Mere Objectivity

I must first swear that this blog post was overwhelmingly inspired by a book that I am reading, then after swearing, which is objectively different things in different contexts and to different people, I want to try and make you see and believe in things in a certain way (and I'm not saying that I'm the author of such a determined way, but that I just hope that you see them that way.)
Well...
People quarrel. People do quarrel and disagree all the time. I quarrel. I disagree. A lot. Sometimes for the "right" reasons, but mostly for the "wrong" ones (take the quotes to mean that the words carry their own differences in weight in matters of ethics).
Most of us quarrel (or argue) so that to [just] prove a point, not that [that] point is the right one, but just because the [point] being proven is our point.
But truth is that we cannot universally have the same opinion about everything. We should not. At least in certain instances. This is because (I think) the moment we mutually agree about ALL things, is the very moment we disagree in one way or another with another peoples' agreement elsewhere. I think that we always agree to culture a certain degree of disagreement.

We should quarrel (methinks) because we have the right to objectivity - especially the kind of objectivity that peripherys our "rights" and "beliefs." But this is not a [good] reason to why we should incline ourselves towards thinking that we ARE to win ALL arguments all the time. It is not.
Consider this example »
Two men are arguing over whether a given dog should be fed at noon or in the evening. Of course the argument is not about whether the dog should be fed or not - because they both, to a good extend, agree that this dog should be fed - but about whether one's time of feeding, with regard to another's (or to the dog), is the most appropriate, and probably most effective (although such a probability only creeps in later).
Thus such an argument (the one between these two men feeding that dog) is likely to remain unproductive as far as what time of feeding the dog is the most appropriate; but may be useful because it tendons itself somewhere between two views that are mutually beneficial to a hungry dog... but none of the two should want to win because, after all, the dog is being fed.
And so in a related way, when it comes to religious and philosophical contexts, consider the following arguments and possibilities with regard to fulfilling a certain angst in the human population about understanding and worshipping God, but which unlike in the case of the dog, remain hanging on a fence - neither satisfying the origin nor the course »

1. The atheist freely argues that there is no God. He defends it. In fact he arbitrarily feeds on his defense (so to say) and thinks that this is the best way humanity should figure out life (and God). He thinks that he is feeding the dog well, but is he? Well, he is not.
2. The pantheist says that all roads that are belief systems on this earth lead to one unspecified "God" or deity. He too claims to be feeding the same dog, right? But with useless food.

3. The scientologist and other numerous (and actually useless) New Age religions (and belief systems) elevate man above God. They think that man has soared above the galaxies of belief in one deity and have therefore made him the king of deities. Their dog is overfed, isn't it? Yes, but with trash.

4. The gnostic thinks that it is impossible for there to have existed, amongst mortal beings, a touchable and visible God. Yes, and objectively so, he denies the preference for belief in a once-fully-mortal-and-fully-immortal-God. Mmmhuh? I don't think I want to say much about their dog, these ones, because he's gonna end up crippled.

5. The idealist, realist, naturalist, existentialist and secular humanist
are all drunk with belief that the singular plurality of supernatural influence on this earth does not exist, and parallel themselves against God in a rather "queer" manner. Their dog is in trouble because it eats the same food all day long - deficient and facing malnutrition.

6. The traditional man is the clueless but most concerning type. As far as Africa is concerned, because he either is mostly (and falsely) obeying a deity he calls "God" or he is obeying some misconstrued rules within his culture that battle to put him somewhere near a certain [known] God, he makes tough cuisines for his dog, but I guess it is still craving for more - it is never fully satisfied.

7. The Muslim and most Eastern cultures and beliefs run on slippery ground while trying to feed this dog - one path which I prefer not to tread upon today - which has influenced a great percentage of the "Theo-seeking" group of mankind. His dog is the sleepy and sickly one.

