Literary Discussions

Reformation Piety

2012-01-27T13:40:00.001-08:00

I spent 20 years (from my 20s into my 40s) with the most conservative Greek Orthodox group, the "Old Calendarists." My views will always reflect that influence. Each age has numerous wicked people a a minority of righteous people. Satan does not use every wicked person as an instrument. But I believe that Satan did use Luther as a powerful instrument to forge a false Christ to beguile and lull people into the complacent belief that their salvation is guaranteed by the simple lip service of once inviting Christ (this false Christ, an angel of light) into their heart as their "personal Savior" and then enjoy an "intimate relationship." I do not find evidence of such a Reformation piety in the first 800 years of Christianity. If you feel that I am mistaken then why let the words of a foolish old man bother you? If you have deep faith in your Reformation piety and your salvation by faith alone, then you should simply ignore my views. I see Luther as a lusty addictive personality who could not endure his vows of chastity. He even wrote sermons about the voluptuous breasts of the Virgin Mary who nurses the infant Jesus. Luther KNEW that the Greek Orthodox had always functioned without a Pope. Luther COULD have chosen to life out his monastic vows among the Greeks. Instead he redesigned Christianity and made celibacy something unnatural and evil. Then he married a former nun and sired many children. Luther ignored verses such as "better never to vow at all then to vow and not pay" and "make your vows and pay them to the Lord."

The price you must pay

2012-01-25T17:38:00.001-08:00

If you feel that you must be "Godly" at ALL costs, even at the cost of your sexuality, then that is the price you must pay; BUT, if you feel that you must be sexual at ALL costs, even at the cost of being "Godly" (whatever that might mean to you) , then THAT is the price you must pay. But, whichever your choice, do not FOOL yourself into believing that you can have it both ways because then you will wind up with NOTHING.

Behavior

2012-01-23T21:26:00.001-08:00

One of the more surprising notions I ever encountered is that if we have a gas in a closed cylinder then, if we examine each molecule, it seems to be totally random, free, even chaotic in its behavior, and yet the volume as a whole obeys very precise laws of temperature and pressure. Instead of molecules we may consider people in a society. Their actions seem free, unpredictable, and yet the society as a whole exhibits a certain collective character or nature.

Test of Toshiba Thrive Tablet

2012-01-23T19:04:00.001-08:00

I want to see how much I can do using only this Android tablet. Watching Republican debates.

Obama's Golden Rule Gaffe

2012-01-23T17:19:00.001-08:00

Erik:

I’ll be honest. I didn’t notice this until someone else pointed it out. But, now I’m wondering who wrote the President’s recent spontaneous affectations of faith. The speechwriter probably has a fancy diploma, but he sure as heckfire didn’t graduate from Bible school.

William:
Interesting! You got me curious so I googled and found one source (among many) -

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/obama-talks-about-his-faith-2/

By the way, my own personal take is that Cain’s words “am I my brother’s keeper?” do NOT necessarily translate into “I AM my brother’s keeper” although many understand the verse in that fashion. Moses said, somewhere, (paraphrasing) “This day is placed before you good and evil, life and death; CHOOSE therefore LIFE.” So, you see, GOOD is each person’s free-will choice and not something may successfully be imposed upon people.

Excerpt:

“I’m a Christian by choice,” the president said. “My family, frankly, they weren’t folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn’t raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead. Being my brothers and sisters’ keeper, treating others as they would treat me, and I think also understanding that Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings, that we’re sinful and we’re flawed and we make mistakes and we achieve salvation through the grace of God.”

Mr. Obama went on: “But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people, and do our best to help them find their own grace. That’s what I strive to do, that’s what I pray to do every day.’’ Yet he said that as president, he also “deeply believes that part of the bedrock strength of this country is that it embraces people of many faiths and of no faith.’’

Erik:
This rule is pure iron pyrite: “the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead–being my brothers’ and sisters’ keeper, treating others as they would treat me.”

I was not talking about the conflation of New and Old Testament passages. That certainly is a standard reading of Jesus’ own words, in which he states that he accepts everything within the Old Testament.

I was talking about the twisting of the Golden Rule to mean EXACTLY the opposite to what most Christians take it to mean.

To be clear, “treating others as they would treat me” means the exact opposite to ‘doing unto others as you would *have* others do unto you.’ That “have” is a pretty derned important word in that particular sentence. Without it, one rapes rapists, murders murderers, harasses harassers, slaps slappers while turning ones check only to those who would turn theirs first, etc… and so on.

That’s just a gaffe, of course. The President didn’t mean to to get it wrong, even if secretly believes that the Golden Rule is a bunch of hooey.

But, it is a telling gaffe. It’s even more telling since his affected faith credo was obviously first focus grouped, then carefully crafted by a wordsmith, and then rehearsed by the President beforehand. I would not be the least bit surprised if the President hadn’t uttered the words precisely as they had been written.

Like I said, the gaffe is very telling.

William:

Erik admitted that he did not notice the gaffe until someone “brought it to his attention.” I was so preoccupied with the vitriol of the initial post that I too did not notice the gaffe until Erik pointed it out to me.

Jefferson indicated in a letter to someone that he desired to “erect a wall between church and state” and it is unfortunate that those very words did not find their way into the Constitution. Why should every candidate have to do a stump speech tour through the Bible Belt and loudly profess that “they have taken Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior; as the ONLY WAY that leads to heaven?” Why does a candidate like Huckabee have to explain to Newsweek what his understanding of “Biblical In-errancy” is (which, by the way he got ass backwards in light of II Peter 3:16.) Why did Bobby Jindal conveniently choose to convert to Catholicism in high school when is family religion was perfectly good for the likes of Mohandas Gandhi. I feel certain that Jindal would have converted to Islam had his parents moved to Indonesia and he would have become a Theravadin Buddhist had they moved to Sri Lanka.

Why does Jeb Bush marry a Roman Catholic Hispanic wife but then wait YEARS before converting to Roman Catholicism? Did he convert out of a deep spiritual conviction or was it a politically convenient move because of controversies arising in the Episcopal/Anglican communion?

From the point of view of Judaism the Christians got “the golden rule” all wrong. Christians pejoratively call the Jewish analog “the SILVER rule.” The Jewish rule was given by the likes of Hillel and Shamai as follows: “that which is HATEFUL to you DO NOT unto others.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder

We all know what is hateful to us but it is presumptuous for use to assume that we know what is GOOD for others, and run about the world with our gun-point democracy and our missionaries who create “rice Christians” (converts in India who are starving and will do anything for a bit of rice and some blankets.)

So, Erik, since you are such a good Christian with immaculate Christian values and deep theological insights and since Christian values are absolutely ESSENTIAL for American political leaders, therefore you have a huge problem with what Paul said in Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Based upon what Paul said there is no person who is worthy of the presidency. Whatever are we to do? Would you actually advocate putting A SINNER in the office of the president?

Erik:

“Erik, since you are such a good Christian [...]“

When did I ever say anything like that?

What I was talking about was the clear meaning of the President’s words. Do you disagree with my interpretation of them?

William:
Erik, how can I be sure that you are a person of integrity who is worthy to represent the American government? How can I be certain that you are not some “whited sepulcher” which appears outwardly to be something pure and clean but inwardly is filled with impurity? Of course, Erik, I cannot know with certainty anything about your true nature.

Erik, how can I see you as “a patriotic American” when you seem to be attacking and demeaning your “commander in chief?” Perhaps I may construe your posts as an attempt both to overthrow the existing regime and also to insert into American government a “religious test” which is expressly forbidden by the Constitution?

Didn’t Jesus say something like “with what measure you measure out unto others so shall it be measured out unto you?” In the spirit of that verse I think we should put Erik under the same microscope that Erik uses on Obama to see if Eric measures up and passes the test.

Erik, you advise me to ask Jeb Bush about his beliefs and not discuss it with YOU. But am I not EQUALLY entitled to ask YOU why you do not write your concerns directly to the White House. Is it not your patriotic DUTY to make some formal statement of your serious concerns? Do you mean to say that you do not care enough about America to “do the right thing and write the letter?”

Are you NOT a high principled idealist who would even put his career on the line to speak out for truth and justice. Or are you a “part-line company man” who parrots the party line. I dare say that you would today condemn the McCarthy “witch hunts” BUT if you were living in the McCarthy era would you have the courage of an Edward R. Murrow to risk everything and speak out against what you see as wrong or would you conform and march in goose-step fashion in hopes of your continued employment and your next promotion?

Erik:
+++
‎’But am I not EQUALLY entitled to ask YOU why you do not write your concerns directly to the White House.”

Entitled? Why you sure are. Ask away.

“Is it not your patriotic DUTY to make some formal st…atement of your serious concerns?”

Nope. A FACEBOOK post was sufficient. Perhaps I will write a letter tot the editor!

“Do you mean to say that you do not care enough about America to do the right thing and write the letter?’”

So far, I have courteously answered all of your questions, while noting that you have not bothered to answer mine. perhaps I will answer this question with a question. What does this have to do with Global Warming on Mars?

“Or are you a ‘part-line company man’ who parrots the party line.”

This isn’t even a question. What does this have to do with the plight of the Plataeans during the Peloponnesian War?

“I dare say that you would today condemn the McCarthy ‘witch hunts’”

I suppose you can dare to say that.

“BUT if you were living in the McCarthy era would you have the courage of an Edward R. Murrow to risk everything and speak out against what you see as wrong or would you conform and march in goose-step fashion in hopes of your continued employment and your next promotion?”

How the hell am I supposed to know that? I can say that I would hold the President accountable for his words, since I am doing that right now. But, I can’t really talk about such a counterfactual scenario, since, of course, it is counterfactual.

William:
You see, Erik, the “golden rule” is a two way street. I am attempting to do “to you” exactly what you are attempting to do to Obama, namely, to twist and distort his words and actions in order to make him look bad. Anyone who reads this long thread would most likely come away with the impression that I favor Obama and am willing to overlook an understandable slip of the tongue but that YOU are most anxious to attack any little gap in his “armor.” You say that you stood long hot hours in the sun in order to “show respect” to the president but perhaps what you did was simply self-serving so that you could brag to everyone that you stood long hot hours.

Erik, you say you could care less about what I think of you so does that mean that Obama does not care what you or I or others think about him?

Erik, are you saying that you do not care what I think about you because you ONLY care about people who agree with you and stick to the “party line?”

Jesus said something about “you shall be judged for every word which proceeds from your lips.” We see the truth of Jesus’s words in the public reaction to this GRG (Golden Rule Gaffe.) But we also see the truth in the fact that each of us leaves a “footprint” with everything that we write or post on the Internet. We are all potentially under that same microscope of scrutiny and the only things which spares us is if we are a nobody (such as I am) and therefore no one really cares what we say or think.

Erik:

“I am attempting to do “to you” exactly what you are attempting to do to Obama, namely, to twist and distort his words and actions in order to make him look bad.”

Thanks for explaining. Too bad you failed, I suppose.

“Anyone who reads this lon…g thread would most likely come away with the impression that I favor Obama and am willing to overlook an understandable slip [...]“

Such a brave soul would be entitled to such an opinion.

“You say that you stood long hot hours in the sun in order to ‘show respect’ to the president but perhaps what you did was simply self-serving so that you could brag to everyone that you stood long hot hours.”

I supposed that I would find this offensive if I thought that you had given any thought to your words before you wrote them. My motives were exactly as I said they were. You have already said that you don’t know me well enough to trust me. That’s fine. But, that is another thing altogether from asserting that I might be lying. I request that you take that back. You have no evidence to support your claim, and everyone who does know me knows that what I said is the God’s honest truth.

“Erik, you say you could care less about what I think of you so does that mean that Obama does not care what you or I or others think about him?”

I didn’t say that. That is a product of your imagination. And, as to the rest of the statement, I have no idea what the President thinks, being that I am not a mind-reader.

“Erik, are you saying that you do not care what I think about you because you ONLY care about people who agree with you and stick to the ‘party line?’”

Ditto Ibid.

“We are all potentially under that same microscope of scrutiny [...]“
Not really. Careerist politicians accept greater scrutiny than average citizens only because they have to. There are many things that can be said about public figures which would be inappropriate to say about a private citizen. The President accepted that burden. If he does not like it, too bad for him.

William:

Erik, I will “take back” whatever you like since I actually value your on-line acquaintanceship (although I am not certain that the phrase “take something back” has any real meaning.) But sure, list everything you would like me to “take back” and I will publicly put my name to it.

Erik, I feel that I like your intellect and value YOUR acquaintance far more than you like or value Obama, but then again I might be wrong.

The only REALLY sad thing about this thread will be if no one else finds it interesting enough to participate on either side of it. I think it is interesting and controversial. After all, I am only doing what I was trained to do for 4 years at SJC, namely take an opposing position and give you a good run for your money, which I assume is what you are also doing.

Taking “offense” or umbrage is a good defensive measure (although it is a form of ad hominem) since it ends the entire conversation with an “I am right; you lose; and I am taking my bat and ball and going home.” If Obama were on our friends list and reading all this do you feel he would be offended by you or suspect that you are imputing to him mendacity?

