries, through the revelation of St. John’s Gospel and the Epistles of Paul, its Greek philosophical meaning of an all encompassing rational order uniting humans and divinity into a ‘great cosmos,’” says a long article called “Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition," by Vincent Rossi, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2465/is_1_30/ai_59520591 and is “thus the supreme ordering principle uniting all levels of being, from the sublimity of the divine to the deepest density of the mineral kingdom.”

This “all encompassing rational order” certainly exists. It exists, though neither as a miracle nor as something intelligently designed either from within, or from without as a chef might design a wedding cake.

It is an all-encompassing rational order only when made comprehensible through an act of rationally ordering what one knows about it, in other words, putting its parts in a hierarchy of rational meanings. This rational ordering is done by the only thing capable of such ordering: the mind of Man. It is Man's mind that decides what his place is or is to be in the "all encompassing rational order."

Any human thought, sentence, expression of language, or fully developed work of fiction, non-fiction or art can and usually does contain a sense of life, an idea that expresses the place of men in the world in which they live.

The Declaration of Independence, is one of those, placing into an all-encompassing rational order the exact purpose for its existence, i.e., it rationally says all it has to say about why the signatories signed it. It does this in its very first paragraph, which is incredibly only one long sentence, part of which is: that often it "becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another," the colonies from England. The Founders knew their place in the world in which they existed, and they knew where they wanted their place to be and it was not in the world as seen by the British Empire. The Founders' sense of life was one of political freedom from tyranny.

Metaphysics are the values of philosophy, and epistemology is the method of "proving" the values. These two manifestations. these elements of consciousness, help make up the subject of cosmology as far as the humanities are concerned. There is also a science of cosmology that deals almost specifically with what are commonly called the "laws of nature," and it is called Physics. Physics has its own "cosmology," described in phrases meant for other physicists.

This sort of cosmology "attempts to measure the immeasurable in mega parsecs and speak rationally about the immensity of space, to explain how its incalculable number of astronomical bodies occupy their incalculable vastness. Cosmology is the human effort at locating us and our environment in relation to all the other environments and their possible inhabitants."[a]
But it has always been the profession of philosophy to put into perspective the ideas of all the other professions. It is why there are ethics of law, ethics of medicine, ethics of warfare, and of journalism, to mention only a very few.

Not one person on Earth needs formal training to make a judgment about the world he lives in, in the sense with which this book deals. We all make those kinds of judgments everyday of our lives.

In the connotation of cosmology as a sense of life, it must be recognized that this sense is as automatic a function of Man's consciousness as his "five senses" are. It cannot be turned off any more than sight can be turned off. We can close our eyes and ignore what would otherwise be visibly before us. We can also choose to ignore the cognitions of our sub-consciously, automatically, evaluating mind: cognitions of impending marital doom, or of something simply being amiss, such as the bad behavior of a child when our evaluation of his behavior turns us toward thoughts of mental illness. Who wants to jump right to that conclusion? So we put off jumping until jumping is no longer a choice. That is, we put it off if we are not rigorous in the integrity of our minds. Most of us are not, sometimes. Many are not, most of the time, suppressing the unasked question, "What should I do?"

Naturalist Loren Eiseley, in his own tranquil and unique cosmological styling, wrote in his classic work, "The Immense Journey," http://www.amazon.com/Immense-Journey-Imaginative-Naturalist-Mysteries/dp/0394701577 of an archaic Homo sapiens, an early Man, having the experience of pondering the meaning of existence. It was about the “Adam” of men, about the first Man to have such contemplation, the first man to think in philosophical terms.

“For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated
himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the
wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill
waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief into the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness.”

In the art world Grandma Moses described in paint on canvas a sense of life which obviously was not formed of the elements of say, a Van Gogh or a Rockwell. Her skills and her cosmology are described as "Primitive." No matter the skill of the artist to depict her world, the way in which any artist sees it, good, bad, ugly, or wondrously beautiful, gives us a look into the soul of the artist. Hers was a productive soul, intent on journalizing the world in which she lived.