The Christian, being the one on the most extreme end - his own end - somehow being puppeted, and somehow puppeting belief (whatever that means), believes in a God who basically gives a book (the Bible) with instructions pointing towards a Savior for all mankind; a Savior who loudly and unreservedly SAYS or rather, PROCLAIMS for all to hear, that He and only He is the way to the only true God, the truth and the life.
The Judeo-Christian view seems to win for me - and I objectively, and also willingly, follow in its footsteps. And not entirely in the Judeo-Christian worldview (that is if it is a worldview at all), but in the Christian belief system, where our dog is well fed, healthy, happy and hopeful...

With the escalating views on religion and pseudo-beliefs, free-thinking has become a modern way of expression, and each one of us wants to have an opinion to put across. What we believe in has become what we live for. We have become so overopinionated that we (most of the time) don't even understand and/or know what we serially defend.

If all the above belief systems argue and quarrel about being objectively right, I might as well call it madness - maybe because quarrels clutter and breed it (madness).

But within such an argument over beliefs, how do we tell who is right and who is wrong? And where do we base our judgement of right and/or wrong? What is the determining factor? Christ? Christianity? The Bible? Not all of us agree.
If all that matters is that the dog should be fed, are we really on the right path? Should we objectively say that this dog (read, desire to serve a purpose and a given deity) will be okay no matter WHO feeds it, HOW it is fed and WHY it is fed? Should we say that we are all objectively right?

Well, philosophy teaches one law that is important to note: truth cannot exist relatively. It is either absolute or it is not truth. So no matter how "objectively right" we may seem to be in our arguments, only one of us is right. And if we have to apply the laws of logic in such a case, we find that there is no excluded middle in both cases - of feeding a hungry dog and in needing to be subject to a given deity. And no matter how objective we may want our beliefs to be perceived, they all can't be true at the same time. That will be contradictory. We are either feeding the dog with BAD FOOD or we are feeding it with HEALTHY FOOD. Period. No middle ground. It is either one of us is feeding the dog right and the rest are just a useless lot or nothing else.

Our belief systems point us in a certain direction and we defend what we believe because we have come to believe that it is true, regardless of whether we are right or not. Yeah, we have the freedom for argument and quarrel through debate, reason and the so-called dialectics, but truth cannot be changed by mere objectivity. It cannot be changed by "how we, on our own, view the world around us" but rather, by understanding and accepting it as it really is.

Truth is a substance of infallibility, and whether our "philosophies" accept it or not, we should consider once again understanding why Christ Jesus said, "I am the way, THE TRUTH and the life..." (John 14:6), and maybe jump over from "mere objectivity" to "What He said is the TRUTH."

Bonface Morris.

"Hello Fantasies!"