I should think you would be pleased that someone is engaging you and giving you some resistance.

By the way, I never implied that you are lying. I totally believe that you did stand in the long hot sun for hours to appear respectful to the office of the presidency and it is totally possible to respect an office even if one despises the individual who holds the office. I have the right in my own mind to question your MOTIVES for standing long hot hours. If a movie star were scheduled for an appearance and people stood in line overnight with the hope of getting a glimpse or perhaps even an autograph then I would assume that they somehow respect and admire that movie star BUT it might also be the case that they hope to SELL the autograph or a photo or boast to others that they saw someone famous.

Erik:
‎”Taking ‘offense’ or umbrage is a good defensive measure (although it is a form of ad hominem) since it ends the entire conversation with an ‘I am right; you lose; and I am taking my bat and ball and going home’ [...] I never implied that you are lying.”

William, you explicitly questioned my honesty, without any evidence whatsoever to support the implications of the question. That is not an appropriate debate tactic.

You are welcome to question anything I say, especially if you have evidence which contradicts what I say. What you are not welcome to do is to baldly question is my word. My word is something which I hold quite dear.

When I talk about my motives for doing this or that, I am essentially giving my word that what I have said is true (as best as I can recall). When you question my word, you ipso facto imply that you believe that I might be lying.

I accept that you did not intend to do that, but, since we are actually talking about the strict reading of a given public person’s words, perhaps this subject is made that much more apt. Regardless of your intention, your words meant what they meant.

In such cases, a simple clarification afterwards is sufficient for remediation. That is, were I in your position, I would have said something to the effect of, ‘Oooooops, I did not mean to question your integrity, please allow me to withdraw the offending remark,’ and then left it at that.

As to your point about ‘offense as a rhetorical tactic,’ let me just say this. I think that in our entire FACEBOOK friendship you have had a chance to read similar words written by me twice. You could thus infer that even if this were a ‘tactic,’ it is one that I do not use routinely.

And, more to the point, as a matter of manifest fact, there was no need for me to use any sort of debate tactic at all, since you know very well, as I do, that I was quite right about the most important fact under discussion: That the President made a rather illuminating gaffe. That is beyond question, right?

William:
Erik, if you were for example to launch a diatribe against homosexuality and I were to conjecture that in reality it is some form of “Jungian Shadow” (which often it is) I would not be calling you a liar but rather I would be psychoanalyzing your to find motivations which you may not even realize yourself. I am certain that you felt in your heart that those long hot hours in the sun were the right thing to do and done with an admirable motivation. I do not question your honesty in that regard. BUT it might well be that you do not want to face the possibility that your actions are under scrutiny and that if you do not “go the extra mile” (another of Jesus’s expressions) then some people might feel that it reflects upon your character.

Yes Erik, you were totally correct in everything you posted about “the illuminating gaffe.”

I, for my part, fail to see why the American public concerns itself with the religious beliefs/practice of any politician or the lack thereof. Obviously many Americans DO concern themselves (which I see as flying against the spirit of the founding fathers and the Constitution) and in fact a significant percentage of Americans are convinced that Obama IS a Muslim (which you quite correctly pointed out is TRUE since Islamic societies consider the son of a Muslim father to be a father even if he never practices or confesses Islam.)

Some people do not see the gaffe as a big deal or anything more than an impromptu extemporaneous slip of the tongue. Others have an agenda to find it “very revealing” as you have so aptly pointed out. Eric, you seem convinced that these were not Obama’s extemporaneous words but actually the script of some oafish speech writer (in which case the gaffe is very revealing about the speech writer and reveals that the president should hire someone else.)

+++++

I need you on my list more than you need me since you are about 10 times smarter and more accomplished than I am so I shall certainly retract (take back) whatever you ask me to “take back” and will most humbly apologize for giving you or others the notion that I suspect you are a liar.

I just got home from a long trip.

I will point out the following technicality:

This entire thread BEGINS with YOUR WORDS (sic) “I’ll be honest.” which does imply or suggest that sometimes you are NOT honest, which leaves us open to the suggestion that sometimes you are DISHONEST. But I am analyzing YOUR OWN WORDS.

I will post this and then view the Youtube link above.

Of course I have no idea, Erik, whether or not you personally identify as a Christian. I would ASSUME that you must to be so upset over Obama’s GRG (golden rule gaffe). Now, IF you are a Christian then you are supposed to LOVE your enemies (and I am certainly NOT your enemy; on the contrary I greatly admire you) AND ALSO you are supposed to REJOICE AND BE GLAD “when people say all manner of evil things against you falsely.”

This is why I am greatly surprised that you take such serious offense and my words. Also, I believe you stated earlier in the thread that you do not CARE what I think. So, if you do not care what I think then I am puzzled why you would care if I think you are a liar (and I never said that or thought that.)

I shall soon turn 62 and I have 1.) never ONCE asked anyone to “take something back” (not even in early childhood) and 2.) I have never once demanded an apology from anyone. Whenever people have chosen to apologize to me, I always silently feel a certain contempt for then since to me an apology has no real meaning. It is like those people who elbow their way through crowds exclaiming “EXCUSE ME.” Their politeness is false. Once a woman did something very thoughtless and dangerous and then kept apologizing to me until I said “IF you were truly sorry then you would have been careful to begin with.” The danger I see in the “forgive me I am sorry” routine is that it is like James Bond 009 “license to..” do all sorts of things over and over and over.

Anyway, I would not intentionally say something if I knew you would get upset and unfriend me. So let me know if I need to grovel or apologize any further. I did think I was giving you a run for your money on a level playing field and that it is an interesting thread, but obviously I am mistaken.

Sorry!

Erik:

“This entire thread BEGINS with YOUR WORDS (sic) ‘I’ll be honest.’ which does imply or suggest that sometimes you are NOT honest, which leaves us open to the suggestion that sometimes you are DISHONEST. But I am analyzing YOUR OWN WORDS.”

Yes, William. I make no claims regarding my personal perfection. In fact, if you read my words carefully, you would know that I conceded my fallibility a number of times in this very thread. What I also said was that my word was important to me. When I talk about my personal motivations, I am giving my word. Because I value my word, and attempt to keep it valuable for others, I prefer that my word be accepted at face value during bullshit sessions such as this, except when there is evidence that I have either misspoken or dissembled. And, being that I am human, I certainly acknowledge both are possible. But, in this case, no such evidence could possibly have existed, since I said exactly what happened. This seems simple enough to me.

As to your apology, I already accepted the non-apology, but thanks anyway. I was not fishing for a better apology, by the way. I was just trying to explain to you what I meant, since you appeared not to understand.

“Of course I have no idea, Erik, whether or not you personally identify as a Christian.”

That’s because I rarely talk about such things publicly. Yes, I do identify myself as a Christian, but not a good one. I sure as heck don’t proselytize, and I will invariably choose football over church. Like the President, I was not raised a Christian. My father was a lifelong militant atheist and my mother has had an ever-changing array of trendy New Age spiritual belief systems, and accompanying cosmologies, which only intersected with Christianity coincidentally and tangentially. I don’t take communion when I attend Catholic mass, which I do often enough, because I am not a Catholic, but I have nothing against that church. I think it is a force for good. I won’t describe which church I do belong to, since I attend that church even less often than Catholic mass. On the other hand, were I ever to feel the need to explain to everyone at a Bar-B-Que about ‘what a good Christian I am,’ I’d hope that I would get the Golden Rule right. I’m just saying…

“I shall soon turn 62 and I have 1.) never ONCE asked anyone to ‘take something back’ (not even in early childhood) and 2.) I have never once demanded an apology from anyone.”

Well, good for you. Apparently, you aren’t me.

“Whenever people have chosen to apologize to me, I always silently feel a certain contempt for then since to me an apology has no real meaning. It is like those people who elbow their way through crowds exclaiming ‘EXCUSE ME.’ Their politeness is false.”

I don’t live in such a world. I live in a world in which people make all sorts of mistakes (sometimes mistakes which wrong others), regret them, and then seek to remediate them. In such cases such people often apologize to those whom they have wronged. I teach my kids to apologize under such circumstances. I always attempt to force myself to do likewise, though a genuine apology is always a bitter pill to swallow.

“Once a woman did something very thoughtless and dangerous and then kept apologizing to me until I said ‘IF you were truly sorry then you would have been careful to begin with.’”

That speaks volumes.

Falling In Love With Love

2012-01-22T09:09:00.001-08:00

Then too, there is always that old saw about "falling in love with love" , namely, we imagine and fantasize what love might be like for us and we see it romanticized in cinema and fiction countless times. Hemingway loved a nuse in Italy in WWI and she dumped him in real life, but in "A Farewell to Arms" Hemingway rewrites the story so that the nurse is madly in love with Hemingway, gets pregnant, dies in childbirth.

The Inequality of Love

2012-01-22T09:05:00.001-08:00

In any relationship it is RARE that two people love each other EQUALLY or for the same reasons. SO, one must choose between someone who loves YOU more than you love them or someone that you love more than they love YOU. After a few years, one grows accustomed and perhaps even bored with anyone, say, Marylin Monroe stepping out of the shower in the altogether, and as the years pass BOTH partners will age and their physical beauty will fade AND one cannot obviously make love 24 / 7 so what is left is all the interpersonal shared moments. It is easier to make a friend into a lover than it is to make a lover into a friend. And even perfect love, if there is such a thing, does not guarantee happiness, if there is such a thing.

Costco acer $499

2012-01-20T12:08:00.001-08:00

596022 acer AS5750-6667 15.6" 4hrs battery 4gig DDR3. Windoews 7 home microsoft signature
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Guns Germs and Steel

2012-01-19T15:18:00.001-08:00

Pg 157 In order to be happy a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness. Hence, Tolstoy writes: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

What to Blog and How to Blog and Why to Blog

2012-01-17T16:55:00.001-08:00

I am age 63. I have been on line every day, blogging since 1998 with AOL dial-up and a free geocities site where I "blogged" by creating html pages (so perhaps I was a blogger before there was the word) ... I spent years on Yahoo chat, Yahoo Egroups, IRC, various forums. Now I have 2000 friends on Facebook and 300 in G+. My FB situation is unique BECAUSE I went to St. John's Annapolis '67-'71 and all courses for all 4 years are REQUIRED (no electives) so all my friends from SJC, even those who graduated last year, read all the same so-called 100 great books of the western world. We all have a lot in common. Sociologists who study social networking claim that no matter how many friends we have, we tend to closely interact with only 20 to 40 and I find that to be true. I have perhaps 20 real friends where we from time to time privately discuss every imaginable aspect of our personal life. I have only ONE such friend so far here in Google Plus and she is in the far east. I notice a great many GIFs many of which are amusing, of cats and people jumping through fire or into toilets or out of toilets. Many of the Gifs are amusing. Some are distracting so I mute them. The point that I want to make is that my years of on line experience consist of simply sharing my thoughts, ideas, ... my life. IF you follow me and read my posts then you get to know me as a person. Many of the people who post dazzling Gifs etc reveal ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about their personal lives. That is fine. That is their choice. I blog each and every day because it is my main form of human contact. My on line friends are actually CLOSER to me than people I meet and see in real life, and it is precisely because ALL WE HAVE ARE WORDS, so we have to share, express, confide. On-line romances are to a females advantage BECAUSE guys often do not open up... so you might date someone for 5 years, bowling, beach, dinners, movies, but never really share, communicate. On line all the guy has is WORDS. So these are my thoughts on blogging/posting.

Smelly Hats

2012-01-16T07:52:00.003-08:00

I realize I am a heretic. I feel that if there is a God (and I can neither prove nor disprove existence) then surely that God knows each and every thought and therefore God knows my benevolent mood towards your mother and her joints. But even before I had my thought, God knew about your mother, the knee, even before the doctor. Even before she was born, God knew about that knee. So, if it gets all better, only God knows. But I cannot see getting on my knees, squinting my eyes, pursing my lips, like G.W. Bush at a photo op. Jesus said whatever you do, do it in your closet and what God sees in private and secret he/she/it rewards openly. Every day I am grateful that I belong to no religion that requires a hat. Hats get smelly very fast and then you have to walk around with a smelly hat. Not good!

Smelly Hats

2012-01-16T07:52:00.001-08:00

Virtue and Happiness

2012-01-15T09:26:00.001-08:00

(8-16-99)

Virtue and Happiness

someone wrote:

Many philosophers have tried to prove that God exists. Some of the various proofs became so famous that they were given names. Likewise, with equal vigour many philosophers have challenged these proofs. In 18th century, Kant suggested that the proof of Gods existence was not provable and that some other aspect of reason must be considered as the source of the idea of God. He postulated that the existence of God was the grounds for the necessary connection between virtue and happiness. Subsequently, Kierkegaard suggests three levels of existence for humanity. The first is his "aesthetic stage", the second his "ethical stage" and the third his "religious" stage. He who lives at the "aesthetic stage" grasps enjoyment. Good is whatever is beautiful, satisfying or pleasant. He is a slave to his desires and moods. "Ethical man" tries to live by the law of morals. Whether he acts correctly or not in a given situation is less important than that he has in fact a view of what is ethical and attempts to act "correctly". (Socrates) Kierkegaard's idea of the "religious man", is postulated from the idea that "ethical man" comes to realise that lack of knowledge of situations from an ethical viewpoint will lead him necessarily to making inaccurate ethical choices. This leads to a sense of guilt and the need to leap by an act of faith into a "religious existence" The idea of faith in the connection between virtuous living and happiness seems to be an important motivator for many Christians in making their leap to a "religious existence". I am interested to know to what extent this statement applies to different religious philosophies.

