Communities and the Co-Creation of Ignorance, Part 2

Communities and the

Co-Creation of Ignorance

PART 2

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

---

I - Broadly

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance,

[but] the illusion of knowledge.

- Daniel Boorstin

Ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge. It is something we make — co-created, sustained, and institutionalized by the very communities we inhabit. Through our shared customs, stories, silences, and systems, we collectively decide which truths to spotlight and which to suppress.

Cultures shape epistemology. They tell us what counts as worth knowing, who is allowed to speak, and whose voices can be ignored. From school curricula to media platforms, from religious teachings to political rhetoric, communal life functions as a layered filter — amplifying some truths while muffling others.

• History textbooks in many nations celebrate military victories and national heroes, but erase legacies of slavery, colonization, or genocide.

• News cycles sensationalize immediate drama while sidelining slow-moving catastrophes like ecological collapse or economic injustice.

• Religious doctrines often teach selective moral clarity while silencing historic complicity in racism, misogyny, or empire.

These are not isolated blind spots; they are social strategies. In each case, ignorance is engineered — not to deceive maliciously, but to stabilize identity, justify the status quo, and preserve collective pride. The result is what process thought might call a structured negation of becoming: the deliberate closure of possibilities that threaten comfort or control.

Such ignorance is never neutral. It is entangled in power, memory, and myth. It defines who belongs, who suffers, and what truths can be told.

In this way, communities establish “zones of silence” — forbidden terrains of memory or knowledge where difficult truths are kept at bay. These zones protect the collective self-image. But they do so at immense cost: they obscure justice, distort history, and delay healing.

The task, then, is not simply to accumulate more knowledge. It is to unmask the mechanisms of collective forgetting — and to ask what it would mean to become communities that no longer need to silence the truth in order to survive.

---

II - Locally (MAGAism)

A lie can travel halfway around the world

while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

- Often attributed to Mark Twain

I - MAGAism and the Weaponization of Ignorance

If ignorance is often co-created, it can also be weaponized. The MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement offers a clear and troubling case study of this phenomenon.

In the world of MAGAism, ignorance is not passive — it is strategically curated. Disinformation campaigns, rejection of electoral legitimacy, hostility toward science, and historical revisionism are deployed not as lapses in understanding, but as instruments of political power. Here, truth becomes negotiable, and loyalty to personality replaces loyalty to principle.

This weaponized ignorance operates on multiple levels:

---

✦ Individuals

Conspiracy theories like QAnon, COVID-19 vaccine microchip myths, or climate denial fracture families, isolate individuals from reality, and cultivate fear. These beliefs do not simply emerge — they are seeded, circulated, and reinforced through algorithmic echo chambers and partisan media ecosystems. In processual terms, they narrow the horizon of becoming, diminishing the relational openness that sustains truth and trust.

---

✦ Communities

Churches, schools, and neighborhoods become polarized and fragile. Once-plural spaces of shared identity are hollowed into zones of suspicion. School boards turn into ideological battlefields. Pulpits preach not grace, but grievance. Deliberation collapses under the weight of partisan absolutism. Communities become echo chambers of engineered antagonism.

---

✦ Nations

Shared democratic symbols - the flag, the Constitution, the idea of truth itself - fracture into competing fictions. Institutions once grounded in law and deliberation are eroded by performative rage and manufactured distrust. National coherence gives way to cultural fragmentation, threatening the very viability of governance.

---

✦ Economies

Anti-scientific rhetoric bleeds into national priorities. Pandemic denial costs lives and impairs healthcare systems. Resistance to renewable energy delays climate action. Attacks on education destabilize curricula and undermine future innovation. In the MAGA worldview, expertise becomes suspect — weakening the foundations of a thriving, adaptive economy.

---

✦ Democracy

Perhaps most fundamentally, democracy itself suffers. When truth becomes subordinated to tribal identity, facts can no longer hold a nation together. The social contract unravels, and authoritarianism rushes in to fill the void left by the collapse of shared reality. Elections become suspect, journalism becomes “fake news,” and law becomes selectively applied.

---

✦ Conclusion

MAGAism reveals that ignorance is not simply “not knowing” — it is a calculated refusal to know, shaped and sustained by power. It is a form of epistemological violence — a disruption of truth designed to consolidate control. This is not ignorance as accident; it is ignorance as strategy.

