tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63189842024-03-13T21:33:48.803-07:00PersnicketyA mental inventory of inanimate artificial pejoratives...and other stuff.
"--Allas vas, valenton del mundo!" --Don Q.PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.comBlogger181125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-89681683483932461682019-09-08T04:36:00.000-07:002019-09-08T04:36:07.849-07:00Favorite Line in a Movie...My favorite movie, a movie I believe to be a perfect gem, is <i>The Third Man</i>. There are many wonderful lines in that movie, both by the author, Graham Greene, and by that genius Orson Welles. But the line I choose to be my favorite is from <i>Dr. Zhivago, </i>a line that I must have heard many times yet when I hear it again I will weep again.<br />
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General Yevgraf—Yuri’s half brother—is attempting to convince young Tanya Komarova (listed as “The Girl” in IMDB casting, played by Rita Tushingham) that she is the long sought after daughter of Yuri and Lara. There’s no proof, but the general tells her to consider the tale he has told her and that she should think it all over. She leaves along with her boyfriend. Tanya walks away, beneath the floor above where Yevgraf watches her. As she slings a balalaika over her shoulder he notes it and asks if she plays. “Does she play? She’s an artist!” the boyfriend exclaims.<br />
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The general hears this and smiles, knowing exactly what it portends:<br />
“Ah. Then it’s a gift.”<br />
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The movie showcases the struggle of individualism against a tide of social pressure in the form of Soviet communism. It pits the poet/artist against the will of communism, a kind of man versus nature story where nature here is the social force of political affliction. The Soviets have won the day, society has become structured and constricted--the individual has lost this war...or was it but a battle? Yuri is dead of a heart attack in a vain attempt to reach a woman on the street he supposes is Lara, long lost to him. Lara later drifts down one of those streams that carries us all away into the unknown. All seems lost in the face of Soviet conformity.<br />
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Then a small sprig of green, in the form of this girl who just might be the child of Yuri the poet and Lara his forever love, peeps out of the frozen tundra which is Soviet Russia. Against all odds it is there, growing green and strong and not to be denied. How can it be? Perhaps the war was not lost after all? Perhaps the spark of the individual artist is still alive in another generation? How can mere individuals attempt to break the bonds of the social conformity they found themselves chained to?<br />
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“Ah. Then it’s a gift.”<br />
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<a href="https://youtu.be/Nn1eDT93H1Y" target="_blank">Ending to Dr. Zhivago</a><br />
<br />PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-9342270828042951332019-09-08T04:27:00.001-07:002019-09-08T04:27:57.794-07:00After a Trump Victory in 2020, How Would I React?After a Trump Victory in 2020, How Would I React?<br />
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With resignation.<br />
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Allow me to explain. Resignation may be applied to someone who takes an unfortunate circumstance with grace and decorum, or if not with that level of charitableness, then at least a simple stoicism.<br />
I do not mean that.<br />
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I mean the other definition: the act of giving up one’s position.<br />
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If Trump and the Republicans win the Senate once again, the country will officially be a failed experiment. The American Empire will be over. We will have imploded, blown ourselves up from within, and not with a bang but a whimper, as Eliot said.<br />
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The climate will then be well over the tipping point of no return. Our grand-kids will be doomed…humanity itself will have set the alarm to some centuries further on. And so there won’t be a whole lot to do anymore. We can—many will, no doubt—gnash our teeth, fulminate, march, and so on, but it will have been a case of too little, too late. They might as well save the wear and tear on the soles of their shoes. Done. Over. Out.<br />
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So those of us such as myself, approaching retirement, will plan to live outside the country if we are able, and those who are chained to the borders (some literally?) will need to bear it all somehow. The progressive cause—merely the idea that things can be improved on—will die.<br />
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To experience the death of a nation is not a pleasant prospect. Best to do something about it right now. Vote and get everyone you know to vote. The Republicans cannot win if those who regularly do not vote do in fact show up. This is it. The whole shootin’ match is coming up on November, 2020. If these people are allowed to succeed we can only look into the collective mirror and state quite directly that we did not deserve the beauty and august political machine which the founders passed on to us.PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-50972588624965975702018-06-14T04:45:00.000-07:002018-06-14T04:45:45.294-07:00J. K. Rowling ManifestoI've just come across a piece by J. K. Rowling, she of Harry Potter fame, and I wanted to showcase it. It is from years ago, concerning an election in the UK but I think it still applies, especially in the current dawn of the neo-fascist Trump era. So...<br />
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From <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Times Online</em>, J.K. Rowling writes:</div>
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<img align="left" alt="JKR" border="0" src="https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/images/morleyd/2010/04/15/jk_rowling.jpg?maxWidth=500" style="margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;" />I’ve never voted Tory before, but . . .” Those much parodied posters, with their photogenic subjects and their trite captions, remind me irresistibly of glossy greetings cards. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more general elections have in common with the birthdays of middle life. Both entail a lot of largely unwelcome fuss; both offer unrivalled opportunities for congratulation and spite, and you have seen so many go by that a lot of the excitement has worn off.</div>
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Nevertheless, they become more meaningful, more serious. Behind all the bombast and balloons there is the melancholy awareness of more time gone, the tally of ambitions achieved and of opportunities missed.</div>
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So here we are again, taking stock of where we are, and of where we would like to be, both as individuals and as a country. Personally, I keep having flashbacks to 1997, and not merely because of the most memorable election result in recent times. In January that year, I was a single parent with a four-year-old daughter, teaching part-time but living mainly on benefits, in a rented flat. Eleven months later, I was a published author who had secured a lucrative publishing deal in the US, and bought my first ever property: a three-bedroom house with a garden.</div>
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I had become a single mother when my first marriage split up in 1993. In one devastating stroke, I became a hate figure to a certain section of the press, and a bogeyman to the Tory Government. Peter Lilley, then Secretary of State at the DSS, had recently entertained the Conservative Party conference with a spoof Gilbert and Sullivan number, in which he decried “young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list”. The Secretary of State for Wales, John Redwood, castigated single-parent families from St Mellons, Cardiff, as “one of the biggest social problems of our day”. (John Redwood has since divorced the mother of his children.) Women like me (for it is a curious fact that lone male parents are generally portrayed as heroes, whereas women left holding the baby are vilified) were, according to popular myth, a prime cause of social breakdown, and in it for all we could get: free money, state-funded accommodation, an easy life.</div>
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An easy life. Between 1993 and 1997 I did the job of two parents, qualified and then worked as a secondary school teacher, wrote one and a half novels and did the planning for a further five. For a while, I was clinically depressed. To be told, over and over again, that I was feckless, lazy — even immoral — did not help.</div>
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The new Labour landslide marked a cessation in government hostilities towards families like mine. The change in tone was very welcome, but substance is, of course, more important than style. Labour had great ambitions for eradicating child poverty and while it succeeded, initially, in reversing the downward trend that had continued uninterrupted under Tory rule, it has not reached its own targets. There remains much more to be done.</div>
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This is not to say that there have not been real innovations to help lone-parent families. First, childcare tax credits were introduced by Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor, which were a meaningful way of addressing the fact that the single biggest obstacle for lone parents returning to work was not innate slothfulness but the near-impossibility of affording adequate childcare.</div>
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Then came Sure Start centres, of which there are now more than 3,000 across the UK: service centres where families with children under 5 can receive integrated service and information. Unless you have previously grappled with the separate agencies involved in housing, education and childcare, you might not be able to appreciate what a great innovation these centres are. They link to Jobcentres, offering help to secure employment, and give advice on parenting, childcare, education, specialist services and even health. A National Audit Office memorandum published last January found that the overall effectiveness of 98 per cent of the childcare offered was judged to be “good or outstanding”.</div>
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So here we are, in 2010, with what promises to be another memorable election in the offing. Gingerbread (now amalgamated with the National Council for One Parent Families), keen to forestall the mud-slinging of the early Nineties, recently urged Messrs Brown, Cameron and Clegg to sign up to a campaign called Let’s Lose the Labels, which aims to fight negative stereotyping of lone parents. Here are just a few of the facts that sometimes get lost on the way to an easy story, or a glib stump speech: only 13 per cent of single parents are under 25 years old, the average age being 36. Fifty-two per cent live below the breadline and 26 per cent in “non-decent” housing. Single-parent families are more likely than couple families to have a member with a disability, which gives some idea of the strains that cause family break up. In spite of all the obstacles, 56.3 per cent of lone parents are in paid employment.</div>
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As there are 1.9 million single-parent votes up for grabs, it ought not to surprise anyone that all three leaders of the main political parties agreed to sign up to Gingerbread’s campaign. For David Cameron, however, this surely involves a difficult straddling act.</div>
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Yesterday’s Conservative manifesto makes it clear that the Tories aim for less governmental support for the needy, and more input from the “third sector”: charity. It also reiterates the flagship policy so proudly defended by David Cameron last weekend, that of “sticking up for marriage”. To this end, they promise a half-a-billion pound tax break for lower-income married couples, working out at £150 per annum.</div>
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I accept that my friends and I might be atypical. Maybe you know people who would legally bind themselves to another human being, for life, for an extra £150 a year? Perhaps you were contemplating leaving a loveless or abusive marriage, but underwent a change of heart on hearing about a possible £150 tax break? Anything is possible; but somehow, I doubt it. Even Mr Cameron seems to admit that he is offering nothing more than a token gesture when he tells us “it’s not the money, it’s the message”.</div>
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Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the message”. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money. If Mr Cameron’s only practical advice to women living in poverty, the sole carers of their children, is “get married, and we’ll give you £150”, he reveals himself to be completely ignorant of their true situation.</div>
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How many prospective husbands did I ever meet, when I was the single mother of a baby, unable to work, stuck inside my flat, night after night, with barely enough money for life’s necessities? Should I have proposed to the youth who broke in through my kitchen window at 3am? Half a billion pounds, to send a message — would it not be more cost-effective, more personal, to send all the lower-income married people flowers?</div>
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Suggestions that Mr Cameron seems oblivious to how poor people actually live, think and behave seem to provoke accusations of class warfare. Let me therefore state, for the record, that I do not think it any more his fault that he spent his adolescence in the white tie and tails of Eton than that I spent the almost identical period in the ghastly brown-and-yellow stylings of Wyedean Comprehensive. I simply want to know that aspiring prime ministers have taken the trouble to educate themselves about the lives of all kinds of Britons, not only the sort that send messages with banknotes.</div>
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But wait, some will say. Given that you have long since left single parenthood for marriage and a nuclear family; given that you are now so far from a life dependent on benefits that Private Eye habitually refers to you as Rowlinginnit, why do you care? Surely, nowadays, you are a natural Tory voter?</div>
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No, I’m afraid not. The 2010 election campaign, more than any other, has underscored the continuing gulf between Tory values and my own. It is not only that the renewed marginalisation of the single, the divorced and the widowed brings back very bad memories. There has also been the revelation, after ten years of prevarication on the subject, that Lord Ashcroft, deputy chairman of the Conservatives, is non-domiciled for tax purposes.</div>
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Now, I never, ever, expected to find myself in a position where I could understand, from personal experience, the choices and temptations open to a man as rich as Lord Ashcroft. The fact remains that the first time I ever met my recently retired accountant, he put it to me point-blank: would I organise my money around my life, or my life around my money? If the latter, it was time to relocate to Ireland, Monaco, or possibly Belize.</div>
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I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.</div>
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A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.</div>
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Child poverty remains a shameful problem in this country, but it will never be solved by throwing millions of pounds of tax breaks at couples who have no children at all. David Cameron tells us that the Conservatives have changed, that they are no longer the “nasty party”, that he wants the UK to be “one of the most family-friendly nations in Europe”, but I, for one, am not buying it. He has repackaged a policy that made desperate lives worse when his party was last in power, and is trying to sell it as something new. I’ve never voted Tory before ... and they keep on reminding me why.</div>
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PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-21687633516365606642018-05-01T11:42:00.000-07:002018-05-01T11:42:00.072-07:00Typical Evangelical Sermon<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">I’ve just finished listening to a sermon by Erwin Lutzer, at the Word Of Life Florida Conference Center (January 28, 2018: “How to Die for the Glory of God”). It concerned our attitude towards our own death. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">I won’t attempt to transcribe it, or outline it. But I do want to say something about it, as it seems to me to be emblematic of evangelical sermons written today. It contains the chief elements necessary for a sermon to be “evangelical.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">These are:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Placing ultimate value on an individual’s grace</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">God is Supreme</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Call to circle the wagons</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Reliance on cliche</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Showing the divide between the Saved and the Damned, the Christian and the...well, damned, using biblical evidence picked, chosen among many verses leaving out any that might show another viewpoint.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Jesus is supremely valuable, says Lutzer. He says, “</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">My</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;"> death is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">my </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">win [my emphasis].” </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">To live is Christ, to die is gain. --Philippians 1:21 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">The evangelical sees death as a win...</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">his</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;"> win. There is so much of a kind of capitalism of the spirit that it leaves Jesus’ teaching to love another as oneself completely out of it all. We seem, in the evangelical church, to be concerned with our own saving grace, and less for those in the world. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">And let me take a moment and speak about how the typical pastor will trot out commonly held information that is simply not true. It has been recognised for a long time that John could not have written the Gospel of John. It is too late a book. Also, it is written in such a way that a common laborer living within the confines of Palestine, in Galilee, certainly would not have written it. It also happens to be </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">anonymously </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">written. All the gospels are anonymous. Why trot out these unproven--unproved, and unprovable--claims? It just makes the entire evangelical Church look false and cultish.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">God is supreme...except when He isn’t. Our deaths, Lutzer says, should be seen as God given, and along the timeline of God. Don’t commit suicide and muck of God’s plan. That’s putting a period where there should be a comma (another cliche). Yet he also holds out the possibility of suicide as being within God’s plan...leave it all to God. Here Lutzer probably understands that there are listeners here that know someone who has died from their own hand. He wishes to give some comfort. But his reasoning is such that he is awash in inconsistencies and contradictions. Is God telling someone to commit suicide or not? Does someone go to Hell after a suicide? Is suicide of Satan...or is everything of God’s choice? How about this: just admit you don’t know anything and that this is all speculation. But that would be honest and plain.