Sitaram's response:

Excellent post!

So many Religions have a quid-pro-quo aspect (something for something). IF you do these good things, and abstain from these bad things, THEN you will receive and enjoy THESE good things, OTHERWISE, you will be deprived of good things and suffer these BAD things.

In Christianity, we see that the soul has a beginning in time: Psalm 139:6 "Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them" and Hebrews 9:27 "And it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment." So he soul is immortal, but not eternal, for it has a beginning in time. And based on the Judgment, the soul is either contemned to everlasting death (the worm that does not die, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth), or it is rewarded with everlasting life ; Isaiah 64:4 "For since the beginning of the world men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him." And 1 Corinthians 2:9 "But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him."

In Hinduism, we read in the Bhagavad-Gita, Lord Krishna telling Arjuna, "There was never a time when you were not or when I was not. You do not remember your births but I remember all my re-births and incarnations." So, in Hinduism, the soul (jiva, atman) has NO BEGINNING in time, it is a spark from the great Light of Brahman. The soul is truly ETERNAL as opposed to the simple IMMORTALITY of Christianity. But, it seems to me that Hinduism goes beyond the QUID-PRO-QUO mentality. Lord Krishna says in the Gita that He receives all worship, offerings and prayers, even from those ignorant of His true nature. And on the walls of the ancient Temple of Sri Vinkanteshera in Tirupati there is an inscription which says "All offerings everywhere, come to Me." In fact, else where in the Gita, Lord Krsna says "Out of THOUSANDS , hardly ONE seeks me, and out of THOUSANDS WHO DO seek Me, hardly ONE comprehends my true nature. So we see here a concept of God who does not expect all mankind to know Him or understand Him or to have correct doctrinal belief concerning Him. How different this picture of God is from the Old Testament verses in which God says "My name is Jealous", Exodus 34:14 "For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God."

Our modern physics understands matter as primordial atoms, made of even more primordial sub-atomic particles, whose origin in time is perhaps the first moment of the Big Bang, but otherwise unknown. And these atoms and sub-atomic particles are RECYCLED in a sort of TRANSMIGRATION, as nebulous gas clouds congeal to form suns, and suns cast out streams which become planets, and planets give off material to become moons, and the atoms which yesterday were in an apple tree, are today a part of my bloodstream, and tomorrow will be in a mosquitoes wing. Also, in modern physics, we see great laws of preservation or conservation of matter and energy in the various laws of thermodynamics and in Einstein's equations. And yet, for Jewish, Christian and Islamic theologies, each soul is created once, and never recycled.

I once heard an Islamic theologian say that, since God (Allah) desired to create the world, He must of necessity create it as OTHER than Himself, and since He is PERFECT, therefore, of necessity, the world that He creates must be OTHER, and therefore IMPERFECT. This NECESSITY which God is under must be POWERFUL INDEED, if it can constrain God's actions!

I read another theologian elsewhere (I cant remember where) saying that since God had nothing but Himself, He created the world OUT OF HIMSELF. Now this notion sounds more Hindu. Consciousness IN ANY FORM, whether a humans, a dogs, or a mosquito's is a spark from that CONSCIOUSNESS which is Brahman.

In Isaiah 55:7,8 we read "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his THOUGHTS: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." In this passage, we see God having THOUGHTS (i.e. CONSCIOUSNESS), albeit not at the same level or quality as HUMAN THOUGHTS (CONSCIOUSNESS), but THOUGHTS nonetheless.

Jesus mentions that a sparrow, which is sold for a few cents, cannot fall from the sky, but the Heavenly Father knows. Most westerners envision God somewhere in Heaven with his Supernatural TELESCOPE watching that sparrow fall from heaven. But from the point of view of the Svetasvatara Upanisad (which describes each being as a tree with two birds, one the individual doer, and the other the Paramatman beholder, God), God does not see the sparrow fall from His Heavenly Telescope, from some distant vantage point, BUT FROM INSIDE THE SPARROW, as the INDWELLING Paramatman.

Western theologies (and I consider Islam western, despite the geography of Mecca) consider the material universe as something which God creates as separate from Himself. He winds it up and sets it running, like the Energizer Bunny of Duracell Battery Fame. God gives the material universe a set of immutable laws, and gives creatures free-will, and then stands back to see what happens, intervening only occasionally to suspend those physical laws in the form of a miracle. Some western theologies even posit that God intentionally limits himself and gives up some of His Omniscience and Omnipotence, and sacrifices His Divine Foreknowledge of all future events, in order to make this Energizer Bunny Universe of ours work properly. And, of course, there is ONLY ONE UNIVERSE, which, in parallel with the western concept of the Soul, was created at a point in time, but which IS NOT IMMORTAL. At some point, as we read in Isaiah 34:4 an Revelation g:14 "And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places." Hence, in the Western view, the TIME-SPACE continuum ceases, much like Stephen Hawkings "A Brief History of Time". And at the End of Time, at the End of Space, we read in the Book of Revelation 7:15-17 "Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." TIME-SPACE ceases, and it is GOD who becomes their LIGHT, their FOOD, their RAIMENT, their SHELTER. And is not this concept in Revelation, of God being the space, light, food and raiment, IS NOT THIS CONCEPT STRANGELY PANTHEISTIC (namely that God IS all things). One of the words in the Torah for God is MAKOM, which means PLACE or SPACE. Hence, the Talmudic saying, "God is the PLACE of the Universe. God is not IN the Universe." In face the Jewish Mystical Kaballah has a notion of Tsim Tsum (or Zim Zum, which means CONTRACTION or WITHDRAWAL). God is such a FULLNESS, COMPLETENESS, PERFECTION, that He must CONTRACT AND WITHDRAW, to make a PLACE (Makom) for the Universe. Strangely, for western minds, the physical, material universe is somehow dirty and defiling, and it is blasphemous to suggest that God IS the Universe, or that the Universe is somehow MADE out of Godstuff. And yet these theologies insist that God is "everywhere present and fillest all things" (as in the ancient Greek prayer 'O Pantaxou paron kai ta Panta pleiron').

Modern Physics and our friend Stephen Hawkings postulates that there are BLACK HOLES, perhaps COUNTLESS NUMBERS OF BLACK HOLES scattered throughout our universe. Some physicists postulate that our very Universe itself is INSIDE a black hole. The notion is that inside each black hole is ANOTHER BIG BANG, another expanding TIME-SPACE Continuum, a Riemann-Space, finite but unbounded. Now Hinduism sees Creation, Preservation, and Destruction as a continuous cycle. This Black Hole notion extends such a notion to a MULTITUDE OF UNIVERSES (Big Bs) all nicely tucked one inside the other, like N-Dimensional Russian Dolls (where each doll has a smaller doll inside). And each "Universe" might be at a different stage of development, each with its Avatars, its Lord Rams battling Ravanna, its Lord Krishna's playing their flutes, its Buddhas awakening and its Christs resurrecting.

Getting back to our QUID PRO QUO observation about western theologies, we may contrast with a story from the Mahabharat (I would love to know the chapter and verse if someone has it please email). There is a King and Queen who are driven into exile from their kingdom and are forced to live in a simple hut in sight of the majestic Himalaya Mountains. The King is a very religious person and always performs his prayers and offerings, in good times and in bad. One day, the Queen emerges from their impoverished hut and sees the King ardently engaged in prayer and worship. She asks him, "Why do you continue to worship God so ardently, seeing that we have been deprived of all our riches, and live in such poverty?" The King points to the majestic Himalaya Mountains in the distance and says, "See how grand, majestic and beautiful the Himalayas are! Do those mountains bear some guilt for our misfortunes? Should I cease to gaze upon them and admire them and praise them, and spite my eyes and my senses to behold them no more, simply because of my misfortune?"

Only a very few actual writings and prayers have come down to us from Lord Chaitanya , the sixteenth century Vaishnav saint. One of those prayers basically says, "O Lord, I do not ask for money, or pleasures, or even liberation from the cycle of birth and death, but only to serve at Your Lotus Feet life after life, even if your foot should crush me." We see that when Lord Ram shot the wicked Balin, who had usurped his brothers throne, Lord Ram had compassion upon him and offered to heal his wound. But Balin replied, "How many lifetimes might come and go without receiving the honor to die at the hand of the Lords' Avatar." So Balin was seeking Union and Moksha, rather that further life and enjoyments.

Christianity has a curious habit of asking other people for their prayers. "Pray for me because I am sick. Pray for my parents. Pray for my son and daughter. Pray for that nation torn by war, plague and famine." Epictetus made an interesting observation in his Discourses. He wrote, "Why do you pray to Jupiter for the safety of your son before he embarks upon a long journey. Why not ask Jupiter for the Equanimity of an Even-Keeled Spirit, to endure whatever good or bad fortune might result." Lord Krishna's, similarly, says to Arjuna, "It is necessary that Joys and Sorrows should enter each persons life, but he who endures them with Equanimity and a balanced spirit is the True Yogin and master of the Self." The Western, quid pro quo notion of prayer is to ask for something. The Hindu notion is that each good and ill that we suffer is our very own doing; a karmic consequence of some thought or action from this life or a previous life. And furthermore, each good and ill that we suffer is for our benefit. King Solomon basically said (if I may paraphrase his writings) : "Every son whom the Lord loves he chastens every one whom He receives, and places their souls in the fire of adversity, until they reach a seven-fold purity like gold in the furnace." There is a sort of impertinence in the notion of asking God to alter our circumstances, if they are for our own benefit and instruction. Such supplicatory prayer is almost a lack of faith in Divine Wisdom, Mercy and Providence and a sort of insult to God. And the insult is compounded when we do not even offer such prayers ourselves but ask others to do it for us. If we had an important favor to ask of a King, and we sent a relative, to ask on our behalf, what would that King thing. It is for a busy King to dispatch a messenger to us, and we are honored by such a visit but it is our place to petition in person, if we are to even petition at all.

The early Greek theologians told a parable about the three types of devotion of believers; the Slave, the Hired Hand, and the true-born Son. The Slave acts out of fear of punishment. The Hired Hand acts from hope of reward. The true-born Son acts neither from fear of punishment nor from hope of reward but from selfless love of the Father. I am somehow reminded at this moment, as I write these words, of Chaitanya's words concerning "the Lord's CAUSELESS MERCY", and that verse in the Gita where Lord Krishna says (paraphrasing), "What my Devotee has achieved, I preserve from birth to birth, and what my Devotee lacks, I supplement and provide through Grace." In the oddest sort of way, we see that God does not create the physical Universe, or sentient beings as His goal. What God CREATES or RE-CREATES, IS GOD. Even a Greek Bishop, St Athanasius, of the early centuries said, "God became man so that Man might become God."

Atheists and Agnostics might speak about man creating God. Theologians might speak about God creating the Universe and mankind. But there is in Hinduism, I suspect, some talk of God CREATING GOD through the perfection of all beings in His Divine Lila or Pass-Times.

(reply from Siddhartha):

Sitaram,

I read through your post. Interesting. I am reminded of an answer I received for my question regarding creation.

This individual pointed me to a fractal video (those cool iterative pictures). He told me look at it, that is Brahman he said, and then he set the fractal into motion, and the movie went into one of the fractals aspects, and he said, that is you, and the movie kept zooming into the aspect and then after a few zooms, the original fractal came at me again.

I thought this to be a nice analogy of Brahman. The Supreme without a beginning in time nor an end. So the person suggested that the question regarding creation is trivial, because one cannot put a finger on where it all began

(from S. Radhakrishnan's "An Idealist View of Life", pg. 232)

The human instinct for justice naturally associates the thought of suffering
and pain with vice and wickedness.
Suffering is the shadow thrown by the power of evil. Even Kant is inclined to
look upon God as a sort of "paymaster in chief", working out a compensatory
system of justice.

For Kant, while Virtue is the supreme good (supremum bonum), it is not the
complete good (summum bonum. The COMPLETE Good includes Happiness also, as
well as virtue.

.......(end of quote)...(my thoughts below)...

Can we be "good" and also be "happy" in our goodness, our modesty, our
moderation, our charity, patience and long-suffering?

Ethical and moral righteousness of behavior is an external, but our happiness
over such behavior involves an internal transformation.

There is a curious verse in the bible... "blessed are those who HUNGER AND
THIRST after righteousness, for they shall be filled". When we first read
this verse, in our youth, perhaps we imagine some oppressed or persecuted
people. The "righteousness" they hunger and thirst for is the redress of
their own grievances, and their deliverance from oppression.

