debitage
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 20.7.02
It's hard to set aside the notion that the earth is more or less flat. Even if you know that the earth is technically round, that roundness is so huge that you can treat the world immediately around you as more or less flat. This illusion is even easier to maintain when there are mountains on all sides of you. You don't have to confront the fact of the earth's curvature because the horizon is blocked by a big mass of rock. You can conceive of the world stretching out flatly beyond the mountain, invisible only because the mountain is opaque. But on the ocean, the horizon is an obvious fact on all sides of you. The sea seems to come to an end, an edge, running flatly out to a measurable distance and then stopping. You seem to be circumscribed by this edge, left without the fiction that the world would keep going if only you could see through mountains.
Fire plays a key role in ecosystems such as Australia's. Though it kills plants, their long-term survival as a species depends on fire. Fire takes plant growth -- a highly structured biological creation -- and breaks it down, reducing cells to chemicals. But those chemicals are then available to the next generation, fertilizing the soil and becoming the building blocks of more wood and leaves and flowers. In this sense fire is both God and his antithesis. It is appropriate to use fire as symbolic of hell because it is the opposite of God, breaking down where his nature is to bind together, reducing when he is a creator. Fire seen this way parallels the Jewish understanding of Satan as the Advocate, drawn from the Book of Job. In Job, Satan is not simply an enemy of God, whose work is anathema to God's work, a rebel angel needing to be taught a lesson. Satan is instead one who opposes God as part of God's plan (playing devil's advocate, if you will), questioning God at every turn to test for weakness. While building up is good, there come times when the way we have built allows us to go no farther and we must tear down and build in a new and better way, much like fire consumes the old wood that inhibits new growth. Yet it is also appropriate to make fire a symbol of God, as the Zoroastrians do. The thing we see when we look at fire -- the energy and light that are released -- is the tangible manifestation of the structure that the fuel once had. Carbon in wood is bound together in a complex structure that is more than just the sum of its atoms, and when that structure is lost in the transformation to ash we see the energy, which allowed that structure to exist, as fire. All this seems to indicate why the burning bush that Moses sees in the beginning of Exodus is an appropriate symbol for God. It's not simply that the bush is a miraculous anomaly, which cannot exist except by divine intervention. The content of the anomaly -- that the bush burns yet is not consumed -- is relevant. For the bush to be consumed would be for it to break down, its constituent parts becoming dissassociated. But God cannot be consumed, because God is connective. So on one level we have a fire -- a force of dissassociation -- made impotent by God's nature as a builder. But on another level we can see the fire not as a foil against which God is defining himself, but as a projection of God in the Zoroastrian sense. The bush is filled and running over with connectiveness.
18.7.02
What concerns me is the issue of hate. I defined love as a form of connectedness. But as Amanda, Durkheim, and part of my own brain pointed out, hate is also a form of connectedness. Specifically, it's the inverse of love. When you love someone, their happiness causes you happiness and their unhappiness causes you unhappiness. When you hate someone, their happiness causes you unhappiness, and their unhappiness causes you happiness. So how does one account for hate in a scheme that promotes connectedness and love? Off the top of my head I see two possibilities. On the one hand is a sort of Zoroastrian worldview. The divine (connectedness) manifests in two conflicting forms -- a positive one (Ahura Mazda/Ohrmazd) and a negative one (Anghra Mainyu/Ahriman). The two are eternally at war, promoting opposite brands of the same thing. The other way is something like the way Plato talks about Justice in The Republic. Hate, while a form of connectedness, would in this sense be self-defeating because it's based on inverses. Two people can hate each other reciprocally -- A is happy, which makes B unhappy, which reinforces A's happiness. But if you have three people, they can't all be in a state of pure mutual hate -- If A is happy, B is unhappy, which makes C happy, which makes A unhappy... It's an unbalanced sort of connectedness that destroys itself, leading to either disconnectedness or love to resolve it. It's heterosexual, so to speak -- you can have a homosexual orgy with as many people as you like, but three heterosexuals can't all be attracted to each other (all love triangles have an open side). At the moment it seems Christianity takes a sort of middle ground -- Satan is there opposing God throughout human history, but he is ultimately weaker than God (by some conceptions, God only allows him to exist to prove the point that evil is self-defeating). It's something that I'll have to think about a lot before I can figure out what middle ground is possible, if any.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 14:25 -- link --
"Of all things, therefore, man should learn, especially of what he can see, and hear, and prove, rather than of spirits whom he cannot prove, nor find when he wanteth them."
I found it interesting that I ran across this qoute so soon after the discussion about Jeff's quote.
17.7.02
Germany is cool.
Today it paid off -- a friend thanked me for saying "one of Jehovah's Witnesses" rather than "a Jehovah's Witness."