"Her images of rural life provided soothing respite from otherwise turbulent times, and fifty years later her vision of the simple life still strikes a resonant chord." [with examples of her work] http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/7aa/7aa76.htm

Dow Chemical's world view was presented in its advertising, giving the world a gift of Romanticism, i.e., the world view of the ideality of what it means to be alive in the best sense of "alive." Dow called their advertisement The Human Element. It is rare anymore to see Romanticismi expounded so elegantly, not to mention unabashedly.

The Dow TV ads are a collage of video clips of real people in their own real environmental "elements," on four continents. Dow says it describes their company's vision for the future in their interactions with cultures and environments and people. I was pleasantly surprised the first time I saw it, and I have not been disappointed yet, seeing it over and over again.

It is a brilliant, shining star of Romantic cosmology, of what Man means in the universe, in an environment that would have no purpose without him.

The Human Element
For each of us / there is a moment / of discovery.
We turn a page. / We raise a hand. / And just then,
in the flash of a synapse, / we learn that life / is elemental.
And this knowledge / changes everything.
We look around / and see the grandness / of the scheme.
Sodium / bonding with chlorine.
Carbon / bonding with oxygen.
Hydrogen / bonding with oxygen.
We see / all things connected.
We see / life unfold.
And in the dazzling brilliance / of this knowledge
we may overlook / the element not listed / on the chart.
Its importance so obvious / its presence / is simply understood.
The missing element / is the Human Element.
And when we add it / to the equation / the chemistry changes.
Every reaction is different.
Potassium / looks to bond / with potential.
Metals / behave with hardened / resolve.
And hydrogen and oxygen / form desire.
The Human Element / is the element of change.
It gives us our footing / to stand fearlessly
and face the future.
It is a way of seeing / that gives us / a way of touching.
Issues. / Ambitions. / Lives.
The Human Element.
Nothing is more fundamental. / Nothing more elemental.

"We see all things connected. We see life unfold. And in the dazzling brilliance of this knowledge we may overlook the element not listed on the chart. Its importance so obvious its presence is simply understood. The missing element is the Human Element." What more can be said about a cosmology of wondrous delight in being human, of human interaction, of human bonding; of "a way of seeing that gives us a way of touching issues, ambitions, lives?"

Philosophical Romanticism is the benevolent cosmology described (by me) as, "From each according to his ability, then he ought to be rewarded ten times over." It is the cosmology of ideals that are attainable by the best of Men (qua Men,) and it allows for the rest of us to look up to things as having possibility, e.g., the performance of Olympic Athletes; wealth created by men of vision in any endeavor, but look at the founders of Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, and at Warren Buffet and others, for inspirational examples. They came, they created, they took, and now they give back a hundred-fold.

Cosmology is demonstrated in every piece of art, which is created by psychological action. Scottish novelist George MacDonald wrote of a young man in a story about the title character called "Malcolm."

Malcolm is a fisherman about whom there seems to be a mystery that he himself is not too aware of; and honestly, he does not much care about the mystery. His mind is on things that matter, and the mystery about him is not high on his hierarchy of values. Malcolm has a blind father he loves more dearly than anyone in the world, yet who he knows is not his biological father and believes to be his grandfather. This is part of the mystery about which he cares little, because Malcolm is as devoted to his father and to the people of his Scottish fishing village and to the Lord of the manor, as anyone could be to anyone or anything. It is not that he does not think about the future or the past, but he lives in the present and his values are not of things he cannot control, but of things he can control. He is loved and revered by the fisher folk, and the only person in the town who treats him badly is a woman who treats everyone badly and who is considered by some to be a witch. Malcolm has serenity.

MacDonald wrote about Malcolm that;

“Joy itself seemed embodied in the wind blowing on him. When it came on to blow hard, instead of making him feel small and weak in the midst of storming forces, it gave him a glorious sense of power and unconquerable life.” [italics added]

Those words in italics are a world view, perhaps caused only when Macolm felt the wind blowing, as you might guess by this excerpt. But is describes Malcolm's overall sense of life, and he carried it with him throughout each page of the book.

