They Call Me Lucifer

Please allow me to introduce myself,
I'm a man of wealth and taste.
I've been around for a long, long year.
Stole many a man's soul and faith.

The concept of the devil and Lucifer has been around for a long time. And, while I've never considered myself a theist, in light of what philosophy has taught me through the discovery of the moral imperative of life, I guess I am a minimal animist. It turns out, is impossible to avoid it.

I cannot be considered a typical animist, which had more to do with believing in the living nature of everything in the universe. I have no belief as this, rather, I have come to the conclusion every human belief system is an animism. All our belief systems contain an animist belief.

It is observable that our knowledge systems appear as if guided through the impossibly complex maze of the infinite complexity that makes up the real world outside each of our minds. It thus requires an animism to believe we can think our way toward some real cognition about what is outside our minds and unreachable.

This is indeed a great leap of faith. The Universe is a far more complex place than any human mind can comprehend either in its entirety or in any of its smaller portions. This is the great dilemma of philosophy.

I use a capital "U" here when I am referring to the Universe that is, not the universe we behold. The goal of philosophy is to know the difference, for which we have one working paradigm, that the difference isn't what we think it is.

It has been known for a long time by philosophy that to know anything absolutely, one must know everything. Thus our common relativist universe is but an off-centered flash-lit glimpse of a hint at the Universe. That vast and infinite mountain of complexity cannot be viewed because, even smaller bits that obscure our view of the Universe cannot be reliably known by us.

Even these small bits are so complex, a pea, a pin, a periwinkle and a pearl are all far too complex for the human mind to grasp within even any measurable fraction of their true complexity as just these small parts of the Universe represent.

It is simply an animist belief to believe we can know anything really. To know anything, we must somehow be guided through the infinite complexity we cannot know toward some modest cogent correlation of understanding of a minute portion of the otherwise infinite complexity of the Universe outside our minds.

Basic to every human belief system is some fanciful idea that allows us to think any of the knowledge of our personal belief systems relates in some meaningful and even remotely correlative way to the Universe large or small.

The proof of this is, it simply does not have to be. The infinite realm where our personally known universes might be, is so much greater than the infinitely singular chance of hitting upon the real Universe, it just cannot be. By the infinite odds against such a coincidence alone, we must assent, we are all animists in our personal belief we know anything however modestly we believe our beliefs to be about something real in the Universe.

As a philosopher I am required to be guided by what cannot be doubted. I am therefore guided by very little other than doubt.

Of that with which I am free of doubt, I have had the cogito, known now for more than two hundred years. I also have had the moral imperative of life for just a year. And now, with this latest statement, that we are all animists in our beliefs, we have something else too.

We can know we believe that somehow we are guided as if from on high, to know we know so very little about the Universe, and again that is the Universe large or small. This might be a profound statement, that we really can know so little, if we can know anything at all. But, it is only profound as we can reflect it back meaningfully upon that which we can know, the cogito and the moral imperative of life. Everything else must be mere speculation, unwarranted, and impossible not to doubt.

At its very essence, knowing how little we know, seems to thrust us precariously toward a belief in god as the hand that guides us toward knowing anything at all. But, we also have a similarly tenuous belief in Lucifer, that seems to indicate we also know, we can be horribly misguided in believing God guides our beliefs about what is. It could be Lucifer fooling us so.

And, I was 'round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain.
Made damn sure that pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate.

Pleased to meet you...
Hope you guess my name!
But what's puzzling you,
Is the nature of my game.

I stuck around Saint Petersburg,
When I saw it was a time for a change.
Killed the Czar and his ministers.
Anastasia screamed in vain!

I rode a tank,
Held a general's rank,
When the Blitzkrieg raged,
And the bodies stank!

Pleased to meet you...
Hope you guess my name, oh yeah!
Ah, what's puzzling you,
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah.

I watched with glee,
While your kings and queens,
Fought for ten decades,
For the gods they made!

I shouted out,
"Who killed the Kennedys?"
When after all,
It was you and me...

Let me please introduce myself,
I'm a man of wealth and taste.
And I laid traps for troubadours,
Who get killed before they reached Bombay.

Pleased to meet you...
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah.
But what's puzzling you,
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah, get down, baby!

Pleased to meet you,
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah.
But what's confusing you,
Is just the nature of my game.