To respond, we must do more than correct falsehoods. We must understand the ecosystem that sustains them — and cultivate counter-processes that reweave relationship, restore trust, and nurture a shared reality in which all can participate.

---

III - Methodologies for Mapping Ignorance

We are not only stewards of what we know

but responsible for the ignorance we allow to persist.

- Miranda Fricker

Ignorance is not simply what we fail to know. It is often what we are trained not to see - shaped, maintained, and enforced by cultural systems, institutional power, and social norms. To understand ignorance as a structured presence rather than a passive absence, several scholarly methodologies offer critical insight.

Each of the frameworks below equips us with tools to unmask how ignorance is produced, protected, and perpetuated:

---

✦ Agnotology: The Deliberate Production of Ignorance

Coined by historian Robert Proctor, agnotology is the study of how ignorance is intentionally manufactured. Industries such as tobacco and fossil fuels provide clear examples: for decades, they funded misleading research and PR campaigns to “cast doubt” on settled science — first about the dangers of smoking, then about climate change.

Result: Delayed public health interventions, environmental degradation, and millions of preventable deaths. Ignorance here is not innocent; it is a strategy.

---

✦ Standpoint Theory: The Positional Nature of Truth

Developed by feminist and critical race theorists, standpoint theory argues that marginalized groups often perceive truths hidden from dominant perspectives. Excluding these voices doesn't just silence people — it erases insight.

Example: Women of color raised early alarms about environmental injustice—such as unsafe housing or toxic waste in low-income neighborhoods—long before mainstream acknowledgment. Their standpoint provided epistemic access others lacked.

---

✦ Epistemic Injustice: The Ethics of Knowing and Being Known

Philosopher Miranda Fricker introduced the concept of epistemic injustice — harm done to someone in their capacity as a knower. This takes two main forms:

Testimonial injustice: When a speaker’s word is discredited due to prejudice (e.g., a Black teenager’s eyewitness account is dismissed in court).

Hermeneutical injustice: When a person lacks the cultural tools to articulate experience (e.g., before the term sexual harassment existed, women’s workplace abuse was often unintelligible to legal systems).

Implication: Injustice doesn’t just operate through actions—it distorts what can be said, heard, or believed.

---

✦ Discourse and Power: Framing the Limits of Thought

Michel Foucault’s work on discourse and power reveals how institutions define what counts as knowledge. What we call “truth” is often shaped by “regimes of truth”—authorized by those in power, enforced through norms, and protected by language.

Example: During the Cold War, mainstream U.S. political discourse rendered any defense of socialism “un-American.” This narrowed the public’s conceptual horizon, making certain economic alternatives almost unthinkable—even when urgently needed.

---

✦ Synthesis: Ignorance as Structured Presence

Together, these methodologies expose ignorance not as a blank space, but as a constructed terrain - shaped by power, institutional design, cultural habits, and selective memory. To resist toxic unknowing, we must learn to interrogate how and why certain truths are obscured, discredited, or rendered invisible.

Understanding ignorance requires more than adding information. It demands we reconfigure the frameworks of attention, authority, and expression - the very structures by which knowledge becomes possible.

---

IV - Processual Epistemology: Ignorance as Frontier

The many become one, and are increased by one.

- Alfred North Whitehead

From a process perspective, ignorance is not simply a failure - it is a feature of an unfinished, unfolding reality. In a world that is open, relational, and in constant becoming, ignorance is inevitable. It arises not because we are flawed, but because we are not yet complete. The question is not whether ignorance exists, but how we respond to it.

Communities can either distort ignorance into rigidity and fear, or receive it as an invitation—a horizon from which creativity, transformation, and justice can emerge. A processual epistemology reframes ignorance through four overlapping lenses:

---

✦ Structural: Systems That Shape Knowing

All knowledge is shaped by structures—schools, media, religious institutions, governments. These systems decide not only what we know, but what remains hidden.

When schools ban books or censor curricula (e.g., on race or gender), they don't just omit facts—they build walls of ignorance.

But schools can also become sites of positive disruption: teaching students not only what is known, but how to ask: What don’t we know yet?

Ignorance becomes dangerous when structures are used to narrow inquiry. It becomes creative when structures cultivate curiosity, complexity, and courage.