The cosmology of Malcolm made it one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I have ever had, and indirectly, along with Moby Dick, set me to thinking about writing this book. Malcolm's psychology is one that ought to be emulated much more than it is. There was a time not so long ago when a reasonable and "decent respect"i for "the opinions of others," as Malcolm demonstrates toward everyone he meets, was expected, even if it was a surprise when it came as gracefully as it came from Malcolm.

Today, many people seem to be in spiritual agony, skeptics, hatefilled for life itself, or at least for most other human beings. We are losing our grace in the face of people, places, and things we cannot change and over which we ought not have control. But we want people to be the way we want them to be, and we let it eat at us like acid on metal. And that, in itself, is a world view, that people are objects to be changed into what we disire them to be in order to make our own world better, and that when we don't get what we want the world throws acid on us.

Although Malcolm was not thinking in the metaphysical terms of "glorious" and "unconquerable," the author clearly was thinking of Malcolm’s psychology—Malcolm was “feeling” the impression upon his soul in those seconds of living in the moment of the wind, and his reaction was automatic. Few of us contemplate our own minds when we are "feeling the moment"; we are too busy enjoying the feeling; or too busy wishing the problem would go away; or too wrapped up in trying to make others be what we want them to be.

MacDonald’s words describe in psychological framing a beautiful moment, for while a cosmology can be descriptive of the entirety of a man’s evaluation of his place in the universe, it is most often consciously experienced at pivotal moments. The rest of the time, we just go on about our lives.

Some persons, perhaps most, never know that such a thing as a "sense of his life" exists, at least not in conscious terms. They may simply experience life as “generally happy,” for example, or “generally drab;” or they may feel that "sense" suicidally, or with melancholy or joy, or with any other emotion within Man’s range. One does not have to be aware of his own cosmology in concrete conceptual terms as described here. Yet in concepts of the connection between mind and soul, reason and heart, it can be seen to exist automatically, as automatically as consciousness itself, for it is “first consciousness.” That is why metaphysics which describe it is the "first science."

Without cosmology we humans would be not even be Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, the “Vulcan” who denies the effect of emotions upon his logic and must subjugate them to it, as do all Vulcans. We are not Vulcans; whether you believe the soul to be eternal or to die with the body, to be real or fantasy, to be mentally or biologically mechanical, or mystic and religiously spiritual, or to be the sum total of a man’s evaluation of what the world is and who he is and where he is in it—your emotion-perceiving soul is demonstrated through your actions, and your soul can often be seen in the way you live and in the way to treat and speak to others.

One’s reaction to his own cosmology demonstrates him as he sees himself in the cosmos, or in the chaos if he believes that is what the world is. His cosmology demonstrates the humor, the pathos, or the travesty of the drama, or the serenity of what he believes existence to be. Spock's logic is not the highest ideal a thinking creature can achieve. Discurse is a tool of reason, and logic is a tool of reason. Irrational logic can be proven to be illogical. A Vulcan's subjugation of his emotions to his "logic" is not an ideal for a thinking feeling being. Subjugating emotions to reason is an ideal. Just ask the Stoics, or Aquinas.

But in some ideas there is a very ugly, hurtful, hurting emotion about life. Most of us would want to suppress that, or get help for it before the suppression destroyed him. We can see the soul of ideas when we look at them.

French philosopher Montaign painted a very different and ugly picture of life than MacDonald did when he described Malcolm’s joy.

“Man,” Montaign wrote, “is this miserable and wretched creature who is not so much master of himself,” yet who “should call himself master and emperor of the world?”

His miserable description of cosmological evaluations did not end there. He continued: “Man feels and sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst and deadest part of the universe.”

Other persons have felt these same things about life, and it is a pity. This is a man’s “first consciousness” expressed overtly consciously, and they are demonstrations of each author's recombinants. Imagine Montaigne's evaluation as your sense of life. You would not have to do harm to anyone else with your denigrating ideas, but you certainly will not rise out of the "deadest part of the universe."