16.7.02
Sin, then, is not just a violation of some arbitrary rules that God decided we should adhere to. Sin is anything that breaks down that beneficial interconnectedness. Harming someone else is directly harmful to God, because the relationship we damage is a manifestation of God. "As you do unto the least of these, so you do unto me." Sophisticated observers have pointed out that hell -- the fate that awaits sinners -- is not the land of fire and brimstone, with demons poking people with pitchforks, that pop Christianity gives us. It's more a state of separation from God. Thinking of it in this way, hell is not a punishment. Punishment implies a disconnectedness (which is contrary to the nature of God). Punishment is artificially imposed justice. A hurts B, so B (or someone external to the conflict but claiming to act on B's behalf) decides to hurt A. But punishment is the opposite of restoration. People speak of "paying for" their misdeeds, but that is not what happens when a person is punished. Think about what happens when you pay for something at the store (for example, a pewter Jesus figurine). The store is losing something of value (i.e., being hurt) when it gives you the figurine. It may seem that, in return, you are losing something of equal value -- your money. But if that were the case, then it wouldn't matter whether we gave the money to the cashier, or gave it to the person behind us in line, or flushed it down the toilet. What's really happening is a restoration -- the store is getting money equal in value to what it lost. And in fact, as long as they get taht restoration it's immaterial who it came from -- if the person behind you in line pays for your figurine, or you find some money in the toilet for them, they'll take it. So therefore the idea of hell as a place of deliberate punishment by a God who could choose not to doesn't make sense. Going to hell doesn't solve the problems created by sin -- if anything, it solidifies them. Hell, then, is something that sinners bring on themselves. They find themselves disconnected because they broke those connections. Of course, it's possible to restore connections. This is the basis of the Old Testament tradition of animal sacrifices -- God was believed to enjoy the smell of burning sheep, and so a negative (sin) was addressed by a positive (animal sacrifice) rather than another negative (punishment). However, there's one problem here. God becomes passive. When a person breaks connectedness, God allows that to be broken. When a person restores it, God accepts that restoration. That conflicts, though, with the idea of love. Love is a specific human form of connectedness. Philosophically speaking, to love someone is to make that person's happiness important. We love ourselves, to the degree that we want to be happy. When we love others, their happiness becomes important to us. God-like love is found in the commandment to love our neighbor as ourself -- that is, to make it so that whether or not happiness is mine or somoene else's is irrelevant to its importance. It resembles an interest in happiness from an impartial, non-partisan, non-favoritist, outside perspective. Love is active because it can be one-sided. Love is not simply a connection that can be broken by either party. Love actively reaches out to other things. So to conceive of God as not just an impersonal principle of interconnectedness, but specifically of love, is to make him active. A loving God does not allow us to send ourselves to hell because, while we may be damaging our interconnectedness, he won't let it be broken. He loves us even if we don't love him. God essentially turns the other cheek, absorbing the damage we do and presenting an undamaged front (another, unbruised, cheek, if you will). This, I think, is the theme (or one of them) of Jesus' life and death. His crucifixion was not a "payment" for our sins, unless we imagine that God is sadistic enough to enjoy seeing someone tortured to death (which makes one wonder how much God really enjoyed animal sacrifices as such, especially given that the Cain and Abel story seems to indicate that the sacrifice is simply an acting out of the more important element -- repentance and a desire to reconnect with God). And if this was truly a payment of some sort, then Jesus ought to have gone on suffering for as long as people continued sinning, rather than rising from the dead after three days. What really happened, it seems to me, is a demonstration. Jesus, is acting out the part of God (and I think this works whether you see Jesus as part of God [the second person of the trinity] or just a representative of God). He absorbed the worst the Romans could do to him -- beatings, crown of thorns, forced labor, exposure, public humiliation, nails in his extremities, and finally death by asphyxiation. And yet he came back a few days later, apparently unhampered by the wounds in his wrists and side (wounds likely just left visible for the benefit of doubting Thomas). In his crucifixion, Jesus demonstrated what he had been saying all along (in contrast to the purity-obsessed, disconnecting philosophies of most Jewish sects of the time) -- no matter what you've done or how much you've screwed up, God's active love is reaching out to you. And casting the story this way makes it irrelevant whether the New Testament account is a historical fact or a myth. God didn't change between the Old and New Testaments. God loved Moses the same way he loved Paul. The Jesus story was simply a powerful message, conveying the nature of God's love in terms that, to judge from the spread of Christianity, had a powerful resonance with a lot of people.
15.7.02
14.7.02
Because making up Latin terms for things always makes them more profound. |
Maybe it's just because I grew up in valleys, but I find the open ocean more claustrophobic than being surrounded by mountains.