✦ Relational: Who Is Allowed to Speak?

Ignorance grows where dialogue collapses. When marginalized voices—whether of migrants, women, Indigenous communities, or religious minorities—are excluded, ignorance calcifies.

Silence is not neutral. It is often a symptom of power suppressing difference.

But when communities open space for genuine listening across difference, ignorance becomes a bridge to deeper understanding. In process thought, relation is the ground of becoming—so ignorance dissolves as relationality deepens.

✦ Invitational: Not-Knowing as Fertile Ground

Ignorance need not be shameful. It can be a threshold—a sign that something new is possible. In science, ignorance drives inquiry. In art, it fuels imagination. In faith, it cultivates humility before mystery.

Ignorance framed as failure leads to defensiveness.

Ignorance framed as horizon opens space for growth.

Communities that embrace the invitation of not-knowing become more adaptive, creative, and just.

✦ Ethical: The Morality of Ignorance

Not all ignorance is innocent. Some forms—like climate denial, historical revisionism, or racial erasure—are not passive but active refusals to engage with truth. These are not knowledge gaps; they are ethical failures.

By contrast, epistemic humility (“I may be wrong. I want to learn.”) transforms ignorance into moral growth.

From a processual lens, how we handle ignorance is a question of character, community, and care. Ignorance becomes a crucible in which ethical formation is tested and renewed.

---

V - Conclusion: Ignorance as Edge of Becoming

Thus, in a process worldview, ignorance is not just a void to be filled. It is a living frontier—the edge of becoming. The question is not how to eliminate ignorance entirely (an impossible task), but how to live with it responsively, relationally, and redemptively.

Communities that treat ignorance as invitation rather than threat can transform what seems like limitation into a resource for justice, creativity, and solidarity. In this way, not-knowing becomes not just a problem—but a path.

Knowing, Not-Knowing, and Becoming: A Processual Guide - Part 1-6 (Part 1)

Knowing, Not-Knowing, and Becoming:

A Processual Guide

PART 1-6

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change,

and to preserve change amid order.

- Alfred North Whitehead

Order or disorder are not inherently good nor bad -

they gain meaning only through movement toward

value, creativity, and compassion.

- RE Slater

This essay forms part of a five-part series titled “Knowing, Not-Knowing, and Becoming: A Processual Guide” - an exploration of how knowledge, ignorance, disruption, and renewal shape our individual and collective journeys of becoming.

We live in a fractured age marked by contested truths, rising authoritarianism, epistemic breakdowns, and the erosion of shared trust. In such a world, ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge; it is often manufactured, wielded, and weaponized. Yet ignorance and disruption, though dangerous, are not only threats. They are also invitations: to listen more deeply, to question false certainties, and to disrupt systems not just destructively, but generatively.

Process thought teaches us that reality is always in the making—open-ended, relational, and co-created. In this spirit, this guide begins with two conceptual maps: epistemology (how we come to know) and agnotology (how ignorance is socially constructed and maintained). These maps are not abstractions; they are lived terrains shaped by power, culture, and history.

As the guide unfolds, we turn toward the destructive dynamics of ignorance, paying special attention to the toxic disruptions of MAGAism. These movements have frayed the social fabric—damaging lives, polarizing communities, undermining truth, and destabilizing democratic norms. But even in this rupture, there is potential. Disruption is not always decay; it can be a clearing, a space from which new ways of knowing, relating, and organizing can emerge.

The final section offers a processual framework for positive disruption—not as a violent act of rejection, but as a compassionate disturbance of what is toxic, rigid, or unjust. It invites us to unsettle false constructions of:

• Personal identity (formed through fear, division, or supremacy)

• Societal myths (of nationalism, exceptionalism, or purity)

• Church structures (that privilege hierarchy over relational grace)

• Political authoritarianism (which thrives on dehumanization and control)

• Theological dogma (that reduces the divine to fixed, exclusionary systems)

Throughout, we affirm that to know is not to conquer, but to engage—to enter into the world’s complexity with clarity and care. To not-know is not failure, but the ground of humility and openness. And to disrupt is not always to destroy, but often to clear space for what can heal and grow.

This processual guide invites you to hold these tensions creatively. To live them. To become through them. It is not a roadmap toward certainty, but a rhythm of living: knowing, unknowing, and becoming - together.