I prefer Malcolm’s joy, or Hermann Melville’s rapturous declaration that, “Man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellow creatures should run to throw their costliest robes.” Amen; Melville's declaration is a cosmology of Romanticism.

At the other end of the metaphysical/ epistemological/ psychological scale from Melville, Byron wrote in Manfred that man is “half-dust, half deity, alike unfit to sink or soar.” Dryden, on the same sink hole, wrote of man as a “dull and…insensible… beast,” and Thomas Brown called Man “splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave.”

There are stark differences between cosmologies that see man in filth and unable to climb out of it, and in one that refuses to be nailed, that values the feelings of joyfulness, gloriousness, life unconquerable, noble, sparkling, grand, and glowing.

A character in Moby Dick has a cosmology of the universe being not so good a place, life in colonial New England being what it was, and the profession of whaling being even harder; but in that cosmology he found himself a good place in which to be.
"[A]nd while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy," he says.

These demonstrate differences, psychologically, of each author’s valuation of Man qua Man. And every living human demonstrates in one way or another his or her cosmology, his or her evaluation of man-in-the-cosmos. Some see his status "qua Man" as filthy, some see him as the highest form of being. But the descriptions say more about him or her who demonstrates these overtly conscious ideas than about reality, because a reality not comprehended of the highest standards of personal worth and behavior do not reflect a “sense of life” of possibility, probability, serenity, virtue, or value, nor of an existence—environmental or psychological—recombinant to Man’s will.

The Human Element / is the element of change.
It gives us our footing / to stand fearlessly
and face the future.

©The Dow Chemical Company. Permission granted.

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On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius: A World View

Atomism is incompatible with Judeo-Christian principles. It is because atomism views matter as independent of God that atomism was demoted by St. Augustine from the predominating world view, a view that held sway for nearly 1000 years. St. Augustine turned it into the skeptical position against theism
1) because atomism declares existence exists from eternity, and denies creation by a God; or
2) because atomism's justification for the cause-and-effect laws of nature are independent of control by a God. (Quentin Smith; " The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism"; http://www.philoonline.org/library/smith_4_2.htm

All men have a world view that for each, in some way, is his explanation of the meaning of existence, of the world. For those who have not "examined" his or her own world view, Ayn Rand defined that view as "sense of life, a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence." “Philosophy and Sense of Life,” The Romantic Manifesto, 25 Whether a person has a world view, a sense of life, or a fully examined cosmology, it sets up the psychology of a his/her emotional responses and the nature of his/her character.

"He who does not know what the world is," wrote Marcus Aurelius, in "Meditations", "does not know where he is. And he who does not know for what purpose the world exists, does not know who he is, nor what the world is. But he who has failed in any one of these things could not even say for what purpose he exists himself." So it is true that some people--perhaps many people in the twenty-first century where the major metaphysical question seems to be, "How can I be sure?"--do not know "for what purpose he himself exists."

But having a world view is something that almost every man, woman, and child have described, only a few hundred years ago, when certainty was required for staying alive.

This concept of a world view is called "metaphysical cosmology," vs. a purely science-related cosmology that explains a physics-oriented world view. World views have been described as: "A [ ] set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world." (James Sire.) As: "A person's fundamental 'world outlook,' or life perspective." (borrowed from the German word "weltanschauung." http://www.religioustolerance.org/worldview.htm

You can even take a test to determine what your world view is. http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=23320

"In the 5th century B.C., some Greeks reasoned that matter cannot be infinitely divisible, and they called the smallest particles in nature 'atoms.'' [ ] Many Greeks believed that atoms 'existed from eternity, for they had not been created.' Lucretius supposed, in like manner, that nothing is ever annihilated and that matter exists in the form of invisible atoms.

"The [atomists] supposed that life had developed out of a primeval slime, man as well as animals and plants. Man was a microcosm of the universe, for he contained every kind of atom. As this is the viewpoint of modern evolutionists, the reader may appreciate that Lucretius, not Darwin, has been the principal spokesman for evolution during the last two millennia.