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">And to evidence the devastation of mankind as a kind of glory to be lauded and appreciated is to go beyond the pale. Lutzer cities Cyprian of Carthage as someone who recognized that our suffering is but an opportunity to praise God. Here [I’ve simply copied from Wikipedia], Cyprian has written:</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">"This trial, that now the bowels, relaxed into a constant flux, discharge the bodily strength; that a fire originated in the marrow ferments into wounds of the </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_of_the_fauces" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">fauces</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">; that the intestines are shaken with a continual vomiting; that the eyes are on fire with the injected blood; that in some cases the feet or some parts of the limbs are taken off by the contagion of diseased putrefaction; that from the weakness arising by the maiming and loss of the body, either the gait is enfeebled, or the hearing is obstructed, or the sight darkened;—is profitable as a proof of faith. What a grandeur of spirit it is to struggle with all the powers of an unshaken mind against so many onsets of devastation and death! what sublimity, to stand erect amid the desolation of the human race, and not to lie prostrate with those who have no hope in </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">God</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">; but rather to rejoice, and to embrace the benefit of the occasion; that in thus bravely showing forth our faith, and by suffering endured, going forward to </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Christ</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;"> by the narrow way that Christ trod, we may receive the reward of His life and faith according to His own judgment!" </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Cyprian#cite_note-7" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: white; color: #0b0080; font-family: Arial; font-size: 8.4pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">[7]</span></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">This is reason to thank God? I see a reason to chastise God, but not to become chummy with Him in adoration.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Circling the wagons is a phrase I use to describe how evangelicals need to stick together for purposes of outreach to the sinning population as well as for forming a cohesive unit to defy the outer world. This can be seen in off-handed comments such as Mr Lutzer gave regarding the Bible and how smartphone Bibles do not qualify. He later disparaged how people with smartphones can even locate the grave of celebrities. Message conveyed: Keep it simple, stupid! Do things the old way...you know...the conservative way, the Republican way. (I may be overreaching there, but he also made a comment about a certain Chicago politician--Lutzer was in the Moody Church in Chicago for some time--who once made a comment about hoping he wasn’t being too clear. Was this Obama? Certainly it was a Chicago Democrat.)</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">When you do not want to seriously investigate a matter, seriously dig deep into questions that human beings have asked themselves from time immemorial, you depend on cliche. These cliches (“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt”; death treated as a mere decision one made that leads to Heaven--and what is Heaven, Mr. Lutzer? Somewhere where people need an event coordinator--or Hell, and we all know what Hell is, yes?) give us a hand-hold to something I suppose, but it isn’t much. There is no question without an answer. No doubts are left hanging in the air. Those who disagree with this type of cultish thought are dismissed with a joke, or pityingly since they are to be burned in the fire of eternal torture. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">And that leads to the final, ever-popular Heaven and Hell. Mostly Hell, but Lutzer likes to imagine a Heaven that is so active, that it seems to resemble one of those old age gated communities with event coordinators and there is just too much stuff for any one person to do (guffaw, guffaw). And Hell of course is deserved, since those people didn’t exercise their God-given brains to decide to follow Jesus. You see that? They have to decide, use their brains. This might cause a thinking person to wonder what happens to people who don’t have thinking brains, or brains adequate for the decision. I guess they just burn in Hell. And what about that decision these evangelicals make? Can it be unmade? Nope. That pastor who happens to sexually harass women, or men, or kids...they get that ticket too. You know who doesn’t get it? Catholics. Because, as Lutzer erroneously states, they depend on the sacraments to be saved. Wrong. But Lutzer has obviously never bothered to even ask a Catholic who knows about such things what the Church truly teaches. I would direct him </span><a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/assurance-of-salvation" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">here</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">. Or, better, anyone can read for themselves directly from the </span><a href="http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Catechism</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">. They make it pretty easy to find out what is and is not taught within the Catholic Church. There is no excuse for such errors as Lutzer makes, other than laziness or prejudice.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">I won’t detail the Catholic argument, but I will say that it makes a lot of sense. And the protestant argument seems to me to have a lot of holes. But we cannot argue the point within the Evangelical Church; we have to adhere to the talking points and spit out the doctrine. Even if it doesn’t make sense; even if it goes against verses within the Bible (see 1 John; see...Oh, here (from the citation above): </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">"Are you saved?" asks the Fundamentalist. The Catholic should reply: "As the Bible says, I am already saved (Rom. 8:24, Eph. 2:5–8), but I’m also </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">being</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;"> saved (1 Cor. 1:18, 2 Cor. 2:15, Phil. 2:12), and I have the hope that I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">will be </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">saved (Rom. 5:9–10, 1 Cor. 3:12–15). Like the apostle Paul I am working out my salvation in fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12), with hopeful confidence in the promises of Christ (Rom. 5:2, 2 Tim. 2:11–13)." </span></div>
<br />PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-6968065471521101802018-03-30T08:43:00.001-07:002018-03-30T08:43:38.055-07:00Am I A Christian?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SI7FU-R9rsE/Wr5a7ZJPZZI/AAAAAAAARaw/ACdYxhHg5jQvqtuLDtwEU6QPp_eD9iLhgCLcBGAs/s1600/Question.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SI7FU-R9rsE/Wr5a7ZJPZZI/AAAAAAAARaw/ACdYxhHg5jQvqtuLDtwEU6QPp_eD9iLhgCLcBGAs/s1600/Question.jpg" /></a></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">I’ve been asked if I am a Christian. </span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-cfeea95c-778f-a0ef-4a09-30d29f4d0bba" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">I said that No, not in the way that most people think of the term. I wanted to say more--so much more--but felt that there wasn’t enough time and besides, I was too tired to get into it.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">So I’d like to get into it. When someone asks me Am I a Christian, I want to say Yes, but… or No, but… I also want to just say what someone wrote in a blog on Patheos (apologies but I cannot find the source) when she said that she was “a human being.” It would be nice to just sometimes leave it at that. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">I do and I don’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus. I do and don’t believe in his divinity. By that, I believe in the narratives (there are more than one) and their power and their truth. But I don’t understand those narratives to be some overarching historical artifact. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Because I don’t feel that there is any overarching historical foundation to any narrative. In other words, there is only narrative. That is it. There is nothing beyond that. Nothing that we can point to and say, definitively, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">There! This is true and I understand it to its core!</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;"> No--there is nothing that the human mind can accept that isn’t transformed into a narrative acceptable to the human mind. [I think that this is a Kantian idea, but my grasp of Kant is rudimentary.]</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">I believe that the human mind transforms everything within its sphere of perception into narrative. The story is elemental to human existence. To treat “story” as if it were “fact,” history, as a kind of artifact of truth, is mere fantasy. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">So I accept the story of Jesus. I accept it wholeheartedly. I do not accept it as artifact...because there is no artifact to accept. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">In my system of belief I can also accept the narratives of the Hindi, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Jew. I was brought up within the Christian narrative, so that is what I am bound to more closely, but it is an accident of birth and nothing more. If I was born of Afghan parents no doubt I would be a Muslim. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">So, I too, like to describe myself as a “human being.” The story, the narrative is uppermost. The arc of the Jesus narrative from virgin birth to heavenly throne is a miracle of human understanding. It can be so beautifully rendered and understood that it might bring the world together in harmony. Except for that wrinkle of human misunderstanding that states that only Jesus is true, only Jesus is God, and narrative is nothing but some child’s bedtime story. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">We can view Jesus as God, Jesus as the Truth, the Light, but still understand the openness of other human concepts. Jesus can be the Only Way, but he can also be Gautama Buddha, or Krishna. How? How can Jesus be the only way but also not the only way? </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Through the complementarian narrative (remember: there is only narrative!). Just as in quantum physics, so too within the human brain (which some scientists are attempting to describe as a quantum computer), we can hold simultaneous narratives/ideas within ourselves. This is merely to describe what we humans do on a daily basis. This is how we are made. We understand only what the brain allows us to understand. Our mind, again going back to Kant, is structured to reason as it must. We see the world in narrative only. That is our Reason. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">What of the Bible? It, too, is narrative, or rather, it is a multifaceted bunch of narratives. In the Sepher Torah alone there are likely to be four or five different narratives threaded throughout. Evangelical Christians are likely to dismiss the hundreds of errors/contradictions within the Bible as “viewpoints.” They see no problem in assimilating an “error-free” Word of God with viewpoints that contradict one another or which contain different information (the time of the crucifixion, the robe worn by Jesus, the different ways in which Jesus is portrayed at his death, the sending by a risen Jesus of his disciples to Galilee...or to Jerusalem) or which contains simply unbelievable information (the raising of zombies in Matthew). They present the Bible as the Word of God and if one happens to see these issues crop up then it must be some weakness within human reason. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">In a way that is precisely what I am saying: the weakness of human reason is that which Kant set out. We only see the world as we are structured to see it. These errors within the narrative of the Bible are not a problem for me. They are simply there, as they are there within any story, to some degree or another (although I do wonder at the “mathematical narrative, or language” which seems to be logically consistent...though Goedels theorem may offer a way out: undecidable statements will always occur within mathematics), and these can be thought of as baked into our psyche and mental acuity. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">And that is what I like to call the Cloud of God. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Within this Cloud lies our sense--necessarily our personification--of the Ideal. From that Ideal we have created narratives. To flesh out these narratives we bake in historical evidence and a-historical “evidence,” or miracles and such. [As I once heard Bart Ehrman say, miracles by their very nature are non-historical.] The Bible is filled with these </span><a href="https://thetorah.com/the-exodus-story-as-jewish-mnemohistory/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">mnemohistorical </span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">tidbits. Layers of history and hi-story are placed one atop another and over time legend accretes with artifacts. Even more time places all within the topic of religious history, convincing many that everything actually happened as it is written down, forgetting that what was written down was a result of intermixed narratives to begin with. </span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, I am a Christian as I self-define the term, but more, a human being. A human being that wonders, questions, and never trusts for </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">answer; for we only know what we can only know. </span>PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-5620275975812746112018-03-11T17:59:00.000-07:002018-03-13T13:59:09.133-07:00The Insincere Christian<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Evangelical Christianity has failed, and has failed for want of sincerity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In order to explain, here is a paragraph from "Hugh Kenner's "A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers" (pp 203-4):</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One thing very engaging about the first half of the book [I.A. Richards' <i>Practical Criticism</i>] is Richards's genial aplomb as he sorts out the comments, never soliciting the knowing snicker. It's clear how his auditors could feel they were helping with a scientific inquiry, not being trapped into acts of self-exposure. And it's exhilarating still to watch the co-author of <i>The Meaning of Meaning</i> make a useful word out of such a rubber stiletto as "insincerity." This Richards defines as "the flaw that insinuates itself when a writer cannot distinguish his own genuine promptings from those he would merely like to have, or those which he hopes will make a good poem. Such failures on his part to achieve complete imaginative integrity may show themselves in exaggeration, in strained expression, in false simplicity, or perhaps in the manner of his indebtedness to other poetry." That is scrupulous and definitive and helpful in coming to terms with a Rupert Brooke, who mayn't have really quite known what he felt at all. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The "auditors" were students in his class, Cambridge I believe, where Richards would hand out various unsigned poems for critique by the students. Richards, and later his students Empson and F.R. Leavis--even Eliot for one class-- attempted a close reading of literature, to teach <i>reading</i>, to show the method behind the madness of creation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Insincerity</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Within the evangelical community are many who have failed to "achieve complete imaginative integrity," or even to think that this was something they needed to possess. They do, at least if they are to be taken seriously, to be taken as sincere.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What they have substituted is the great flaw of dogma: unquestioning devotion with a lack of curiosity and a great deal of mental laziness. Curiosity and a devotion to truth--not dogma--leads to imaginative integrity. There is no meaning to the meaning of evangelicals any more, if ever there was.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We see this especially in the doctrine of inerrancy to the Bible, which truly is mere bibliolatry. Instead of examination of the hundreds of inconsistencies found therein, the question is begged and begged and begged: the supposition is that the Bible is inerrant, thus any <i>perceived </i>errors must be merely perceived as such and not in reality errors. The imagination is never piqued; the curious cat sleeps a very long nap.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">An insincere person sees the Risen Christ not as a question to be answered--answered literally or perhaps literately?--but an answer so that no one may question. That is the very essence of a theological insincerity. A sincere person might ask Did this happen or might'n it have happened in some other fashion? Is this a story, a narrative meant to give us humans hope? Is this some very deep well of mythic meaning? These and other questions are all worth asking, asking by a sincere person; but an insincere person does not ask them, does not dare to take <i>that leap of faith!</i></span><br />
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But we live in the times of questioning. We question our government, our corporate betters, and yes, we question our religious leaders. As we should.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We should question anyone who shoves the spade of dogma toward our throats. We should question any who portray the answer as greater than the question, who ignore possibilities in place of pictured certainties. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">I used to be in the habit of thinking truth was some mental destination in the manner of scientific inquiry (though a destination that was never going to be ultimately visited). I believed, until recently, that one’s life, if dedicated to truth, might bring you closer and closer to that promised land, but it was to be as that mathematical puzzle with the frog: The frog might jump half the distance to the shore, lily pad to lily pad; as it does so it gets closer, closer, closer but it never gets to pad on dry land. Never.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">But of late I view truth not as a destination but as a quality, as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">sincerity</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, a quality that Greeks of old might have labeled </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">arete</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, the living of one’s life to full potential. Living sincerely would entail living fully, living by moral example, by living rationally and imaginatively. It isn’t knowledge--though it does contain knowledge; it isn’t morality--thought it does contain that also. It is the full measure of a human being. Maybe this is what Pirsig was talking about. I do think this is what Jesus and Buddha were talking about. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">The evangelical community are stoppered by the doctrines allotted them. They are not free to imaginatively explore options unavailable within Bible colleges. What might Jesus have meant by “Son of Man”? Did he call himself Son of Man? You may not ask those questions within the community of believers; you could only assume the answer. That is not living a sincere life. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">And if you cannot live a sincere life within the religious community, you should not be </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>in</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> the religious community. Better to start all over. </span></div>
<br />PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-44466175340337187012018-03-11T07:07:00.000-07:002018-03-11T07:07:41.264-07:00Does God Care About Football?<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Today I finally received the answer to the question I’ve asked nearly all my life: Does God care about football? Richard John Mouw informs me [TU, Voices of Faith, 2/3/18¹] that “God cares much about how the game is played. And it is not simply about how the players treat each other.” Has Mr Mouw read the New Testament? I get that the Old Testament is quite football-worthy, what with all that smiting and so forth, but it sure seems that the NT becomes quite un-football-esque in places. But maybe that’s just me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s not as if Matthew 25, or the Sermon on the Mount comes down on the side of how we treat one another. Did not Jesus say it best when he offered us, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Roboto; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Do to others what you want them to do to you...and hit ‘em hard! Knock his block off. Role the replay!"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, he didn’t say </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">exactly </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that, but one can imagine him saying it...if you pretend for a moment that you live in the universe of Richard John Mouw. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’d leave football out of the equation. No spectacle wherein participants gravely injure themselves could possibly be thought Jesus-like. And I’m not just talking about the broken bones, but about the brain injuries that will show up in twenty years. Football produces thousands of people lying in nursing home beds with dementias. It creates scenes of carnage where a man places the barrel of a shotgun to his chest--so his brain can be later scanned showing people like Richard John Mouw how this evil thing we call a game is really just about money and pain. How much destruction does this game create? Vast swathes of waste and violence--but is this not predictable from a “game” which has its modus operandi as violence? That is what the “game” is about, after all. The Creator must care about how we play our games, but to conclude, as Mouw does, that He would affirm and validate this evil is a perverse conclusion that should never go unanswered. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The more I ponder this question, the more I see football as a form of mass hysteria, a madness that infects even those who claim to care about such things as religion, God, and how we treat one another.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;">¹In case the link does not work, as a subscription may be needed, I'll past the article below, since it is quite short:</span><br />