---

Preface

Some fractures are sudden. Others are slow — accumulating over years, hidden beneath polite silence or fortified by loud certainties. We are living in the midst of both. Truths once trusted are now contested. Communities once whole are splintered. And beneath the noise, many carry a quiet ache: a longing for clarity, for courage, for connection.

This is not a time for easy answers. It is a time for deeper seeing. For learning how knowledge is formed — and how ignorance is cultivated. For noticing not only what we believe, but why we believe it, and how belief can be bent toward harm or healing.

This collection is not a doctrine, but a rhythm. It does not promise mastery, but movement. Through the languages of process thought, theology, and social critique, it seeks to make space — for unlearning, for disrupting, for becoming.

We begin not with conclusions, but with attentiveness. We listen for what truth sounds like beneath distortion, what wisdom feels like in the presence of humility, and what love requires when the ground is shifting.

This is a guide for those willing to walk through uncertain doorways. For those who sense that knowing is not conquest, and not-knowing is not failure. For those who believe that disruption can be holy when it clears the ground for something truer to grow.

Let us begin.

---

Mapping Knowing and Not-Knowing

PART 1

by R.E. Slater and ChatGPT-5

We live in a fractured age — one marked by contested truths, toxic disruptions, and deep cultural divides. In such a time, both knowing and not-knowing matter. Knowledge alone is not enough; ignorance itself must be understood, for it is as socially created as knowledge. Our task is not only to resist toxic beliefs and acts but to disrupt them positively, opening pathways toward renewal.

This collection gathers reflections on epistemology and agnotology, on personal and communal identity, on church structures, political life, and theology. It explores how ignorance is manufactured, how toxic movements disrupt democracy and community, and how process thought offers a way forward: not by clinging to rigid certainties, but by embracing reality as a dynamic becoming.

At its heart, this work is a guide to living humbly with both knowledge and ignorance, courageously disrupting what harms, and co-creating what heals. In the rhythm of knowing and not-knowing, we may discover the seeds of becoming together.

---

I - How We Know (Epistemologies)

Every great advance in natural knowledge

has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

- Thomas Huxley

• Rationalism — Rationalists argue that human reason and innate structures of thought are the deepest sources of knowledge. Thinkers such as Descartes and Leibniz emphasized that certain truths (e.g., mathematics, logic) can be grasped independently of sensory experience. Rationalism trusts the mind’s capacity to discover universal principles. 🔗 Wikipedia: Rationalism

• Empiricism — Empiricists like Locke and Hume stressed that all knowledge begins with experience. Sense impressions provide the raw data for reflection, from which abstract concepts emerge. This view grounds science in observation and experiment, but also faces challenges (e.g., induction). 🔗 Wikipedia: Empiricism

• Foundationalism — Foundationalism seeks certainty by building knowledge upon “basic beliefs” (self-evident, incorrigible, or directly given). From these secure starting points, further beliefs are justified. While appealing, critics argue that no belief is beyond challenge. 🔗 Wikipedia: Foundationalism

• Coherentism — Coherentists deny the need for indubitable foundations, claiming that beliefs are justified when they cohere within a larger web of interconnected beliefs. The strength of justification comes from mutual support. Critics warn this may allow circularity or relativism. 🔗 Wikipedia: Coherentism

• Infinitism — A less common view, infinitism argues that justification requires an infinite chain of non-repeating reasons. While seemingly impractical, it avoids the pitfalls of circular reasoning or arbitrary foundational stopping points. 🔗 Wikipedia: Infinitism

• Pragmatism — Pragmatists such as Peirce, James, and Dewey defined truth as what “works” in lived practice. Ideas are validated by their consequences and utility, not by correspondence to some static essence. Knowledge is always provisional, tested by experience, and open to revision. 🔗 Wikipedia: Pragmatism

• Naturalized Epistemology — Quine argued that epistemology should be continuous with the natural sciences, especially psychology and cognitive science. Instead of seeking ultimate justification, we should study how humans actually form beliefs and learn. 🔗 Wikipedia: Naturalized Epistemology

• Reliabilism — Reliabilists claim that beliefs are justified if they are produced by processes that are generally reliable (e.g., memory, perception, logical inference). It shifts the focus away from internal certainty toward external dependability. 🔗 Wikipedia: Reliabilism