You are seated there staring at the wall, not actually serious about anything but just allowing a fulfilling emptiness to yell at you. You are unknowably moving from one side of the chair to another, or your hands, or feet or head, are obeying your mind in a way you would not want to confess exists - in a rather out-of-this-world kinda way. Your consciousness is somewhere between awareness and curiosity; between expectancy and anxiety...
You are in a fixed state and warring on in it with pomp and valor. While in that place of your "great" life, you are probably smiling sheepishly and having this goody-goody feeling about something - something you don't know, but are pretending to know and like, err, something you are loving so much. That something seems so real yet so unreachable. And because it is making you feel jilted and edgy, you keep on seating there and smiling, and obviously, someone looking at you would say that you are excited, are in a hysterical hyperbole and that you are enjoying every moment of it. Why? They can see it in the immense brightness of your eyes, the glittering of your outer countenance and, you look like you have found new love: you know how people look like after finding new love, right? Yeah, you look that way.
Seemingly, you are lost. You are lost in the combined angsts of your heart and mind which are combing through you and making you look lost and too happy.
Maybe, just maybe, you have been sitting (or "sleeping") there for a while already. And while seated/sleeping there, this is what is happening: you have probably "met" this hawt guy or lady who has swept you off your feet (literally). You've chatted them up and you feel interested. You now have a date scheduled out and have gotten dressed up to kill (literally) - for the date. You've looked up yourself in the mirror, done those face gestures and happy ninja moves that are your legendary trademark of, "Yeah, um looking cool, ain't I? I've got an animal to kill, yaaay!!" So, unknowably (again), in the real world, you are now smiling and tossing and turning on that chair or bed of yours... Back to your world: you've stepped out of the house with this swing vote look you always wear to mean, "I'm all this sweet and important, you know!?".
Mmmmmmmh...
You've gotten to the date venue, and, OH MY GOD! you've just had such an oooooooowesome date: Ooooooh! The arrangement! The beauty! The romance! You soooo feel that you're in love.
Meanwhile, you've dated this dude/dudette (dudine?) several other times (while right there on your chair or bed) and have gotten married: the wedding is off the chains - somewhere in Dubai or is it Durban or in the Caribbean... Barbados maybe? ;)
Okay. You've now come back home after the aaaaaaawwww!!! wedding (some guy says I shouldn't do that) and you and your "boo" now have these two soooo cute babies...
Mmmmmmmh... And you've given those babies really cute names... and they are now crying... they're crying really loud and you don't like it... that's when you wake upppp...!! Grrrrrr!!! Reality is still yelling at ya! ;) You realize that you are just on your chair/bed in your clumsy diggs. Nothing has really changed: there is no hawt dude/dudette, there are no dates (not even promising ones), no wedding, no sunshine on a beach... it is just a lonely you seated there wallowing in your hidden world... so you end up feeling bad and may choose to go back to "sleep"...
Or, ION,...
You are in school, it's your graduation day: you now have a degree... Oh my! You're having this tingly feeling you can't put on paper... so you together with your self-enfranchised buddies have organised this great get-together party and everyone that shrills in your life is there. You're feeling like yelling because, well, you are planning to propose to your "long time" girlfriend today in the so-called after party. Guy, you're feeling like a pumpkin amongst water melons! The day goes on as planned: people smile, guys laugh, the music is great [and sentimental], life is sooooo musical in that day - it is like it is singing to you; people give you gifts and say these well rehearsed sweet nothings, kisha they go away. *Sigh!* This is the moment you've been waiting for, right?   Ouch! You're now tipsy-ish (in the sense of emotion) and are ready for the evening date with your chiq (someone looking at you in the real world sees you turn about on that chair with a jolt), but, well, but... it seems that you never managed to travel with all your senses to that sweet world of yours, because, well, you can smell your tea in the real world on that gas cooker over there "burning"... so, voila! Aaaaaargghhh!! Your dream partially ends...
In short, you are fantasizing. Yes my friend, you are swallowed up in the fantasy world...
The reality of fantasies is so heavy in our world today. We seem to have gotten used to it. We even enjoy it. In fact, psychoanalytic research puts the number of people who fantasize (at least on a daily basis) at 9 out of 10. Which means that there is a very high possibility that each one of us fantasizes or daydreams daily. 
Psychological studies mostly bring out fantasizing as a symptom to most personality disorders - something which we may deny if told that it is part of us, but it is true - even though I ain't becoming some kind of doctor on this one.
Okay. Lemme throw away the psycho-bla bla card and come back to our world...   
As we've seen above, fantasies are normal. Maybe what we need to look at is the risk of our predisposition to them, because their occurrence is simple:
They arise when our desires start growing up in us with the support of our minds. Our minds pick up messages from the longing in our hearts and start creating images when we are in a status of "a paused consciousness of our immediate environment." These mind-images begin existing independently in our mind-world (formulated and created by our thoughts) and later begin acquiring faces and places, values and principles to a perfection that may be hard to override.
At the beginning, those images of our "dream world" are vivid and blurred, but with time, and when we allow it, these images start becoming real: they become so real that their existence in our lives is now tangible and unavoidable...
There's something about these mind- images (fantasies) though: they are not imagination(s). This is because imagination bases its strengths on wonder, awe and a longing to understand things; while fantasies base their strength on wishes, overrated desires and unrealistic expectations. Fantasies don't have wonder in them but a certain type of longing which if not well controlled, may be harmful to the host's relational life, thus becoming a personality disorder as described above. They seek to overdo and overemphasize certain aspects and qualities in people, things or situations. And sometimes, all these aspects and qualities are not possibly achievable in one person or instantaneous situations or things.  
Fantasies are a great fuel to shattering relationships that were otherwise doing well, and may also lead to the single person or single parent to remain "unattached", due to one comparing their partner (or potential partner) to the inbuilt mind-images of what the "right" partner has been conceived to be or to look like.
It has been proven that we mostly use fantasies as an escape way and a relief from the reality of lacking the things we would so much want to have in the real world - like in our relationships, leadership structures (in our organizations, families and nation), in our marriages, schools and working places... We use them as excuses and avenues to our own world - a world that only exists in our hearts and minds, and this causes us to set even higher standards for ourselves and those around us.
Although this makes us mostly dissatisfied and unsatisfied with life and what we meet and get thus shredding our levels of contentment (something God would so much want us to have), fantasies have some positive side to them too - the aspect of having a desire, a goal and a target to live for due to the longing, and may help in generating hope if channeled to the right direction.
Most of the good things we desire and want so bad (and end up fantasizing about) like good jobs, great families, a good nation, good girlfriends (read: Mrs Right) and good boyfriends (read: Mr Right) are victims of how our hearts and minds construe or misconstrue the realities and facts around us.
A possible solution to this problem may be to:-