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Twenty years ago I had a public theological disagreement with Reggie White of the Green Bay Packers.</div>
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In addition to being a defensive end for the Packers, who were soon to play in the Super Bowl, White was a Pentecostal preacher. Both of us — and other players and theologians — were interviewed for the Sports Illustrated cover story, “Does God Care Who Wins the Super Bowl?”</div>
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Several of my theologian friends took the negative position on this. One doubted God cared about the game at all, and a couple were wary of any suggestion that God had anything to do with deciding who wins.</div>
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Reggie White was a supporter of the idea of an active divine role in the outcome. What basis do scholars have for thinking God does not take sides? he asked. After all, he observed, “God intervened in David‘s fight with Goliath.” There was the clear case of divine intervention “in Jesus’ victory over death.” The SI reporter who interviewed me told me Reggie had observed to him that God “doesn’t think much of losers.”</div>
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While not ready to endorse the idea that God determines who the winner will be, I rejected the view of those of my theological colleagues who insisted that God stays rather aloof from what goes on in football games. I said — and I still see it this way — God cares much about how the game is played. And it is not simply about how the players treat each other as competitors. It’s also about the physical prowess that is on display in a well-played game.</div>
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My friend and colleague Lewis Smedes mused about the range of things God enjoys: a well-written poem, a Bach concerto, a courageous act of justice. I would add to the list: an exciting football game. When a quarterback throws a pass and a player makes a spectacular catch, I imagine the Lord saying to himself: “Nicely done! This is one of the reasons why I created the human race!”</div>
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Twenty years ago, the Packers lost to the Broncos in Super Bowl XXXII. John Elway, the Denver quarterback, completed excellent passes in the game. I think God enjoyed watching those plays. I don’t think he was disappointed with Reggie White for being on the losing team.</div>
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I must acknowledge the Creator’s interest in how the game is played while not being a fan of anyone. We human creatures are not bound to that neutrality. I keep a theological perspective on the Super Bowl. I am not wondering which team God favors more than the other. But I have an interest in the outcome. I have strong feelings about one of the teams playing in Super Bowl LII: I hope they get beat. But if their quarterback happens to complete a few passes, I will remind myself about what God enjoys.</div>
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• <span class="" style="font-style: italic;">Richard John </span><span class="hit" style="background-color: yellow; font-weight: bold;"><span class="" style="font-style: italic;">Mouw</span></span> <span class="" style="font-style: italic;">is a professor of faith and public life at at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pacidina, Calif.</span></div>
PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-14248252113035041952017-11-24T09:44:00.001-08:002017-11-24T09:44:23.586-08:00God, Music, Language, Art<b id="docs-internal-guid-8dc716b8-ef1e-77e2-5618-da29335761b4" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ruBISGdcfCg/WhhaZBz6olI/AAAAAAAAQmE/qZgf3NmClF4wM_fh7WOfcgVO-BHkDoD1gCLcBGAs/s1600/Music.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="166" data-original-width="303" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ruBISGdcfCg/WhhaZBz6olI/AAAAAAAAQmE/qZgf3NmClF4wM_fh7WOfcgVO-BHkDoD1gCLcBGAs/s1600/Music.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Given the notion of a creator God, it can easily be guessed that it--this creator-god--would communicate with its creation, yes? One might imagine a less collaborative deity, I suppose, one that just exists, theistically, and that was the view of many of our own founding fathers. That view, however, seems such a blind alley. A creator without the interplay, the teamwork, of its individual creations, that is just a stifling thought.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So what would this communication be like? Would it be in language, in words, that men use? How could words work to convey the mesh of a creator’s inner-workings? Can language hold that much meaning? Even if so, the best language can do is to hold it within one language at one time. Anyone who has attempted the fool’s errand of translation knows how impossible it is. But I guess it is possible for a creator to speak in one language. Maybe he chose Hebrew, then Greek and Aramaic. But what of the native tribes out there? Where is their Bible? What of the Slav’s and the Chinese (all eight different linguistic groups with their many different dialects), and the Saxon and the German and the Romance languages and the Asian-Tibetan and Viet and African language groups? What is “The Bible” to them? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It gets worse: What is the Bible for the trees? The shrubbery, the grasses? Don’t laugh: a creator would treat all its creation as its children, yes? What is the language meshwork for the fungi and the potato? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps it isn’t in language at all. Maybe that is a blind alley.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps it is in music. Listen to Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Opus 135. Is that a communication by our creator? Is the sound of a chord played by a concert symphony the sound of God [</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, I've heard there was a secret chord / That David played, and it pleased the Lord /But you don't really care for music, do you?</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">]</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? What is this creator-god saying to us? What happens when we attempt to “translate” the joyful sound of a Mahler Symphony into words? Or any music into words? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is impossible, as absolute music is...absolute. It registers as emotion, not rationality. How many wars would not have been waged had we heard the voice of a creator in music, instead of words? How many acts of terror avoided?</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not to say that this creator wouldn’t have used words as well. But not words as historical artifact, not words as descriptions: that kind of language does not hold enough power. I cannot envision a creator-god of the universe describing the comings and goings of some small group of people. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But language as poetry, with the artful techniques that can be employed by people of genius, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I can envision. That’s possible. I think of works like The Song of Solomon, Psalm 23, the Gospel of John, but also of The Brothers Karamazov, Don Quixote, King Lear, Hamlet, and countless individual poems and stories. These are like music; they cannot be translated (at least, they cannot be translated without another genius who creates in that translation another great work of art--an entirely different work of art). They cannot be distilled into some summary of rationality. They are of a whole, indivisible as works of art must be.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The music of art allows us to hear this communication with a creator; we can call it spirit, we can call it any number of things. When you hear it you feel it, and once you feel it, you can know it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here is an exercise some might want to entertain: After watching a movie with a wonderful score (I suggest Gladiator, or The Last of the Mohicans), listen to just the score. As you do, don’t you re-track the movie? Don’t you re-examine it, see it, feel it? The weight of the movie’s core is within the score, held in the notes, the melodies, the harmonies. The remaining parts of the film, the plot, the actors, the cinematography, seem excess, seem dross: as the skeleton falls away we hold onto the essence of the movie. The Bible is like that, too. If we could scrape the literalness away, we could feel the essence remaining; we could slough off the silly notions of historicity and literal inerrancy and just feel what remains at the core. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What prevents us from understanding is the literal word. It hinders in its walling off of possible connections, possible meanings, possible...possibles. It is the impossibility of language--its inevitable failure at conveying total communication of any idea--that opens the door to spiritual connectedness. This is what the genius does when he writes great works of art, great poems, great stores. He takes the failure of language, its cracks, its broken pieces, and molds something that conveys great emotional meaning: the lie that language tells gives way to a spiritual truth. The closer language comes to music, in the way it can hold truth and experience closer due to the brokenness of itself, to allowing the music of a truth to fill in the cracks in language, the closer it becomes possible to see, and feel, what it is we really are. </span></div>
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PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-92071002010830215712017-11-17T09:59:00.000-08:002017-11-17T13:22:26.954-08:00The Museum of the Bible<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hliyFzndYw4/Wg8jELKLDwI/AAAAAAAAQkA/LdNFiEWOxEkSohkzXEksZWGHIoEnjxh6QCLcBGAs/s1600/bible%2Bmuseum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hliyFzndYw4/Wg8jELKLDwI/AAAAAAAAQkA/LdNFiEWOxEkSohkzXEksZWGHIoEnjxh6QCLcBGAs/s1600/bible%2Bmuseum.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The new </span><a href="https://www.museumofthebible.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Museum of the Bible</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> has officially opened in Washington, D.C. It does not proselytize (openly). It does not apparently teach Creationism. It seems to be fairly open about certain narratives that ended up being, shall we say, in disrepute (slavery, ahem). It attempts, in the words of one of the directors, to make the Bible “cool.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nice location, right near where the Smithsonian sits, not far from the Mall, so it takes in the gravitas of a serious museum along with a near hand-holding with government. One might be forgiven for thinking the Green’s (the Hobby Lobby family and chief funders of the museum) are acting within the Dominionist ideology, which states that Christians (meaning </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">evangelical </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Christians, not those of the baser mainstream denominations, thank you very much) must integrate themselves into government. Can you say, “theocracy”?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is likely not going to be an exhibit showing visitors how the Green family stole </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/opinion/hobby-lobby-iraq-artifacts.html?_r=0" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">artifacts</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and was fined $3 million dollars. It seems they bought some Iraqi cuneiform tablets on the cheap, labeled them as “clay samples” with a worth of a couple hundred dollars, when they were actually worth...well, who knows; unquestionably their value was much more than a couple hundred dollars. Maybe the Green family feels the Eighth Commandment to be too communist. No one, except the Green family, knows if their are other stolen artifacts held in their collection.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, there has been some mention that the Green family ended up supporting ISIS through their fraudulent purchasing of stolen artifacts, but that isn’t strictly true. The fraud occurred before ISIS formed. However, these acts of purchasing artifacts through the black market do support the further demolition of archaeological sites. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Museum of the Bible attempts to show the Bible as one narrative. It doesn’t mention the Koran, doesn’t mention The Book of Mormon, even though those books are dependent on the Christian Bible. It doesn’t treat them at all. The Museum of the Bible pretends that there is one view of the Bible, and that view is that of evangelicals such as the Greens. The Bible to them pretty much stopped at The King James Version. It pretends that the scholarship in the 19th and 20th centuries never happened. It pretends that the Bible is entirely without flaw, that scribes copied “The Bible” perfectly down through the ages. It pretends that we have one original Bible. It avoids the deep questions of what is the “original” Bible? I doubt it treats of translation problems at all (though I have not visited the site and cannot say for certain). It pretends that the Bible is the perfect text that they show within the museum and that evangelicals are the authorities on the Bible. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Although there is a plaque that states that their authenticity has not been verified (yet), there is the implication that these are the real deal: Scholars are just about united in stating that they are forgeries. But worse than that, although</span><a href="https://news.nd.edu/news/dead-sea-scrolls-yield-major-questions-in-old-testament-understanding/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the Dead Sea Scrolls </span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">can be used to show that the Bible is not the concretized uttered Word of God, evangelicals like to pretend that the Bible is inerrant, and that there are no grey areas of textual divergence. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It would be nice if there was a public catalog of all the 40,000 items held by the Greens. Are they correctly provenanced? Were they legally purchased? Is the black market of archaeological tablets, scrolls, and the like still being supported by the Greens? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Museum of the Bible is not about truth, it is about propping up a monument to evangelicals. This is the FOX News of Museums, somewhere people can go who have preconceived notions of the Bible, who do not wish to have those notions challenged, and who can feel good about themselves for belonging to the correct religion, and even the correct subset of that religion. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8dc716b8-cb1e-15f8-39d1-96eeffc6e48d"></span><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>There should be no religion above the truth</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">”--motto of the Theosophical Society. You will not find that motto in the Museum of the Bible, nor will you find that sentiment. </span></span></div>
PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-22100538059639526722017-10-28T16:20:00.000-07:002017-10-28T16:27:42.873-07:00Leonard Cohen's Sufi Mysticism<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="ck54t" data-offset-key="cqosv-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<span data-offset-key="cqosv-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin</i></span><br />
<i style="font-family: inherit;">Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in</i><br />
<i style="font-family: inherit;">Lift me like an olive branch be my homeward dove</i><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px;"><i>And dance me to the end of love</i>.--</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><i>Leonard Cohen</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span data-offset-key="eqobi-0-0">and this </span>made me think that this could easily be a Sufi poem, something like </span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-2f26d675-64f2-8227-dba9-6745dd48206a"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt; vertical-align: baseline;">S</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline;">uddenly the drunken sweetheart appeared out of my door.</span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-2f26d675-64f2-8227-dba9-6745dd48206a"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline;">She drank a cup of ruby wine and sat by my side.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Seeing and holding the lockets of her hair</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline;">My face became all eyes, and my eyes all hands.--</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 8pt; font-style: italic;">Rumi [Translator: Shahram Shiva]</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit;">Mary Blye Howe's book, Sitting With Sufis, instructs us that:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"For the Sufi, Love is the path to God. Rumi tells us that only the person whose garment is</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">'rent by the violence of love' can be be wholly pure from covetousness and sin." </span></span></blockquote>
And this love is not the "agape" love that protestants like to portray it as, or rather, it is and it isn't. Agape love is a general term, one that can also include the passion of a lover (it is used in the Septuagint to describe Amnon's love for his half-sister, Tamar (not <i>that </i>Tamar...the other Tamar) who he then rapes. <br />
<i>Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on</i><br /><i>Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long</i><br /><i>We're both of us beneath our love, both of us above</i><br /><i>And dance me to the end of love</i>. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px;">--</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><i>Leonard Cohen</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">What wedding is Cohen speaking about here? And what time period does he refer to, dancing very long? And how can we be beneath our love and above it at the same time? Perhaps this no ordinary human love he speaks to.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Dance me to the children who are asking to be born</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Raise a tent of shelter now, through every thread is torn</i></span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>And dance me to the end of love</i>.</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px;">--</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><i>Leonard Cohen</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Through the curtains that our kisses have outworn." Doesn't that dovetail nicely with Rumi noting that our garments should be rent by love? And the tent of shelter...a temple?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I don't know enough of Cohen's theology to make him into a Sufi mystic or Kabbalist (the Zohar text of the Kabbala is replete with this sort of language like The Song of Songs) or even a proto-Christian. As a <a href="http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-leonard-cohen-jewish-buddhist-and-christian-too" target="_blank">columnist </a>once said, "</span><span style="color: black; font-family: , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: normal;">If he were to be theologically categorized, he could be called a </span><a href="http://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/easter-story-bringing-science-and-spirituality-together" style="border: 0px; color: black; cursor: pointer; font-family: BentonSans-Regular, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal;">panentheist</a><span style="color: black; font-family: , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: normal;">, in dialogue with a God that lured him onward."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; white-space: normal;">It really doesn't matter what you label him as. Cohen was a man who sought to find the right question more than to find the answer. And that question was filled with an ocean of love.</span></span>
