Jesus and Siddhartha Gautama: were they to have met...

Leave aside that Siddhartha lived six centuries before Jesus, were they to have met, what would they have talked about?

I'm imagining the briefest encounter, say on the train, between stops. Four minutes for the Christ and Buddha-to-be to discuss the issue on the forefront of their minds.

Monday Night Football?
The Tax Bill?
How Obama is letting us down/inspiring us like no other?
Suicide bombings?
Afghanistan/Iraq?
Social Security?
Universal health care?

My guess is that one would ask the other, is Kendall Station the next stop?

Cliff Lee Runs Afoul of America's Religions

Cliff Lee has reportedly accepted a five-year $100 million offer to play for the Phillies, $50 million less than the Yankees had offered.

Lee is running afoul of two American religions: making money, wherein more is always better than less, regardless what else is at stake; and baseball, the American pastime/religion of summer months, wherein the Yankees almost always get their way.

That the money soaked Yankees could not purchase Lee shows that, while these religions often run together, there are moments when they do not. Everyone, the Yankees included, must feel good about that.

Plato's Internet

Plato's Republic offers the profound insight that the city-state can be studied as a projection of the soul. If you want to see justice in the soul, which is so small as to beggar the eyes, study it in the city-state, which is large and thus can be readily seen. Train your eyes to the larger frame, then look back to the soul. With some work, using this approach, you'll be able to see the soul's true nature.

Plato was concerned about justice and found that actual cities are feverish, driven by appetites, and thus do not reliably reveal the structure of justice. To see the structure of justice reliably, Plato sketches a conceptual Republic.

The feverish city is the one in which we live. Plato's understanding of knowledge and truth are quite different from Christian sources, but in translation his point is that sin dominates the city. If you want to understand justice, you really have to think about heaven or the kingdom of God.

If you want to understand sin, a term which might well be translated into other conceptual schemes, your best bet is to study 'the city.' A good focus nowadays is the Internet. The Internet is a double, a projection, of the 'unsaved soul.' It's all there: from the devotional and devout, to the hideous and harmful; from the loving and giving to the aggressive and destructive; from the high-minded to the pig pen.

What the Internet reveals about us, as a projection of our ad hoc interconnections, is less interesting than how it alters us over time. Every new projection includes, in lesser or greater measure, elements that derive from previous projections. There isn't an unprojected starting point; each moment is already conditioned by what is and what has been.

Plato thought that philosophers could escape this conditioning nexus but that most of us would need to die to be free from it. He believed that the body was more tied to feverish elements than the soul. The Internet seems to show that the soul is every bit as feverish as the body--and perhaps more so.

Plato's project in the Republic was to conceive a realm of justice, that of free citizens living according to justice. That is, he hoped to show how human beings could realize their full potential, the core of which he thought was essentially divine. This project should be rethought for the twenty-first century.

Wikileaks, G-d, and G-d's Kingdom

Wikileaks reveals many things, not least of which is how 'private' voice and 'public' claim are frequently at variance. All of the deep inhalations of exasperation testify against us, to discomfort with our own duplicity--that, too, was leaked. That our duality was already known is little comfort, for their was great comfort in publicly denying what was privately held, and privately mocking what was publicly heralded. There was great comfort in acting like the world of discourse was one. That comfort, though illusory, was a prayer.

Let's define G-d as that which anything can be said, and nothing need be leaked; as that which leaks nothing and is what she says; as that in which duality is privatio boni.

Let's define the Kingdom of G-d as the biggest Wikileak in history, that in which every hiding bursts forth into the light of day, and instead of doom and judgment, naught but grace remains.

Prayer

Prayer is the mind's work at becoming un-insane, to see self and world, and mind, apart from apparitional conjurings and aspirational projections.

'God' is, perhaps, the mind's most powerful tool for creating true consciousness, 'God' being an artifact excavated from the mind's hidden regions.