Lord Krsna in the Gita says 'The self is the best friend (potentially) but
also (potentially) the worst enemy..."

Why does that verse say "hunger AND thirst"? Would not one metaphor be
adequate.

Food and water are such a deep-seated primordial need.

When we are older, perhaps we see not the external oppressor and tyrant and
persecutor, but the INTERNAL tyrant of our own appetites, desire, ego, pride.

"Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from God".

"If you drink the water from this well, you will thirst again, but had you
asked Me, I would give you living waters, and you would thirst no more..."

"eat this all of you, this is my Body..."

"drink this all of you, this is my Blood.."

Certainly a Christian will be pleased to see the importance of eating AND
drinking as a metaphor of Communion, Eucharist.

The word Yoga is related to the word yoke, a joining, a union, which is
similar to "communion".

Is Christ "happy" in His crucifixion, His suffering?

Christ speaks of the "travail" of a woman giving birth, but when it is over,
there is joy over the child which is born, and the pain of travail is
forgotten.

The process of "joining" or yoking two entities together, taken to its final
extreme, is to merge, to become one, to be "non-different".

In the 4th century, St. Athanasius, a Christian Bishop said "God became man,
so that man might become God."

Ahimsa is the highest form of Dharma.

To become perfect in righteousness, in non-violence, and also to be perfectly
HAPPY with such a state of being, not grudging or resentful or filled with a
longing regret; this is the complete good.

But if we can only achieve one, then to be moral and righteous, and suffering
is higher than to be happy but unjust.

To be righteous and suffer is saintly. To be happy and unjust is sinful. To
be righteous and happy is Divinity.

Sex in Moderation

2012-01-15T05:50:00.003-08:00

It occurs to me that sex is an important "part of life" ... but "part of life" means there are other things in life so if and when it becomes "all of life" then something is out of balance. I know a woman in her late 30s who married a much ...younger man in his early 20s (they later divorced.) She said when he came home each day THAT'S ALL HE WANTED TO DO... and she said she was tired and wanted to do other things and only do that some times, but not ALL the time.

I know what my friend said about her younger husband. I also know many true stories and confessions from my college days. ALSO, there are case studies of certain people who have 500 contacts per week. As Carl Saga used to say "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." I was Greek Orthodox for 20 years (from age 23 to age 43) and in a monastery for 13 months. I seriously doubt that Christ had sex but I can feel compassion for those who feel the need to see Christ as a sexual person. Jesus said "Some are born eunuchs' some are made eunuchs by others and some make eunuchs of themselves for the sake of the kingdom of God. This is a hard saying but let those to who that grace has been given take it up." I am paraphrasing from memory. Now lets see what I can google.

http://bible.cc/matthew/19-12.htm

And we can add to that Paul's statement that "it is better to marry than to burn"

http://bible.cc/1_corinthians/7-9.htm

And I will add to this what was said by Cephas in Book One of Plato's Republic. Socrates and his companions saw the old man, Cephas (whose name literally means HEAD), and said "How is your service of Aphrodite" (i.e. how is your sex life) and Cephas answered that when one reaches old age then one is "freed from many mad masters."

It is wise to read the thread for clues. It is wiser to read scriptures and the classics.

Sex in Moderation

2012-01-15T05:50:00.001-08:00

http://bible.cc/matthew/19-12.htm

And we can add to that Paul's statement that "it is better to marry than to burn"

http://bible.cc/1_corinthians/7-9.htm

It is wise to read the thread for clues. It is wiser to read scriptures and the classics.

Downsize Government and Cut Costs

2012-01-15T05:26:00.001-08:00

When a company falls on difficult times, one of the things that seems to happen is they reduce their staff and workers. The remaining workers must find ways to continue to do a good job or risk that their job would be eliminated as well.

Wall street and the media normally congratulate the CEO for making this type of "tough decision", and the board of directors gives upper corporate management big bonuses..

Our government should not be immune from similar risks.

Therefore:

Reduce the House of Representatives from the current 435 members to 218 members.

Reduce Senate members from 100 to 50 (one per State). Then, reduce their remaining staff by 25%.

Accomplish this over the next 8 years (two steps/two elections) and of course this would require some redistricting.

Some Yearly Monetary Gains Include:

$44,108,400 for elimination of base pay for congress. (267 members X $165,200 pay/member/ yr.)

$437,100,000 for elimination of their staff. (Estimate $1.3 Million in staff per each member of the House, and $3 Million in staff per each member of the Senate every year)

$108,350,000 for the reduction in remaining staff by 25%.

$7,500,000,000reduction in pork barrel earmarks each year. (Those members whose jobs are gone. Current estimates for total government pork earmarks are at $15 Billion/yr).

The remaining representatives would need to work smarter and improve efficiencies.. It might even be in their best interests to work together for the good of our country!

We may also expect that smaller committees might lead to a more efficient resolution of issues as well. It might even be easier to keep track of what your representative is doing.

Congress has more tools available to do their jobs than it had back in 1911 when the current number of representatives was established. (Telephone, computers, cell phones to name a few)

Note:

Congress does not hesitate to head home for extended weekends, holidays and recesses, when what the nation needs is a real fix for economic problems. Also, we had 3 senators who were not doing their jobs for the 18+ months (on the campaign trail) and still they all accepted full pay. Minnesota survived very well with only one senator for the first half of this year. These facts alone support a reduction in senators and congress.

Summary of opportunity:

$44,108,400 reduction of congress members.

$282,100,000 for elimination of the reduced house member staff.

$150,000,000 for elimination of reduced senate member staff.

$70,850,000 for 25% reduction of staff for remaining house members.

$37,500,000 for 25% reduction of staff for remaining senate members.

$7,500,000,000 reduction in pork added to bills by the reduction of congress members.

$8,084,558,400 per year, estimated total savings. (That's 8-BILLION just to start!)

Corporate America does these types of cuts all the time.

There's even a name for it.

"Downsizing."

------------------------------

Also, if Congresspersons were required to serve 20, 25 or 30 years (like everyone else) in order to collect retirement benefits, taxpayers could save a bundle.

Now they get full retirement after serving only ONE term.

----------------------------------------

IF you are happy with how Washington spends our taxes, delete this message.

Otherwise, it's time to "downsize" Congress

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please consider forwarding, if you agree.

I have cleaned this e-mail of all other names, sending it to you in hopes that you will keep it going and keep it clean. This is something I believe in and I hope you all read it all the way through.

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months and 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971...before computers, before e-mail, before cell phones, etc..

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure.

I'm asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. Term Limits. 12 years only, one of the possible options below..

A. Two Six-year Senate terms

B. Six Two-year House terms

C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

2. No Tenure / No Pension.

A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

3. Congress (past , present and future) participates in Social Security

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.

4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

7. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12.

The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S. ) to receive the message. Maybe it is time..

LET'S FIX CONGRESS!!!!! If you agree, pass it on. If not, just delete. You are one of my contacts. Please keep it going. Possibly "gridlock" is the best possble scenario we can hope for at the present! They aren't doing much, and "doing nothing" is better than making it worse! Even the "new blood" is succoming to the "status quo" at breakneck speed, and caving to current ruler!

Small problems lead to major problems

2012-01-15T05:00:00.003-08:00

My wife started coughing and choking all the time and went to an allergist for a year. The more pills and inhalers he gave her the worse she got. When the only tool you have is a hammer then every problem tends to become a nail. One day I walked into his office and told him she is getting worse and he is doing nothing. We finally found out what the problem was when she went for a routine physical and they saw from her creatinine that her kidneys were almost gone. She had a very rare autoimmune disease called Wegner's Granulomatosa which can attack the kidneys and sinus and lung. IF it had been detected a year earlier, then massive doses of prednisone MIGHT have saved her kidneys. She went on hemodialysis, then to peritoneal dialysis, then back to hemo, then her sister donated a kidney and it died in 12 hours, then she received a cadaverous kidney which just barely works, but it keeps her off of hemodialysis. But it all started with the coughing, choking. And they used a gadolinium contrast dye in an MRI and that caused a second serious autoimmune disease, nephrogenic fibrosine dermapothy which is incurable and very painful. And she has a third autoimmune disease, Graves syndrome (thyroid). When she started in dialysis, they had to insert a shylie access in her neck for 6 months while they built a fistula in her arm. The shylie caused complete occlusion of the SVC (superior vena cava) so that caused all her veins to enlarge to compensate. And they cant insert a stent because they can see what they are doing and more contrast dye would damage the kidney, and she is otherwise asymtomatic for the occlusion, and then nature of the circulatory system is that it would probably occlude again anyway even with the stent. For the want of a nail the horseshoe was lost, For the want of the horseshoe the horse was lost. For the want of the horse, the soldier was lost. For the want of the soldier, the battle was lost. For the want of the battle, the kingdom was lost. And all for want of the nail.

Small problems lead to major problems

2012-01-15T05:00:00.001-08:00

Reason, Tradition and the Good

2012-01-11T20:06:00.001-08:00

What do you think are the most important things to say about Reason, Tradition, and the Good ?
Tradition produced Scriptures. Scriptures did not produce Tradition. The Book of Job speaks of God as having such power over human reason that it may become foolishness. I will look up that passage. For the Catholic, I should imagine, God i...s synonymous with Goodness BUT God is beyond our human comprehension. Solomon said "there are ways that seem good but the end thereof is death. When Josephs brethern came to him in Egypt to ask forgiveness... Joseph said "You intended evil but G-d transformed your evil into Good" ... I am posting this in hast because FB and browser are unstable... one may simply have faith or hope that all is for the good, but our reason is weak and the true nature of good is beyond our comprehension. Faith is a gift given to some and understand follows from faith, but only enough understanding as is necessary to be salvific - Maximus the Confessor
Bezaleel was the architect of the first temple. One of the early theologians wrote "be, therefore, a spiritual Bezaleel" meaning that Bezaleel took some subjective liberty in following the plan of the temple. So if we interpret or embellish we must remain in the spirit of the tradition.
Aquinas is in error in the Summa stating that understanding comes first and faith follows from understanding. Maximus the Confessor is correct stating that faith comes first as a give and understanding comes from that gift of faith. Saints are sinners for all have sinned and fallen short... and saints are not infallible.
http://williambuell.posterous.com/be-thou-a-spiritual-bezaleel
http://bible.cc/job/12-25.htm
We must reflect that the fall from paradise began with the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In Hebrew, in Genesis 1:1, "darkness and void" is "Tohu va Bohu" which is already present. The source of all sin is pride and it is difficult to acquire understanding yet avoid pride.
Jaroslav Pelikan takes Paul's passagehttp://bible.cc/1_corinthians/13-13.htm and interprets FAITH as doctrinal creed (e.g. The Nicene Creed - I believe in one God") ... so Pelikan suggests that LOVE is more important than doctrine. I am wondering if love in the Greek is really the word for charity. I must search.
All of the above is the "religious answer" - for the secular age of reason and technology, we do become like gods in the sense that we can alter genetic and molecular structures... but since moral/ethical GOOD is beyond our grasp, therefore... our technology may be our destruction -- perhaps the enduring good was with the Neanderthal who lived in harmony with the environment and was hardy through natural selection, needing no health care.
We are not told that the Tohu Va Bohu was created but rather simply IS
We fell through disobedience which involved questioning which involved reason. Salvation, if there is salvation, comes through unquestioning obedience where one crucifies the self will. Think of Christ in the tomb as the divine kenosis or emptying.
Ptolemy's Almagist is solid reasoning AND is accurate but does not get at the truth of cosmology. Reduction ad absurdum proofs USE what is false to arrive at what is true in the context of some axiomatic system but we know from the work of Kurt Godel and axiomatic systems are relative and not absolute so we feel less certainty today than Socrates and Euclid felt, or Descartes for that matter.
Solomon prayed for wisdom and God promised Solomon that he would be wiser than any man who came before and ALSO wiser than any who would com after. Jesus said "a WISER than a Solomon is in your midst" but Jesus is not simply anthropos but Theos-anthropos.
Hans Kung put it all in a nutshell on page 1 of "On Being Christian" ... WHY do we need Christ.... Why can we not simply lead good lives as rational humanists?
Maimonides states that "Righteousness is not a goal or end but merely a preparation for participation in a future world (of the Tikun Olam / Apokatastasis , I imagine)
Kung is still a priest, still in communion BUT he raised serious questions about the doctrine of Papal infallibility. But still .... IF you believe that REASON and UNDERSTANDING come first and faith follows.... then you are faced with the p...roblem of answering Kung's question....WHY do we need an actual incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, if reason and understanding is sufficient to persuade us to lead a life which saves
You have no choice but to be stuck in the dynamics of your own grand narrative (with all due respect) PLUS your opening post hints you were at a loss as to how to answer.??!!
Luther of the Reformation became trapped in the grand narrative which he constructed... and Charles Stanley is now trapped in Stanley's grand narrative
But if understanding is prior to faith, and you already have Aquinas and Augustine, and the host of others... then what is lacking.... all should follow as a grand syllogism, no?
The five foolish virgins WERE VIRGINS (possessed purity) AND they possessed oil, only not sufficient oil. Where does REASON come into play in any of the parables. I say if you cannot find the role of REASON in the parables then you have failed.
as I see it... for the first 10 years or MORE after the ascension there was NO New Testament, and yet somehow, those Christians, many illiterate , has all that was necessary and sufficient for salvation. So what role does REASON play.... Did Aquinas make any errors. Aquinas was not Pope so you cannot claim papal infallibility. Furthermore, we may assume that in the first 800 years the Church had everything that was necessary and sufficient for those who worked out their salvation. Now "tradition" evolved over the centuries. But as I see it you have a very difficult task to reconcile your notions of "reason" with the history of the early Church.

