Writings Available for Downloading

This is a duplicate of a posting I’ve made at Acts of Being.

Some of my writings are available for free download from Acts of Being: 2 articles, samples of 3 novels, and one complete book on human knowledge.

Contact me at loydf at loydfueston.com if you’d like to read the entirety of one of those novels.

Short articles

I have two articles available for downloading. One discusses the need to render justice to our Creator even when we feel little or no love towards Him or no particular desire to worship Him: Justice: The First Step Towards God.

The second article discusses, very briefly, a common misperception of the nature of “human rights” and the dangers which arise from that misperception: Natural and Inalienable Rights, discusses the nature of “human rights.”

Novels

I have five novels completed. Sample chapters for three of them are available:

1. A Man for Every Purpose is written from the viewpoint of a man who has made a fortune in offering immortality of a sort: very safe and secure storage of the hard and enduring parts of a human being along with the fragile DNA. He wonders why he’s one of the world’s richest men but living in a simple room attached to his lab. Someone’s enjoying the fruits of his cash-flow, but who? And why does he have an occasional desire to indulge in pond-scum? Is it those genes he shares with sea-worms? And what about those genes he shares with those children who are said to be his? The mothers of those children despised him or didn’t know him. Someone’s enjoying his rights as a rich man to conquer women, but who?

2. Corporate Sex is a tale of liasons between men and women, cash-rich corporations and asset-rich corporations, and other entities subject to great and burning passions.

3. The Hermit of Turkey Hill is a story based upon a strange man my grandfather befriended. For nearly 40 years, the man lived in the town where I was raised, a town where my grandfather had been police chief. He spoke so few words that, when he died, no one could even guess where he came from. And when he died, my grandfather searched the man’s shack for a clue to the identity of the hermit but found only another mystery.

Nonfiction book

I have one complete nonfiction book available for download. This book, Four Kinds of Human Knowledge, presents my claim that ultimately there are only two types of knowledge: knowledge of God in His transcendence and necessary being and knowledge of God in His contingent role as Creator. Yet, because of our limitations in perception and intellect, I advocate looking at human knowledge as if it were four types: revealed knowledge, speculative knowledge, scientific empirical knowledge, and practical empirical knowledge.

New Book on Knowledge for Download

I’ve placed a book on my other website for free download. The announcement posting for the book, Four Kinds of Knowledge, has a short description of the book and its purpose and also has a link to the actual file for the book’s contents.
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Of One Mind

The experience of modern democracy puts before us a strange contradiction: democratic man is the freest man to have ever lived and at the same time the most domesticated. It will be said that the difficulty is quickly clarified: he can only be granted, he can only give himself, so much liberty because he is so domesticated. One has to ask how, since the dog whose contentment the wolf envies is not unaware of the collar to which it is tethered, modern man is so sure of being ever more free if in reality he is ever more subjected. [The City of Man, Pierre Manent, Princeton University Press, 1998, page 181]

The situation is still worse than we might first think. This domestication of modern, democratic man is related to the fact that he values a peace that can be obtained only by a uniformity of opinion. Manent discusses this problem elsewhere in his book. To my knowledge, the strong tendency of modern, democratic man to brainwash himself in the interests of mainstream views was first noted by Touqueville in Democracy in America which was published back in the 1830s.

Roughly speaking, Manent’s complex analysis boils down to the sad fact that the modern democratic system can hold together only if we are all tolerant of other’s beliefs in such a way that we end up compromising our understand of the ‘good’. Effectively, we throw away the very concept of truth in order to live in peace with neighbors who hold a radically different idea of a good life.

Modern democratic man doesn’t seem capable of the true tolerance which can allow the growth of bohemias. That is, any bohemias, existing or developing, will be turned into tourist centers complete with coffee-shops and T-shirt booths. Sexual perversion is domesticated so that Oscar Wilde becomes one half of Mr. and Mr. Middle-class America. Creative efforts which might be legitimate but are certainly dangerous, such as avant-garde music or literature, became subjects for grant applications to various sorts of suits who commute from exclusive suburbs to their comfie offices at the NEA or the Ford Foundation.

This ongoing and relentless effort to homogenize all thoughts and all ways of behavior results in minds and hearts of mush. After all, we’re very particular creatures even in the way that we think about and live out the most absolute and transcendental of truths — for example, each cultural realization of any form of Christianity has different ways of submitting to the Creator. Even with the Mass to unite Catholics, Orthodox, and some other traditional and sacramental forms of Christianity, Roman Catholics who are Italian have different ways of praying from Polish Roman Catholics. The Coptic churches, Catholic or Orthodox or independent, are different from all other Christian churches in many of their ways. Benedictines have different ways of life from cloistered Dominicans and Calvinists find both ways to be strange.