For those who are feeling lost just now, consider the awareness of the Universe you might have to behold, were you a periwinkle, a jellyfish or a mosquito. Yes, we are far more complex creatures, or so we suppose. But we are not so much more complex as we might assume, when we consider the complexity of the Universe, again both the large and small of it. In this light, our insignificance is no less.

And for those who read here with a commitment to their belief in God, consider as did Descartes to arrive at the cogito. God could be fooling you. And, if not God because you believe him too benevolent, Lucifer might be fooling you.

For those who hold no belief in a god, there is the philosophic sureness that we can know nothing but the cogito and then only tangentially of the moral imperative of life. As a philosopher, I must doubt the existence of god, or I become a theist. The theist by his truth-emphasis, is no longer a philosopher who must maintain a doubt-emphasis. One can however do this hypothetically, and, still keep one's faith in a higher being for the comfort one might find there.

Here however, it would seem necessary then also to believe in Lucifer, which is not the embodiment of the pinnacle of good, but the embodiment of the greatest depths of evil and bad.

As philosophers, we have no definition of good or bad, except as they derive from the cogito and the moral imperative of life, and here each are left nearly vacuous.

In all my writings here on Thomas Paine's Corner about the moral imperative of life, what should be as astounding to you, as it is to me, is that not any one of the many professed philosophers who have left comments about my articles have dared cross the boundary of the moral imperative, by saying, It is not true.

The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world.

Some have stopped by long enough to say that I am not a philosopher, and that I abuse the title. Some have said the moral imperative is nothing new, but they are mistaken. The moral imperative says a moral commitment to the future is morally more important than any necessary moral commitment to the present.

The moral imperative does not say that the present is not morally important. It says that the future is morally more important than the present, and it subordinates always the morality of the present to the future.

There was never a moral imperative of life prior to 2006 when I discovered it. There has never been a morality statement that is categorically true in every instance, and that covers everything that is moral. The moral imperative does this.

The moral imperative subordinates every other human belief system to the moral importance of our obligation to the future.

As I have said before, Kant presaged the possibility of there being a categorical moral imperative. This is the pinnacle of his work. Kant's categorical moral imperative, while left in puzzlement, was his most important, if not his only philosophic accomplishment. It was left in puzzlement because he simply did not have the moral imperative at the tip of his feathered pen.

I have read enough of the works of Kant to know, could I travel back in time and give it to him, he would say, "Yes." And, without hesitation or, giving it another thought, he would then scribe it into his works exactly where it fits.

We would all be living with the benefits of it today, were that possible.

Still, even the moral imperative does not destroy Lucifer, the nemesis of believers in God. And we all can still be fooled, even if we do not believe in God. The moral imperative implies we can leave the world better than it was when we entered it. But, we can still be fooled into thinking, by our actions that this is what we are doing, even though we are not.

I spent more than a month discussing the moral imperative with a small group at Beingism.org. This group represents something of the common secular humanist belief that has evolved out of the meandering history of philosophy that passes for academic philosophy, like what is taught in colleges around the country.

The Beingists were amicable enough, more amicable than I find most academic philosophers who have shut off inquiry because they are too busy discovering exactly how many fairies fit upon the head of a pin. The Beingists tolerated and were entertained by the old guy and what I had to say. But, every time I pushed them into a corner, they would scoot out of it. They would fall back into their well-healed belief systems that had nothing to do with philosophy. In the end, I bid them my best.

I have known for a while due to my study of philosophy and the history of it, no philosopher, including myself, is likely to be well enough understood in his own lifetime to amount to much more than a glorified crank. That is simply the nature of how human beings absorb philosophy. It is a slow process not measured in a lifetime, and certainly not to be measured in the shorter production-lifetime of a single philosopher. I was no child prodigy philosopher, as I have come to philosophy late in my life, when I was already older than the age at which the vast majority of philosophers we know by name had already left this world.

From my hoary perspective Nietzsche died when he was still a kid. We can only wonder what he would have found, had he recovered his terminal illness to write more.

Still, I have read enough philosophy to know, philosophy done well is irresistible. It can, not just move mountains. It can construct them as well. Alexander, his great army, and the temptation of fantastic wealth and power could not move Diogenes, and yet Diogenes is still moving all of us today.

My Beingist friends were receptive at first. I tossed the moral imperative at them, and with a small bit of haggling they caught on to it. They took it in for a while. When I proposed to them that our society's cherished belief in science was nothing more than a belief system, one no different than any other belief system, they balked. I persisted. They balked again. I persisted and they balked even more. I finally had to give it up. Life is only so long, and if philosophers go on missionary trips attempting to convert the faithless, they end up in no better company and, their time having run out.

