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134 comments:
At the Monday Night Cafe...
for appetizer, we have Proverbs 15:17
"Better is a little, where love is
...than a fatted ox where there is strife"
Bon Appétit!
SAN ANTONIO, TX—Everyone has noticed that Neil Rodgers is appallingly ignorant of the world around him. This is most emphasized in the way he never reacts to current events with complete panic or despair as if he just doesn’t understand how horrible things are.
“It’s sad,” said John Reynolds, a coworker. “It’s like he doesn’t understand how terrible the world is. Doesn’t he see the news? Doesn’t he read Twitter and see how vile everyone is?”
Many credit Rodgers’s ignorance to his Christian faith, the irrational belief that he is loved, that there is a happy ending to everything, and that the world is not just a random mess of awfulness.
“He really believes this stuff,” says Marvin Hanson, his neighbor. “It’s like because of his crazy beliefs, he won’t accept the scientific consensus that we’re all going to die because of global warming or something and that it’s good we’re all going to die because people are terrible.”
Some of the people around Rodgers are planning an intervention to break through his religious faith and get him to understand the facts about the world. Their hope is that eventually he’ll react to terrible breaking news not with an unsubstantiated belief that he and his family will be all right but with the more educated reaction of wishing a meteor would come and end everything.
-- The Unfunny Babylon Bee
so is this accurate? vice-signally is what the right now stands for?
"You can call me a Grandma killer," conservative writer and editor Bethany Mandel declared on Twitter. "I'm not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids' teachers in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I'm not."
It's startling to see someone boast in public about how they are willing to sacrifice others’ loved ones for a trip to the zoo. But it's not exactly uncommon.
During the pandemic, conservatives have repeatedly and publicly trumpeted their disregard for the lives of the old and the sick. Historian and writer David Perry has called this kind of public callousness "vice-signaling": a public display of immorality, intended to create a community based on cruelty and disregard for others, which is proud of it at the same time. It is, essentially, the polar opposite to “woke” left-wing virtue-signaling..."
Independent UK
And this:
"Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." Eph 4:31-32
Sunsong,
Ummm...how about reality-embracing?
Your spring is quite a bit further along than ours.
@AIA
good one, but a tough one!
"If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other."
Galatians 5:15
So 2,000 current and former DOJ employees signed a letter calling on Barr to resign for dismissing the charges against Flynn.
That shows how deep the rot is. I've come to the conclusion there is nothing worth saving at the DOJ and FBI. Defund them both and start from scratch.
During the pandemic, liberals have repeatedly and publicly trumpeted their disregard for the economic lives of workers. Some have called this kind of public callousness "vice-signaling": a public display of immorality, intended to create a community based on cruelty and disregard for others, which is proud of it at the same time. It is, essentially, the polar opposite to “woke” left-wing virtue-signaling..."
@ICARM,
My favorite:
Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.
Philippians 2:5-8
Chris Hayes: Why Yes, I Suppose There Is a Conspiratorial Subculture On the Left That Blames Everything on Russia, and I Suppose I've Been a Leader of That Conspiratorial Subculture.
But You Know Who's Really to Blame Here? Russia
ICARM,
I find the first, humbling step toward kindness, mercy and charity to be almost--almost--impossibly difficult. Then, having emptied myself (for a moment), I find the release of wrath and bitterness to be exhilarating. But it is not me, but God in me, working a miracle of conversion.
well said, Anne-I-am.
@AIA
one of our faves also! -- we included that in a post the other night
re: OT/NT
a ref: MT 23:11
So 2,000 current and former DOJ employees signed a letter calling on Barr to resign for dismissing the charges against Flynn.
Obama really did an incredible amount of hiring there.
@AIA, S. Cooper
"For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do-this I keep on doing. 20Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. 21So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22For in my inner being I delight in God's law; 23but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Christ Jesus, our Lord"
Romans
I'm trying to decide what's virtuous about destroying hundreds of thousands of small businesses, putting 20 million people out of work, watching as many as 40 million people lose their employer provided health insurance, and driving millions of children below the poverty line with all that entails.
Or forcing people to forego needed but not critical medical care, watching childhood vaccinations drop by as much as 60%, laying off nurses, and closing hospitals.
Someone needs to explain to me why this is virtuous.
make other people comfortable
/=
sacrifice others’ loved ones
Words mean things. Failure to comprehend them indicates stupidity; twisting them indicates dishonesty. We should try to avoid both.
@ICARM,
I think I am particularly susceptible to the power of Paul's words. I wrote my thesis in seminary on the possibility of Paul's writings bringing about conversion events in his readers--much as Peter's preaching (and one hopes, all preaching) brings listeners to repentance and rejoicing.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Anne at 8:35: I find the hardest step is rejecting Satan’s lie that I am too angry, scornful and self-centered to deserve to come to Jesus in the first place. It’s an over and over again process.
this is a typical Left cudgel-- they've had "Paul Ryan" wheeling grannies off a cliff for years now.
It's never a standard/principle--
...it's a cudgel. (see Fen's Law)
Was corresponding on Twitter with someone about ethnicity and nationalism, and it wasn't long before he started talking about anti-Jewish conspiracies. This is an unfortunately common phenomenon among the nationalist right subculture. A certain segment of it is positively obsessed with seeing nefarious anti-Jewish machinations around every corner and under ever bed.