What is the common ground for all of these manifestations in human lives of some understanding of Christianity? A sort of abstraction which requires no serious effort to be turned to easy-to-digest goop. Things get worse when we Christians try to talk to Jews as if we don’t really believe Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God. The goop becomes blandly unpalatable when we try to find common ground with Buddhists and Hindus and animist pagans.

This isn’t an argument against tolerance. In fact, I’d favor an openmindness which doesn’t turn Puerto Ricans into wannabe middle-class white Americans who dress in funny and colorful clothes a few times a year. Aren’t those spicy foods so interesting? And that music has such a good beat.

Me? I listen to so-called World Music radio shows every so often and I can appreciate music from Puerto Rico and Senegal and the various tribal lands of South Africa partly because it’s so exotic and partly because of the similarities which often show with an ethnic form of music to which I have truer attachments — Celtic music. Some of the traditional Celtic musicians learned how to play traditional Celtic percussion instruments from Africans or Jamaicans — most musicians in Celtic lands had forgotten how to use their hands after modern drum-sets with sticks had become so popular.

All forms of ethnic music, all forms of literature, are in danger in our world. Democratic man would turn them all into mass-merchandised products. All ways of life which are interesting and rich are in danger of becoming villages at some theme park.

From Sin to Rights

In the state of nature, where man discovers himself as an individual, he discovers that he is something prior to being a citizen or a Christian, something more fundamental than either. Before his submission to either political or religious law, the individual is a whole, since he has in him the sufficient source of all his actions, de facto as well as de jure. Every man is a whole sufficient unto himself prior to the existence of the law. [The City of Man, Pierre Manent, Translated by Marc A. LePain, Forward by Jean Bethke Elshtain, Princeton University Press, 1998, page 34]

In the context of that quote, Manent was expressing the ideas of modern political philosophers and most certainly not his own ideas. More specifically, Manent is speaking of the “state of nature” as defined by modern political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and also assumed by Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence.

How is it that we got into this situation where the descendants of Christian peoples, Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant, came to believe that they’re individuals of this sort, pre-existing their relationship to a greater human community, political or religious, pre-existing even their relationship to God? How can we believe ourselves to be free-standing in this way, even autonomous agents, when we are taught by the Bible and by Christian tradition that our salvation comes when we are one (in Christ) as Christ and His Father (and Their Spirit) are one? [See John 17:11.] How is it that our efforts to guide and direct our own conversions and those of other human beings seem to accord too well to this assumption that there we’re individuals who choose to center our lives on God, or not, in the same way that we choose a toothpaste?

God Himself is communal. He is not a solitary God, not even the solitary God of Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian who spoke of a solitary God who needed man to have a conversation partner. Father and Son and Holy Spirit have plenty to say to each other and don’t need us. Why did God create and then shape this world? Why did God create man? While we’re told that He loved us before we were even conceived, I think we need to be a bit more humble and not assume that God created us primarily for our own sakes and then to speak as if the Almighty watched helplessly as Adam and Eve fell from grace forcing Him to send His Son to suffer for us. We’re characters in a story being told by God, a story in which the main event is the self-sacrifice of the Son, a self-sacrifice which act of love and submission to His Father. When we consider the absolute centrality of God and of the relationships between Father and Son and Holy Spirit, it would seem we’re driven to the conclusion that we’re the accidental beneficiaries of a drama of love played out primarily between God the Father and God the Son. Moreover, we have to recognize that the all-powerful God is telling the story He planned to tell and not a story which has been changed by acts of Adam and Eve. We have to learn how to read the Bible in light of our basic beliefs about the all-powerful God.

Because of our tendency to read the Bible in strange ways which are in conflict with those basic beliefs about God, because of our decreasing levels of reading and thinking skills as the West continues its 500 year decay, modern Christians have no coherent view of even our physical universe let alone a greater view of Creation in all its phases and in its basic foundational elements. (See From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun for a frighteningly plausible history of the decay of the West in terms of that decay in literacy and see my other blog Acts of Being for discussions of my efforts to produce a coherent Christian view of Creation.)

Randomness as a Sign of God’s Presence

One of the most important, if little noticed, intellectual events of modern times is the development of a rational understanding of randomness. Based on that rational understanding, I made the claim in my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand, that only God could make a truly random number and only God could act in a truly random way. I’ll try to discuss the reasons for these two tightly related claims and I’ll try to make the discussion accessible to readers who didn’t study mathematics in college.