Still, I learned from the Beingists just how entrenched Twenty-first Century humanity is in its belief in science and empirical knowledge. It is all an animism, for everyone believes in their unconscious core that science is guided by some benevolent hand from on high toward truth. Empirical processes are however, no different. They represent a mere belief system, just another religion. And more so, it is a religion that by it results and its effect upon humanity is much more like witchcraft and Voodoo than any other religion.

While the Beingists wished me well as we parted. It seemed to me that it must have seemed to them, I was the embodiment of Lucifer.

The Luciferication of anyone who threatens to disrupt your belief system is natural. The Beingists are not to be faulted for this. Anyone whose moral instincts are intact has this reaction against anyone else who comes along asserting fundamental beliefs that wholly contradict what it is you otherwise so firmly believe. And generally, as Lincoln Steffens the famous journalist elucidated in his amazing autobiography, the moral instincts of everyone are intact. And you can observe this, if you take the time to step into their shoes as did Steffens.

Philosophically all this trenchant mumbling thus far does nothing to verify the existence of God or Lucifer. Philosophically what this gives us is a sure notion of our selves, and more importantly a good indicator of what we are likely not to know because of the way we perceive the world.

Thus, now we can know three things categorically: 1) The Cogito, 2) The moral imperative of life, and, 3)

All this only verifies something about our perception. It says nothing about the Universe, except as it strangely exists in our minds.

Now, I have strained my brain enough for the day doing pure philosophy. So, let's have a bit of fun. Let us time travel to the time of the Frenchman, Ren� Descartes (March 31, 1596 � February 11, 1650) and the German, Immanuel Kant (April 22, 1724 � February 12, 1804) and bring them both back with us forward in time. What would they make of our world?

These are the two most important philosophers in the history of western philosophy. Descartes is beginning-Enlightenment, and Kant is mid-Enlightenment. Let me be the courtier for these noble gentlemen of philosophy. I am older than Descartes when he died and younger than Kant when he died. Neither would speak my language well enough to understand me the way I speak 20th Century Americanized English. All I could do would be to show them the sights.

Both of these men are deeply religious. Of the things that would knock them off their feet, to their knees and send them into genuflecting fits of piety, they have never seen an electric sign, an automobile, or an airplane. Neither has either ever smelled the exhaust fumes of the combustion engine, heard the varied noises of traffic, or seen the light pollution we accept as natural in our daily lives. They could not imagine a television set and the marvels there in that would strain their credulity to the limit. Nor could they begin to fathom my computer within which I could instantly pull up a picture of both of them, and, for Descartes translate the Wikipedia entry about him into a kind of French, portions of which he would be able to read. Kant's German would likely be even more troublesome on the net. Even the fonts and typefaces displayed on a computer screen might give them hieroglyphic-like trouble.

So, let's say they were only able to stay an hour with me. All the while I would maintain the fantastic grin I was born with on my wide male face crested with hair as white as Kant, offset as it would be by my mouth full of teeth, neither of them would still have. Flitting I would escort them through what to them would surely appear a dream when they are returned to their own time, to awaken as if it was from a dream. What would they make of me and their impossible dream-like experience then?

They would be sure they had met with Lucifer. This is what we have learned. I in my time would so upset their belief systems, they would be sure I was Lucifer.

And yes, science is just another religion, a very destructive religion, one more akin to witchcraft and Voodoo than any other religion. Kant and Descartes would be astonished at the constant scientific destruction they saw going on in their demonic dream.

There should be no surprise that science, this most successful religion of the world to date, has spread wider over the surface of the world than Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Chinese traditional religion, Buddhism, primal-indigenous religions, African Traditional & Diasporic, Sikhism, Juche, Spiritism, Judaism, Baha'i, Jainism, Shinto, Cao Dai, Zoroastrianism, Tenrikyo, Neo-Paganism, Unitarian-Universalism, Rastafarianism, and Scientology combined.

We can add to this list of religions, science and every ism ever thought up. These too are all mere belief systems. They are all religions, and human belief systems that can neither be affirmed or denied to exist meaningfully in the Universe except as they exist in our minds.

