Thinking about Descartes...Again

Why do I keep thinking about Rene Descartes? I think it's because he so perfectly exemplifies the evils of our day. His Cogito ergo sum infected humanity with a legion of devils perhaps the worst of which was to make every individual a tinpot god positing that anything he thinks must be true. Descartes should have stuck to math.

His famous statement actually is obviously wrong. It makes more sense to say "I breathe therefor I am," since we never stop breathing until we die, whereas we don't "think" 24 hours a day. Do we stop existing when we're sleeping?

Descartes' "I think, therefor I am," has it exactly backwards. "I am, therefor I think," makes more sense; although I would say, "i am (with a small i), therefore I think...and breathe, and eat, and work, etc." Each of is, after all, a creature made in the image and likeness of the great I AM. It is "in Him we live and move and have our being."

Descartes, however, has thrown out all reality that begins with the senses. They can't be trusted. Odd position for a scientist. What's easily observable, like a tree, can't be trusted to exist, but anything a man can imagine does. Descartes' dualism separates the mind and spirit of man from his body. Man isn't a union of body and soul, but a mind attached to a machine. It's the perfect philosophy for the pro-abort. As one deathscort in Falls Church used to tell me. Abortion just frees up the soul of the baby to be placed in a new body. I wonder...would Descartes have been proud?

Descartes is often called the Father of Modern Philosophy which is apt because he certainly reflects the heresy of Modernism, the synthesis of all heresies. He could also be called the Father of virtual reality since his philosophy made the individual thinker the arbiter of his own personal reality. "What's true for me is true for me; what's true for you is true for you." No wonder we live in a mad world; it's governed by a philosophy of madness, one that's getting madder by the minute.