Let me give a crash course on the new view of randomness which started to develop in the 1960s. In the middle of that decade, a prominent Russian mathematician, A. N. Kolmogorov, and an American high school student, Gregory Chaitin, both had the idea that randomness was more a matter of algorithmic complexity than of some sort of magic. To cut to the chase, a random number is one which has no patterns which allow it to be described more briefly than simply listing the digits. To be perfectly random, the number can have no patterns at all. It must have algorithmic complexity that is absolutely infinite.

Much of Chaitin’s work deals with degrees of randomness more than with perfect randomness because we can’t produce a random number. Nor do we have the slightest reason to believe that nature can produce a random number or any movement or change that corresponds to pure randomness — unless God interjects that randomness. Yet, Chaitin’s major result in many ways was a surprisingly simple proof — by the standards of modern mathematics — that every number is random. No number has a pattern. This doesn’t mean that 1.22222… or 1.25 are random. Those numbers and any individual number, random or non-random, represents a vanishingly small point on the number line. It turns out that all numbers with patterns, all the numbers of our elegant and well-ordered mathematics, add up to a vanishingly small length on the number line. There are so many random numbers that the infinities of numbers with some patterns are overwhelmed. In the sense of what is called ‘measure theory’, there are essentially no numbers with patterns in comparison with true random numbers.

What does this mean? As the mathematician Marc Kac (pronounced ‘cats’) said in the early 1970s when the ideas of Chaitin and Kolmogorov were becoming known:

Now we know what a random number is. It’s a fact.

[I quote from memory.]

What is Freedom?

In the modern world, we tend to think of freedom in terms of satisfying desires. To be sure, even many who live for that false sort of freedom seem to realize that we then become no more than our desires or, more horribly, the thwarting of those desires — a terrible and humiliating state in either case. Hannibal the Cannibal is the most free of all modern men because he has become his desires and he has gained the power to satisfy them. Hannibal the Cannibal is the role-model for our politicians and our lawyers, our investment bankers and our corporate executives, our athletes and our entertainers. He may even be a role-model for many clergymen.

Let me move in a different direction with a quote from a modern philosopher:

[W]e are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.” (page 172, Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson, Dover Publications, 2001 reprint)

Let me provide another quote, this one from a prominent brain-scientist:

An intent is the directing of an action toward some future goal that is defined and chosen by the actor. (page 8, How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman)

In Thomistic moral philosophy, ‘intent’ defines human morality and freedom. We don’t freely will to be a good man or a good woman, we choose to struggle towards that state of goodness. We don’t freely will to cut down on our drinking or stop smoking, we choose to move towards a state where we don’t continue our bad habits or bad thoughts because our brains and our bodies and our relationships to others and to our environments have all changed. We should realize that the very process of forming intents can be a bit vague if only because we don’t see the goal clearly until we’re well along the path. I’ve certainly deluded myself often about the goal of becoming a Christ-like man and I’ve also deluded myself about the nature of the path I have to travel. The forming of our moral intentions is an ongoing process and not an action taken once and for all time.

The modern concept of free-will is useful to entrepreneurs, political or commercial, as they go about their task of destroying local community life to draw us all into the gigantic marketplaces of a land where natural cultural and physical boundaries have been dismantled. That concept of free-will leaves most human beings stripped of their defenses against those entrepreneurs and other predators and parasites of a cosmopolitanism and imperialism rendered all the more damaging to human beings by the pretense, in the U.S. and other countries, that we remain dedicated to traditional human values.

Social Components of Intelligence

In a recent entry, (see Networks of Public Spaces Rather Than One Square), I spoke of the confusion that diversity can cause to us as we go about our daily activities. I spoke as if it were a matter of needless expenditure of energy but now I wonder if it might be deeper than that. I should have suspected so because I made a reference to some entries I wrote on my other blog (starting with Adaptive Minds: A Review of “Adaptive Minds”, Part I) where I discussed the work of Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist who has shown that some of our thinking is done in interaction with our environments and not just inside our isolated heads as most would assume. It’s even proper to say that some of our thinking is done by our environments.

The more radical and more consistent position on moral matters, which I should have taken, is that social confusion caused by uncontrolled diversity or other factors will obscure or cripple much of our moral knowledge and our moral reasoning skills because that confusion on our streets and in our malls and on our television sets is part of our thinking. We become stupid because of the confusion and social disorder around us. We don’t just have to work harder to determine if that fellow behind the counter is trustworthy. We simply are obtuse and may not even be aware of the reasons for our own discomfort.

It takes a great effort to be morally intelligent in the modern age and it might still be impossible if we don’t find good communities which can do some of our thinking for us. This should hardly be a surprise to Christians who have the goal of becoming part of the body of Christ, rather than the goal of spending eternity doing our own thing.

Where is God?