But, was it "comprehension" that saved people, and do all who comprehend repent and work out their salvation with fear and trembling? We all know that smoking causes serious illnesses and such knowledge or understanding is necessary but, obviously, not sufficient for all to give up smoking.

Rome and Constantinople split PRECISELY because of this difference regarding "reason." The RC Church states that the Eastern Orthodox Church is merely schismatic which means they have no doctrinal errors (I assume) yet part of E.O. doctrine (up until the 20th century) is that the RC Church is deeply in heresy on many counts. FURTHERMORE, Christ tells the Apostles that no human flesh has taught you these things but God has placed it in your heart and no person comes to the Son unless the Father draws him, so I hardly see Socratic dialectic or Aristotelian syllogisms playing a role. IN FACT, the Greeks who "owned" Plato and Aristotle, never use them in their theology, so if reasoning and understanding are so important than why do the Greeks IGNORE the two Greek sources of dialectic and logic for so many centuries?

The Words of Jesus In Matthew

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An interesting discussion arose in Facebook when someone stated that Jesus said many "warm and inclusive" things. I challenged them to list what they can remember but they could not. So I found a website which lists ONLY the words of Jesus.

http://www.rdletter.com/

(the entire words of Jesus from the New Testament would be 162 pages in PDF)

The Gospel According to

Matthew

Chapter 3

At River Jordan, to John the Baptist

Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulﬁl all righteousness.

Then he suffered him.

At the baptism of Jesus,

after the Holy Ghost descended

The Father spoke

This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

Chapter 4

Alone in the wilderness, to Satan

It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that

proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy

God, and him only shalt thou serve.

Borders of Zabulon and Nephthalim,

preaching to the people

Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

At the sea of Galilee, to Peter and Andrew

Follow me, and I will make you ﬁshers of men.

Chapter 5

On a mountain top, to his disciples

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

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are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for

they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst

after righteousness: for they shall be ﬁlled.

Blessed are the merciful: for

they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see

God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of

God.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for

theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile

you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely,

for my sake.

Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in

heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith

shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and

to be trodden under foot of men.

Ye are the light of the world. A city that

is set on an hill cannot be hid.

Neither do men light a candle, and put it

under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are

in the house.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your

good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am

not come to destroy, but to fulﬁl.

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven

and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law,

till all be fulﬁlled.

Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least

commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in

the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same

shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

For I say unto you, That

except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes

and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill;

and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:

but I say

unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall

be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca,

shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall

be in danger of hell ﬁre.

Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and

there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee;

leave there

thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; ﬁrst be reconciled to thy brother,

and then come and offer thy gift.

Agree with thine adversary quickly,

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whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver

thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the ofﬁcer, and thou be cast

into prison.

Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out

thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not

commit adultery:

but I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a

woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his

heart.

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from

thee: for it is proﬁtable for thee that one of thy members should perish,

and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

And if thy right

hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is proﬁtable for

thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body

should be cast into hell.

It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his

wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement:

but I say unto you, That

whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication,

causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is

divorced committeth adultery.

Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou

shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths:

but

I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne:

nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the

city of the great King.

Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou

canst not make one hair white or black.

But let your communication be,

Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for

a tooth:

but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall

smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

And if any man

will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak

also.

And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee

turn not thou away.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour,

and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them

that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which

despitefully use you, and persecute you;

that ye may be the children of

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your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil

and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even

the publicans the same?

And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye

more than others? Do not even the publicans so?

Be ye therefore perfect,

even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

Chapter 6

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them:

otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.

Therefore

when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the

hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have

glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

But when

thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:

that

thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself

shall reward thee openly.

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for

they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the

streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have

their reward.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when

thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father

which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

But when ye pray, use not

vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard

for their much speaking.

Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your

Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.

After

this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed

be thy name.

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in

heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts, as

we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us

from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.

Amen.

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will

also forgive you:

but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will

your Father forgive your trespasses.

Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance:

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for they disﬁgure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Verily

I say unto you, They have their reward.

But thou, when thou fastest,

anoint thine head, and wash thy face;

that thou appear not unto men to

fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in

secret, shall reward thee openly.

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and

rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

but lay

up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth

corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:

for where your

treasure is, there will your heart be also.

The light of the body is the eye:

if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

But

if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore

the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love

the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot

serve God and mammon.

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall

eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.

Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

Behold the

fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into

barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than

they?

Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the ﬁeld,

how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

and yet I say unto

you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the ﬁeld, which to-day is, and

to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye

of little faith?

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? Or,

What shall we drink? Or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

(For after all

these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that

ye have need of all these things.

But seek ye ﬁrst the kingdom of God,

and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Take

therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for

the things of itself. Sufﬁcient unto the day is the evil thereof.

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Chapter 7

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

For with what judgment ye judge, ye

shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to

you again.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye,

but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Or how wilt thou

say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold,

a beam is in thine own eye?

Thou hypocrite, ﬁrst cast out the beam out of

thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of

thy brother’s eye.

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls

before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and

rend you.

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall ﬁnd; knock, and it

shall be opened unto you:

for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that

seeketh ﬁndeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

Or what man

is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?

Or if

he ask a ﬁsh, will he give him a serpent?

If ye then, being evil, know how

to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father

which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

Therefore all

things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to

them: for this is the law and the prophets.

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the

way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life,

and few there be that ﬁnd it.

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but

inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Ye shall know them by their fruits.

Do men gather grapes of thorns, or ﬁgs of thistles?

Even so every good

tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth

good fruit.

Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down,

and cast into the ﬁre.

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the

kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is

in heaven.

Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not

717 Mt

prophesied in thy name? And in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy

name done many wonderful works?

And then will I profess unto them, I

never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them,

I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:

and

the rain descended, and the ﬂoods came, and the winds blew, and beat

upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.

And

every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be

likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:

and the

rain descended, and the ﬂoods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon

that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.

Chapter 8

To a leper

I will; be thou clean.

And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

See thou tell no man; but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer

the gift that Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them.

In Capernaum, to the centurion

I will come and heal him.

To them that followed

Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.

And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and

shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of

heaven.

But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer

darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

To the centurion

Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee.

In Capernaum, to a certain scribe

The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of

man hath not where to lay his head.

In Capernaum, to one of his disciples

Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.

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On a boat, to his disciples

Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?

Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea;

and there was a great calm.

In the country of the Gergesenes, to devils

Go.

And when they were come out, they went

into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd

of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.

Chapter 9

In Bethlehem, to a man sick of the palsy

Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.

In Bethlehem, to the scribes

Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?

For whether is easier, to say, Thy

sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?

But that ye may know

that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins,

To the sick of the palsy

Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.

In Bethlehem, at the receipt

of custom, to Matthew

Follow me.

In Matthew’s house, to the Pharisees

They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.

But go

ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacriﬁce: for I

am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

In Bethlehem, to the disciples of John the Baptist

Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom

is with them? But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken

from them, and then shall they fast.

No man putteth a piece of new cloth

unto an old garment, for that which is put in to ﬁll it up taketh from the

garment, and the rent is made worse.

Neither do men put new wine into

old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles

perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

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On the streets of Bethlehem,

to a woman with an issue of blood

Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole.

At a ruler’s house,

to minstrels and people making a noise

Give place: for the maid is not dead, but sleepeth.

To two blind men in a house

Believe ye that I am able to do this?

According to your faith be it unto you.

See that no man know it.

In the cities and villages of Israel, to his disciples

The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few;

pray ye

therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his

harvest.

Chapter 10

To his disciples

Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans

enter ye not:

but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

And as

ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Heal the sick,

cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received,

freely give.

Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses,

nor

scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for

the workman is worthy of his meat.

And into whatsoever city or town ye

shall enter, enquire who in it is worthy; and there abide till ye go thence.

And when ye come into an house, salute it.

And if the house be worthy,

let your peace come upon it: but if it be not worthy, let your peace return to

you.

And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye

depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.

Verily I say

unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in

the day of judgment, than for that city.

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye

therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

But beware of men:

for they will deliver you up to the councils, and they will scourge you in

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their synagogues;

and ye shall be brought before governors and kings for

my sake, for a testimony against them and the Gentiles.

But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall

speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak.

For

it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.

And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the

child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to

be put to death.

And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but

he that endureth to the end shall be saved.

But when they persecute you

in this city, ﬂee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have

gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come.

The disciple

is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord.

It is enough for

the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they

have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they

call them of his household?

Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing

covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.

What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear in

the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops.

And fear not them which kill

the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able

to destroy both soul and body in hell.

Are not two sparrows sold for a

farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.

Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.

Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess

also before my Father which is in heaven.

But whosoever shall deny me

before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send

peace, but a sword.

For I am come to set a man at variance against his

father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against

her mother in law.

And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and

he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

And

he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.

He that ﬁndeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake

shall ﬁnd it.

1021 Mt

He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth

him that sent me.

He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet

shall receive a prophet’s reward; and he that receiveth a righteous man in

the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward.

And

whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold

water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no

wise lose his reward.

Chapter 11

To John the Baptist’s disciples

Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see:

the blind

receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the

deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to

them.

And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

To the multitude, concerning John the Baptist

What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?

But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold,

they that wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.

But what went ye out for

to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet.

For this

is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face,

which shall prepare thy way before thee.

Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath

not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least

in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

And from the days of John

the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the

violent take it by force.

For all the prophets and the law prophesied until

John.

And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.

that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

But whereunto shall I liken this generation? It is like unto children

sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows,

and saying, We have

piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and

ye have not lamented.

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and

they say, He hath a devil.

The Son of man came eating and drinking, and

they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans

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and sinners. But wisdom is justiﬁed of her children.

To the cities

Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe unto thee, Bethsaida! For if the mighty

works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they

would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.

But I say unto you,

It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, than

for you.

And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be

brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in

thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

But

I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the

day of judgment, than for thee.

Then to his Father

I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast

hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto

babes.

Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight.

All things

are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but

the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to

whomsoever the Son will reveal him.

To all gathered

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you

rest.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly

in heart: and ye shall ﬁnd rest unto your souls.

For my yoke is easy, and

my burden is light.

Chapter 12

In a cornﬁeld, on the Sabbath, to the Pharisees

Have ye not read what David did, when he was an hungred, and they that

were with him;

how he entered into the house of God, and did eat the

shewbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither for them which

were with him, but only for the priests?

Or have ye not read in the law,

how that on the sabbath days the priests in the temple profane the sabbath,

and are blameless?

But I say unto you, That in this place is one greater

than the temple.

But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy,

1123 Mt

and not sacriﬁce, ye would not have condemned the guiltless.

For the Son

of man is Lord even of the sabbath day.

In the synagogue, on the Sabbath,

to the Pharisees

What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it

fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?

How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to

do well on the sabbath days.

In the synagogue, to the man with a withered hand

Stretch forth thine hand.

And he stretched it forth;

and it was restored whole, like as the other.

To the Pharisees when they said,

This fellow doth not cast out devils,

but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils.

Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every

city or house divided against itself shall not stand:

and if Satan cast out

Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?

And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast

them out? Therefore they shall be your judges.

But if I cast out devils by

the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you.

Or else

how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except

he ﬁrst bind the strong man? And then he will spoil his house.

He that

is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth

abroad.

Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall

be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall

not be forgiven unto men.

And whosoever speaketh a word against the

Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the

Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in

the world to come.

Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else

make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his

fruit.

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?

For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

A good man

out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil

man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.

But I say unto you,

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That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof

in the day of judgment.

For by thy words thou shalt be justiﬁed, and by

thy words thou shalt be condemned.

To the scribes and Pharisees

An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall

no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas:

for as Jonas

was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of

man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

The men of

Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn

it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater

than Jonas is here.

The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment

with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost

parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater

than Solomon is here.

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he

walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and ﬁndeth none.

Then he saith,

I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come,

he ﬁndeth it empty, swept, and garnished.

Then goeth he, and taketh with

himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in

and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the ﬁrst. Even

so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.

In a house, to the people

Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother

and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee.

Who is my mother? And who are my brethren?

And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples,

Behold my mother and my brethren!

For whosoever shall do the will

of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and

mother.

Chapter 13

On ship by the sea side, to the multitudes

And he spake many things unto them in parables,

Behold, a sower went forth to sow;

and when he sowed, some seeds fell by

the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up:

some fell upon

stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung

1225 Mt

up, because they had no deepness of earth:

and when the sun was up, they

were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.