I think people predisposed to conspiratorial thinking share a few things in common. (1) a difficulty grasping a concept like emergence, the way that smaller units acting independently can give the appearance of an organized whole. Instead, people see these kinds of systems and tend to believe they are the work of an invisible organizer working covertly, (2) a general mistrust or skepticism towards institutions and institutional authority. Institutions are often seen to have been corrupted or subverted by that same "invisible organizer," (3) a preference for wickedness over incompetence as an explanation for human behavior.
Pants,
Just so. And here we are, discussing the power of the Word...
Perhaps being made in the image of God means above all, having the power of the word, and all of its creative and destructive capacity. Maybe eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil meant that man discovered the power of the deceitful word. The power of the Lie. And having listened to the father of lies, claimed for himself the malignant potency of the lie.
and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us,
...full of Grace and Truth.
Pants,
How seductive that lie is. For whom did our Lord come, if not for those of us who are angry, scornful and self-centered? A pure heart has no need of redemption; the innocent need no saving. Jesus did not come to save the righteous, but to save sinners.
And all of us have missed the mark (hamartia) and fallen short of the glory of God.
That is fascinating anne, i went to catholic high school college and graduate school and i learned less than in the 10 years i became a christian.
J Farmer,
As for #1--this is similar to the way a joke seems to spring spontaneously from multiple sources, so that no one person can claim to be the originator of the joke. The human mind does have a pattern of thinking, giving rise to ideas and speculation across multiple nodes.
Humility is necessary
https://biblehub.com/philippians/3-8.htm
We sometimes forget this:
https://biblehub.com/romans/3-10.htm
Surprised no notice on this blog that Elon Musk gave the middle finger to the tyrants in California and re-opened his Tesla plant.
Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling,
and to present you unblemished in His glorious presence,
with great joy—
to the only God our Savior
be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority,
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
before all time,
and now,
and for all eternity.
Amen." (Jude 1)
good nite all
The preacher gave a 45 minute sermon on the 23rd Psalm during streaming services on Sunday.
In depth!
When you’re a church musician, you hear a lot of sermons. I’ve heard a few really great ones.
One ponders those words and considers their import,
'Even though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death'
Will they throw Musk in jail like we did that woman who opened her nail salon? If not, why not.
Humility is necessary, true, none of us do nearly as much good as we should,
Like most of us, I have had lots of friends who were really bad people.
But almost all of them, sometimes in their lives, performed good deeds.
Those good deeds may not be remembered right now (by anybody but me), but a thousand years from now, there will be people on the face of the earth who are alive only because someone, generations before that, did something that nobody else could do. Here is a short list of two people who did good things that nobody else could have done, because they were there and we were not, and because they did the right thing,
(a) I knew a guy who almost got into a bar fight that he could have won but he took pity, even after his many drinks, on the opponent.
Had they fought, the loser would have been arrested (my friend was a tough sneaky bastard, and the fight was on his home turf - had the cops arrived the other guy would have had no chance at telling his side of the story) and the poor guy would not have got to medical school with the misdemeanor on his record --- and he turned out to be an above average brain surgeon.
(b) I knew a woman who talked someone out of overdosing on drugs, I am saying she literally sat there in a room, with the drugs on the coffee table, the patchouli incense burning itself out in the incense holder on the card table where people were playing cards, and talked a future mother of five from ingesting that next round of evil pharmaceuticals.
Neither the guy (the talented fighter) nor the girl (on the couch, talking someone out of an overdose) generally lived what we could call a good life, they were both arrested at least once (on other occasions), and when they died (early 80s, early 90s) they were quickly forgotten.
(details slightly altered, just because).
A hundred generations from now, though, the good they did will still have made a noticeable change in the world.
Mike and Dianna, by the way, were their names, should you care to be so kind as to pray for their departed souls. My name is Stephen, pray for me if you want to, don't if you don't.
'Even though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death'
I know how this one goes. My mom made a needlepoint for my dad when he was in the Marines
"I shall fear no evil because I'm the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the valley."
It seems like a contradiction but it isnt.
Putting it another way:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yTfuCMvgI0s
putting it another way
Stephen Cooper,
God uses the least among us to do His will. Why should we be surprised? He picked the least plausible way to come to us where we are, in a way that He knew would be mocked and derogated, in the form of the lowliest, in order to show His might.
And I will add them--and you--to my prayers tomorrow morning. May you do the same for me.
Jesus has all the power in the world, and yet he knew he could not save himself, because he had to save us instead.
Narciso,
Thanks. I really enjoyed that.
@Anne:
As for #1--this is similar to the way a joke seems to spring spontaneously from multiple sources, so that no one person can claim to be the originator of the joke. The human mind does have a pattern of thinking, giving rise to ideas and speculation across multiple nodes.
I agree. Pattern recognition is probably an essential component of how the human mind constructs the world. You can think of science, in a way, as an effort to independently verify these mental constructions.