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PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-6808762071434591052017-10-07T06:06:00.000-07:002017-10-07T06:06:09.503-07:00Mental Health and the American Problem<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Uhz9NilGpPg/WdjRBEd5ruI/AAAAAAAAQS0/xAexS4JEPi0QmEWgckEyQOGpsI0iFl3jwCLcBGAs/s1600/Schizophrenia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="189" data-original-width="267" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Uhz9NilGpPg/WdjRBEd5ruI/AAAAAAAAQS0/xAexS4JEPi0QmEWgckEyQOGpsI0iFl3jwCLcBGAs/s1600/Schizophrenia.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "merriweather" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 16.2px;">Emil Kraepelin, who in the 1880s helped cement how the West deals with schizophrenic individuals (he is called the father of biologic psychiatry), eventually came to see psychotic thought not as merely a "nature" problem, but also as a "nurture" issue. He saw culture not as causative, but as contributing, especially in its treatment. <a href="https://psmag.com/magazine/the-touch-of-madness-mental-health-schizophrenia" target="_blank">Nev Jones, PhD</a>, has begun to delve into the ways in which culture exacerbates the lives of individuals with mental disease. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "merriweather" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 16.2px;">Jones, who herself has had schizophrenic episodes, is now the leading advocate for re-thinking how the West must treat these individuals. Rather than simply rounding these people up and locking them away in a padded room, or--not much better--walling them off from friends and family and employers and classmates via society's ostracism, she sees a reinventing of treatment to allow for inclusion of the individual into their current culture. She isn't, as far as I know, an advocate for eliminating pharmacological care, but rather for the allowing of these troubled people to continue living their lives within the culture that they find themselves in, or, even better, of widening their circle of influence within that culture.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "merriweather" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 16.2px;">Currently our western culture views these people askant, and fearfully. They think of mass shootings and wonder...Will this guy go off and kill indiscriminately? Does he have a trunk full of guns? They think of James Holmes, the "Batman" killer, who gunned down 82 people in a cinema in 2012. James Holmes had tried to get psychological help just a few days before the shooting occurred. I</span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: merriweather, serif; font-size: 16.2px;">f James Holmes had successfully received some help, what would that help have been like? Would it have helped? It is doubtful, since current medical treatment is inadequate. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: merriweather, serif;"><span style="font-size: 16.2px;">As Jones makes clear, a person undergoing a psychotic episode needs to be in contact with their circle of influence, their friends and acquaintances, their culture. And the wider culture needs education on the elements of schizophrenia. It is not a cancer or terminal illness; many undergoing these episodes will revert to normal life. What makes it less likely for these people to live normally is a culture that cuts them off and treats them like prisoners. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: merriweather, serif;"><span style="font-size: 16.2px;">Those with mental illness are much more likely to be victims of crime. They are no more likely to be assailants than those in the wider population. For incidents of mass murder, such as the recent Las Vegas shooting (and we simply don't have enough data currently to make any conclusions as to the motives of the shooter), we should be ramping up our mental health care system, using the latest information concerning the best possible care for the best possible outcomes. (This doesn't obviate the need for common-sense solutions to gun regulation, either; we can do both.) </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: merriweather, serif;"><span style="font-size: 16.2px;">Knowledge and action can reduce the incidents of mass shootings. And the lives of those with psychotic disorders can all be improved as well. Society wins; the patient wins. And if we lived in any other first-world nation it might well be possible. </span></span></span>PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-82272025294225568062017-07-23T13:05:00.000-07:002017-07-23T13:05:17.939-07:00The Third Man<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-znzzzszWVRg/WXUBNW3AEwI/AAAAAAAAP8E/or1hf4JaqcQB0LV1MK2tBdMKpw90MUvWACLcBGAs/s1600/The%2BThird%2BMan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="675" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-znzzzszWVRg/WXUBNW3AEwI/AAAAAAAAP8E/or1hf4JaqcQB0LV1MK2tBdMKpw90MUvWACLcBGAs/s320/The%2BThird%2BMan.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We recently hosted a movie crew for five days. Twelve film students from the New York Film Academy used our house as a film set--and hostel--to complete what was the final project for the year. The director/screenwriter/producer was a vivacious, very intelligent girl from China, who we had hosted a couple of years ago while she matriculated at a local high school. </span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-28d7b456-710a-8149-d0c3-41cba2cbfcba" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The project was fascinating to observe. Movies are omnipresent in our culture, but little is known of them outside the industry, as to how they get made, what is involved in their construction. What most people know about movies consists of the actors. Movie buffs will also wax on about this or that director, and you occasionally will hear something about some cinematographer. Nothing about the writers (there are always many, many writers, as in plural, within just one film), or the costume designers, or set designers, or the guy in charge of lighting or sound or editing. These people are anonymous, but nothing goes on within the making of a movie without them. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Indeed, the many different production companies that role down the screen at beginning and end credits seem now to me to be absolutely necessary. It takes an army to make a movie. It takes a company just to feed this army. The final impression this adventure had on me was that what we experience from our entertainments--but really from any and all aspects of life: our businesses, jobs, our friends, our religions, our politics--is but the surface. The Third Man, my favorite film, is not great because of Orson Welles’ performance, nor Alita Valli’s, nor Joseph Cotten’s. Nor any of the amazing supporting actors (I particularly like Ernst Deutsch’s Kurtz, and Erich Ponto’s Dr. Winkel). It isn’t even about Carol Reed’s wonderful direction or the great writing from Graham Greene (who was the sole screenwriter who originally wrote the novel as a prelude to the film). The film is a miracle --all films are miracles of a kind-- of collaboration. If at the end it all works, and if it can be said to be art, you can chalk it up to an amazing symbiosis of talent, opportunity--meaning money--effort, and luck. What you see on the screen is the apex of the effort which bobs on the sea of time (our iceberg in this analogy), and this is true of all our creations, all our connections in life: our connections being our friends, our interests, our experiences.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The “movie” of our own life has this same dichotomy: lived underneath in the algal weeds, the currents flowing here and there, with the messiness of our exertions, is where the true meaning lies, full of questions upon questions; and on the surface is where the actors play their two-dimensional lives and where we barely notice --but don’t often allow ourselves to ask about -- the deeper questions flowing in the muddied currents.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Everything can be considered entertainment. The show, the theater, but also science, philosophy, history, the arts, the many religions. There is the surface, the show upon which we project our hopes and expectations, our needs, the surface which we accept without questioning too much. The scientists say this or that, and we, not being scientists, accept it all. The religious leaders also propound this or that is true, or this or that is false, and we accept it because we are not divinity students after all. We see the show, and then we genuflect before it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is no way to live a life. To accept blindly. To walk in single file hither and yon wherever you are told to go. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Do this and...you go to Hell! Don’t do this...and you go to Hell! Judgment! Fall on your knees! This is the show. This is the surface play. Underneath it is all the mess of texts and historical judgments, cultural ideas that changed with the wind. Asking one question brings this house of cards down, just one simple query, and it is this: Is it true? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are ten thousand different ways to see the truth. Every truth has its gaffer, its sound technician, its lighting director. The further down you go, the further you see how things work, how things are put together, the more despairing it can all seem. We want one truth, not ten thousand. We want the movie to be about Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton and Alita Valli, not the swirling truths that fly out tangential to all those third man references. Who is the third man? Is he the dead man, the man before the war, the man who used to believe in things, the man who existed behind the scenes, but is now projected high up on a Ferris Wheel, talking of cuckoo clocks, the man Alita Valli loved, then lost? The man of shadows, cast by a lighting guy getting paid a buck-fifty an hour?</span></div>
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PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-19723778191499382432017-07-14T06:16:00.002-07:002017-07-14T06:16:26.854-07:00The Message Bible--A translator's conundrum<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4-IKu18YNkY/WWjEEsZIOKI/AAAAAAAAP4A/tVTnlKdyeYAU0-7np2R9yn7q6_W5kNHWACLcBGAs/s1600/BiblePic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="960" height="173" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4-IKu18YNkY/WWjEEsZIOKI/AAAAAAAAP4A/tVTnlKdyeYAU0-7np2R9yn7q6_W5kNHWACLcBGAs/s320/BiblePic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Poems are not perfect crimes. Too often, meaning is reduced to a feat of amateur detection which assumes that a poem is a kind of murder or a jewel theft, with a corpse, a hidden weapon, and a blueprint of the plumbing, all of which can be logically deduced by any Englishman with a large magnifying glass and credentials from Scotland Yard. But poems are not perfect crimes, for all their apparatus of passion, intention, and obsessive ingenuity in transforming fantasy into experience and experience into fantasy. Their procedure is vascular or sonal, rather than rational. They move like snails under a shell, carrying the coiled weight of their language over a sensitive paraphernalia of sticky horns and protoplasm in little bursts and thrusts, leaving the glistening accident of their chemistry behind them. Meaning is the trail of the snail.”--Ben Belitt</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-28d7b456-413a-4b8c-3828-305d1cd7fb26" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“The translation of poetry can never exceed the enigma of it, and be true.” --Ben Belitt</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’d like to discuss The Message Bible, a translation that has become extremely popular. It is written as a kind of “street language,” in a common tongue, easily understood and read. That is its mission, in a sense, to deliver the message of the Bible into thoughts that are easily grasped, and implied, easily propounded. Here is an example, from Galatians 3, The Message in red, NIV in blue:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Message: </span><span style="background-color: white; color: red; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let me put this question to you: How did your new life begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? Or was it by responding to God’s Message to you? 3 Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. If you weren’t smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you could perfect it? 4 Did you go through this whole painful learning process for nothing? It is not yet a total loss, but it certainly will be if you keep this up!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">NIV:</span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? 3 Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh? 4 Have you experienced so much in vain—if it really was in vain?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An important point here is to understand that neither of the above (and one could also include the KJV, ESV, or any other English translation) is actually the Bible. The Bible, always to be regarded as a library of books, not one book, is a result of a kind of “cutting and pasting” from thousands of versions of artefacts collected over hundreds of years. These artifacts are mostly in Greek and Hebrew. They, in order to be read in English, must be translated. Therefore, it is important to have some idea of translation theory as you pick and choose among the variety of Bibles out there. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are a number of translations that seek a word-for-word style of translation. Is this possible, even? What are words? What is language? These are questions at the very heart of translation theory, at the very heart of humanity itself, for what is it to be human if we do not have the tool of language? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let’s view words as little Russian nesting dolls, dolls filled with “meaning.” Not just one meaning, since this isn’t mathematics we are talking about. The meaning within even just one doll has within it another doll--these are nesting dolls, remember. Each word has multiple dolls within it, some many, some less. Some are so filled with other dolls that we wonder if we'll ever reach the final doll. In any case, let’s color our dolls red, to indicate Greek. We wish to re-color all these dolls to a blue color, to indicate English. How best to do that? <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE9aWJkLtZ4" target="_blank">Eugene Peterson</a>, the author of The Message (and please don’t make the mistake that it is not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he himself</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> who is the author, not God Itself), reads the Bible as a story, and he himself has told us that he believes that we all as human beings create our stories, that we live our stories--this is how we perform our human lives. This is how we give meaning to life. We. Create. Stories. How wonderful to hear a pastor state that so clearly. And I agree, wholeheartedly. He tells us that every translation is basically a new story, because each language will breathe into the Bible a new outlook with the new language. Again, this is impossible to argue with. Translation is indeed a betrayal. But… Peterson has seemingly forgotten something here regarding translation. Translation is a carrying from one doll to another doll, of meaning, much as if we were to fill a bucket full of water (please excuse my mixing of metaphors) and then to carry that bucket to another, pouring it all into that second bucket. Except we note that some splashes out due to the endeavor to get that bucket over to the other. Some also splashes out as we pour. What we have is less than what we began with. On the other hand, we also note that there were some bits of other materials in the second bucket and it has colored the water. It looks different now...because it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">different. It is different and it is less--</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and it is more</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">--as it has been diminished by the work of carrying it to the second language/bucket.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But Peterson is marvelous in that he understands that to translate is to offer a new language, a new story. (I wonder how many pastors would agree with him on that.) He understands that reading, too, is a type of translation: the reader takes these nesting dolls, pops them open, and attempts to fill new dolls in his own mind...again though, something gets lost in the translation, things are added, too.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ben Belitt, the brilliant poet and translator, who passed away about ten years ago, realized that you need to do something more than just empty the dolls and carry the water. You had to go to the original and experience the enigma of that original as for the first time. Belitt saw that there wasn’t just the original on the page, the spanish poem by Neruda, say, but the original that the poet, that Neruda himself, experienced as he was writing his spanish poem. Each translation was to be a tapping into the experience of the poet, and so each translation was a new poem, a new “story” as Peterson himself realizes, I think. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So Peterson, I conclude, errs not so much with his theory, but with his execution. I think he just doesn’t have the chops to bring the original experience into play. That isn’t to say he shouldn’t be praised for the effort. But the readings from The Message that I’ve heard do not elevate my spirit, and they do not contain the Spirit. (See those verses from Galatians? They even leave out the Holy Spirit entirely.)</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Any serious biblical reader will still need to study a variety of translations, using principally the NIV and NRSV (the latter was composed by the very best scholars attending to meaning and ease of understanding). Though the King James and NKJ versions are the very best for English literature they also happen to be the very worst for scholarly attention. Still, it helped form, along with Chaucer and Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, the English language itself, so that is saying something.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1d2129; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One more word about The Message. There must be hundreds of different translations out there now. The Living Bible became very popular and gave rise to a number of versions that one suspects exist not so much for their perspicacious perspective on The Word, but for their sales figures. Is The Message just another way to line the pockets of the author, and his agent and publisher? I don’t know, but I suspect it is a factor. If The Message served to hook someone on to the Bible and some spiritual journey it would be a good thing; it might however make for a lazy man’s effort to forego the task of looking under the doll’s skirts, to continue my prior metaphor. In other words, if The Message is a beginning on a journey to more adult, more satisfying investigations then it is well worth plunking down a sawbuck or two for it. If it is merely the last effort to bring one into a dull, unsatisfying slog through some alien culture, then it is best to pass it by, since there simply isn’t enough meat there to sustain anyone for very long. </span></div>
PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-18991630900557870182017-06-06T08:40:00.000-07:002017-06-06T08:40:46.555-07:00What is reality?<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -0.75pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 0.75pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Economica; font-size: 30pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What is reality</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -0.75pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Economica; font-size: 30pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Joining religion to science</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="4" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Z5tQGN69Tt1qLCh64GuOqQ9jYl-8GAupb9FxqfU9pF1hxmQ_xYVJqLoqKv7BE1Lvag8-bA0dSXcukLjQhnwfrIXGXNobdx_laBC7l5S0bQYjWOPZZrKwxHmbA35q_NiuT-kLcLU" style="-webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad); border: none; transform: rotate(0.00rad);" title="horizontal line" width="624" /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="445" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/vbStdHTN1W6vIFuvE33qaDdn1Itsy_3NqL-524Ona1G2a_5zFlP0waFdkFI-GDbYK0ZDvm_fp0yC88pwlrJks4QYldkFGwbAWTqtp-vEXxIgpU7qpFf5OoMxmMJnZzKM2vbpZJQ" style="-webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad); border: none; transform: rotate(0.00rad);" title="Placeholder image" width="623" /></span></h1>