"Lucretius (c.100-c.55BC), chief proponent of atomism, still offers the prevailing world view of reality. No less than twelve English translations of his poem "On the Nature of Things" are readily available in print, the most recent being published in 1995." http://www.commonsensescience.org/atomism.html

"On the Nature of Things," is a description of what Thomas Paine in 1794 in "The Age of Reason" referred to as "the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness" of religion.

"It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind;" Paine wrote, "and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel."

So did Lucretius, and this is his telling of his world view, of Man's place in it, and of the evil influence of religion against the better judgments of men. This is only a very small part of it. Go to the link below the title information to see all of it, or search for other sources.

"Lucretius' scientific epic "De rerum natura" is considered a masterpiece of Epicurean philosophy. Epicurus taught that the world could be understood by reason and that religion only arouses unnecessary fear. Lucretius denounced popular beliefs in deities and supernatural creatures.

"As a poem, "De rerum natura" is remarkable [as] a lyrical presentation of what would otherwise be tedious information." "De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things): Introduction." Epics for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. eNotes.com. January 2006. 1 September 2008. http://www.enotes.com/de-rerum/

On the Nature of Things

By Titus Lucretius Carus (c.99-55 BCE)

Written 50 B.C.E Translated by William Ellery Leonard

http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html

pro·em noun
1 : preliminary comment : preface 2 : prelude

Mirriam-Webster Online

http://www.merriam-webster.com/

Part I
by Lucretitius
Proem

Mother of Rome, delight of Gods and men,
Dear Venus that beneath the gliding stars

