Okay facadesaside: what is this song really about? Is the mystery what made it so lovable before I found it out? This song is a parable of Christ as a punk rocker. The singer of Franz Ferdinand sings, "What's wrong with a little destruction?" and the punchline is that in a consumer culture, Christ would find all of this over-consumption terrible. Christ was the one who said to get rid of all of the possessions. You can look all of this up on wikipedia, on the page about the song. Fun stuff!
Here's a problem, just off of the top of my head: now isn't it interesting; at least to me, when people talk about stuff as if it is random? We talk about stuff and the facade-aside is that there is a thought process that one person has that the other person cannot see.
I've been accused of being random! Why? Because of this very conundrum of connections and randomness. Is the randomness only what is unseen? Randomness is a philosophical-scientific concept. To the extent that we assign the idea of plan or order to this world, it is a problem of fate, and therefore faith.
But knowing what we know about causality, as scientist-philosophers, or theologians if you want to wax that way. I superstitiously believe that there is a cause to everything. I unsuperstitiously-empirically-factually believe that there is a cause to everything that can be verified.
Therefore, because of this second claim, there are two options outside of the randomness accusation that we need to follow:
First, what I just said or implied:
1) The thought process or process of thought is known to the person speaking the thought, and unknown to the accuser who says, "You're random!" (Why should this be an accusation, or called an accusation in the first place? That is, why is it "wrong" to be random in this world? One reason of course is that the nature of wrong is a very obscure concept sometimes; another one is that it's wrong to be boring, say, on blogs....Let's talk more about that soon gang. Quick flashback to 150 years ago: She's a witch!).
Two other options:
2) The thought process is not known consciously to the person who is saying the thing, and the connection is subliminal and unconscious --> coming into concsiousness. I can't think of an illustrative example right now, but the point is that the connection has already been made in the person's brain, and somehow this can be activated from potentially used memory to actively, intentionally used memory.
3) The thought process is in fact "random" to the degree that it seems as though it is an uncaused occurrence. That is, sometimes random firings of brain chemicals go off and no one knows why. I empirically hypothesize (as opposed to, uhm, take for granted superstitiously) that there is a very real, very much "planned out" cause for this. I use "planned out" not like some guy with a beard has organized our lives before we actually live (some people believe this); but as a point that these firings can be understood as a sequence, just like "random" sneezes or what the people in the late 1800's thought were "random" fevers. "Random" fevers incidentally turned out to be a lack of clean food and so on.
Just a quick sidenote here (but is it random at all?): The power of religion is transcendence, which we'll have to get to later, but I will say this: that religion overcomes even itself at times. I've a mathematician friend (he reads this blog, too), who is obsessed with contradictions (one of them specifically is the mathematical-logic Tautology of Explosion, that once you have one proposition and not that proposition, everything is logically legal, logically allowed; just a note to myself for later: doesn't this tautology resemble the Slippery Slope arguments?).
Anyway, people always complain about how religions contradict themselves. The way that I got to this was that the religions were telling people that the fevers were God's plan, that the fevers were God's way. This still happens all over the world, but certainly we hear about it about once a year in the United States, where families still in fact do this; and they reject medicine and so forth.
But the strangest thing happens when you look in a Jewish book of Aphorisms (that's sayings and quotes, kids): if you look under superstition, there's all sorts of stuff about how terrible superstition is. There's another goofy conflict that is out there that the religions pit one another against each other: how could you deny the one monotheistic Allah but keep the one monotheistic Adonai, or the one monotheistic God? It gets incredibly sticky in the United States when Baptism has only minor differences with Methodists, who only have minor differences with Presbyterians, and there are a variety of other examples. It's a big joke, and one of serious frown faces, when you bring this up to rabbis and priests.
What right do religions have, then, of denouncing superstition?
The answer is contradiction, and the power of transcendence. Do your own thing with science and so on, and when you want to get goofy with superstition, do it with everything that you can. Do it on weekends and so on. Get it out of the science lab and into the church. If you need to see it or hear it for yourself, then do it for yourself; as long as you don't bother me with it you're fine.
Incidentally, the geniuses that I talk about on this blog, mostly from the modern period of philosophy, with various others, are mostly religious in their systems. The namesake of this blog, if you're just joining us or have forgotten, is Immanuel Kant, who established objective science as empirically and factually real. It is his difference between appearances and things in themselves that I named this blog "facadesaside" for. It's a matter of truth to see appearances, or facades, and also a matter of truth to see things in themselves, to put the facades aside as it were.
Kant was a professor of the sciences (and philosophy) and he worked excruciatingly hard. But he was also raised in a Pietist home, which is a spinoff of Lutheranism, which, ta-da, has an emphasis on work ethic and education.