<h1 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.7999999999999998; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -0.75pt; margin-top: 10pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 16pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Introduction</span></h1>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.7999999999999998; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -0.75pt; margin-top: 10pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Quantum Gravity Research, based in Los Angeles, has created a video uploaded to YouTube <a href="https://youtu.be/w0ztlIAYTCU" target="_blank">here</a>, that attempts to explain Emergence Theory. Emergence Theory is based on the idea that our reality has a foundation of a crystalline “language” of geometric shapes of which our 4-dimensional reality is but the shadow or projection. Time is thought of as illusory, at least they do not see it as a moving arrow into the future. It is more likely to be like a block of the ultimate crystalline shape: no past, no future. More of a Now. QGR appears to me to think time is still something, something that influences the whole. Here is where I cannot agree, or cannot understand their view, which is to say that time is in flux, but not showing the normal arrow into the future. Yet science does not show the future influencing the past. QGR views reality as information, information as reality: and it is, further, a reality that needs consciousness to “read” it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Consciousness</span></h2>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.7999999999999998; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -0.75pt; margin-top: 10pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">QGR does not come out and say it, but obviously God could be that consciousness. They postulate, though, that since theoretically speaking the universe can be itself conscious at some point in the future (though there is no real future, only our perceived future) this universe-consciousness could very well *be* God. Not how we think of God now, not Jehovah God, not Jesus God, but a Consciousness-God. It seems to tend toward the Eastern way of thinking of the Oneness of the Universe. The main tenet of Jesus, too, that of seeing yourself in one’s neighbor, can also be put forward as a link.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.7999999999999998; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -0.75pt; margin-top: 10pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[The video also points toward a science that predicts the unity of the quantum world with that of the general relativity world, and in doing so predicts the constants of the universe, namely the speed of light and the golden mean.]</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #8c7252; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Unity</span></h3>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-8feacbbc-7e0d-cd25-ae26-fef95f2624f4"></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.7999999999999998; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: -0.75pt; margin-top: 10pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The path forward in science may well reach to religious aims: the experience of the universe and our role in it. We are conscious agents acting as “readers” of the language, influencing the universe by our reading, and being influenced in turn by other elements: all aspects of the universe in the end being of one consciousness, one God-Heaven. The common elements of all the major religions can be understood to be pointing in the same direction as science.</span></div>
PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-83975653769464515722017-05-30T10:00:00.000-07:002017-05-30T10:00:37.240-07:00The Broken Bible<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the Gospel of John, Jesus is executed on the Day of Preparation for Passover. As lambs went to the slaughter so Jesus went to the Cross. In Mark, he was executed on Passover. Fundamentalists have contorted their minds over this for centuries; all have convinced themselves that no error has been made, and no inconsistency presents itself. Well.</span></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZAVBA6mAdRM/WS2kreoiBzI/AAAAAAAAPdY/6zEMuyaSLOo_ycnDyIfuHe0-kk3lWVOawCLcB/s1600/broken%2Bglass.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZAVBA6mAdRM/WS2kreoiBzI/AAAAAAAAPdY/6zEMuyaSLOo_ycnDyIfuHe0-kk3lWVOawCLcB/s320/broken%2Bglass.jpg" width="213" /></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Obviously there is a problem here, but only if you view the Gospels--the entire library of the Bible, really--as history, as recorded moments, verifiable through archaeology, and historical accounts. Something else seems to be going on in the Bible, but here we are in the 21st century and Christians still feel timorous discussing the possibility that the Bible is not history, and that many things contained within it simply did not happen.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These fundamentalists fear that if people knew of the discrepancies held within the pages of the Bible, that people would run hither and yon, away from the preachings of the Good Book. What they fail to grasp is that people are running away due to the anti-intellectualism, the fervent holding on to a truth that is a lie, that this book contains errors and inconsistencies. If you show a child an amphora and tell that child that this is a magical jar which when rubbed will jettison a genie who will then grant three wishes, that child may well believe you, if young enough. But eventually life will show that child that jars do not jettison genies; indeed, life will show the child that genies do not exist. That child will no longer believe in genies. More, that child will no longer believe him or her who told them that genies exist. The child will toss that jar against a rock and smile as it shatters.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Belief in the Bible as God’s letter to mankind, as our little instruction book of life, eventually becomes, as the child’s jar, shattered. It is this way of thinking that makes the Bible fragile; in an of itself it is anything but.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But it need not be. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What if instead of a completely error-free book, a book written by God Himself, we are given a book that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">artfully </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">shows us what a people believed concerning their world, their God? Of how they saw the universe? What if instead of a diary we are shown a literature?</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The writer of the Gospel of John (almost certainly not John the disciple, just to shatter another amphora) wishes for us to share his belief that Jesus is the very Lamb of God gone to the sacrificial slaughter. We don’t expect it to be a literal transcription of events, if we read it correctly. We expect it to be art, and so convey a higher truth, a truth higher than mere journalistic entries might suggest. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mark too, is written this way. So too Matthew and Luke, Acts, and the letters of Paul, Peter, etc. Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes, The Song of Solomon, and many others even those that almost made it (Shepherd of Hermas, Didache, Apocalypse of Peter) into the canon, are also made in this same artful manner. When read as literature, when read as if written by poets, they can be seen as among the greatest works of art ever created by mankind--a Christian and Jew (as regards the OT, Mishnah, Talmud) would say </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">greatest.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When read this way people marvel at it all, in the way that they marvel that a genius such as Shakespeare ever existed, or Cervantes, or Chaucer, or Karamazov, or Tolstoi. Where did that genius come from? How can we ever understand it? When read as history, it becomes acidic, even hateful in parts. It is how the Muslim extremists read the Koran. How White Supremacists read the Bible. Fundamentalists of all stripes tear mystical holiness into the shreds of a simple-minded literal correspondence between this and the other; they lack any sense of doubt, uncertainty, mystery.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Put down the Bible of the fundamentalists, the Bible of dates and times and records and gift it to the dustbin of history. But then pick up the Bible of miracles--not the miracles of a magic God, not the miracles of blindness cured, water to wine, dead men brought to life; pick up the Bible of miraculous art, that shows us with an unknowable genius that this world holds a great and terrible beauty, and holds it within a vessel artfully made.</span></div>
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PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-90062249784506534942017-03-14T07:46:00.000-07:002017-03-14T07:46:31.268-07:00The Processed Church<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nbEbkhl5pco/WMgBWcD3D3I/AAAAAAAAOxo/XrCozD7fwikLlKHIdHz3pcherSjYRanPACLcB/s1600/Bread.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nbEbkhl5pco/WMgBWcD3D3I/AAAAAAAAOxo/XrCozD7fwikLlKHIdHz3pcherSjYRanPACLcB/s1600/Bread.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;">To process: the performing of a series of actions to change or preserve something. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Michael Pollan’s documentary film series, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cooked</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, ends with the final episode on Earth, which describes the culinary act of fermentation. The penultimate episode dealt with Air, and mainly featured the baking of bread with an inspection of what process is involved with changing wheat kernels into flour. Previous episodes dealt with Fire and Water. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To watch as food is changed from form to form, by the action of fire, or bacteria or yeast, or simply time, makes you aware of how far we have become separated from original methods of processing food. How we now substitute manufacturing processes in order to produce cheap packaged products that last a very long time on store shelves. We know we lose something for convenience, and for costs. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What is that something? </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe we hide something. Or substitute something for another. Is this a kind of game we play, a trick? A pretense?</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A loaf of genuine sourdough bread baked in one’s very own oven is not the white bread held in plastic bags stacked neatly on supermarket shelves. We call both bread. One is; the other is something else we merely call bread. The essence in the latter is hidden, to the point of vanishing. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I could make the same point comparing a finely made home-brew to Budweiser. Or a home-made yogurt to Yoplait. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One has been changed, processed out of existence. Bit by bit. To discover the original you have to go back to the very basics, before the manufacturing of profit and loss and indefinite shelf-life.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Modern religion is the processed food of the spirit. To wonder as the first wondered you have to remove yourself from the church, from the dogma and doctrine. You have to eliminate the answers others have penned in, pinned on, and concentrate on the questions. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is the lesson of the Gospels. Jesus is portrayed in these stories as a man shoving aside the assumptions of the religion of his day. Prior to the doctrines concerning his divinity, the docetism, the christologies, there was the profound question: Who is this man? This man that says these things? When he died, his followers were shocked, I believe. They most likely had been told by him that he was the messiah. That was why he was killed, after all. How could it be he died without achieving the kingdom that he spoke so much about? He had spoken to them, had convinced them that the kingdom of God </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was at hand</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And so they believed...until it wasn’t...and then they didn’t. But then new ideas crept in, new doctrine, and the rest is history. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The process of changing Jesus into God, of a small gathering of disciples into an empire, took many years. Layers of argument formed the concrete of liturgies and theologies. Lasting for almost two thousand years. The process of layering dogma upon dogma protects and hardens against almost all internal dispute. But there are always some who ask what was it like in the beginning, before the rules, before the answers.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Transformation is a change, an alteration from one thing to another. Processed foods are transformed, but we call the natural baking of bread, in its simplest form, a transformation, not a process. This is simply saying that processed things have a negative connotation, and transformation a positive one. Likewise, the fermentation of wine and beer use the natural transformation via yeasts omnipresent in the air and on surfaces to change into alcoholic beverages. The yeasts seated on the ground grain bubble up to breathe within a dark, warm, wet environment and produce sourdough.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Transformation reaches back to the natural beginnings, as we look for the reasons for a change, in order to discover the how’s and why’s. Perhaps that is really where mankind discovered science, in the laboratory of a dish of fermented grapes or grains. The transformation became both religion and science. We wanted to know what was hidden that delivered such a life-giving product to us. Dionysus was worshiped for the amazing properties of the foods and drink which gave us that fermented magic. Later in history that same wonder gave us science, which is really just a tool to answer questions, which then gives us more questions. And all along our history we sat looking, wondering at all the hidden things in life, creating works that showed what we were, how we thought: Art.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is the question that alters, the question that spurs. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If one were to take a medical text from the 17th century and use it today to train our doctors and researchers we would be in a very bad way. Not only would people die needlessly, we would also be asking the wrong questions, the questions we have learned to ask since that book was written; we’d ask about how the humours influenced us, perhaps about the astrological influences, about the need for bleeding. We are doing precisely that when we go to church and use the Bible for our only spiritual guide. We ask what does the Bible say about homosexuality? What does the Bible say about the role of women in church? About the age of the earth? The Bible should not be tossed aside (nor should we toss aside our 17th century guide) as worthless, but we should learn to use it alongside other guides that we have learned are quite useful and that have taught us much, taught us too about the Bible, what it really is, how it was really put together. </span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">W</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">hat we should be using are the guides of science, guides that use experiments to test hypothesis, mathematical guides that tell us logically what is possible; and the guide of nature itself, looking at nature, as an artist or scientist, or just in wonderment, and asking questions of it. </span><br />
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Religion has become the hardened answer to what used to be a wonderful question. In science we form a hypothesis and see what turns out to be true, experimentally. “Is this the way things happen?” How? Why? What. Is. This. Really?</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Similar to the kingdom of heaven is leaven that a woman, taking, hid in three measures of flour until was leavened all. --Matthew 13:33</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This yeast, is hidden within the flour--and a great deal of flour it was. What Jesus was saying, I think, is not so much an allegorical teaching as a pointing to the essence of ourselves, or at least our spiritual selves. He saw the kingdom of God as a community, a community where everyone saw everyone else as themselves, as members of a whole body, living in common, taking care of each other, a family of God. And as God within nature supports his creation naturally so does God support us. As the leaven, hidden, works its magic until it blossoms as a loaf of living bread. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jesus was describing the kingdom of God: the hidden --but discoverable!-- source of life. Jesus himself was turned into the very symbol of that life, later worshipped as that source. The eucharist, a marvelous magical symbol, the transformation of the bread to Jesus Christ, delivered a symbol of a symbol of a natural source of God’s goodness: bread. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then so many words were written to wrap Jesus up and deliver him to the people. In time he was processed like a plastic-wrapped package of Wonder Bread, words that held him like chains, so enwrapped and involved him that he is not even seen through them. So where to sit and try and view him, find him again? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe an orchard, maybe in some baker’s kitchen. Hidden for a short while, but just wait a bit. </span></div>
PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-22668094445926225742017-01-12T09:39:00.000-08:002017-01-14T05:47:52.099-08:00The Old Church<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XorsVbOQJ1k/WHe_Gzaj5MI/AAAAAAAAMOw/DM954YhTuSYGvDd3-zEJZw9Q5SVrSw4aACLcB/s1600/demolition-1753681_960_720.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XorsVbOQJ1k/WHe_Gzaj5MI/AAAAAAAAMOw/DM954YhTuSYGvDd3-zEJZw9Q5SVrSw4aACLcB/s320/demolition-1753681_960_720.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The church that I belong to seems old. It has lost the ability to grow and it deteriorates with age. But it isn’t old just in the sense of losing its capacity to grow, in its energy; it is old in the sense that it imagines itself as old, and places itself at a time more than one hundred years ago, around the time of 1850 or so. </span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-78f1cc60-93bd-e316-2f16-557b8df23a87" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That was the time when science never heard of natural selection. A time that was still pre-industrial and climate change was far into the future. It was a time when race was solidly understood by the majority of people as a great divide and a biological imperative. It was a time before the age of mass destruction from warfare and mass shootings. It was a time before even the term “homosexual” was known and used, and certainly not other terms such as “trans-sexual,” “queer,” “gay.” It was pre-dispensationalist, and so end times were not given so easily as an excuse for inaction. It was a time before the landmark collection, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Essays and Reviews</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, was published, which for a time destroyed the idea of an inerrant and consistent reading of the Bible (cf especially, H. B. Wilson’s ideas concerning the need for morality to be ascendant over doctrine; and Jowett’s essay </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the Interpretation of Scripture</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">), and gave a leg up to modern theological liberalism with its view that reason has received short-shrift in many an evangelical church.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-78f1cc60-9d3b-4747-bf32-e398799bda53"><span style="font-family: Arial; vertical-align: baseline;">We in the Church/church have walled ourselves off because we use creation science, not the real science, to justify the inerrancy of biblical language. We treat Jonah as really being in the belly of fish/whale; we treat Adam and Eve as being real people (and Moses, and Abraham, and Jacob, and on and on). We think that Noah (real guy, that Noah) built a great big ark (real ark!) so that all the animals would survive a worldwide flood (real flood!). We don’t tend to discuss climate change. We do tend to discuss the coming of Jesus. We spend all our time building a fortress that keeps other, more knowledgeable people, outside of our cult-ish interior.</span></span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With age comes many things, wisdom often quoted among them--but not always present--in aged institutions and people. Though there is often, with age, an impulse to divulge, to present openly when before, at a younger age, one tended to wait, to recede in the background, to see how others put forth their arguments, their beliefs. As you age you sometimes get bolder.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But not the church. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You cannot call yourself bold when you are living in the far gone past; 1850 does not allow you to be revolutionary in any mode of thought. </span></div>