1.      Look at one's self and gauge if one's expectations of others are genuine or overrated, and therefore guide their thinking in proportion to what others are able to do in their day to day relational lives.

2.     Look deeper at one's self and ask yourself these simple questions: "Am I being realistic? Am I being too overrated? Are these things possible in my world? Are these expectations of mine in line with the will of God upon my life?" When one starts looking at life with a rational mind, one is moved to differentiate between possibilities and dreams.

3.     Be keen enough to compliment and appreciate the few good things in the people around us. Not all people (read: men or women or leaders or country) can be serially bad. You, err, we need to learn to sacrifice and understand people as they really are and stop being obsessed with creating people into "what we want them to become." Fact: we can NEVER change anyone. We should leave that to God!

4.     Stop complaining of the little or minor inconsistencies one may be meeting daily in their lives and start appreciating every little thing they have (and meet) as a gift from God.

All I can say as my last word on this is: don't be too over your heels. Live life in moderation, think moderately and know that people are soooo different... and their lives are soooo different too.
Don't allow yourself to be stressed up for nothing: for a course that is nonexistent! You deserve a stress free life that appreciates the things you see and have... 
No one can ever be the same person or an equal replica of that person you keep seeing in your fantasies but we can just be who we are and what God created us to become... Give us a break by being real!
And by the way, this post is speaking to me more than it may even be speaking to you...

Have a great weekend guys!!



Bonface Morris.

