[MD] False Messiah

[david buchanan]

DM asked dmb:
What do you understand by the word transcendental?

dmb says:
On occaision I'll use "transcend" when talking about the shift upward in 
psycho/spiritual development. In the broadest sense, it just means "going 
beyond". But when I describe theism as the belief in a transcendent God, it 
means a God that is outside of experience and outside of nature, "beyond the 
universe or material existence", as my old pal Merriam puts it. So 
transcendent and supernatural mean roughly the same thing.

DM said:
>I would say, for example, that the world is a transcendental
>concept. It is certainly not something that can be experienced as
>a whole. The way it appears in experience is always partial,
>the whole is largely absent but makes partial and constantly
>changing appearances. It is a postulated idea, as Pirsig says,
>and a good one, but nonetheless transcending experience as
>does most of the cosmology we need to construct to explain
>existence to ourselves. Also the vast sphere of the possible
>that is not actual transcends any mere fragment we may experience.
>Yet is crucial to make sense of existence, to make sense of agency,
>emergence, mathematics, etc. As for supernatural, it would be pretty
>easy to say DQ is supernatural and leaves the natural (SQ) in its
>wake...

dmb says:
I think it would be confusing to say DQ is supernatural. It is not beyond 
experience nor nature. I would even say that its confusing to say our 
concepts and cosmologies are supernatural. Surely we know them from 
experience and are part of the universe too.

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