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<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But, some in this old, old church will say, it is better to be right than merely modern. Prevailing opinion isn’t correct just by virtue of it being current. </span></div>
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<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Granted.</span></div>
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<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yet a church that fails to argue the points is a church that has already failed to convince any to its point of view. The secularists have made their choices. They have walked away. They have largely argued these views individually and come to conclusions that the church disagrees with, and not just those views touched on previously, but spiritual doctrines that many people simply do not believe in anymore. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A church that teaches the same doctrine, views the world through the same eyes, has the same viewpoints that occurred in 1850, is not a church that will survive much longer. Indeed, it is something of a miracle that it has survived this long. Do not expect it to survive beyond this next generation, because this generation has made itself known as one for which progress is important, and which demands that ideas be talked about, and defended. This generation wants, and needs, a church that will be the tip of the spear to thoughtful, progressive ideas and solutions to the problems in a modern world. That is where the energy is deployed. The church, to them, is now more the butt of the shaft, held tight (to the past). </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If the church wishes to remain relevant, it needs to speak to relevant topics, in a modern way, with modern ideas (science) not viewed as the enemy of God but as Calvin saw it all, as non-threatening, as merely a part of a revealing nature. And if it does not wish to take part in relevant discussions, does not wish to partake in the controversies that surround us, then why should we care if it lives or dies? Something else will replace it. Jesus said nothing will prevail against his church, but did not say that the church would remain stagnant. As the church changes, it becomes other than what it was. Someday, perhaps very soon, those in the church will find themselves outside what the church currently establishes itself as, and those in the church of 1850 will not recognise it, will not even see it as a church at all. They will be lost in the past, and only history books will speak of them, if they’re even that fortunate.</span></div>
PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-19684709741565252882017-01-05T11:34:00.000-08:002017-01-05T11:34:05.744-08:00The Beautiful Book<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7d/MUTCD_R5-1.svg/2000px-MUTCD_R5-1.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Image result for signs" border="0" height="200" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7d/MUTCD_R5-1.svg/2000px-MUTCD_R5-1.svg.png" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is a sense in which you can take any sign whatsoever, whether a tree, a musical note, a word, and find ambiguity, find a space that resonates and echoes until you lose it completely and you wonder, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What did that mean? </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is also a sense in which you can take any sign and apply it almost exactly, precisely to a given situation. You have the sense that you know it completely.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Signs are like this, like a jazz composition, that the composer has written down and gives to a few different bands to play. All the bands have the same musical notations, the signs, and they appears exactly the same on the page. Yet all the bands will play a different song, if only slightly different, playing within the ambiguous space of the composer’s signs.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That is language.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Everyone knows what it is; and no one knows what it is. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nietzsche apparently felt that truth is a “mobile army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms...illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten.” Umberto Eco apparently disagreed. When reading semioticians my mind fogs. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But however Eco dismantled Nietzsche, the philosopher caught that sweeping nature of signs, of pointing to an expanding truth, but a truth that is vaporous and that does not have a distinctness to it. You simply cannot draw an outline around the truth and shade it all in, point to it, and say, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There! That’s it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So when I listen and read the evangelical predisposition to absolute truth as written in the inspired Word of God, the Bible, I am predisposed myself to add a rejoinder: Have you never thought about the words? The words themselves? What do you know about them? </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">can you know about them? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am going to guess that after studying Eco and all the other great semioticians one would, if even a little like me, still be left a bit askew. It’s a tall task. It is a task that few even seem to know exists: a bit like not noticing that, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ah! Over there is a mountain called Everest. Never noticed it before! How’d I miss that?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here is a bit, as explanation, of Eco’s formula (taken from an online </span><a href="http://semioticon.com/sio/courses/communication-and-cultural-studies/umberto-ecos-model-of-communication/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lecture </span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by Gary Genosko: </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Consider, then, the nuts and bolts of Eco’s model. A sender makes reference to presupposed codes (and the circumstances orienting these) and selected subcodes in the formation of a message that flows through channel; this message is a source of information (expression) with contextual and circumstantial settings (settings that are coded according to cultural conventions or remain relatively uncoded or not yet coded such as biological constraints). The addressee receives the message and with reference to his or her own presupposed codes (and the actual circumstances, which may deviate from the presuppositions) and selected subcodes, the selection of which may be indicated by the context and circumstances, interprets the message text (content). Here, Eco adopts from Metz the redefinition of message as text as “the results of the coexistence of many codes (or, at least, many subcodes).” ((A </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Theory of Semiotics</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, p. 57.)) The structuralist disconnection of the message-text from authorial intention helps to underline Eco’s sense of the interpretive freedom found in certain kinds of decoding that eludes such a point of reference.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, that clears it up. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It must be clear that our texts, and our cultural assignations of that text, and our interpretations of that text, the connotative and denotative meanings, and so forth, render meaning inescapably...fuzzy. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back to our jazz band. Let’s suppose that the musical score is Genesis (an analogy). Each of our jazz bands takes the notes and interprets them differently, each sees some freedom within the signs and toots out a different tune. Chord changes occur quite apart from the text itself, but one’s interpretation of signs leads to different outcomes. A different song appears, and not just between the three bands, but if allowed to play the tune again, each time it becomes something else. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is not merely true of music. This is what happens to language. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Bible is not language embedded in concrete. It is musical. It is interpretive. It is fuzzy. That is just the way it is, you cannot get around it, though many pretend otherwise.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An evangelical fundamentalist reads Genesis and interprets the melody, calculates the rests and time signature, and concludes that the earth is 4500 years old, give or take. He calculates that we came from one man, Adam. He calculates that God walked the earth and gave him fruit to eat but that Adam disobeyed and ate of that one tree he should not have eaten from. He further calculates that evolution is crap and a whole lot of people walked the earth named Abraham, Isaac, Jacob/Israel, Moses. And so forth. He closes the canon and declares it Good! (But homosexuality is very bad!)</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Such is the result of not knowing much about semiotics, language interpretation, mythic reading, translation theory, or much about anything. This is what ignorance does, propping up mis-readings as idol-worship, as bibliolatry. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is a cure for this sort of destructive non-interpretive mode of reading the Bible: it is to read it as Art. William Blake thought of the Bible as the Great Code of Art. And so it is, but only if you understand how language works, how the hidden inconsistencies (actually, they are not so hidden but are quite openly declared if you choose to see them) within the Bible show humanity’s grappling with the warring tendencies of life, how life is this </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>and </i></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that, at the same time; Job resisting the impulse to curse God but pretty much cursing him anyway; God telling Job who he is talking to...and not telling him anything; psalms of great praise to God and psalms questioning God’s goodness. And that is just the Old Testament. There is a lot here in the Bible; a lot that needs digesting. But don’t think that it actually can be digested, that it can be made sense of. It cannot. You have to hold the warring factions in your head all at once, as if a Zen koan; the Jehovah of death and destruction alongside the Adonai of Jesus. The sound of one hand clapping.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Beautiful things have tension, lack perfect symmetry. They say: A </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">terrible </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">beauty. They emerge, beautiful things do, out of time and space and history, full of noise and terror and cradled softness: it comes and then it goes, born to die. It is not easy, this sort of book, and neither should it be.</span></div>
<br /><br />PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-90924702854341317082016-12-14T04:03:00.000-08:002016-12-14T04:04:32.474-08:00The Greatest Enemy of the Spirit of God is...<br />
[I was going to title the blog post as "The Greatest Enemy of Religion," since it is pithier; but the point isn't truly Religion's enemy, as an institution...and I like Spirit instead of God because Spirit is more numinous, more hazy: God cannot be a "being" but must be seen as more of a verb--so say I.]<br />
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The greatest enemy is...The Bible.<br />
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Now, it doesn't <i>have </i>to be, need to be; but it currently <i>is </i>the greatest enemy. I am going to use a metaphor that Timothy Beal uses in his book, "The Rise and Fall of the Bible." Professor Beal compares the Bible (which he notes in the sixth chapter of that book, which I like quite a bit, is actually a mistranslation as the original Greek <i>ta biblia</i> truly means <i>the scrolls</i>, or the books) to a rock which people cling to, unchanging, hard, a foundation we can firmly stand on. Or...we could choose to see it as a river, which can carry us onward, to a journey that we leap into, that carries us to unknown places in unknowable ways, <i>if we let it</i>. If we stop clinging to what it is we think we know.<br />
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But I do not advocate forgetting it, or burning it or anything drastic like that. The Bible is valuable; it is necessary to read it to understand history and the current political situation; it is valuable spiritually if only for the parables of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount and many of what the historical Jesus said (one does have to realize that there is an historical Jesus, the man-Jesus, and another Superman-Jesus) as well as Psalm 23 and the Song of Solomon and many, many other writings within it.<br />
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The Bible is the enemy of the Spirit because religions keep teaching that it is unchanging, that it is fixed, that it is inerrant, has no discrepancies--is sufficient. The more you study the Bible for yourself, without the leading hand of some study manual or pastor, the more it becomes obvious that this is not history, and is not inerrant. We've been sold a pig in a poke.<br />
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Ever since the New Criticism of the mid-nineteenth century (cf Julius Wellhausen and <i>Essays and Reviews, </i>1961) we have learned bit by bit that there is no original Bible. There are many variants. The variants do not always agree. They've learned that the Torah is not one story but several all melded into one, being pieced together by different factions.<br />
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And we've learned that there was no actual Eden, no real Adam or Eve (or Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, or Noah). Archaeology has not been kind to the Bible. Sure, it has found evidence for certain important events, such as the existence of many cities and civilizations mentioned in the Bible. However, the Noah's Ark, exodus, the First Temple, the wandering in the desert...nope. <br />
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They have learned that the Gospels are sometimes historical and sometimes not so much; you have to be careful to apply the tools of historical scholarship to the New Testament before saying that Jesus said this or that (cf Bart Ehrman). They have learned that Paul did not write all the letters ascribed to him. They have learned that Revelation was not written by John of the Gospel, nor did John the son of Zebedee, write the Gospel of John. Who wrote the other Gospels? No one knows.<br />
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If you read the Bible in parallel versions you will realize that discrepancies not only exist, they are everywhere. You will be unable to square certain sections such as the account of Genesis (there are two in Genesis but another in Job and another in Proverbs), which robe was placed on Jesus (the scarlet or the purple?), who saw Jesus and when at the resurrection (and where did he go and to whom did he go?), and you will be unable to account for modern scientific theories (evolution, the theory of gravity in Jericho's demise in Joshua...though alternate reading for that merely could allow for a long day's light...but still the Bible is still contradicting itself when it states that God allowed himself to be influenced by man for the first time here: <i><span style="background-color: white; color: #281b21; font-family: , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">"there has been no day like it before or since, when the Lord heeded a human voice."</span> Um...wrong. Cf Moses, cf Abraham.) </i>And if any book will turn you away from God it's probably Joshua, where we are given a description of God that can be likened to Stalin.<br />
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That isn't to say you cannot find God in the Bible. You just have to be discriminating. The Song of Solomon. The Sermon on the Mount. Psalm 23. Genesis (if you don't allow yourself to treat it as some sort of scientific treatise). The parables. There's a lot of great stuff here. Don't ignore it. And don't pass it all off as the skeptics often do, throwing out the baby with the bath water.<br />
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God is in there, but he is hidden.<br />
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To reveal Him in the Bible you can do the same thing that you do when you reveal Him elsewhere: stop looking for Him as a Him (or a Her or an It) and start looking for the verb, the action, the love: love as action, moving through creation: love as creative action. That is God.<br />
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The Bible has become, in the hands of evangelical conservative Christians, a house of cards that has already fallen. It came against science and science won. It came against historical criticism and the latter won. To rely on this version of the Bible, the one of literal truth, is to plant one's foot squarely on the brakes of any future revival of Christianity.<br />
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<br />PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-59980084948997986322016-11-29T16:17:00.000-08:002016-11-29T16:17:13.453-08:00God is in control<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; color: #4a4949; font-family: "Segoe UI", Frutiger, "Frutiger Linotype", "Dejavu Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.6px;">
God is in control.<br />
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So say the evangelicals after the Trump election. So says Michael Gerson albeit in a more honest and intellectual way (I have pasted his column to the end of this blog). And so say I, though with a different inflection, a different meaning entirely, from the Christian Right.</div>
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Today I saw that, while traveling in a plane to the finals in Colombia, the Brazilian soccer team, <span style="font-size: 12.6px;">Chapacoense</span><span style="font-size: 12.6px;">, crashed and all but three team members and some from the crew perished. God is in control.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">God is good, all the time. So says the evangelical Right.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">Aleppo battle continues. 16,000 civilians flee.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">God is in control. God is good. All the time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">Think of the God of the Now. Think of His presence throughout all the created universe, His influence, His power, His essence. Where is this God, this He? Nowhere. Not in heaven, which is not a place any telescope can point out; not on Mars or any star; He is not in the Kuiper Belt or in the sun or on the dark side of the moon, hiding. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">He is not a He. But He who is not a He is in control and is always So God-awful good?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">"God is a verb, not a noun."--Buckminster Fuller. Why isn't that obvious? He is not an old man, he is not some angel; it is not a he nor a He. Nor is he a She. Even in that dusty tome, The Holy Bible, God says to Moses <i>I am that I am</i> (Ex 3:14), which is a verb. I have read that in the Hebrew the phrase can be considered as conflating all the tenses of the verb "to be," past, future, present.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">God is good. All the time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">Three army personnel killed in terror attack in Nagrota, India.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">Where is God when a child is suffering? When a child with cancer is undergoing certain chemotherapy treatments, that child suffers torment; it is the same as if someone were torturing her. The child, she screams, screeches. The father can do nothing. Except weep. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">God is good. All the time.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #4a4949; font-family: segoe ui, frutiger, frutiger linotype, dejavu sans, helvetica neue, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.6px;">Where is God then? In the space-less heavens? Where? It is the wrong question. God is nowhere. God is a verb; God is what is alive, God is creation as it is creating itself. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">There is no goodness in God except for what is becoming. There is no control from God except for what is and is to come. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">To be is not about happiness. It is merely to be. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.6px;">Perhaps we expect too much of God. </span></div>