So the Arlington County regime -- which has done basically NOTHING during the coronavirus emergency except send out property tax bills while voting a budget that gives the Board a raise, but refuses to disclose any information about where the cases are -- announced today that beginning tomorrow, it is creating a covid hot zone about a quarter-mile from my home.
Their walk-up testing center that will draw a slew of positive cases to walk around almost right next to me will be in a fairly crowded area right across the street from a shopping center. And, no doubt, some of those tested will wander over to go to the store or get a hamburger or something.
Did the County bother to notify the neighborhood that they were increasing the danger to them, rather than locate their center in a location that did not have lots of people around it? Of course not. Did they ever think of putting their covid hot zone next door to the County Board members homes, like they did in putting it next to mine? Of course not.
Second Corinthians 4
Since God has so generously let us in on what he is doing, we’re not about to throw up our hands and walk off the job just because we run into occasional hard times. We refuse to wear masks and play games. We don’t maneuver and manipulate behind the scenes. And we don’t twist God’s Word to suit ourselves. Rather, we keep everything we do and say out in the open, the whole truth on display, so that those who want to can see and judge for themselves in the presence of God.
Annie Dillard wrote a short meditation on faith called "An Expedition to the Pole." I don't know how many times I have read it.
"A taste for the sublime is a greed like any other, after all...Besides, in a way I do not pretend to understand, these people--all the people in all the ludicrous churches--have access to the land."
What is the land?
"The Pole of Relative Inaccessibility is 'that imaginary point on the Arctic Ocean farthest from land in any direction.' It is a navigator's paper point, contrived to console Arctic explorers who, after Peary and Henson reached the North Pole in 1909, had nowhere special to go. There is aPole of Relative Inaccessibility on the Antarctic continent, also; it is that point of land farthest from salt water in any direction.
The Absolute is the Pole of Relative Inacessibility located in metaphysics. After all, one of the few things we know about the Absolute is that it is relative inaccessible. It is that point of spirit farthest from every accessible point of spirit in all directions. Like the others, it is a Pole of the Most Trouble. It is also--I take this as a given--the Pole of great price."
....
And her observation on the mass:
"Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter. Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens."
"Obama really did an incredible amount of hiring there."
I saw the Excel list. They got people who were hired during the Nixon administration.
I really wonder, how did they contact these people so quickly? It's like someone has a list and was ready to roll it out.
I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. . . . He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, for the old order has passed away.”
The one who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”
-- Rev. 21:3-5
Anne, thanks so much.
For the record, and even though there is probably next to nobody who thinks of him for more than a fleeting moment on any given day (that would be Mike, died early 80s) and probably next to nobody outside her immediate family who remembers her on any given day, even though she only passed away less than two decades ago, they were not the least among us (imho).
They knew what bad people were like before they could talk (I knew their families and friends well). Knowing that .... well, they had much to forgive, and they had forgiving hearts, and though they died young and, to an outsider, they seemed to die not only young but also almost alone in the world, I do not like to think of them as having ever been among the least among us.
More Dillard:
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of thge catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning...
My response: It is indeed a fearful thing to encounter the Living God.
Much as they say when we take the eucharist, with unclean thoughts, we are 'guilty of the body and blood of the lord 'and risk comdemnation.
Let no one deceive you with empty arguments, for because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the disobedient. So do not be associated with them. For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.
Live as children of light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth.
-- Ephesians 5:6-9
Church is a practice.
The purpose of church is to pray and sing together, and to let go of the mental chaos that consumes us in our daily lives.
From my point of view, belief is a minor issue.
I practice a prayer cycle almost every day. I do this to focus and quiet my mind, and it works.
The shoe is dropping on the folks who did the NSA database searches for Obama..
Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell has declassified the list of former Obama administration officials who were allegedly involved in the “unmasking” of then-incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn.
ABC News first reported the news but initially said in the title that Grenell was in the process of trying to declassify the list of Obama officials.
Those are felonies. Singing will begin in 3,2,1...
@Michael K
I wish I were as optimistic as you seem to be.
Unmasking the coup perps is a PR struggle as well as a judicial and political struggle.
The Democratic Party media complex will work hard to kill and discredit this struggle.
And, it’s dangerous. I’m sure Prez Trump knows this, but he’d better have multiple levels of personal security in place.
Its a tricky wicket, they always play victom or avenger, how the card is dealt.
Michael Shermer and Daniel Dennett to one degree or another see religious belief as a result of mankind's ability (need?) to find patterns, whether the patterns mean anything or not, or exist or not. See "spandrel."
I think I'm about where Farmer is as a materialist, but not by the same route.
Nasty old O'Hair and Co. had it something like this: "the Universe lacks conscious immanent purpose." I don't find that particularly troubling as a philosophy, or an articulation of the limits of human understanding.
IMHO the most complex and inexplicable thing in Creation is the few pounds of advanced monkey brain we lug around on top. Just because we exist as humans we know that our AMBs are the arena of dream, vision, rapture, fantasy, ecstasy and insight -- who hasn't experienced these whether in a natural or altered state?
Like Shermer, Dennett, Dawkins (sure, might as well be damned for a goat as a lamb) and some others, I find the prospect that our AMBs might BE the consciousness of the Universe awesome and maybe even heartening.
The rainbow is still beautiful.