• Evidentialism — Evidentialists hold that a belief is justified only if supported by sufficient evidence. W.K. Clifford’s dictum remains central: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” 🔗 Wikipedia: Evidentialism

• Virtue Epistemology — This view emphasizes the qualities of the knower, such as open-mindedness, intellectual humility, and courage. Knowledge depends not just on having true beliefs, but on being a virtuous knower. 🔗 Wikipedia: Virtue Epistemology

• Social & Feminist Epistemology — These approaches stress that knowledge is not purely individual but socially situated. Who counts as a “knower,” whose voices are excluded, and how power shapes inquiry all matter for truth. 🔗 Wikipedia: Feminist Epistemology

• Bayesian Epistemology — Models belief as degrees of probability, updated mathematically in response to new evidence. Bayesian reasoning is influential in science, AI, and decision-making. 🔗 Wikipedia: Bayesian Epistemology

• Process Epistemology — Process views reject static certainty and treat knowledge as relational, contextual, and always unfolding. Knowing is an event of becoming, shaped by interaction, creativity, and openness to novelty. 🔗 Discussion: Process Epistemology.

---

IA - Processual Perspective on Knowing (Epistemologies)

In process philosophy, knowing is not static or isolated, but relational, temporal, and participatory. It is an unfolding process—a continuous becoming—where the knower and the known co-create meaning through experience. Rather than aiming for an immutable certainty, knowledge is approached as a living act within an evolving context.

Traditional epistemologies such as empiricism, rationalism, or foundationalism often seek fixed grounds for certainty. Process thought reorients these toward fluid grounds of becoming, where truth is not located in isolated facts or unchanging principles, but in the creative integration of past experience, present interpretation, and future possibility.

The processual view values pragmatic engagement, contextual insight, and mutual prehension—the felt interrelation between subject and object. It honors naturalized, social, and feminist epistemologies for recognizing the embeddedness of knowledge in lived experience and shared structures. It also integrates Bayesian, virtue, and process epistemologies as tools for navigating change, uncertainty, and emergence.

In this framework, knowing is always unfinished—a creative advance into novelty, ever open to revision and enrichment. Truth becomes less about correspondence and more about coherence within a dynamic whole, oriented toward value, relational adequacy, and compassionate application.

Thus, to “know” in process is not to grasp and hold, but to participate and evolve—to move with reality rather than master it.

---

*Process Agnotology = A Process Theory of Ignorance

---

II - How We Do Not Know (Theories of Ignorance & Limits)

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

- Francis Bacon

Ignorance is not simply lack of knowledge but the refusal

to know, a turning away from what unsettles.

- Charles Mills

Here we survey major theories of knowledge (epistemologies) and of ignorance (agnotologies), showing how each frames the human quest for truth. We end with a processual perspective: knowledge as dynamic, ignorance as horizon.

• Agnotology — Coined by historian Robert Proctor, agnotology is the study of how ignorance is deliberately created or sustained. Tobacco companies, fossil fuel lobbies, and authoritarian regimes have all manufactured doubt to maintain power. Ignorance is not mere absence; it is often intentional.
  🔗 Wikipedia: Agnotology

• Gettier Problems — Edmund Gettier’s 1963 paper demonstrated that “justified true belief” is insufficient for knowledge. In his famous examples, someone may hold a belief that is both true and justified, yet still correct only by luck. This forced philosophers to refine what counts as knowledge.🔗 IEP: Gettier Problems

• Underdetermination — Evidence often supports multiple, competing theories equally well. For example, early astronomy could be explained by both Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. This suggests data alone may not determine truth. 🔗 Stanford Encyclopedia: Underdetermination

• Duhem–Quine Thesis — Scientific hypotheses cannot be tested in isolation, but only in conjunction with auxiliary assumptions. When predictions fail, we may not know whether the core theory or the background assumptions are to blame. 🔗 Wikipedia: Duhem–Quine Thesis

• Theory-Ladenness of Observation — All observation is filtered by prior concepts, assumptions, and theories. There is no “neutral seeing”; what we perceive is shaped by interpretation.

• Incommensurability — Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend argued that scientific paradigms can be so different in concepts and methods that they cannot be directly compared. This challenges ideas of cumulative progress.