And

some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them:

but

other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold,

some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.

Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

To the disciples when they asked,

Why speakest thou unto them in parables?

Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of

heaven, but to them it is not given.

For whosoever hath, to him shall be

given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from

him shall be taken away even that he hath.

Therefore speak I to them in

parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do

they understand.

And in them is fulﬁlled the prophecy of Esaias, which

saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye

shall see, and shall not perceive:

for this people’s heart is waxed gross,

and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at

any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and

should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should

heal them.

But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they

hear.

For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men

have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and

to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.

Hear ye therefore the parable of the sower.

When any one heareth

the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked

one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which

received seed by the way side.

But he that received the seed into stony

places, the same is he that heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it;

yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation

or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended.

also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and

the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and

he becometh unfruitful.

But he that received seed into the good ground

is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit,

and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

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To the multitudes

Another parable put he forth unto them,

The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in

his ﬁeld:

but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among

the wheat, and went his way.

But when the blade was sprung up, and

brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.

So the servants of the

householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed

in thy ﬁeld? From whence then hath it tares?

He said unto them, An

enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we

go and gather them up?

But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the

tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.

Let both grow together until

the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye

together ﬁrst the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather

the wheat into my barn.

To the multitudes

Another parable put he forth unto them,

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man

took, and sowed in his ﬁeld:

which indeed is the least of all seeds: but

when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so

that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

To the multitudes

Another parable spake he unto them;

The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid

in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.

In a house, to his disciples when they asked,

Declare unto us the parable of the tares of the ﬁeld.

He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man;

the ﬁeld is the world;

the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children

of the wicked one;

the enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is

the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.

As therefore the tares

are gathered and burned in the ﬁre; so shall it be in the end of this world.

The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of

his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity;

and shall

cast them into a furnace of ﬁre: there shall be wailing and gnashing of

teeth.

Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of

their Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

1327 Mt

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a ﬁeld; the

which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and

selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that ﬁeld.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking

goodly pearls:

who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and

sold all that he had, and bought it.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the

sea, and gathered of every kind:

which, when it was full, they drew to

shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad

away.

So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth,

and sever the wicked from among the just,

and shall cast them into the

furnace of ﬁre: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Have ye understood all these things?

Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven

is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his

treasure things new and old.

In and to the people of his own country

A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own

house.

And he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief.

Chapter 14

In a desert place, to his disciples when they said,

the time is now past; send the multitude away,

that they may go into the villages, and buy themselves victuals.

They need not depart; give ye them to eat.

And they say unto him, We have here but ﬁve loaves, and two ﬁshes.

Bring them hither to me.

To the disciples when

they saw him walking on the sea

Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.

To Peter

Come.

1428

To Peter when he was afraid and began to sink

O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?

Chapter 15

In Gennesaret,

to the scribes and Pharisees

Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?

For God commanded, saying, Honour thy father and mother: and, He that

curseth father or mother, let him die the death.

But ye say, Whosoever

shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest

be proﬁted by me;

and honour not his father or

The empire strikes back

2012-01-06T08:19:00.001-08:00

New Yorker - Adam Kirsch

Sigmund Freud

Suppose rome were like a human mind. All structures throughout history would be simultaneously present... Nothing is ever truly forgotten Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Indian Hell

2012-01-05T08:55:00.001-08:00

An Indian dies and goes to hell. There he finds that there is a different hell for each country. He goes first to the German hell and asks "What do they do here?" He is told "First they put you in an electric chair for an hour. Then they lay you on a bed of nails for another hour. Then the German devil comes in and whips you for the rest of the day."
The man does not like the sound of that at all..., so he moves on. He checks out the USA hell as well as the Russian hell and many more. He discovers that they are all more or less the same as the German hell.
Then he comes to the Indian hell and finds that there is a very long line of people waiting to get in. Amazed he asks "What do they do here?"
He is told "First they put you in an electric chair for an hour.Then they lay you on a bed of nails for another hour. Then the Indian devil comes in and whips you for the rest of the day."
But that is exactly the same as all the other hells - why are there so many people waiting to get in? "Because maintenance is so bad that the electric chair does not work, someone has stolen all the nails from the bed, and the devil is a former Govt servant, so he comes in, signs the register and then goes to the cafeteria..."

The Temptations of Authorship

2012-01-05T08:51:00.001-08:00

Michael Littleton was a very devout Christian whose lens of piety and understand was ground and polished in centuries following the Reformation. I, a young student, naive, was afflicted with a form of pride in that I desperately desired to utter or author something uniquely profound. I was like a moth drawn to a flame and the closer I approached the more beautiful it became and the more intensely I suffered its damaging effects. I think Mr. Littleton was displeased with my pride and self-will or willfulness that I wanted to turn in a poem rather than an essay but he respected my freewill choice. My desire for wisdom and profundity, perhaps misguided, almost destroyed me in my Sophomore year. I had to go to Dean Keefer and ask for a week or two leave of absence to return home and get myself together. As best as I can recall, I began to suspect that I had achieved some unique vision or gift or insight and I became paranoid that others were envious. I suppose we read such books as "great books" with the hope of truly understanding them and perhaps in a new way, and we may secretly desire to one day write something of our own. There were people at college who were kind to me during my affliction and there were others who thrive upon suffering who were not so kind or compassionate. I suppose what complicated all of this was that I was a virgin and a part of me felt ashamed of my status and a part was afraid to change that status. I remained a virgin until age 30, long after I had left the Greek monastery in Brookline and was living in the Hotel Essex in Boston across from South Station Amtrak, near Summer St. and Atlantic I think. And then one evening, June 7, 1979, I suddenly decided at sunset to walk to a street I had never seen and there was a used bookstore which was not supposed to be open but the owner had left a young woman without the keys to lock up, and I entered and saw a copy of "The Haunted Bookshop" by Christopher Morley, and I turned to the beautiful young woman and said "You should read this because it is about a bookshop just like this." We married three months to the day after we met, and stayed married for 13 years and then divorced.

Serious On-Line Discussions

2011-12-27T11:50:00.001-08:00

Around the year 2000-2001 I spend a year everyday in IRC Undernet in a channel called #philosophy run by a retired teacher with the handle "Skept" who strictly forbade ANY mention of religion or politics. One day I mentioned something about Kierkegaard and Skept booted me saying that my comment was too religious. When the mention of religion and politics is forbidden then much is lost. I edited and reposted (blogged) a number of the chat dialogues. What I discovered in IRC (and in Paltalk) is that very few people have the attention span to discuss anything in depth for several hours. I should include Yahoo religion chat rooms from 1999. People would always enter such rooms and say "What's the topic" and there were topics, but no one stayed on them very long or went very deeply or quoted extensively from source texts. And this is sad BECAUSE applications like IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and Paltalk provide the possibility for holding seminars. I could only find satisfaction in blogging long essays and interacting with the questions of occasional readers that came along.

The Universal Form as Spatio-Temporal Montage

2011-12-26T22:09:00.001-08:00

The Universal Form

A Catholic priest once asked a crusty old Irishman "What is your religion?" He answered, "My religion is the oldest religion in the world. I try to be a nice guy."

Psychologist Alfred Adler would ask each patient for their “earliest memory.” Adler believed that the psyche “promotes” some early memory to the position of “first memory” and that the nature of that remembered experience is very revealing, setting the stage for the course of that individual’s development.

What we come to know as our self is a portrait which we have drawn over time. The brush strokes are a series of freewill choices.

Everyone experiences public events and incorporates them into a private, personal, secret interior world. Someone who writes seriously makes that secret world into a public event.

Life appears to us as an endless collection of unstructured images and events. We pick and choose and impose some narrative structure, theme and plot upon this cacophonous, kaleidoscopic confusion.

The self is a work in progress. As we construct our identity, we come to know our self through an emerging self awareness. Each of us is an author with respect to our autobiographical narrative sense of self. We define our selves.

The late Jacob Kline used to say “we become what we are.” He meant that a newborn infant is in no sense an adult as it lies there in its crib, helpless, and yet it is an adult inchoate in that it has the potential within it to develop into what we consider an adult.

In one sense, we become what we are. In a different sense, we are what we become.

If you are born with no fingers then you do not “have it in you” to become a pianist. If you were born with twenty fingers, then perhaps you could play the piano in a way that no other can play.

What I really want to write about, today, is my search for a new term to designate a phenomenon which I have seen several times.

The best term I can find so far is “spatio-temporal montage.”

I have most recently encountered the phenomenon of spatiotemporal montage in the final chapter of Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward Angel:”

And through the Square, unwoven from lost time, the fierce bright hordes of Ben spun in and out its deathless loom. Ben, in a thousand moments, walked the Square: Ben of the lost years, the forgotten days, the unremembered hours: prowled by the moonlit façades; vanished, returned, left and rejoined himself, was one and many – deathless Ben in search of the lost dead lusts, the finished enterprise, the unfound door – unchanging Ben multiplying himself in form, by all the brick façades entering and coming out.
….
And in his vision he saw the fabulous lost cities, buried in the drifted silt of the earth – Thebes, the seven-gated, and all the temples of the Daulian and Phonecian lands, and all the Oenotria to the Tyrrhene gulf. Sunk in the burial-urn of earth he saw the vanished cultures: the strange sourceless glory of the Incas, the fragments of lost epics upon a broken shard of Gnossic pottery, the buried tombs of the Memphis’ kings, and imperial dust, wound all about with gold and rotting linen, dead with their thousand bestial gods, their mute unwakened ushabtii, in their finished eternities.
He saw the billion living of the earth, the thousand billion dead: seas were withered, deserts flooded, mountains drowned; and gods and demons came out of the South, and ruled above the little rocket-flare of centuries, and sank – came to their Northern Lights of death, the muttering death-flared dusk of the completed gods.
But, amid the fumbling march of races to extinction, the giant rhythm of earth remained. The seasons passed in their majestic processionals, and germinal Spring returned forever on the land – new crops, new men, new harvests, and new gods.
And then the voyages, the search for the happy land. In his moment of terrible vision he saw, in the tortuous ways of a thousand alien places, his foiled quest of himself. And his haunted face was possessed of that obscure and passionate hunger that had woven its shuttle across the seas, that had hung its weft among the Dutch in Pennsylvania, that had darkened his father’s eyes to impalpable desire for wrought stone and the head of an angel. Hill-haunted, whose vision of the earth was mountainwalled, he saw the golden cities sicken in his eye, the opulent dark splendors turn to dingy gray. His brain was sick with the million books, his eyes with the million pictures, his body sickened on a hundred princely wines.

Such spatiotemporal montages are always experienced as apocalyptic visions.

Compare Wolfe’s passage above with Jorge Luis Borges’ description of the Aleph:

O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space... Hamlet, II, 2
But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the schools call it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatness of Place. Leviathan, IV, 46
An Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points.
"It's in the cellar under the dining room," he went on, so overcome by his worries now that he forgot to be pompous. "It's mine -- mine. I discovered it when I was a child, all by myself. The cellar stairway is so steep that my aunt and uncle forbade my using it, but I'd heard someone say there was a world down there. I found out later they meant an old-fashioned globe of the world, but at the time I thought they were referring to the world itself. One day when no one was home I started down in secret, but I stumbled and fell. When I opened my eyes, I saw the Aleph."
"The Aleph?" I repeated.
"Yes, the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending. I kept the discovery to myself and went back every chance I got. As a child, I did not foresee that this privilege was granted me so that later I could write the poem. Zunino and Zungri will not strip me of what's mine -- no, and a thousand times no! Legal code in hand, Doctor Zunni will prove that my Aleph is inalienable."
"Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too."
On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.
I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.
I want to add two final observations: one, on the nature of the Aleph; the other, on its name. As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental. For in the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph, the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor's Mengenlehre, it is the symbol of transfinite numbers, of which any part is as great as the whole.

The square of Wolfe and the Aleph of Borges are the face of Herman Hesse’ “Siddhartha.”

While Govinda with astonishment, and yet drawn by great love and expectation, obeyed his words, bent down closely to him and touched his forehead with his lips, something miraculous happened to him. While his thoughts were still dwelling on Siddhartha's wondrous words, while he was still struggling in vain and with reluctance to think away time, to imagine Nirvana and Samsara as one, while even a certain contempt for the words of his friend was fighting in him against an immense love and veneration, this happened to him:
He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes--he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying--he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person--he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword--he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love--he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void-- he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds--he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni--he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of then died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face--and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely of the same kind as the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected ones are smiling.
Not knowing any more whether time existed, whether the vision had lasted a second or a hundred years, not knowing any more whether there existed a Siddhartha, a Gotama, a me and a you, feeling in his innermost self as if he had been wounded by a divine arrow, the injury of which tasted sweet, being enchanted and dissolved in his innermost self, Govinda still stood for a little while bent over Siddhartha's quiet face, which he had just kissed, which had just been the scene of all manifestations, all transformations, all existence. The face was unchanged, after under its surface the depth of the thousandfoldness had closed up again, he smiled silently, smiled quietly and softly, perhaps very benevolently, perhaps very mockingly, precisely as he used to smile, the exalted one.