Narr
FTR I don't think our AMBs ARE the only consciousness of the Universe, and how cool would that be?
I have identical twin 11-year-old daughters who are very athletic and love playing soccer. But of course their entire spring soccer season was cancelled so to stay in shape they have been going for runs around the neighborhood every couple of days, just the two of them or sometimes with their older brother. Today during their run some old fart harassed them about not maintaining a six foot distance. They were so upset that they waited several hours to tell me what happened because they thought they were doing something wrong and were going to get in trouble. What kind of asshole harasses a couple of kids getting some exercise the only way they can? Now they are probably not going to want to run any more. Is the society in which we want to live?
"You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in your tent, saying, 'I am just going outside and may be some time.' The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve, and seas become vapor, and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins."
Her writing is so beautiful it makes my body ache. She touches something inside of my mind and describes my sometimes desperate and always unending search for the Divine--what she might term the Sublime. Annie captures the sublime heart of me--and the ridiculous rags that I clothe it in--the superfluous appurtenances of this life and this time that I cling to as though they will cushion my walk into the fiery heart of love.
Narr,
Why do our AMBs intuit the numinous? CS Lewis poses that question. Why, sitting in our caves, with the fire at the entrance blazing to keep out the night and the monsters it hid, did man come up with the supernatural?
To say that our AMBs needed to explain natural phenomena begs the question. Why? Tigers and mice and flamingos have no need to resort to the numinous to explain the glinting eye in the darkness, the sudden storm, the trembling of the earth. Only we, with our special and terrible gift of mind, see the work of that which cannot be explained, the Divine, the Unknowable, the Capricious.
Only man fears ghosts.
@Narr:
IMHO the most complex and inexplicable thing in Creation is the few pounds of advanced monkey brain we lug around on top.
I generally agree with this sentiment with two caveats: (1) society is even more complex, (2) it'd be ape brains, not monkey brains.
@Anne:
Why do our AMBs intuit the numinous?
The short answer is: nobody has a clue.
To say that our AMBs needed to explain natural phenomena begs the question.
I am not sure that "needed" is the correct verb.
The sound of my lover! here he comes springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills.
My lover is like a gazelle or a young stag.
See! He is standing behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattices.
My lover speaks and says to me, “Arise, my friend, my beautiful one, and come!
For see, the winter is past,
the rains are over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of pruning the vines has come,
and the song of the turtledove is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines, in bloom, give forth fragrance.
Arise, my friend, my beautiful one, and come!
My dove in the clefts of the rock, in the secret recesses of the cliff,
Let me see your face,
let me hear your voice,
For your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely.”
-- The Song of Songs 2:8-14
@JF,
Needed. Hmm. Let me think on that. I think we found it necessary. Explaining natural phenomena brings them into the realm of the comprehensible.
Would you say we desired to explain natural phenomena? From whence came that desire? My cat has no need to explain the thunderstorm that shakes the house and awakens him from sleep. Are we, rather than the feline, destined to die from our curiosity? (And perhaps, like the cat, redeemed by its satisfaction?)
Is it turtles all the way down?
And, it’s dangerous. I’m sure Prez Trump knows this, but he’d better have multiple levels of personal security in place.
5/11/20, 9:59 PM
I fear that too.
Rick Grennell also needs guarding.
Adam: I told Anna, “The Bridegroom will come shortly.” I said this thinking of the love which had so died in her soul. The Bridegroom passes through so many streets, meeting so many different people. Passing, he touches the love that is in them. It if is bad, he suffers for it. Love is bad when there is a lack of it. . . .
Anna: Isn’t what one feels most strongly the truth? . . . Is not love a matter of the senses and of a climate which unites and makes two people walk in the sphere of their feeling? Adam, however, did not fully agree with this. Love is, according to him, a synthesis of two people’s existence which converges, as it were, at a certain point, and makes them into one. And then again he repeated that the Bridegroom would walk down this street shortly. This news, heard for the second time, not only fascinated me, but suddenly awoke a longing in me. A longing for someone perfect, for a man firm and good, who would be different from Stefan -- different, different . . . And with the feeling of this sudden longing, I must have started running, looking closely at the men I passed.
Adam – This is just what compels me to think about human love. There is no other matter embedded more strongly in the surface of human life, and there is no matter more unknown and more mysterious. The divergence between what lies on the surface and the mystery of love constitutes precisely the source of the drama. It is one of the greatest dramas of human existence. The surface of love has its current – swift, flickering, changeable. A kaleidoscope of waves and situations full of attraction. This current is sometimes so stunning that it carries people away – women and men. They get carried away by the thought that they have absorbed the whole secret of love, but in fact, they have not yet even touched it. They are happy for a while, thinking that they have reached the limits of existence and wrested all its secrets from it, so that nothing remains. That’s how it is: on the other side of that rapture, nothing remains, there is nothing left behind it. But there can’t be nothing, there can’t! Listen to me, there can’t. Man is a continuum, a totality and a continuity – so it cannot be that nothing remains! . . .
Love is not an adventure. It has the taste of the whole man. It has his weight. And the weight of his whole fate. It cannot be a single moment. Man’s eternity passes through it. That is why it is to be found in the dimensions of God, because only He is eternity. . . .