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The Michael Gerson column is pasted below: </div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; color: #4a4949; font-family: "Segoe UI", Frutiger, "Frutiger Linotype", "Dejavu Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.6px;">
Among the disappointments of the 2016 election, the close identification of many evangelicals with a right-wing populism has been the most personally difficult. On Election Day, it was disturbing to see so many of my tribe in Donald Trump’s war paint.<br />
The most enthusiastic Trump evangelicals have taken the excesses of the Religious Right in the 1980s not as awarning but as a playbook. In this political season, they often acted more like an interest group seeking protection and favor than a voice of conscience. They blessed an agenda that targeted minorities and refugees. They employed apocalyptic rhetoric as a get-out-the-vote technique. And they hitched the reputation of their religious tradition to a skittish horse near a precipice.<br />
As a citizen, Ihope that the faith many evangelicals have placed in the Trump administration is justified. As a commentator, I expect a tunnel at the end of the light.<br />
It is part of my job to have strong opinions on public matters. But lately I have been conscious of a certain, unwelcome symmetry. When it comes to Trump evangelicals, I have found myself angry at how they have endorsed the politics of anger; bitter about the bitter political spirit they have encouraged; feeling a bit hypocritical in my zeal to point out their hypocrisy. A dark mood has led to anxiety and harshness.<br />
This is the mortal risk of politics: to become what you condemn. It is not limited to one side of our cultural and political divide. Religious conservatives, for example, are typically attacked by liberals for being preachy and sanctimonious. But televangelists have nothing to teach the cast of “Hamilton.” In my case, I know — in calmer and clearer moments — that an attitude of fuming, prickly anxiety is foreign to my faith, for a couple of reasons.<br />
First, Christian belief relativizes politics. The pursuit of social justice and the maintenance of public order are vital work. But these tasks are temporary, and, in an ultimate sense, secondary. If Christianity is true, C.S. Lewis noted, then “the individual person will outlive the universe.” All our anger and worry about politics should not blind us to the priority and value of the human beings placed in our lives, whatever their background or beliefs.<br />
Christianity teaches that everyone broken, sick, and lonely — everyone beneath our notice or beneath our contempt — is, somehow, Christ among us. “He is disguised under every type of humanity that treads the Earth,” said Dorothy Day. I suspect this also applies to Trump supporters — or never-Trumpers, depending on your political proclivity. “Those people” are also “our people.”<br />
We show civility and respect, not because the men and women who share our path always deserve it or return it, but because they bear a divine image that can never be completely erased. No change of president or shift in the composition of the Supreme Court can result in the repeal of the Golden Rule.<br />
Second, Christians are instructed not to be anxious —“take no thought for tomorrow” — because they can trust in a benevolent purpose behind events. This may, of course, be a delusion, though it would be a mass delusion affecting most of humanity through most of history. If the atheists are correct, the universe is vast, cold and silent, indifferent to the lives and dreams of jumped-up primates crawling on an unremarkable blue ball, destined for destruction by a dying sun — a prospect that may be even worse than a Trump administration.<br />
If Christians are correct, that blue ball was touched by God in a manner and form that Homo sapiens might understand. And the vast, cold universe is really a sheltering sky.<br />
Days away from the start of Advent, many Christians are beginning their spiritual preparation for God’s implausible intervention. Advent is a season, wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his prison cell, “in which one waits, hopes, does various unessential things, and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside.” For believers, Christmas culminates the remarkable story of a God who searches for us. The only adequate responses are stillness, gratitude and trust.<br />
After a dismal and divisive campaign season, many of us need the timely reminders of the Advent season: That people matter more than all our political certainties. That God is in control, despite our best efforts. And that some conflicts can’t be won by force or votes — only by grace.<br />
• <span class="" style="font-style: italic;">Michael Gerson’s email address is </span><span class="text_link link_wrap type_eml" data-link-target="michaelgerson@washpost.com" data-link-type="EML" style="color: #0000ee; cursor: pointer; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><span class="" style="font-style: italic;">michaelgerson@</span></span><span class="text_link link_wrap type_eml" data-link-target="michaelgerson@washpost.com" data-link-type="EML" style="color: #0000ee; cursor: pointer; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;"><span class="" style="font-style: italic;">washpost.com</span></span><span class="" style="font-style: italic;">.</span></blockquote>
PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-34864279892074159902016-11-25T06:17:00.002-08:002016-12-07T08:45:27.748-08:00So what the heck is evangelical Christianity?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So what <i>is </i>evangelical Christianity? There are the basics, or five fundamentals (or more depending on your particular denominational flavor): Biblical inspiration and the impossibility of error within scripture; the virgin birth; Jesus' atonement for sin; bodily resurrection of Jesus; belief in Jesus' miracles.<br />
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Okay, so that is a beginning.<br />
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But at some time, not sure when but probably around the mid-century, something else happened, something that created a sub-set of fundamentalism: the evangelical movement. They still liked the five F's but seemed squishy regarding other non-fundamentalists, more likely to reach out, as Billy Graham did, to the youth. Youth for Life and like-minded organizations sought out the young with rock concerts (Christian rock concerts, but still) and Bibles that emphasized paraphrastic interpretations, emphasized form over content one might say. In his book, The Rise and Fall of the Bible, Timothy Beal, a professor of religion at Case Western Reserve Univ at the time of the publication of his book, shows that there has been a definite slippery slope toward the promotion of the Bible over the sanctity of the Bible.<br />
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Evangelicals also emphasized the "born again" experience, and the relationship with Jesus. They were true Lutherans in the original sense, believing stridently in salvation through faith by the grace of God's gift of Jesus' death and resurrection. There is a strong attraction to end times (we are always, it seems, living in the end times...until we aren't) and dispensationalism. There is also a strong tendency to judge: Gays have not been known to flock to evangelical churches (neither have any LGBTQ people).<br />
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The term, however, is difficult to really pin down. Mainline Christian churches such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church and even the Catholic Church (decidedly looked askance at by evangelicals) have the appellation "evangelical." Evangelicals will use the term, at least in the US, to differentiate themselves from other mainline churches, and Catholics.<br />
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There is a cultural difference, too, it seems to me. Evangelicals are largely white, and fervent nationalists, fervent capitalists, Republicans all (I am aware of something called Progressive Evangelical Christianity but it seems so far afield from what I experience in the evangelical world that I do not speak of it here), and also largely of the Tea Party/Libertarian sort.They are chiefly set in the South. But inroads have been made even in New England where an evangelical college has been started, the New England Baptist College and the Southern Baptist Association has helped to plant churches all through New England but mostly Vermont, seen as a bellwether of insidious liberalism (if they can grow churches in Vermont, one can hear them say, they can grow them anywhere).<br />
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Evangelicals love football, sports of all kinds, hunting, conservative politics, and prayer. Prayer is a biggy. Not the sort of prayer that Kierkegaard spoke of (<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13.3333px; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;">The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays</span>) or squishy meditation, but healing prayer, prayer that changes the lives of others and even the world. It is said often that the most important thing we can do for the nation, for the planet, for one's neighbor, for one's church, is to pray. God is always in control, you see? Nothing happens without the hand of God in it. But what of disease, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamies, war, torture, starvation, injustice... but why ask these pesky questions. God is in control!<br />
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Revival is a popular topic. Waiting and praying for revival. End times, as I previously mentioned, is another.<br />
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Climate change is not really a concern to evangelicals. Why would it be if we are living in the end times, if the new kingdom of God is just around the corner. Heck, all of politics is pretty much just a forerunner to the coming of Jesus--some even think that we can egg on God to get this going faster by pricking the Israel-Palestine conflict. Get that temple built!<br />
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All this comes at a cost. The kind of society that Jesus was teaching us about, caring for one's neighbors, peaceful but progressive change, helping the homeless the poor, widows, orphans, children, making sure everyone has healthcare, treating everyone equally and with respect, all these problems have solutions; but these solutions are not seen as necessary if we have another New Kingdom coming around the corner. Why bother changing the world if Jesus is coming tomorrow?<br />
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This is why I see evangelical Christianity as something to be fought against, something to be argued against, something to be at war with. It is one thing to believe prayer can alter the course of the universe by convincing the Creator that, Hey, that girl with diabetes should really be treated better don't you think? Those being tortured by ISIS can use a helping hand 'cause apparently you forgot about them; it is one thing to think that scripture was written by God's hand (or his inspiration whatever that truly means); it is one thing to think Jesus is coming in glory tomorrow; but it is quite another to ignore the present danger of climate warming that will destroy the lives of billions. It is quite another to ignore inequality that takes food from the mouths of children. It is quite a different thing altogether to be pro-birth but care not one wit about children drinking lead and other poisons and breathing in mercury from coal stacks, or starving, or just plain dying because their parent don't have any health insurance.<br />
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Evangelicals have also aligned themselves so fervently with the GOP that they voted (more than 81%) for Donald Trump, who cannot even be described as a Christian, let alone an evangelical. They previously voted for Romney, a Mormon, a religion evangelicals do no even consider Christian. It does not matter that Trump proved a liar, a philanderer, a man of no morals, a cheater, a xenophobe, a sexual predator. Didn't matter that his wife posed naked for a lesbian photo-shoot (I personally have no problem with the photos; but evangelicals show their hypocrisy when <i>they </i>don't). Didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was the "R" next to his name. It should be scarlet, and it should have been a "P" for Power.<br />
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And this is why I will no long ever consider myself an evangelical Christian.PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-7638373880055091732016-11-10T16:24:00.000-08:002016-11-10T16:24:25.590-08:00Epilogue<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Our names may perish” said the boy, Kolya, at the funeral of the little peasant boy, Ilyusha, in Dostoevsky last masterpiece. And they will. Time will fly on by, like the sparrows that the boy wished to flock to his grave, to keep him company. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The election now seems like a funeral, so that is why the reference to The Brothers Karamazov. And for those who dislike veiled references, I point out that the progressive movement which hoped to push the nation into the future space of its past promises, Ilyusha, the poor peasant boy struck down by a mixture of peasantry and bad luck, is that very same progressive movement; a movement that hoped to quell the poverty and homelessness of a sick, anti-Christian austerity, heal the earth from a despoilment of over a century of greedy oilmen, and finish the social movement built on equality and fairness for all: gays, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, and the transgendered.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was all going so well. Until it wasn’t. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now we face the shovelfuls of dirt pouring down on our shocked faces. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not forever. But long enough. At least for a generation. Until this pitiful “Boomer” generation has passed on and we make space for our children and our childrens’ children, only then can the earth hope for some respite from our clawing, grasping hands. Has there ever been a generation more deserving of its name perishing? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The world needed one more “greatest generation.” It got instead one that can be described as miserly and measly. Another conservative court will abscond with its corruptible Citizens United verdicts, its shackling of the EPA, its allowance of Republican voter fraud (known as gerrymandering). </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The novel ends hopefully. Alyosha, the true hero of the novel, spiritual heir of the author, expounds on the beauty within the ties of humanity, how they will remember their friend forever, will remember their brotherhood on that day, when they stood around the grave, humbly, together in humanity and love. </span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-c0475819-50bd-e88c-3fc6-b048a9878b29"></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dostoevsky hoped for great things from his countrymen. Love, brotherhood. One generation after his death came the 1917 revolution and decades of death and repression. Standing over the grave of the progressive movement, after this victory of an alt-right racist, misogynist, and it also must be said, idiot, we can remember our brotherhood as Alyosha did. That is what I prefer. But I wonder about the revolution of 1917. The progressives will always be a force. Now though one does have to wonder if it is all just too late. </span></div>
PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-3793593229783867222016-10-20T11:10:00.000-07:002016-10-20T11:10:06.566-07:00What might the Church look like without a steeple, without a door?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The churches where I live are experiencing highs and lows. Most have decreasing congregations, and whether they are so-called Bible-believing churches or more liberal mainline, it doesn't seem to matter. The Southern Baptists have for the past few years come into New England with an influx of leadership and money and are attempting a large church planting effort. Hundreds of small churches are being seeded here in New England. But these are pitiful efforts (just speaking honestly). They involve grabbing some Bible believer and trying to make a pastor out of him (it is always a man). The congregation might just be his family. A cynic could be forgiven, I think, for suggesting these plantings are an effort to show the hand of God on some spreadsheet handed around a table back home in the more fertile fields of the South: See! The Hand of the Lord is at work in New England!<br />
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New Englanders have voted with their feet. They do not like going to church. Not on Sunday, not on Wednesday, not on any day of the week ending in "y." Though they might still have some vague reverence for the Bible they do not read it. They do not know its contents (that might be a good thing as it does contain some bits that are contradictory and less than what most consider "Godly" acts).<br />
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Is it time to double down and thump our dusty Bibles? Or has that time simply passed? I say that the time has passed.<br />
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There has been some nascent efforts to bring a virtual church to the masses. Most have failed. <a href="http://qideas.org/articles/can-church-happen-online/" target="_blank">Today's pastors just do not think it Biblical.</a> They see the Church as having to be physical, having to be a place where physical bodies congregate and where the sacraments can be administered, such as baptism. They are stuck in the <i>sola scriptura</i> mode of thinking. They have made an idol out of the Bible; it has them in shackles.<br />
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It is my opinion the time has passed for the physical Church. If the Church is to continue it has to be re-made, totally; it must not even resemble the Church of the past hundred or so years. It must be spic-span-tastically re-done. For the Church to evolve it has to contain the following characteristics:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Relegate the Bible to archive status;</li>
<li>Create different models for different types of people;</li>
<li>Use the internet to create a network, local and international, of friendships and co-workers;</li>
<li>Rely on local models for local face-to-face interactions;</li>
<li>Become flexible in terms of meeting places and ideologies and times.</li>
</ul>
<br />
When creating that list I could not decide on what the future Church needed as far as leadership structure was concerned. Top-down? Bottom-up? Who would be the spiritual leader and how would it be decided? Who would structure the workings of the church? How would this work itself out? Not sure. So I leave that for another day.<br />
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The central focus is on the second bullet point (I will skip the first for now as it is the most controversial, but for a peek at how some see the Bible in a modern light see the blog: https://jesuswithoutbaggage.wordpress.com/how-to-follow-jesus/ ) Different models for different types of people is a key point. In thinking about this I wanted to describe within the context of a metaphor how this might work. I've settled on the image of a forest.<br />
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We have a scene before us, from a bird's eye view, a large tract of wooded area, softwoods, hardwoods, streams with gullies and hilltops. Depending on the type of person you are, you can view this forest differently. There will be searchers, educators, poet-artists, builders, philosophers, biologists, climatologists ('ologists of all stripes). To strip the classification down to a core grouping, let's say they are:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Educators</li>
<li>Builders</li>
<li>Poets</li>
</ol>
The Educators are within our forest church to teach and to learn. They point out the different meanings inherent within the areas of the forest, make analogies, and offer references to past teachings that further the understanding of the whole.<br />