All three of these scenes are the vision which Arjuna had of Krishna as the “universal form.”

Vision of the Universal Form
Arjuna said:
11:1. Out of compassion you revealed to me this Highest Mystery of the Divine Atman. It has dispelled my ignorance.
11:2. You told me, O Lotus-eyed, how all beings arise and disappear. I have learned also about Your Imperishable Greatness.
11:3. As You describe Yourself, O Great Lord, I am thirsting to see You in Your Divine Form, O Supreme Spirit!
11:4. If you hold me worthy to see It, O God, then show me Your Eternal Being, O Lord of Yoga! The Blessed Lord said:
11:5. Behold, O Partha, My Forms, hundreds and thousands, Divine, multicolored, multifarious!
11:6. Behold adityas, vasus, rudras, asvins, maruts. Behold countless miracles, O Bharata!
11:7. Behold in My Being, O Gudakesha, the entire universe — moving and nonmoving — with all what you desire to see!
11:8. But truly you are not capable of seeing Me by your eyes, so I endow you with divine eyes. Behold My Supreme Yoga!
Sanjaya said:
11:9. Having uttered this the Great Lord of Yoga showed to Arjuna His Universal Form
11:10. with countless eyes and mouths, with many miraculous sights, with numerous divine adornments, brandishing numerous divine weapons,
11:11. in divine garments and necklaces, anointed with divine fragrant oils, with faces to all sides, all-wonderful, flaming, infinite.
11:12. And even if the shining of thousand suns would blaze forth in the sky it cannot be compared to the Glory of this Great Soul.
11:13. In It Arjuna saw the whole universe subdivided into many worlds, but united into one in the Body of the Highest Deity.
11:14. Then astonished Arjuna bowed his head to the Deity, joined his palms and spoke.
Arjuna said:
11:15. In You, O God, I see gods, all kinds of beings, the Lord-Brahman seated in a wonderful lotus asana, all rishis, and wondrous celestial serpents.
11:16. With countless arms, bellies, mouths, eyes — everywhere I see You — unlimited are Your manifestations. My eyes can see neither the beginning, nor the middle, nor the end of Your Glory, O Infinite, Boundless Lord!
11:17. I behold Your Radiance, Your infinite omnipresent Light with discs, diadems, and scepters. Like blazing flame, or a dazzling sun You radiate the rays of light hard to look at.
11:18. You are beyond my thinking, O Imperishable Lord, the Supreme Goal, the Foundation of the universe, the Immortal Keeper of the eternal dharma, the Primordial Soul — thus my mind conceives You!
11:19. There is neither the beginning of You, nor the middle, nor the end! You are unlimited in Your Power! Your arms are countless! Like suns and moons are Your eyes! When I behold Your Face It blazes like sacrificial fire and scorches the worlds with Your Glory!
11:20. You alone fill heavens and all planets and all which is extended invisibly between them. The whole triune world trembles in front of You, O Mighty One, in front of Your appalling Face!
11:21. Hosts of gods surrender to You folding palms in awe. All appeal to You! And armies of saints praising You make hymns that sound throughout the entire universe.
11:22. And hosts of rudras, adityas, vasus and sadhyas, visvas, asvins, maruts, ancestors, gandharvas, asuras, yakshas, gods — all are admiring You!
11:23. Seeing Your mighty Form with eyes and mouths of untold number, with rows of fearsome teeth, with vast breast, with countless hands and feet the worlds are trembling and so am I.
11:24. Like a rainbow in heaven You are shining with dazzling light — with mouths wide open and giant flaming eyes. You permeate my Atman … As I behold You my strength fades away, my peace vanishes…
11:25. Like flaming glittering swords are Your numerous teeth in the open fearful jaws. The sight of them terrifies me, I do not know where to hide from the vision of You. Be merciful, O Lord, the Refuge of the worlds!
11:26. Dhritarashtra’s sons and many rulers from various countries of the Earth, Bhishma, Drona and Karna, and heroes from the both belligerent parties —
11:27. all they are rushing into Your open moths where rows of teeth glitter fearfully. Like mighty millstones they grind all warriors clutched between them turning their bodies to ashes.
11:28. As waters of rivers rapidly and violently rush towards the great ocean even so these mighty warriors, rulers of the Earth rush headlong into Your open burning mouths.
11:29. As a moss swiftly flies into a flame to die in it so do they rush into the dreadful jaws to disappear in them and find death there.
11:30. Devouring everything in all directions the fire of your countless tongues burns to ashes all creatures. The space is filled with Your Radiance! The world is blazing under Your all-pervading rays, O Lord!
11:31. Reveal to me Your essence! Your vision is terrifying me beyond all measure! I prostrate myself in front of You! Have mercy on me, O Mighty Lord! What is concealed in You I aspire to know! But Your present form is dreadful for me!
The Blessed Lord said:
11:32. I am the Time that brings despair to the world, that slays all people, manifesting its law on the Earth. No one of the warriors arraying here for battle will escape death. You alone will not cease to live.
11:33. Therefore, arise! And reach your glory, vanquish your enemies, and enjoy the power of your kingdom! They are already slain by My Will. You provide just the outer appearance, slay them by your hand.
11:34. Drona, Bhishma, Jayadratha, Karna, and all the warriors present here are already doomed to die. Therefore, fight boldly, O Arjuna! And the victory on this battlefield will be yours!
Sanjaya said:
11:35. Having heard the words said by the Lord, Arjuna trembling and prostrating, addressed Krishna again with voice faltering of fear:
11:36. The worlds are right to rejoice in praising You in songs and hymns beholding Your Magnificence, O Hrishikesha. Hosts of saints prostrate in front of You and demons scatter in fear.
11:37. And how can they not venerate the Great Atman that is superior to Brahman! O Infinite One! The Lord of all righteous men! Refuge of all worlds! Eternal! You are both Being and Non-being, and That Which is beyond Them!
11:38. Among gods no one is superior to You! The Primordial One! The Supreme Refuge of all the living! You pervade the entire universe! O Cognizable! O Omniscient! The whole universe is contained in Your Form!
11:39. You are the God of wind, the God of life, the God of death, the God of fire, the God of water. You are the Moon, the Father, the Progenitor of all beings. Be praised thousand times, again and again! Be ever praised!
11:40. All prostrate in front of You! Hail to You from all sides! There is neither limit to Your Might nor measure to You Power! You include everything since You are Everything!
11:41. If I sometimes inadvertently addressed You as my friend: “O Krishna! O my friend!”, I did this out of my emotions being unaware of Your Greatness,.
11:42. And while resting, joking, playing, eating, or having fun I did not show the due respect to You — being alone with You or with other friends — I beseech You: forgive me my sin, O Immeasurable!
11:43. The Father of the worlds and of all the moving or non-moving! The most honorable and glorious Guru! There is nothing comparable to You! Who can excel You? Who in the all worlds can surpass You Glory?
11:44. I prostrate myself in awe before You and implore You: be forbearing with me! Be my father, be my friend! As loving one with his beloved even so you bear with me!
11:45. I beheld You Glory seen no one before. I am shivering with fear and joy. I implore You: assume Your previous form! Have mercy on me. O the Lord of gods, the Refuge of worlds!
11:46. I strive to see former You in Your glittering crown and with kingly mace in hand! Show me Your form, which is known and dear to me! Hide this multi-armed form of Yours unbearable for mortals!
The Blessed Lord said:
11:47. Arjuna! By My Grace you came to know My supreme and eternal Form, which is revealed only in Yoga, in mergence with the Atman. Of the men around no one but you have seen it.
11:48. Neither merits, nor knowing the Vedas, nor offerings, nor exploits of ascetics, nor profoundness of knowledge — nothing is able to reveal this concealed Form of Mine that you saw.
11:49. Allay your confusion and trepidation, do not be afraid about seeing My awesome Form. Forget your fear! Cheer up your spirit! Behold My form well known to you!
Sanjaya said:
11:50. Having said these words Krishna assumed His usual appearance and comforted shocked Arjuna. The Great assumed again His gracious from.
Arjuna said:
11:51. Seeing again Your gracious human appearance I am coming to oneself and regaining my normal state.
The Blessed Lord said:
11:52. That Form of Mine which you have seen is very hard to see. Even gods are ever eager to see It.
11:53 One cannot see Me such as you have seen even if he knows all the Vedas, performs ascetic exploits, makes offerings.
11:54. Only love can behold Me thus, O Arjuna! Only love can contemplate Me in My innermost Essence and merge with Me.
11:55. He who does everything (only) for Me, for whom I am the Supreme Goal, who loves Me, who is not attached, devoid of enmity — that one comes to Me, O Pandava. Thus in the upanishads of the blessed Bhagavad Gita, the Science of Eternal, the Scripture of yoga, says the eleventh conversation between Shri Krishna and Arjuna, entitled:
Vision of the Universal Form.

Vision of the Pralaya:

The Puranic sage Markandeya's vision of universal dissolution appears in the third book of Mahabharata (3,186-187).

Markandeya was a religious ascetic who spent all his time in meditation and prayer and the reading and discussion of sacred writings.
One day, a great storm arose, and ocean swelled and all things were engulfed and submerged in a great deluge. All the world was being destroyed in a flood.
Markandeya was swept far out to see by the raging torrent and frequently swallowed by the whirl pools, vortexes and maelstroms, only to be spewed forth again to the raging surface of the waters.
Markandeya greatly feared for his life and mourned for the impending doom of the world he had always known.
Suddenly in the midst of the raging chaos, Markanedya saw a tree firmly planted, rising out of the water. One branch of this tree was haloed with an unnatural light which melted the surrounding darkness and gloom. Markendaya struggled desparately to draw close to that branch. Upon one leaf of that branch he saw the source of the luminosity. A beautiful infant lay sleepily upon the leaf, placidly sucking the large toe of his right foot. As Markandeya came even closer, to have a better look, he was suddenly inhaled by the infant's breathing, through the nostrils, and found himself inside the infants body. Inside the body of the child, Markandeya discovered the world as he knew it, before the flood, peaceful, calm and safe. He saw the mountains and the oceans, the forests and the cities, all beneath the star-filled heavens.
A moment later, Markandeya was exhaled again and found himself surrounded by flood waters, beholding the child reclining upon the leaf.
With the next moment, the child and the tree and the deluge vanished and he was once again seated in his retreat as he had been when this vision started.
God then appeared to bless Markandeya and said "People shall benefit by these stories which you shall relate to them."

The Virgin Birth

The Archangel Gabriel cried unto the Virgin:

Awed by the beauty of thy virginity, and the exceeding radiance of thy purity,
What worthy hymns of praise may I offer unto thee?
Or how shall I name thee? I am in doubt and stand in awe!
For thy womb has become more spaceous than the heavens, now that it contains the uncontainable one!
Rejoice! Thou bride unwedded!

The Upanishads: Katha Upanishad: Part One Chapter I
{14} Death said: I know well the Fire-sacrifice, which leads to Heaven and I will explain it to you. Listen to me. Know this Fire to be the means of attaining Heaven. It is the support of the universe; it is hidden in the hearts of the wise.
{20} Nachiketa said: There is this doubt about a man when he is dead: Some say that he exists; others, that he does not. This I should like to know, taught by you. This is the third of my boons.
{21} Death said: On this subject even the gods formerly had their doubts. It is not easy to understand: the nature of Atman is subtle. Choose another boon, O Nachiketa! Do not press me. Release me from that boon.
{25} Whatever desires are difficult to satisfy in this world of mortals, choose them as you wish: these fair maidens, with their chariots and musical instruments - men cannot obtain them. I give them to you and they shall wait upon you. But do not ask me about death.
{26} Nachiketa said: But, O Death, these endure only till tomorrow. Furthermore, they exhaust the vigour of all the sense organs. Even the longest life is short indeed. Keep your horses, dances and songs for yourself.
{27} Wealth can never make a man happy. Moreover, since I have beheld you, I shall certainly obtain wealth; I shall also live as long as you rule. Therefore no boon will be accepted by me but the one that I have asked.
{1} Death said: The good is one thing; the pleasant, another. Both of these, serving different needs, bind a man. It goes well with him who, of the two, takes the good; but he who chooses the pleasant misses the end.
{2} Both the good and the pleasant present themselves to a man. The calm soul examines them well and discriminates. Yea, he prefers the good to the pleasant; but the fool chooses the pleasant out of greed and avarice.
{5} Fools dwelling in darkness, but thinking themselves wise and erudite, go round and round, by various tortuous paths, like the blind led by the blind.
Deuteronomy: Chapter 30: Verse 12
... It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say: 'Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it?'
2 Chronicles 2:6
But will God in very truth dwell with men on the earth? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee; how much less this house which I have builded
1 Kings 8:27
But will God in very truth dwell on the earth? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee; how much less this house that I have builded!