-- Karol Wojtyla, The Jeweler's Shop, Act II.
Thats the difference between this pontiff and the last two. They were capable of profound thought and greater faith i think.
Adam – I came back to show you the street. It is strange. Not because it is full of shops, neon lights and buildings, but because of the people. Look, on the other side of the street there are some girls passing by; they are walking, laughing and talking loudly among themselves. . . . Their lamps are out, so they are on their way to buy some oil. They will fill the lamps, and the lamps will burn again. . . .
They are the wise virgins.... And now look over there. Those are the foolish virgins. They are asleep and their lamps are lying by the wall. One has even rolled across the pavement and fallen into the gutter. To you it seems they are asleep in those recesses, but in reality, they too are walking down the street. They are walking in their sleep. They are walking in a lethargy – they have a dormant space in them.
You now feel that space in you, because you too were falling asleep. I have come to wake you. I think I am in time.
Anna – Why did you wake me? Why?
Adam – I’ve wakened you because the Bridegroom is to walk down this street. The wise virgins want to come forward and meet him with their lights; the foolish virgins have fallen asleep and lost their lamps. I promise you they will not wake in time, and even if they do, they will not be able to find and light their lamps. . . .
The Bridegroom is constantly waiting. He constantly lives in expectation. Only this is, as it were, on the far side of all those different loves without which man cannot live. Take you, for instance. You cannot live without love. I saw from a distance how you walked down this street and tried to rouse interest. I could almost hear your soul. You were calling with despair for a love you do not have. You were looking for someone who would take you by the hand and hug you.
Oh, Anna, how am I to prove to you that on the other side of all those loves which fill our lives, there is Love! The Bridegroom is coming down this street and walks every street! How am I to prove to you that you are the bride? One would now have to pierce a layer of your soul, as one pierces the layer of brushwood and soil when looking for a source of water in the green of a wood. You would then hear him speak: “Beloved, you do not know how deeply you are mine, how much you belong to my love and my suffering” – because to love means to give life through death; to love means to let gush a spring of water of life into the depths of the soul, which burns or smolders, and cannot burn out. Ah, the flame and the spring. You don’t feel the spring, but are consumed by the flame. Is that not so? . . .
The Bridegroom is coming. This is his precise hour.
-- Karol Wojtyla, The Jeweler's Shop, Act II.
I wish I were as optimistic as you seem to be.
I wish I was as optimistic as you think I am. If Trump loses the election we go to Kurt Schlicter's world.
To spell it out, jesus is the bridegroomn and we are to behave as if tomorrow is the date of betrothal.
Sunsong, you are now in K(ar)en B's good graces.
Mark, that is beautiful
So li keoung sic the premier of china is in charge of the wu flu response
Michael K,
I enjoy KS's novels. I don't want to live in one.
Andrew – And the jeweler, as I have already mentioned, looked at us in a peculiar way. His gaze was at once gentle and penetrating. I had a feeling he was watching us while he was selecting and weighing the rings. He then put them on our fingers to try them. I had the feeling that he was seeking our hearts with his eyes and delving into our past. Does he encompass the future too? The expression of his eyes combined warmth with determination. The future for us remains an unknown quantity, which we now accept without anxiety. Love has overcome anxiety. The future depends on love.
Teresa - The future depends on love.
-- Karol Wojtyla, The Jeweler's Shop, Act I.
A recently seen headline....."Can you catch Corona Virus from your cat?"
One has to matthew 24, one is struck how it has been misrepresented or not.
@Anne:
From whence came that desire?
I think that's an unanswerable question. It is basically asking why is the brain the way it is and not some other way. Recognizing patterns in the natural world is relatively simple compared to recognizing the patterns behind human cognition or social interaction is massively more complex. Perhaps the "desire" is a byproduct of the fear of the unknown. Maybe we are compelled to answer unaswerable questions with, "God did it."
Narciso,
Indeed. The bridegroom is knocking at the gate--are we ready? How hard it is to live always in readiness for the moment of fulfillment, of the culmination of desire and dread...I say desire because "like as a hart longs for the water stream, so longs my heart, O God, for thee;" and I say dread, because how can I dare to hope that I will not burn to ash under the gaze of the Holy One?
T.S. Eliot: "Go, go, go, said the bird. Humankind cannot bear too much reality." And what is reality? Not that which is taken in by our eyes, and our ears, and our touch. Reality is the instantiation of Love itself, of the Word spoken in the darkness: Come to me, all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
We are the Bride. You are the Bride. "Oh, Anna, how am I to prove to you that on the other side of all those loves which fill our lives, there is Love! The Bridegroom is coming down this street and walks every street! How am I to prove to you that you are the bride?"
Each of us is the Bride that Jesus loves with such a fierce deep passion, if only we would realize it and accept it. “Beloved, you do not know how deeply you are mine, how much you belong to my love."
I haven't been lurking around for a week or so, too busy building new fences so I can keep a couple of goats. I'm sure I've missed a lot of sparkling discussion.
Since my brother moved into the "farmhouse" with the intention to buy, today I detached my flagpole from the greenhouse and brought it two doors north to install at my house tomorrow where it can be seen from the street.