• Skepticism — Philosophical skepticism doubts whether certainty is ever possible. From ancient skeptics to Descartes’ doubts about perception, skepticism highlights the fragility of justification.

• Problem of Induction — David Hume showed that there is no logical guarantee that the future will resemble the past. Induction (drawing generalizations from experience) works pragmatically but lacks certainty.

• Fallibilism — The principle that all human knowledge is provisional. Even our best-supported beliefs may be mistaken, and therefore must remain open to revision.

• Epistemic Luck — Knowledge requires more than truth and justification; it must avoid being correct “by accident.” Gettier-style examples highlight this vulnerability.

• Epistemic Closure Failure — Challenges the idea that knowledge is closed under known entailment. You may know you have hands, but not be able to rule out being a brain in a vat — suggesting closure does not always hold.

• Cognitive Bias & Heuristics — Psychological research shows that humans rely on mental shortcuts (heuristics) that distort judgment, such as confirmation bias or availability bias. These produce systematic ignorance.

• Standpoint Blindness — When dominant perspectives marginalize or silence others, whole domains of knowledge are lost. Feminist standpoint theory highlights how excluding oppressed groups sustains collective ignorance.

• Testimonial Injustice — Miranda Fricker’s term for when prejudice leads us to discredit someone’s testimony. This silences voices and perpetuates ignorance.

• Power/Ideology — Michel Foucault and others note that what counts as “truth” is shaped by structures of power. Knowledge is never neutral; it is entangled in systems of domination.

• Radical Uncertainty — Some realities are not just unknown but unknowable in advance, such as emergent phenomena in complex systems. This challenges rational planning.

• The Unknowable — Some realities lie beyond human comprehension: Kant’s noumenon, divine mystery, or aspects of quantum mechanics. This humbles reason and expands awe..

---

IIA - Processual Perspective on Ignorance and Epistemic Limits

In process philosophy, knowledge is not a fixed possession, but a dynamic unfolding—a continual becoming shaped by experience, relation, and interpretation. It is always in flux, emerging through interactions with the world, others, and ourselves.

From this view, ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge but the horizon that defines the boundaries of our current awareness. It is not a failure, but a necessary and even productive space: the edge from which novelty arises and where learning becomes possible. Just as the future draws the present forward, ignorance invites inquiry and calls us into deeper participation with the world.

Where traditional epistemologies seek certainty or static truth, a processual epistemology embraces contingency, context, and growth. It acknowledges that knowing is always partial and that un-knowing is not an obstacle, but part of the creative tension that fuels transformation. Ignorance, rightly engaged, is the soil of wisdom.

In this way, process thought encourages epistemic humility, ethical openness, and imaginative engagement. It teaches us that not knowing is not the end of understanding—but its beginning.

Processual Meaning in Motion, Part 3

Processual Meaning in Motion:

Frege, Process and Developing

a Living Language

Part 3

Metamodern Theosophy:

Semantic Reinterpretation in Process Philosophy

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

return to Part 1

continue from Part 2

RES

How might process theosophy (discussed in Part 1) address classical Christian thought using Frege's semantics so that the hidden or the sublime might be heightened or expanded?

Chat GPT

This is a rich and profound question - inviting us to explore how process theosophy might use Frege’s semantic framework to reframe and deepen classic Christian thought, particularly in revealing the hidden and sublime meanings that traditional theology often flattens or misrepresents.

Let’s approach this in four layers:

🔹 1. Frege’s Semantic Triad and Theology

Recall Frege’s triad:

• Sign (Zeichen): The linguistic form (e.g., "God," "salvation," "resurrection")

• Sense (Sinn): The conceptual content or mode of presentation (e.g., “God as sovereign ruler” vs. “God as relational becoming”)

• Reference (Bedeutung): The real entity or truth the word points to (e.g., God, actual redemptive transformation, etc.)

In traditional theology:

• The sign is often treated as fixed and sacred.

• The sense is inherited dogmatically (creedal).

• The reference is presumed to be metaphysically static and absolute.

But this locks meaning into closed containers - mistaking orthodoxy’s sense for the fullness of divine reference.

🔹 2. Process Theosophy: The Recovery of the Sublime Sense

Process theosophy, especially grounded in Whiteheadian metaphysics, challenges this static approach. It posits:

• God is not a static object but an evolving relational reality - luring creation toward novelty, justice, beauty.