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The Builders take the material of the forest and build new things, new buildings, new structures, that hold together and offer shelter and safety and opportunities to grow.<br />
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The Poets reveal the hidden dimensions of the self and how the self inside the forest is not really a self, but everyone; they take us by the hand and show us hidden paths that seem to be not paths leading outside us but paths leading within.<br />
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The map of this church/forest is not the Bible: at least, for us in the New Church it isn't; we don't always use the Bible for our map. Sometimes we do. Some of us choose a canon within a canon, like Luther did, and use that to show that our New Church is much like the old, or at least not quite as dissimilar as some say it is. But it is rarely used as the only map. Rather we live in the forest, and find our way by experience, by living there, by noticing things, by being aware.<br />
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But how is this Christian? Mustn't we still use the Gospel as our base? Well, yes. But the Gospel comes from the Spirit, through Jesus. We can see the Gospel in Buddha--yes, yes we can. We can see the Gospel in Lao-Tsu. We can see the Gospel in every nook and chink of space and time. But don't we have to emphasize that others are wrong? That others don't knock at the correct door? No. We actually don't. Not if Jesus is in fact the Christ, we don't. So stop worrying so much over it. Let it go. Let the question remain, and the answer pass away like a morning mist.<br />
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What if instead of studying the Bible on Wednesday nights, churches studied Dostoevsky? Or Melville? Or Goya? Or Mozart? In art we are shown ourselves, as we are and as we might be. We see the forest for the trees. And instead of studying Dostoevsky in some building which needs electricity and heat we meet in a Google Circle? Or a Facebook group? What if instead of a tithe we funded a Go Fund Me page for people in need, some we know, others we don't? What if instead of meeting on Sundays listening to a sermon on Jonah we met to repaint the homeless shelter? Or to repair someone's roof? We use the materials in our forest to build something and in so doing we create relationships and meaning in our lives.<br />
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What if some of us walked through our forest and discovered hidden meanings of who we are and what we were meant to be? The forest begins to teach us something of ourselves and our relationship not only to each other but to the world of nature. Some might see comparisons to what the Buddha taught, or Lao-Tsu.<br />
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And what if instead of handing someone a tract and asking if they know Jesus, we sent a Facebook friend request and shared an article about some bill making its way through a Congressional subcommittee (okay, not everyone is as interested in the machinations of Congress as I am).<br />
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I tend to think each Circle Church (tentative name) would evolve in its membership through time. Some would become almost evangelical in nature, its members wanting a traditional discussion of the Bible. Most would shunt the Old Testament aside and other than some mention of Jesus' words and a key teaching by Paul they would tend to the here and the now. Questions would arise. And that would be a good thing.<br />
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Questions are key for the new Circle Church: answers are to be avoided, at least hard and fast answers. We need to become familiar with living in the question. With answers we tend to pretend to know; and with this pretense we become hardened, and we fail to feel the "living waters" flowing over us. The trick is to be soft, squishy soft, to feel that sense of wonder that comes when you realize how little you know.<br />
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The danger is that we point fingers at others more answer oriented, those who see the Bible as a fundamental, as the literal Word. We can argue--we will lose. We will lose because you cannot, and should not, destroy someone's sense of mystery. The Bible, though some will see it as becoming an idol, is the touchstone for many. Leave it. Answer others with a question if need be. A question furthers the journey onward and leaves a space for others to come to you.PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-43786264071880881152016-10-09T17:24:00.003-07:002016-10-20T14:03:32.865-07:00What is required of us, as Christians?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Is Evangelical Christianity the worst evil ever manifested by humanity, as averred by a recent online <a href="http://chriskratzer.com/why-evangelical-christianity-is-the-worst-evil-ever-manifested-upon-the-earth/" target="_blank">article</a>? No, I do not believe that. I put that in there to manifest not its inherent evil but to 1) prod the reader; and 2) to bring up the underlying premise of that article: what is required of a Christian?<br />
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The blog's author, CK Ratzer, basically states that nothing is required. Christ has given his Grace once and for all and the Law is without effect (this is the antinomian view, from <i>anti=</i>against; <i>nomos=</i>law). That is the Good News. He then postulates that Evangelical Christianity preaches a "mixed" gospel, one of repentance and grace, then one of required action, action that never accumulates into goodness, but is a cause of guilt and shame and never-ending judgmentalism.<br />
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Anyway, I didn't want to argue what he has already argued. Read the article and see for yourself.<br />
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As to what is required...<br />
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We know that "repent" is a mis-translation. It may well be, as is often repeated, the worst translation in the Bible. The Greek is "metanoia," and it means a total transforming alignment with God. Not a feeling of sorrow for one's past transgressions with corollaries about never walking that path again. But let's say we have "metanoia'd" and we are born again into a heart-to-heart with the Creator-God. What then?<br />
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One might imagine a life lived sinless, expectation-less, without further wish fulfillment. Can you imagine such a life? Neither can I.<br />
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What I imagine is a life when one might experience the joy of metanoia, but it would be fleeting. It would be maddeningly short-lived, but it would remain in one's memory. It would have been life-changing; and we would always want it back.<br />
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How do we then live our life? Do we say, I'm born again so I am saved? Now to tell the others? What of my sins, which I know full well I'm going to commit, despite Paul's assurance that we can put it all aside? [And what do I think sin is? I think sin should more be defined by weakness, a failure to live one's life as one wants to live it in accordance to our joy in metanoia.]<br />
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Does sin/weakness mean I am no longer saved? Jesus said, Go, be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. Paul said, basically, that the flesh is weak, the flesh sins ("nothing good dwells in me"), and but that the flesh isn't the "I" who sins but only the weakness of the flesh. Huh? This I think, is silly, and wrong. (As to my personal view of Paul's letters as scripture: they aren't. Paul apparently thought he was in the End Times and so I think he was attempting to be an apostle for Christ, to lead people to Christ, to explain things, but not speaking as God's Word: Why would he think of his letters as scripture if it was the time of Christ's return?)<br />
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It is weakness that lives in me, even after "metanoia." We are weak. But Grace has nothing to do with weakness. And it has nothing to do with belief (which I think really should be translated more as "trust"). A God that depends on belief --a rational, mental activity-- for being saved is not a God that I can imagine. No, belief would have nothing to do with it. It is a full-on trust; and this trust can be conceived (must in fact be) as acting on those who have no capacity for rational thought: the comatose, the mentally-handicapped. If a person with an IQ of 40 cannot be said to be saved then what is being saved for? God cannot require rational belief in order to save someone. I certainly reject such a God.<br />
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In order to envision trust, imagine a sleeping body floating in a pool. The person is incapacitated and held up by only a hand, the hand of another standing by the person's side. If the hand slips away, the person's body flips over, drowns. The mind does nothing for the grace. It is only the trust of the person for the other holding him/her that saves.<br />
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The person's body in the illustration is not an actual body: it is the person's oneness. Call it soul, spirit, essence. It does not rely on thought. It relies on the hand supporting it. The spirit trusts the hand of God. I think it might be this when we experience metanoia, joy. We sense it, profoundly, and <i>at once</i>. In the <i>Now!</i> [It should be mentioned that I believe it to be important to stress the "<i>it might be this</i>" of our little hypothesis...we have too much of the "<i>this is that</i>" kind of nonsense: we suppose, we guess, we wonder...we don't <i>know </i>squat.]<br />
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The weakness of the body --what others might call sin-- of ourselves, continues unabated in this life. We never get stronger. We can never rely on our actions to save us. Some have suggested that since we are sinful creatures we can confess our sins and then go on sinning...only to confess again. Once saved, after all, saved forever, right?<br />
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We are always floating in the pool. Always weak and almost drowning. The metanoia keeps us from drowning, the trust in the hand that holds us. To say as we just have, that we can confess and then go on sinning just misses the point: we are always sinning; we are always weak; we are always floating and in danger of drowning. Always. Being saved isn't like removing us from the pool. I know a lot of people think that it does, that we are then saved and we don't sin anymore, that we can just climb on out, say Whew! and be done. That just seems silly to me. It isn't the world that I know, at least.<br />
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I like this metaphor of floating, almost drowning, because the next question comes up quite naturally: Why do we drown? No, really drown, or die, or suffer? Where is that mysterious spirit hand then, eh?<br />
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Well, we die. We are all going to die; it is our fate. We don't like to think about it. We pretend we are going to live forever. Someday our last breath will be taken. We are saved --we experience metanoia-- in our <i>life</i>, while we <i>live</i>; it is not about any hereafter. It is about the <i>Now!</i> And perhaps every day there is suffering for us; there certainly is suffering all around us.<br />
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There are two human emotions that have the capacity to join us all together: Love, and Suffering. Both can have elements of selfishness. Love can veer toward desire, can be all-consuming to the point that we shut out the rest of the world. But Love can be enormous, can be world-wide in scope, it can be amazing. And strong! Suffering too can be identity focused. We are in pain and we think of ourselves and how we don't want to feel this way. But when seeing others suffer, and seeing them thus we feel their pain, we are drawn to them in that suffering: it is painful and it is awful in a way that is the complete opposite of Love. It reminds me of the taijitu symbol (yin-yang), opposites but inhabiting the whole.<br />
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The fact of our human suffering does cause many to reject God, reject Christianity. This may be wrong. We Love; we Suffer. This is being human. There is no escape. What is required of us, as Christians? Perhaps it is merely this: to Love, and to Suffer, and to reach after what joins all of us, the <i>Now!</i>, the <i>metanoia</i>, the <i>joy</i>.<br />
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<br />PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6318984.post-27640146273632387422016-10-01T08:20:00.002-07:002016-10-01T08:20:33.343-07:00Who are you, and what am I?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The philosophy of self is one of those nitty-gritty subjects that Hume and Kant and Descartes liked to discuss. What is the self? And why is that at all important?<br />
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It is important to me personally in that a main tenet of my religion--which up until a few years ago (not sure how I would describe it today...perhaps progressive Christian) would be described as evangelical protestant--was that one needed to be "born again." Also, obviously, having a belief in the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal savior. Other creedal beliefs were also thrown in (the Bible being inspired by God, the miracles of Jesus, the virginity of Mary, the belief in scripture).<br />
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So that was "me." But what if "me" were not me? What was the "me" <i>of</i> me? If anything? If I could not answer that question, then in what sense could I say, for instance, that I was an evangelical Christian? That I was born again, that I was destined for union with God? If I could not answer that question, it seems to me, then these questions all became moot. And so the idea of Self is of particular importance...for anyone who holds certain faith questions near and dear.<br />
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First: Can I say what I am not? I think so; I am not a chair, not that hat hung on a post, not that cat linking its paws. I sense things, and this gives me a pretty good idea that I am a something that can be said to be not-that. (Maybe Hume and some others would disagree.)<br />
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Second: My idea of Self is mental. If I lose a leg, or both, or an arm or a finger, heck, a gall bladder too, I still can consider myself <i>a self</i>. This is a mental thing, the self. Unless we are transferring to the mind (whatever that is) merely the actionability of the brain, which can be considered just another organ, albeit one that houses <i>the self. </i>Is the mind merely the brain's activity or is it something else? Who knows? Let's assume it is the brain's activity since how in the heck are we going to prove otherwise?<br />
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Third: The self is my mind. But...the mind varies. And from what I read it varies quite a bit, that a "unified experience" only lasts a few seconds in the human being [Galen Strawson 1997]. We shouldn't assume that we are only one self; we might be multiple selves, even if these multiple selves are so closely related to one another that they blend continuously into one another (or seem to). From this it seems clear to me that we are indeed multiple selves. Certainly the "I" of my tenth year is different than the "I" of my twentieth year. It is very likely that each minute of each day of our existence has within it multiple selves. I doubt very much if the "I" of ten minutes ago is the "I" of my now.<br />
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Fourth: We are contingent beings. By this I mean that we can consider ourselves to be "what we desire to be" or even "what we desire to believe" or we can consider ourselves the net result of our decisions: we are the self of an act of decision. So we could say that that gentleman was the guy who decided on that occasion to sign up for the army and eventually become a veteran. Also, since employment is another popularly held view of our "self" he could be considered the gentleman who got his degree in electrical engineering while on a G.I. bill. Any decision we make really could work. But here is the rub: our decisions are contingent on many factors, pressures, that one day to the next change (and remember that we are probably different selves moment to moment). That would make our idea of self contingent. We become agents of chance, of our environment (and our natural tendencies, which though genetic, can still be agents of chance since we are from our birth chance creations through the machinations of DNA).<br />
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It is also important, too, to see ourselves as within a group, especially as within a religious group or cultural group. A Stanford encyclopedia article (to be read <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-knowledge/supplement.html">here </a>if you wish) points out that there is new literature on the societal pressures that go into making one's idea of self. This seems common sense to me: the groups we belong to pressure us to conform to an identity; this pressure causes us to make decisions and to create in consequence a view of our "self" though it is only contingent on something outside ourselves (whatever "our self" can constitute).<br />
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The same article cites Velleman (1989) that shows that our desire to act in a certain way is influenced by how we predict we wish to act. Here:<br />
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<i>Our desire to understand what we are doing, at the moment we are doing it, is usually satisfied, since our predictions about how we will act are themselves intentions to act, and hence our beliefs about what we will do are “self-fulfilling expectations”.</i></blockquote>
Thus we are what we wish ourselves to be. We want to be that hero depicted in some book and we base our expectations of our self on the prediction that this is to be our fate.<br />
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All this is to say that we are not what we seem. We live our lives pretending to be someone. Pretending to be part of one's chosen group, but that choosing itself was a result of some contingency. In the end we are fluid. The Tao Te Ching, in its first chapter:<br />
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<span id="anchor_Toc42851285">The</span> Way - cannot be told.</div>
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The Name - cannot be named.</div>
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The nameless is the Way of Heaven and Earth.</div>
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The named is Matrix of the Myriad Creatures.</div>
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Eliminate desire to find the Way.</div>
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Embrace desire to know the Creature.</div>
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The two are identical,</div>
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But differ in name as they arise.</div>
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Identical they are called mysterious,</div>
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Mystery on mystery,</div>
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The gate of many secrets. [A.S. Kline tranlator]</div>
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Could not this be speaking of the Self? Matrix of the Myriad Creatures?<br />
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But, so what? This question: When can I say I have achieved Myself? When can I say "I believe this!" or "I am born again!" We are acting, pretending, that we are making rational decisions that create our own being, and that this being is unchanging somehow (though we all recognize the mutable nature of being).<br />
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Am I born again? Do I believe in Jesus, the Christ? Am I the person who chose to wear a blue shirt this morning? <i>But differ in name as they arise. Identical they are called mysterious. </i><br />
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We ask questions of people, spiritual questions, that no one can answer honestly. So we should stop asking these questions. Or, asking them, expect no answer, and if an answer does come, expect it to float away. What is there but to look into the eyes of another, and try to see oneself? Isn't that what Jesus meant when he tasked us to love one another? Another non-self, mysterious, a gate of many secrets.PersnicketyRphhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09914330200685268029noreply@blogger.com0