I got my first shipment of new flags today, two Scottish flags and a Gonzalez Flag from the Texas Revolution, the "Come and Take It" banner with the star and cannon silhouette. Which is very cool, since I own a working 10# Parrott Rifle replica. As far as I know, I'm still the only guy in town with artillery.
Still coming, I've got a Scottish royal banner, a couple of American flags and three East German flags—my personal "pirate flag" and three for less than $9. Oh, right, and a Presbyterian Church flag. I'm going to have a lot of fun just running things up the flagpole.
The Jeweler's Shop is easier to read than to see in a production. But it does have a certain poetic beauty.
And written by a priest/bishop in Communist Poland.
Consider poland for about 250 of those years it was russian territory.
Milwaukee guy - don't forget to take pictures, that sounds like something people would like to see even if they were not there in person
The han dynasties were contiguous with the time of jesus.
To look at the time scale that was how many dynasties ago?
lots of good quotes from Saint Paul earlier tonight.
My favorite saint, Elizabeth of the Trinity, had a special devotion to the words of the Lord which Saint Paul, acting under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote down, and one of the more interesting ways to spend a free hour or two is to read the best remembered quotes of Saint Elizabeth and to reflect on them in light of similar quotes from the Bible.
I guess i had slighted dillard, i had littke notion.
Lots of interesting talk back and forth--and wondrous quotes--but I am afraid we have scared everyone else off....She notes wryly.
I say cor ad cor loquitur, and she, a saint, and by that measure much closer to the truth than me, says abyss calls to abyss,
Narciso,
I love her writing. She has a gorgeous essay about an eclipse. And short stories that are a wise commentary on human nature.
the night is long, and there is plenty of time for anyone to say what they want to say, if they want to say it.
They cant compute, its like garmin we are supposed to be discussing the cause de jure, whereas waze has a better focus.
well narciso i have lots of friends with Caribbean families or Caribbean heritage and eventually i sometimes ask them if they like to smoke cigars.
seriously what is up with all those people who can afford cigars, who have Caribbean heritage, and who are all like well I don't smoke cigars?
Driving the Bible and prayer out of public soaces was a great tragedy, in part because what takes its place platitudes were full up on those.
and i mean these are people who are willing to drop 5K on a visit to Disneyland, where a good Dominican cigar is like 8 bucks
I have an aversion to cigarette smoke i tried a cigar back when it was the rage in the 90s it didnt take.
For how many people and where are they flying from?
That claremont piece encapsulated what i e thought about modern pedagogy.
We can't reopen until we have a vaccine!!!!!!
well that makes sense. but i am getting suspicious, i always get answers like that.
still i am glad cigars are not as popular anymore they are a lot cheaper.
Off topic, I think I got dumped by a very slightly chubby girl once because she overheard me telling some guy that "chubby girls can be cute". I wasn't talking about her! Some people are just too sensitive. All for the best, I guess, who wants to be married to a slightly chubby woman who forbids you from using the word chubby either in her presence or out of her presence when she might be eavesdropping.
That was not in the 90s
Washington Post headline -
Finding a vaccine won’t be enough to end pandemic
Even after a vaccine is manufactured, limited supplies could create coronavirus haves and have-nots around the globe.
And even then, there will be squirrels because mutations
https://mobile.twitter.com/PolitiBunny/status/1260018271106940933
Chutzpah doesnt suffice
It was a status symbol, its like with spirits you can be economical or splurge
Sigh.
Washington Post headline -
Tracing South Korea’s latest virus outbreak shoves LGBTQ community into unwelcome spotlight
Authorities say they need to know everyone who was in one nightlife district, even if they don’t want to be found.
Mom, Dad, two kids, SUV from Virginia and back. 2K. But their house would rent for 4K a month, so staying away is another 1K of unused value for that week.
All right, 3K, not 5K. That is a lot of really good cigars.
When I was young one of my friend's dads smoked a good cigar a couple times a week, I always liked visiting when the house smelled of cigars.
They cant be uninvolved, that sounds familiar.
See, now I have to stay up.
OK Farmer, ape brains. Smartypants. (Monkeys, apes, they all look alike to me--at least their brains do.) And to me society's complexity is an emergent property of the interactions of our individual AMBs, multiplied assplodentially. (And I might argue that individuals are more unpredictable than masses anyway--to that extent "more" complex.)
Anne, Professor Lewis failed to impress me in 1969 and nothing I've learned about or from him since leads me to see him as a guide to understanding anything but the opinions of CS Lewis. My hypothesis about how and why we perceive and deal with the numinous is in my references--we have these brains, quite useful for many purposes, and we enjoy using them so much we easily fool ourselves with their workings.
We fear because we live in a scary world. For most of human existence, it was better to have ten false alarms than miss one real threat--because one was all it took.
We fill the shadows and dark places with monsters, and invent magic weapons against them. It's our way of domesticating our fear of the Great Unknown, the Death that only us AMBs know is coming.
Mark, sorry, I give JP2 a lot of credit as a worldly leader in a time of crisis, but his musings on love and . . . all that, don't resonate with me.
Do I personally fear death? Yes, but less death than dying. Is oblivion after life different from the oblivion before life?
