Rogue Messiah: The Philosophical Wanderer by Stuart N. Taba

2

Table of Contents

Prologue 3

1. Introduction 4

2. Belief, Truth, and Knowledge 12

3. Skepticism 23

4. Precursive Faith 39

5. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan 51

6. Free Will and Destiny 65

7. Human Agency 83

8. Asian Thought 91

9. Mind/Body 114

10. Ontology: East/West Perspectives 125

11. Dualism 143

12. Fear of Dying 157

13. Existence of God 206

14. Evil 236

15. Pascal’s Wager for God 254

16. A Slice of Theory of Everything 268

17. Theory of Everything 275

18. Endangered American Values 298

19. Absolutism/Relativism/Existentialism 388

20. Cosmic Consciousness 421

Epilogue 452

Start From Scratch:Begin with nothing without advantage. In racing the "scratch" is the starting line sometimes literally scratched on the ground. Horses or peope racing with a handicap start ahead of the line;the ones thought not to need a handicap "start from scratch." James Joyce, in Ulysses (1922), wrote of "A poor foreign imigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny." (pg. 247)

 

Prologue

I begin this manuscript –- “Rogue Messiah: The

Philosophical Wanderer” – by analyzing “Philosophy for

Dummies,” by Tom Morris, integrating the task from my

perspective. I then similarly read and write of former President

Jimmy Carter’s “Our Endangered Values,” an account of a

morally responsible man pushed from the Oval Office by the most

effective corporate spokesman of the media age, bringing forth an

era of exploitive Republican capitalism. Writing from my

perspective, I seek not merely to recite Carter’s message, but to

report and react to his issues and themes. “A Theory of

Everything,” by Ken Wilber, is the third book I use as the focal

point of my writing, highlighted by the descriptions of “second tier

consciousness,” the next step of the consciousness evolution. I then

turn to discuss absolutism, relativism, and existentialism, widening

the scope of my work. Finally, I conclude by incorporating

“Cosmic Consciousness,” by Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D., into

my realization of human destiny. This manuscript ends my “Rogue

Messiah” trilogy; in it, I have learned as I have read and written

of a coming era of higher consciousness revolution. Welcome, read

on.