Christianity, Gnostics and the Negative Philosophy

Argument is not that easy. It is even harder when there is a lot of disagreement. Although relativism concludes that absoluteness of fact is not achievable, and there is only a ‘most probable truth’, there is no way conclusions can exist unless we agree to one code of operation. Even absolute terms in a fact (what we love calling ‘the dogma’), has to face argument for it to qualify (at least for those supporting it) to be Truth in its infallibility.
World philosophies have upped their game of dialectics. Philosophy has become the common food of the intellectual person. It has put the entire globe on the edge of intellectual anticipation and value systems that are warping towards it. Malcolm Muggarage (one of my favorites) writes and says, “We have educated ourselves into imbecility”. I think that’s why our parents fear that we should go to school and ‘read too much’; and it may be the reason for such a verse as Ecclesiastes 12:12, NET BIBLE (Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. There is no end to the making of many books, and much study is exhausting to the body).
But men should argue. They should reason. They should argue and reason constructively. Even God reasons… (Isaiah 1:18, NKJV, “...Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD...”). Men and God reason because by reasoning, the mind’s explosive capabilities are either intuitively or exponentially run into… We can say that reason helps in the dialysis of facts. Reason is the best way to abstractly define or defend a belief. It may not be the only way, but by it the values, likes and dislikes of an oral being are thoroughly explored. It helps us define assumptions, state fears, make our inventions understood and… just talk. It may bring strife but that is what communication always breeds – a war or a peace… So, although all men have the freedom of opinion and the right to reasoning, we just have as less freedom to choose the subjects of those opinions (or reasons if to say) as we have on the decisions that are the aftermath of the same – mainly searching through the recipients and gaging their ability to see through each opinion or reason...
I’ll make it simpler for you…
Atheists have their own opinion on the existence of God. They say there is no God. Strong as it may seem, it is their choice. It is their dogma. Their opium of the mind. They believe that in saying so, many can believe in their opinion. They believe that you should believe them and later believe in them because they believe in nothing… And that the nothing they believe IN is the ultimate cause of all belief and thus should be the object of every other belief… including yours and mine…. And there are many more who believe in humanism, naturalism, existentialism, realism... the list of modern philosophies is endless…
Basically (and for the sake of this post) I will slightly address the belief held by Gnostics. Don’t be scared of the many stupid titles here and there… it is philosophy anyway…
The gnostics believe that a person cannot have true knowledge about the existence of God; and that although they acknowledge there being a God, they don’t deny the possibility of His non-existence... To them, God’s existence is not a problem, the problem is them believing that He can become flesh and still be God… They believe that God eternally exists only as a spirit and can never be flesh; and that Jesus was not a man at all but a man-God… bla, bla, bla… It is here where I find a problem with negative philosophy and the Gnostic culture. Ouch! I’ll have to run through the basics of this negative philosophy some other time…
But on the other side of the philosophical-and-spiritual debate, the Apostle John (that great teacher who with strong statements defends the course of his belief in Christ – his Lord, cousin and best friend – says that He saw and TOUCHED HIM [which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched – 1 John 1:1] and that [the Word became flesh… John 1:14]) has words to speak about and against Gnostism and all its branches…
The apostle John cooks us through a momentum of mind stirring battles between Truth and a philosophy of his day (which by the way was not called Gnostism then). He openly displays the fallacy that many Gregorian (and together with Jewish) believers had fallen into due to the love of philosophy as opposed to the love of Truth. That’s why you hear him mention truth in both contexts of the scripture quoted above (if you read the whole text)…
And as Christians, we are tempted to improvise Christianity in order to run in line with modernization. We are tempted to topple Christianity into the communization that is globalism. Do you ever wonder where such religions as Mormonism, New Age and Scientology came from? It was out of desire to make Christianity a globally acceptable religion; a desire to conquer over the scam that are the wrangles between Christianity and its immediate environment anywhere…
We find out that maybe through reasoning, we will define to them (the world and the philosophies therein) why we think they should acknowledge the presence of a supernatural power that eternally exists and eternally controls the universe. Gnostics (even from the time of John the Apostle) believe Christ was not fully human, and that He was a spirit being with a body-like form that was not corruptible... and that we mortals are not capable of reaching that perfection in our ‘weakness’... but the basis of reasoning or argument will be as a tool that will enable is to reach a consensus with them. That consensus will not be by compromise but just like John, through exposing Truth. Truth and only Truth will define to them who Christ really is and what He really desires of them… We as independent Christians choose not to accept others’ views on certain matters concerning belief just as we choose to say, ‘Yes’. Having good reason (and good in this case is not relative) is a keystone factor.
C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity talks about The Law of Human Nature. He says that his arguments are not a platform for promoting one denomination within Christianity over another but rather an aid to assist in making rightful choices. And the act of making rightful choices he says, in his introduction, is like a hall where we all enter and ‘reason within ourselves’ as to which door to knock and later open…
Just like we reason over facts with men, let us reason over Truth with God and men… so that as many as there are in world philosophies, so should there be in the Truth of God…

Sincerely,
Morris.