Fear death the way a leaf fears the forest floor, or a tear fears the ocean.
Narr
It's not so much turtles all the way down as Escher staircases, to me--or ants on a Mobius strip.
PS Good night!
Narr
Before I see any responses. Good night! Good night!
if you go to an ethnic restaurant, and if you have learned a few hundred words in their language, you can almost always get the best of the best, not just status symbol good, but peak of civilization good, from their wine list or from the bar, and if you learn the accents right (I spent a couple years learning linguistics) they won't charge you any extra . of course you can't dress like a slob.
Its one view not privileged over another, i imagine woytila saw much of that alwley of death in his formative years
The Professor is playing cards with Mr. Drysdale and they are talking about time travel.
Later, the Professor finds himself back in time. In April 1865, Washington City, and he encounters an officer and his lady friend going to see a play at Ford's Theater.
The Professor tries to warn Emmet the handyman, whose doing duty as a police officer, but he just thinks he's drunk. So he doesn't prevent the assassination of the President. But he does change history.
“We sat alone in the small public housing apartment. George Barrett, the lawyer friend who had defended black demonstrators during the Sit-in Movement, had pulled some strings to get it for Millie when her money was gone. She had been nauseous all day, and I sat beside her bed with the kidney basin half-filled with the cloudy stomach fluid. She could still talk, though the esophagus was completely blocked. However, she made no verbal request, gave no oral orders. Just kept gazing at the viscid liquid, occasionally raising her eyes upward. She repeated
the same movements several times. I dipped my fingertips into the basin and held them there. Her eyes accepted the offering. I slowly crossed her forehead three times, saying no words. She closed her eyes as I did. In her own way, perhaps because fate had been so cruel, she was a woman of great inner strength. It seemed proper that the sacramental came from deep within her own body. Not ex opere operanto. Ex opere operantis. Baptism? Unction? The Hospice nurse called at five next morning.”
— Forty Acres and a Goat (Banner Books) by Will D. Campbell
I first read this more than 30 years ago.
Mark - Beverly Hillbillies (Mr Drysdale), Twilight Zone, and Green Acres (Emmet the Handyman)?
I remember that episode, russell johnson the professor was in it
Alf and Ralph were the handymen on Green Acres.
The "virtue signalling" "vice signalling" thing is like Batman and the Joker arguing about who made whom. I wish people would understand that conflicts go on and on and you can't just sum up your opponents with a clever phrase and get rid of them. "Virtue signalling" actually seemed to have some meaning, though it was overused. Now that "vice signalling" enters the language we may have to give up both terms just to stay sane. It's a stretch to say that "I want to take my kids to the zoo" is "vice signalling" but that's what labels do - they sum up feelings and actions so that the lablers can easily dismiss and dispose of them. Isn't everybody tired of such rhetorical games by now?
Emmett was in a few episodes of Petticoat Junction, which was in the Green Acres universe, but that's not his claim to fame.
The Twilight Zone: Back There"
What a pleasant evening it has been, spending a few hours chatting with gentle minds of different perceptions and beliefs.
I hope you all sleep wonderfully well and dream of cotton candy dogs and licorice cats.
J farmer said . . .
. . .
Maybe we are compelled to answer unanswerable questions with, "God did it."
Or maybe "nature did it"?
Where I live every natural object is plant or animal, water, or air, coral, or basalt.
The basalt is congealed lava a few hundred or a few thousand years old. If I go back to my birth place in the Upper Midwest, you will find places where a river, like the Saint Croix, has cut through a hundred million years worth of sedimentary rock to the basalt left by an ancient volcanic eruption.
A hundred million years is a very long time. Imagine a flat plain. Geologic processes began to push up a mountain range at one foot greater than the amount eroded every thousand years. In ten million years you will have mountain range ten thousand feet tall. Now imagine the opposite process. Every thousand years, our ten thousand foot mountain range is eroded more than it grows by one foot. After ten million years were are back to a flat plain.
The lava stopped flowing in Minnesota a hundred million years ago, long enough to grow and erode to a plain five such mountain ranges in succession. Yet, when you find some uneroded basalt, as you sometimes will in a cut for a road or a bridge, it looks identical to basalt that is a few years old. That is a very stable part of reality.
Now consider life, especially human life. We are like phantoms. The organic molecules that make up our material bodies are incredibly large, variegated, and delicate. Molecules that consist of thousands of atoms have very slightly more positive or negative regions that make temporary connections to other large, variegated, and delicate molecules. Together they create more larger, variegated, and delicate molecules that we call cells. The cells specialize and become flesh, bone, and the chemical processing machines we call organs.
Fully assembled, you have a human being, stable as an entity for perhaps 80 years before the system fails and is broken down into simpler and simpler chemical engines until it merges into the soil.
We humans know that from dust we came, and to dust we shall return. What we are we? Nothing else in the universe we study is like us. Nothing else knows that it is mortal.
@Lewis Wetzel:
Or maybe "nature did it"?
That is my assumption, yes. I don't believe in god.
But you are investing nature with the powers of god, J. Farmer. The universe creates consciousness, without intent, just as it creates basalt without intent.