• Religious language is symbolic and unfolding, not final.

• Revelation is ongoing, not fixed and closed.

Thus, process theosophy decouples sign from rigid sense. It reopens theological signs (e.g., “glory,” “judgment,” “Christ”) to new, dynamic senses that more accurately resonate with the actual reference: a co-creative, persuasive divine reality which is always in process, evolving and becoming towards redemptive fullness.

➤ Frege’s model helps process thought reveal:

• That the traditional sense of Christian terms is often misaligned with their reference in lived, relational experience.

• That true sublimity - the divine lure: reality's unfolding beauty - has been trapped in stale or moralistic senses of words.

• That "misunderstood subliminals" are often the true depth behind the signs, long ignored by creedal literalism.

🔹 3. Bringing Forth the Hidden: Theopoetic Application

Let’s apply this through an example:

Word/Sign: Salvation

• Classical “Salvation”  = Escape from hell; legal pardon God’s saving act in Christ

• Processual “Salvation” = Transformative participation in divine life; an ongoing relational becoming into divine harmony

Inplication:

• The sign is the same.

• The reference, God’s redemptive activity, is arguably the same.

• But the sense in process thought is far more sublime, hidden, evolving, and more existentially true than the juridical framework of classic theology.

🔹 4. Theosophic Implication: From Public Misunderstanding to Sublime Realization

In this light, processual theosophy becomes a hermeneutics of uncovering:

• It re-signifies theological language so it aligns with a living divine reference.

• It invites mystagogy, not dogma - guiding people into the unfolding mystery, rather than enclosing them in fixed dogmatic senses.

• It restores the sublime not as supernatural spectacle, but as emerging/emergent presence in becoming.

This re-enchantment isn’t irrational... it’s supra-rational, poetic, relational, open. It takes what was publicly known (the sign), confronts the classically-and-Platonically misaligned sense, and reinterprets the meaning processually to reflect the truer reference: That God is a God ever in transformatively loving process with-and-alongside the world.

✨ Summary in Fregean Terms:

Process theology reclaims theologically "closed" signs from their fossilized senses, realigns them with the living reference of God-and-creation's divine becoming, thus revealing the hidden sublimity previously veiled by millennia of dogmatic misuse.

What the Sign Forgot

A Fregean Theosophy in Verse

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

> The word was sung - salvation true,

a symbolic sound all faithful knew

It rang in pews, in solemn creeds,

but missed divinity's life in whisper needs.

> For sense was shaped in courts and kings,

of wrath and rules and mortal things;

That forged heavy chains from fear and guilt,

miscalling it love O' wretched thing.

> Yet still the sign had deeper delves and dreams,

which meaning flowed 'neath all living things;

As justice danced in mercy’s fire,

yet a loving God transfixed all souls' desire.

Not iron gates, but gardens wide and flowing,

nor fiery wrath, but bounteous rivers deep and true;

A heavenly process filled with hearts renewing,

not saved from hell but saved into creation's mystery.

Having traced salvation's hidden frame,

from broken words to living impress;

Though symboled sign yet remains -

it's sense expands Love's divining reference.

The Sign that Grew Wings

A Fregean Theosophy in Verse

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

The sign once stood like carved tablet stone,
cold syllables beneath Almighty's throne.
But time has turned the world askew -
breaking meaning from it's granite script.

The sense now sings in layered tones,
not fixed, but enfolding like winged flames.
In consuming reference, unchained, unbound,

across lively acts met within loving hands.

Let us then behold divine's signs grow wings,
to flutter and soar beyond the breath of men.
For only when we dare re-learn, re-vision,
can God be truly beheld salvation's meaning.

Finale

What began with Frege’s precision ends in metamodern resonance. Meaning, once seen as static correspondence, becomes living coherence in motion. Through processual theosophy, theology returns to life - not as defense of doctrine, but as participatory artistry within divine enfolding. In Fregian Process, signs evolve, senses deepen, and references emerge within deepening relationships.

This is theology reborn:

not in the preservation of hardened meaning - but in its renewal.

Not in the defense of fixed truths - but within the maturation of becoming.

In Frege’s logic, meaning was the bridge between word and world.

In processual theosophy, meaning is the world becoming lively word.

- R.E. Slater & ChatGPT