Makest to teem the many-voyaged main
And fruitful lands- for all of living things
Through thee alone are evermore conceived,
Through thee are risen to visit the great sun-
Before thee, Goddess, and thy coming on,
Flee stormy wind and massy cloud away,
For thee the daedal Earth bears scented flowers,
For thee waters of the unvexed deep
Smile, and the hollows of the serene sky
Glow with diffused radiance for thee!
For soon as comes the springtime face of day,
And procreant gales blow from the West unbarred,
First fowls of air, smit to the heart by thee,
Foretoken thy approach, O thou Divine,
And leap the wild herds round the happy fields
Or swim the bounding torrents.
Thus amain, Seized with the spell, all creatures follow thee
Whithersoever thou walkest forth to lead,
And thence through seas and mountains and swift streams,
Through leafy homes of birds and greening plains,
Kindling the lure of love in every breast,
Thou bringest the eternal generations forth,
Kind after kind.
And since 'tis thou alone
Guidest the Cosmos,
and without thee naught
Is risen to reach the shining shores of light,
Nor aught of joyful or of lovely born,
Thee do I crave co-partner in that verse
Which I presume on Nature to compose
For Memmius mine, whom thou hast willed to be
Peerless in every grace at every hour-
Wherefore indeed, Divine one, give my words
Immortal charm. Lull to a timely rest
O'er sea and land the savage works of war,
For thou alone hast power with public peace
To aid mortality; since he who rules
The savage works of battle, puissant Mars,
How often to thy bosom flings his strength
O'ermastered by the eternal wound of love-
And there, with eyes and full throat backward thrown,
Gazing, my Goddess, open-mouthed at thee,
Pastures on love his greedy sight, his breath
Hanging upon thy lips. Him thus reclined
Fill with thy holy body, round, above!
Pour from those lips soft syllables to win
Peace for the Romans, glorious Lady, peace!
For in a season troublous to the state
Neither may I attend this task of mine
With thought untroubled, nor mid such events
The illustrious scion of the Memmian house
Neglect the civic cause.
Whilst human kind
Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed
Before all eyes beneath Religion- who
Would show her head along the region skies,
Glowering on mortals with her hideous face-
A Greek it was who first opposing dared
Raise mortal eyes that terror to withstand,
Whom nor the fame of Gods nor lightning's stroke
Nor threatening thunder of the ominous sky
Abashed; but rather chafed to angry zest
His dauntless heart to be the first to rend
The crossbars at the gates of Nature old.
And thus his will and hardy wisdom won;
And forward thus he fared afar, beyond
The flaming ramparts of the world, until
He wandered the unmeasurable All.
Whence he to us, a conqueror, reports
What things can rise to being, what cannot,
And by what law to each its scope prescribed,
Its boundary stone that clings so deep in Time.
Wherefore Religion now is under foot,
And us his victory now exalts to heaven.
I know how hard it is in Latian verse
To tell the dark discoveries of the Greeks,
Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find
Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing;
Yet worth of thine and the expected joy
Of thy sweet friendship do persuade me on
To bear all toil and wake the clear nights through,
Seeking with what of words and what of song
I may at last most gloriously uncloud
For thee the light beyond, wherewith to view
The core of being at the centre hid.
And for the rest, summon to judgments true,
Unbusied ears and singleness of mind
Withdrawn from cares; lest these my gifts, arranged
For thee with eager service, thou disdain
Before thou comprehendest:
since for thee I prove the supreme law of Gods and sky,
And the primordial germs of things unfold,
Whence Nature all creates, and multiplies
And fosters all, and whither she resolves
Each in the end when each is overthrown.
This ultimate stock we have devised to name
Procreant atoms, matter, seeds of things,
Or primal bodies, as primal to the world.
I fear perhaps thou deemest that we fare
An impious road to realms of thought profane;
But 'tis that same religion oftener far
Hath bred the foul impieties of men:
As once at Aulis, the elected chiefs,
Foremost of heroes, Danaan counsellors,
Defiled Diana's altar, virgin queen,
With Agamemnon's daughter, foully slain.
She felt the chaplet round her maiden locks
And fillets, fluttering down on either cheek,
And at the altar marked her grieving sire,
The priests beside him who concealed the knife,
And all the folk in tears at sight of her.
With a dumb terror and a sinking knee
She dropped; nor might avail her now that first
'Twas she who gave the king a father's name.
They raised her up, they bore the trembling girl
On to the altar- hither led not now
With solemn rites and hymeneal choir,
But sinless woman, sinfully foredone,
A parent felled her on her bridal day,
Making his child a sacrificial beast
To give the ships auspicious winds for Troy:
Such are the crimes to which Religion leads.
And there shall come the time when even thou,
Forced by the soothsayer's terror-tales, shalt seek
To break from us.
Ah, many a dream even now
Can they concoct to rout thy plans of life,
And trouble all thy fortunes with base fears.
I own with reason: for, if men but knew
Some fixed end to ills, they would be strong
By some device unconquered to withstand
Religions and the menacings of seers.
But now nor skill nor instrument is theirs,
Since men must dread eternal pains in death.
For what the soul may be they do not know,
Whether 'tis born, or enter in at birth,
And whether, snatched by death, it die with us,
Or visit the shadows and the vasty caves
Of Orcus, or by some divine decree
Enter the brute herds, as our Ennius sang,
Who first from lovely Helicon brought down
A laurel wreath of bright perennial leaves,
Renowned forever among the Italian clans.
Yet Ennius too in everlasting verse
Proclaims those vaults of Acheron to be,
Though thence, he said, nor souls nor bodies fare,
But only phantom figures, strangely wan,
And tells how once from out those regions rose
Old Homer's ghost to him and shed salt tears
And with his words unfolded Nature's source.
Then be it ours with steady mind to clasp
The purport of the skies- the law behind
The wandering courses of the sun and moon;
To scan the powers that speed all life below;
But most to see with reasonable eyes
Of what the mind, of what the soul is made,
And what it is so terrible that breaks
On us asleep, or waking in disease,
Until we seem to mark and hear at hand
Dead men whose bones earth bosomed long ago.

Any variation in this publication of "On the Nature of Things" that varies from Latin hexameter verse, in which each line has six "feet," or units of rhythm, is purely accidental, and the fault of the copy/paste procedure allowed by the copyright from the website listed above.