A seemingly silly question. Any child could tell you that God is in Heaven just as many pagans could have told you that Zeus is on Mt. Olympus. Actually, it’s not clear that either the child or the pagan would have a well-formed idea or image corresponding to those words, but they would have their standard answers. All children and most adults will have a view of physical reality tied to naive perceptions of space and time and matter.

To understand is to accept reality and to have a way of viewing it as a coherent whole. Modern physics, especially the cosmological models derived from Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and modern mathematics, including geometries and logics and theories of randomness, have cast doubts upon the absoluteness or transcendental nature of any of our scientific or logical or mathematical truths. Time and space are not necessary, though they are necessary for the existence of life as we know it. Our greatest mathematical truths might well be contingent truths of Creation, that is, truths created by God as the underlying stuff of this world. See The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 2.1. God as the Creator of Truths for a preliminary discussion of this difficult issue.

But, we all tend to think as if the necessary truths of our sort of existence are necessary truths in an absolute sense. If we wish to talk to God, we literalize that action in our imagination, thinking ourselves to be facing God and talking to Him as if He were a human companion. Of course, Christians believe it’s possible to speak with the Son of God in this way and we believe that Jesus Christ is true God as well as true man, but we quickly get ourselves into trouble this way because the Son of God is not only facing us in His human body but also inside of us, bringing us into being and energizing us each instant that we exist.

The God of Jesus Christ is present in this world of time and space. In fact, He’s deeper inside of us than we ourselves can reach, as St. Augustine of Hippo pointed out. Going back into the Hebrew Testament, He is the God who declared His own name to be I-am, a name hard to understand because we are tempted to interpret it in terms of an unbalanced existentialist theology that disdains creaturely substance, but we are equally tempted to think that Moses was merely told that God has necessary being and is the only entity which is truly immortal. The Father of the Gods in the higher forms of paganism could have also claimed such as he sat on his throne.

Praising God by Understanding His Creation

In my writings, I try to use the entire spectrum of human knowledge to construct what I call a worldview. (See Acts of Being for more technical writings dealing with mathematics, physics, and metaphysics in light of Christian revelations.) In this worldview, I extend the Biblical perspective to view the entire universe of this age after Einstein as a narrative. God is telling a story in which a surprisingly important part takes place on an insignificant ball of dust circling a rather ordinary star which itself is part of a complex of galaxies streaming towards something called the Great Attractor, a gravitational center of a large group of groups of galaxies. And the story continues to grow and develop.

More importantly, when this narrative is seen as such, it’s morally ordered, as all narratives are. Even when it comes to historical events which were far from well-determined, we can only tell the story of the modern British people by way of a Shakespearean ‘fiction’ that a nation was in formation, in a purposeful way, in those centuries after the conquest by the Normans, their bureaucratic rationalization of England and Wales, and the integration of Normans into the culture of the Angles. In the great play by the Bard, Henry V is seen as conscious of the larger movements of which he was part — and some participants in history have been surprisingly aware of the greater state of affairs. But it’s not necessary that purpose be served consciously. It is necessary that we realize a mere recitation of facts under the pretense that there’s no order in this world is meaningless and a sheer waste of time and effort. In any case, the world is a world, that is, it has a purpose revealed to us in the life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ — though obscurely to our creaturely minds.

Why are Human Beings of Greater Worth than Chimpanzees or Rattlesnakes?

In my previous entry, Christian Misuse of the Concept of ‘Person’, I spoke of the need for Christians to give higher priority to revealed truths even at the cost of eliminating some arguments which seem of practical value in protecting human life. That leaves open the question given in the title of this entry. Why, indeed, is human life of greater worth than the lives of other sorts of biological creatures?

Let me seemingly divert to a question which turns out to be the same. Why did Jesus Christ, the Son of God, accept baptism? Surely, He didn’t need to be baptized. He bore our sins but was Himself free of all sin. The second antiphon for the Morning Prayer, (Liturgy of the Hours — modern Roman Catholic version) on the Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord tells us what occurred when the sinless Lord of Creation entered those waters to be baptized by one of His own creatures:

Springs of water were made holy as Christ revealed his glory to the world. Draw water from the fountain of the Savior, for Christ our God has hallowed all creation.

Water is good in its natural qualities. It refreshes and cleans. It’s all-important to life on earth because it irrigates so effectively, bringing in nutrients and carrying away wastes.

It’s fitting that the Lord chose such a substance to play a role in baptism, a rite in which we’re cleansed as we move towards salvation. But we must remember that water as a natural substance isn’t the source of the grace which can lead us to salvation. That grace is in the waters of baptism, when united with the proper words — I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit — because that grace flows out of the Lord Jesus Christ and into the waters of the world and that flow of grace began when the Son of God let His human body be baptized with water.