Ramblings on Weakness and Liberalism

A thread connecting Moses and Paul is that weakness serves as a foundation for strength--or manifestation of divine power. Moses' inability to speak positions him to speak for the Delivering One. Paul glories in weakness and foolishness through which divine power and wisdom are made known.

Nietzsche diagnosed and rejected this thread more clearly than anyone else. On his interpretation, this weakness derived from the debased and lowly, and served as the foundation for 'transvaluation,' that the values of nobles would be rendered diabolical. The elegance of Nietzsche's rejection is faith in its purest form, save that it is inverted and rejected. His anti-Christ is a mirror-wide avatar of Christ.

The (seeming) Pauline influence on the Gospel of Mark, and thus also Matthew and Luke, is such that power is rendered questionable, unless it is given in service of others. Here, too, Nietzsche was clear sighted, for he saw that latent within Christianity was proto-liberalism, which was coming to flower in his lifetime, along with a countercurrent of hideous fascism.

Arguably Nietzsche articulates (and rejects) the deepest element of the cultural genome on which we continue to rely. The ideas contained in these genes simultaneously question power (hence commending, albeit indirectly, liberalism) and also urge protection of the vulnerable (hence commending, also indirectly, the welfare state). These ideas also press forward a powerful, and often forgotten, existential element: that possessing power intensifies the likelihood that we will live enslaved to our false ideations of the world. This is the spirit (in Weber's sense) of political liberalism.

On awakening

I was roused from dogmatic slumber by Kant, much as he had been by Hume. I was jostled to consciousness by the Buddha: awake, awake, he said. I was nagged to alertness by my seven year old son, abetted in this by the two year old.

To the philosopher, the enlightened sage, and my boys, I have one thing to say: I need coffee.

O Lord

The people just wanna know,
why are you so brooding and silent
inclined to speak through loons
if you speak at all?

Speaking of valuation...

ἀλλὰ καὶ αἱ τρίχες τῆς κεφαλῆς ὑμῶν πᾶσαι ἠρίθμηνται. μὴ φοβεῖσθε: πολλῶν στρουθίων διαφέρετε

Lk. 12.7

Good to know!

Really Intelligent Design

image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Earlier on Theo. Prescripts, I opined that intelligent design makes no sense. ID is residual creationism, a view which is neither scientifically nor theologically satisfactory.  But if evidence can be supplied for really intelligent design (RID), I'll go for it.

Here are a few items that will convince me:

1. a planet (anywhere will do) where grass outgrows weeds.
2. humans with four lungs, two of which have cancer-resistant qualities and can tolerate cigarette smoke for 99 years.
3. an immune system that doesn't take its cues from being initially subdued by critters.
4. a jungle where the animals can actually sing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."
5. a planet (again, anywhere will do) where everyone named Heisenberg designs GPS systems.
6. a planet where there is no death, nothing ever runs out, and happiness prevails.
7. a planet where oil is in tanks under the ground, simply waiting to be uncorked.
8. a planet in which weekend days are five hours longer than weekday days.
9. a planet that requires no eating, nothing of anything else.
10. a planet without advertisements and commercials.

The divine telescope

To further a theme of opening one's eyes as per a previous post: we use a microscope to see very small objects; we use a telescope to see very distant objects; we use concepts to grasp large or complexly organized patterns: world, cosmos, self. Immanuel Kant called these regulative ideas.

It may be that without some concepts our vision is impeded, just as we cannot see very small or very distant objects without a microscope or telescope. The concept of God commends the largest possible perspective to us, at least ideally. It's surely true that some concepts of God limit and restrict vision; that's the essential notion of an idol. A task, and perhaps the task, of theology is to develop a concept of God that enhances our seeing of self, neighbor, world, and cosmos.

A Post-Halloween Reflection

Join Gregory Crofford and me, for a discussion of the meaning of Halloween.

A Post-Halloween Reflection