Like all other religions, and every ism as well, science comes to us from the past. Like all other religions and every ism, science offers to us individually some personal benefits. Like all other religions, science is a human belief system based wholly upon assumptions that can be doubted by philosophy and disproved. For anything really to be truth in the Universe, it must be a categorically true. This is what philosophy has determined, and it has determined there are very few categorical truths we can know.

Philosophy's method of doubt thus remains truth-supreme over every other belief system of humans, because it uses the surest known human method for finding truth. The philosophic methodology of doubt is so thorough, and so revealing, philosophy has determined there are no static categorical truths about the Universe humans can grasp.

There are for us only paths toward categorical truths. This is the nature of our ability to understand the Universe and, this shortcoming relates directly to the known problem, that in order to know anything absolutely, we must know everything.

There are only three known paths toward categorical truths. 1) The cogito gives to us all a sure knowledge of how to discover and to know of our existence. 2) The moral imperative of life gives to us a path toward the nature of everything moral. 3) As noted here, philosophy can categorically tell us some things about how we must incorrectly perceive the Universe.

All else that we know is mere convention we rely upon because we find it enchanting enough for each of us to construct a personal pseudo-knowledge based upon the enchantment that acted as a catalyst to our constructing ad hoc such knowledge. All these ad hoc knowledge sets of humans can be doubted and even proved false and misleading by the cyclical nature of human reason and logic.

All the ad hoc knowledge we each have constructed for ourselves since birth, and, we each individually have as our most cherished beliefs, this is our soul. I will say it again. This is our soul. It is so cherished and held in such high esteem, it is what some hope takes flight upon death.

So you see my readers, you can call me Lucifer, if you wish. But I too have a soul. My own belief, as it has already been described here, forces me to see what is moral first in what we are going to leave for the future of humanity. The Beingists, like perhaps you too, as their views are common, they believe in the conscientious application of science and technology to provide for the poor and downcast today. They are secular humanists. Their moral instincts are intact, if it contrasts with my own moral views.

I believe we still have the chance to work toward decreasing the population to sustainable levels, and also to save the earth from technological devastation, a devastation that is the undeniable legacy of the religion known as science. I do not believe science is a net positive good by any stretch of even the most deluded imagination bent upon fantasies of Star Trek, or Stephen Hawking's utopian Grand Unifying Field Theory quest.

I prefer to leave the future headed toward the Garden of Eden over the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley, or worse, no world. I care not for humans who study science, witchcraft or who speak of the Rights of Men. These belief systems are religions and have amounted to no net improvement to the world we will bequeath to the future.

When the personal belief system of anyone is challenged, even by truth as would be my reality as shown to Descartes and Kant in our little mind experiment, they, like you, would assume any such challenge to be a Lucifer.

Kant and Descartes would not in the least bit be intrigued or enchanted with me in my era. Rather, despite their great genius and an undoubted intellectual curiosity, Descartes and Kant would both likely wish never again to have to meet with such a horrid devil as I would appear to them in my time.

This is no doubt how I appeared to the Beingists.

Welcome to the world of a philosopher. Philosophers are not apologists for the belief systems of humans. Philosophers write for the future, and the future alone. The method of philosophy is doubt.

Real philosophers are thus assured to be Lucifers in their own time.

Just as every cop is a criminal,
And all the sinners saints.

As heads is tails,
Just call me Lucifer,
'cause I'm in need of
Some restraint.

So if you meet me,
Have some courtesy.
Have some sympathy,
And some taste.

Use all your well-learned politesse.
Or, I'll lay your soul to waste, um yeah.
Pleased to meet you...
Hope you guessed my name, um yeah.

But what's puzzling you,
Is the nature of my game, um mean it, get down!
Woo, who...
Oh yeah, get on down.

Oh yeah,
Oh yeah!
Tell me baby, what's my name?
Tell me honey, can ya guess my name?

Tell me baby, what's my name?
I tell you one time, you're to blame!
Ooo, who!
Ooo, who!

Ooo, who!
Ooo, who, who!
Ooo, who, who!
Ooo, who, who!

Ooo, who, who!
Oh, yeah.
What's me name?
Tell me, baby, what's my name?

Tell me, sweetie, what's my name?
Ooo, who, who!
Ooo, who, who!
Ooo, who, who!

Ooo, who, who!
Ooo, who, who!
Ooo, who, who!
Ooo, who, who!

Oh, yeah.

Sympathy For The Devil by The Rolling Stones, Beggar's Banquet, 1968.

Don Robertson, The American Philosopher

--------------------------------------------------------