I do not believe that this is a reasonable position, but we are all free to believe what we want to believe.
@Lewis Wetzel:
I do not believe that this is a reasonable position, but we are all free to believe what we want to believe.
I understand completely that people find it implausible. From my perspective, I don't really see how adding a god to the equation changes much. It could just as easily be that we were created by a god who is indifferent to us. It still wouldn't tell how nature works the way it does. It still wouldn't tell us why were here. It still wouldn't tell us if there is life after death.
It is still a huge leap to get from a creator god to a personal god. For me, when I look at the variation of religious belief across space and time, I think the likeliest explanation is that these ideas are all human creations. Mind you, I have no desire to "debunk" religion, and I think something like an atheist convention is ludicrous. So long as religion does impose itself on me, I have zero problem with it.
"Those are felonies. Singing will begin in 3,2,1..."
I suspect the only punishment these folks will suffer will be the little bit of humiliation, if any, they experience seeing their names and offenses published.
Thanks to everyone who made this thread such a remarkable —event, venue, document, inspiration— for yourselves and also for us, the laggards who stumble on it by morning light. Your thoughts and words are a gift. They are heartfelt in the best possible way. I will remember them if (when) the snarking and bickering return.
Blessings.
I don't really see how adding a god to the equation changes much.
God only effects you. If you seek him. So God only changes the equation if you are part of the equation.
Anthropologist Loren Eiseley put it this way:
“… if ‘dead’ matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful powers, and may not impossibly be, as Hardy has suggested, ‘but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.’”
(Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey, 1957)
The discussion above about God, and related theorizing, is on a different level than what I am going to say. I find it both interesting and comforting as a human being.
I couldn’t help but notice, however, concepts closely connected with works of the economist F.A. Hayek:
Adam Ferguson observed that social structures of all kinds were “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (1782)
Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design. — Adam Ferguson [emphasis added]
“Friedrich Hayek was most taken by an observation Adam Ferguson made in this work that social structures of all kinds were ‘the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’. This led him to develop his notion of ‘spontaneous order’.”
In his columns below, the economist Don Boudreaux observes the complexity in society from simple arithmetic truths, which provide a basis for his analysis. I’ve linked both an older column and one published just yesterday:
Marvelous Properties [of spontaneous market orders]
“The economist Paul Romer notes the astonishing fact that if you thoroughly shuffle a deck of 52 cards, chances are practically 100 percent that the resulting arrangement of cards has never before existed.
"Never.
"Each time you shuffle a deck, you produce an arrangement of cards that exists for the first and only time in history. …”
“The Magnitude of the Economic Challenge Even in Normal Times
"When I was young, the number of family members gathered for our family’s Thanksgiving dinner was about 20 – a large dinner gathering, yes, but nothing out of the ordinary. Yet the number of different ways to arrange the seating of a mere 20 people around a dinner table is – drumroll! – 2,432,902,008,176,640,000. …
"I didn’t write the above to impress you with my knowledge of advanced arithmetic or my ability to google “How old is the universe?” I wrote the above to make a point about the economy. ...
Hat Tip:
Cafe Hayek (where I saw the link to his latest column)
Complexity is a Real Factor
In his contribution to psychology, Hayek touches on the “AMB” (see comments by others above):
The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (University of Chicago Press, 1952, 1976)
This book was written decades after he first thought about the subject. Raised in Vienna by a family of scientists, Hayek’s first thoughts on such matters came to him while dissecting frogs, if I recall correctly.
From Hayek’s preface to the book:
“In the end it was concern with the logical character of social theory which forced me to re-examine systematically my ideas on theoretical psychology.
From the Introduction by Heinrich Kluver:
“According to Dr Hayek, sensory perception must be regarded as an act of classification. What we perceive are never unique properties of individual objects, but always only properties which the objects have in common with other objects. Perception is thus always an interpretation, the placing of something into one or several classes of objects. …
“The qualities which we attribute to the experienced objects are, strictly speaking, not properties of objects at all, but a set of relations by which our nervous system classifies them. …
“Every sensation, even the ‘purest,’ must therefore be regarded as an interpretation of an event in the light of the past experience of the individual or the species. …
“‘Mind’ for him has turned into a complex of relations; it is simply ‘a particular order of a set of events taking place in some organism and in some manner related to, but not identical with, the physical order of events in the environment’. …
“At the same time it is to be clearly understood that at least a certain part of what we know at any moment about the external world is not learned by sensory experience, but is rather implicit in the means through which we can obtain such experience; that is, it is determined by the order of the previously established apparatus of classification. To express it differently, there is, on every level, a part of our knowledge which, although it is the result of experience, cannot be controlled by experience because it constitutes the ordering principle. ...
Morning y'all. I kinda expected fireworks.
But I see everyone took my comments in the spirit I made them. I'm not a debunker of faith--what a quixotic enterprise! And I have no overarching theory to explain--explain!--what my little AMB perceives in its all-too-brief moment.
I'm an epistemological moderate: personally I've never experienced and do not perceive the reality of the extremes of perception in which terms like salvation and atonement, or cosmological constant and wave function are relevant to how or why I live.
I do read and take seriously all good faith critique.
Narr
I'll leave it there and find a fresher thread
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