Lazarus and the rich man

2011-12-25T17:58:00.001-08:00

I was thinking just the other day about Lazarus and the rich man, and how Lazarus was "in the bosom of Abraham" presumably in heaven, and the rich man (we never learn his name) is in, we assume, the torment of hell, and the rich man is requesting intercession, and then the final comment that even if someone WERE to return from the dead and warn people, they would not take heed. And we do not know that the rich man was wicked but only that he lacked that "oil of compassion" as the five foolish virgins (who WERE VIRGINS = physical purity) but lacked sufficient eleemosynary (oil = elaion) works

Bible Recipe for a Church

2011-12-24T10:04:00.001-08:00

Mike has mentioned the apostolic injunction to "go unto all the nations and preach" yet at times I get the impression that Mike feels he IS apostolic and is preaching his brand of understanding to convert, say, Roman Catholics, away from the error of their monolithic Magisterium and bring them over to the truth of his local store front church. Now it seems to me that all the world is aware of the Bible and the choices of religions by means NOT of apostles wandering sandal-clad with staff in hand but because of Gutenberg's printing press, and Internet podcasts and magazines and the activities of all sorts of secular scholars who write books on the topic. Mike seems to feel that the words of the Bible are clear, obvious, unambiguous and all that is necessary and sufficient to produce a Bible-based Christian. If this is true then why does anyone need a pastor or preacher. It seems to me that anyone who is literate and can read can make themselves into a Christian. And since it is written "wherever two or three are gathered in my name" then all you need to do is find one or two people who see eye to eye with you and get some bread or matzah and wine or grape juice and bingo, you can have Communion. I mean, why not? But what confuses me is that if the Bible is a clear-cut cook-book recipe for how to make a Christian and have a church then WHY is there not more unity or agreement or fellowship among all these Bible based Christians. In fact, some of them insist upon having poisonous snakes as part of their service and certainly there is a verse which says "and if you touch a poisonous serpent it shall not harm you" . So are those snake-handlers Christians? What they do certainly seems Bible-based. And WHY is there a place like St. Catherine's monastery in Sinai Egypt which has practiced unchanged since at lease the third century. Are THEY Christians? If St. Catherine's is in error then why did God allow them to survive all this time to confuse everyone as to what the true definition of Christianity is. We know that God destroyed those priests who offered "strange incense" in the Old Testament and had the earth open and swallow them up.

Show me your prophetesses

2011-12-24T09:29:00.001-08:00

For several years I worked as a computer programmer with the wife of a pastor who herself had a major in mathematics and a minor in theology. One day I asked her, out of curiosity: "SUPPOSE that a Roman Catholic began attending your services and after some months asked to convert to your faith: would you baptize them or how would you receive them?" She said "Oh, they are not Christians since they believe in works so we would baptize them, but FIRST we would have them produce a number of witnesses who could testify that they are leading a godly life." NO I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. This is verbatim what she answered. So obviously she believes that someone must be sinless at least in the sense of no public scandals BEFORE they can be baptized. Do YOU feel the pastor's wife is theologically correct? One day I met her pastor husband and I asked him whether which denomination/tradition he was, Baptist, Evangelical, Pentecostal, Lutheran, etc. He looked shocked and said "well I hope I am BIBLICAL." I said, "but dont you realize that if you spoke to the Pope, and to the head of the Mormon Church, and to a Jehovah's Witness and to a Christian Scientist that EACH would insist that they are Bible based?" He looked embarrassed and said "well I suppose you are right." In fact, somewhere in Acts it speaks of a family with two prophetess daughters. Since that must be Biblical, I ask you to produce a few prophetesses from your congregation to show me that you are Bible-based.

Faith v. Works - Who is a Real Christian

2011-12-24T09:08:00.001-08:00

I feel that there are no guarantees. The reason for the JUDGMENT is to be judged, so no one bypasses the judgment and there you shall answer for every idle word which passes from your lips. Grace and Works are an inseparable mystery. The judgment of God is a mystery to humans. And "God will not be mocked" by which I mean to say that you cannot have God over a barrel with a basket full of cherry-picked verses. The FOOLISH virgins did not have enough oil. Everything is fraught with danger since there are no guarantees BUT there is greater danger in relying totally upon faith. Better to err on the side of works than on faith. I was just looking the other day at that passage "I will have mercy upon whom I shall have mercy." Its like the laborers in the vineyard; some work from sunrise til sunset and others work only at the last hour, they all receive the same wage, the same penny, but they all WORKED. Do you imagine that those Roman Catholics whom you suggest are not Christians will be turned away at the judgment and told "you depended upon works and did not realize that everything is faith" ? With what measure you measure out unto others so shall it be measured unto you. So if you judge your Roman Catholic neighbor as un-Christian then perhaps the same will be measured out to you at the judgment and you will hear "I never knew you; go to the outer darkness" - As I explained to you, those "words of God" did not get written down and finalized until more than a century, and there were no verse numbers so the Apostles would not understand your verse references. In fact there were no lower case letters or spaces between words. Yet somehow, in the absence of written scripture there was a Church which was guided by tradition. It is that tradition that produced the Bible and not the Bible which produced tradition. And 2Peter 3:16 describes YOU as one of those with a weak foundation who twists and distorts passages to your own destruction. Go and visit St. Catherine's in Sinai Egypt to see Christians who have lived in an unchanging tradition since apostolic times.

A Personal Relationship With Jesus

2011-12-17T18:44:00.001-08:00

I question whether it is meaningful or appropriate for a Catholic to speak of "a personal, intimate relationship with Jesus" for anyone NOT in communion with the Catholic Church. If it is possible for someone outside the Roman Catholic Church to be saved by this "personal relationship" then why is the Catholic Church necessary? And how does someone know that their personal relationship is not with a false angel of light which Paul mentions in the epistles?

http://bible.cc/2_corinthians/11-14.htm

The words "intimate", "personal" and "relationship" do not appear in Strong's Exhaustive Bible concordance.

Here is a search engine for the entire Catechism which yields only a few vague references to a relationship with God .

http://ccc.scborromeo.org.master.com/texis/master/search/

The closest thing I find in the Catechism pertains to the life of hermits and would not apply to a layperson:

***

The eremitic life

920 Without always professing the three evangelical counsels publicly, hermits "devote their life to the praise of God and salvation of the world through a stricter separation from the world, the silence of solitude and assiduous prayer and penance."

921 They manifest to everyone the interior aspect of the mystery of the Church, that is, personal intimacy with Christ. Hidden from the eyes of men, the life of the hermit is a silent preaching of the Lord, to whom he has surrendered his life simply because he is everything to him. Here is a particular call to find in the desert, in the thick of spiritual battle, the glory of the Crucified One.

***

Here is a page which is Roman Catholic and stresses an "intimate, personal relationship with Jesus" but it seems to be aimed at Evangelicals who try to win converts from the RC Church.

http://rcspiritualdirection.com/blog/2011/11/02/can-a-catholic-have-a-personal-relationship-with-jesus

I see this "personal relationship with Jesus" as a recent Evangelical Protestant innovation and not something stressed in the first 1500 years of Christianity.

Correcting Student Papers

2011-12-11T21:32:00.001-08:00

I volunteered to read over one seminarian's papers because English is his second language. His papers are not very long but it is a lot of work to diligently read every sentence and correct spelling and grammar. We do in in Google documents so I can highlight phrases, sentences, change the color, and place the correction in a COMMENT. I wonder how any staff could really give proper attention to hundreds of papers. There should be some automated on-line program to exercise students in grammar, spelling, style. But what really bugs me is some of the ideas that are being taught to him. His professor or textbook makes a few statements that disturb me. One statement is to the effect that Plato's Academy and Socrates methods form some unbroken tradition that appears in the Catholic Church and that when people are taught a "method" to distinguish "truth" from "falsehood" then this is somehow "formational" or transformative. Another paper which bothered me stressed that the Virgin Mary is totally sinless, yet ancient prayers from the early centuries refer to Christ as "the only sinless one" ... the early Church refers to Mary as "Panagia" (All-Holy) and "blameless" but stops short of placing her in the same sinless category as Christ. I understand the differing views of Roman Catholic vs. Eastern Orthodox on original sin and Immaculate Conception but I think its more prudent to be conservative and remain silent on certain matters. Also there are topics which the Greeks call "theologoumena" things which may endlessly discussed without coming to any conclusions but which are matters not essential to salvation (e.g. exact details of the how and why of Dormition/Assumption) -- Anyway, this "taste" for me of what it is like to correct papers makes me realize how difficult it is and also.. the problem of respecting the student's right to see things differently but yet make them aware that there are other ways to see them.

Legal Signatures

2011-12-07T11:27:00.001-08:00

Speaking of cursive for legal signatures, one of the first things I learned was my full name as a legal signature, and I have done it the same way for 50 years. But I have known so many people who have cryptic little Byzantine marks which g...ive NO indication as to what their actual name is BUT they are marks which are difficult to forge. I worked for 3 years for a man from Paris who was out of the country half the time and I was in the office by myself. With his permission I often had to sign that cryptic little signature of his. I learned cursive writing in Russian enough to get by when I was in my 20's but I cannot remember it now. It isn't THAT big a deal to learn a phonetic alphabet like Greek or Russian; each one took me less than a month. Children should master some skill sets. We do forget much of what we learn/memorize unless we use it regularly. I did every single problem odd and even in the 960 page calculus text by Purcell just to see if I could do it. Now all I can tell you is that a derivative is a slope at a point, an integral is an area under a curve, a double integral is a volume and a triple integral is a volume in 4-space and multidimensional spaces are simply models to handle 10 or 20 variables algebraically and do not necessarily have a visual analog.

Exercising the memory

2011-12-06T18:11:00.001-08:00

I will soon turn age 63. I can notice a very slight deterioration in memory and cognitive abilities. Learning Mandarin Hanji characters definitely seems beneficial as a mental exercise. Initially I had to spend literally hours tracing one character over and over and over. Slowly, it became easier. I was able to visualize certain characters during the day. I began to gain a sense of stroke order. Many elderly people take up crossword puzzles as a way to keep the mind active. I do not enjoy doing things which are arbitrary and meaningless. I do not enjoy games. There is actually a government committee in China which oversees the characters. Each school grade has a certain number of characters that they must master before they proceed to the next grade. A college student can recognize about 4000 characters which allows them to understand 80,000 words. 2000 characters is the minimum for reading a newspaper. 100,000 is required for Classical Chinese.

Calligraphy

2011-12-06T14:56:00.001-08:00

I watched a long documentary on the life of Steve Jobs in which they interviewed the calligraphy expert who helped Jobs develop various fonts for the Apple. The calligrapher said he refused to write in any fashion except by hand and he lamented the decline in handwritten documents. I am teaching myself Chinese Hanzi (simplified, not traditional) by stroking characters with my finger on an Android screen and letting an app called Hanzi Recognizer find them. Stroke order is essential. Even if what I write/stroke resembles the character exactly the search engine will not find it because it uses the order of the strokes as part of the search. I had my personal reasons for choosing simplified (used in mainland China) over traditional (used everywhere outside mainland). I have watched youtube videos of master Chinese and Japanese calligraphers at work. There is a kind of beauty in these logographs and a mood which arises during the practice of "painting" the characters. However, most Chinese speakers have cell phones and use pinyin phonetic methods to bring up the Hanji characters and so gradually I think the skill of stroking characters will vanish. There are input methods which allow the finger to stroke and do not require pinyin but still, stroking by finger is different from the ink brush which allows so much more style and expression.

Should children still be taught how to write in cursive longhand script?

2011-12-06T14:42:00.001-08:00

One thing is certain - at a young age we can learn almost ANYTHING if we are required... but in our twenties or thirties or forties we will not be able to learn cursive script, touch typing, bicycle riding, driving an automobile, or any number of other things because there are windows of opportunity which close as we age. One obvious window is our ability to read, learn spelling, grammar, punctuation. I have known some adults who were either totally illiterate (total inability to deal with symbols) or functionally illiterate (they can stumble through a sentence with difficulty but they have little comprehension.) I worked at Stone & Websters Engineering in the 1980s and they had archives of ledgers going back to the 19th century. Everyone commented on how markedly the quality of the handwriting declines around the turn of the century.

Printing, Cursive Script Longhand, Typewriter, Keyboard or Speech Recognition.

2011-12-06T14:24:00.001-08:00

Most of my life I have printed whenever possible because my cursive script is so illegible. A few years ago I had to spend a period of time without Internet, so I carried a spiral notebook and blogged in cursive script, typing it once I had Internet access. I still have some of those notebooks. My choice of cursive was subconscious. I think I can write more quickly in cursive and since it is only for me to read I do not worry about legibility. I did learn to touch type 60 wpm at the age of 11 so for me the most natural way to think creatively is at a keyboard. In fact, I volunteered to help one seminarian who speaks English as a second language. When I want to write at length about some complex topic I find that not only must I type at a keyboard, but it must be a blog of some sort.

Gisela Berns , Tutor at SJC, told me that she cannot think creatively with a keyboard but must have the feeling of pen upon paper. I remember reading about some recent published author who submits written manuscripts in cursive script and is perhaps the very last to do so, but I cannot remember the name.

J.D. Salinger spent his days at some mechanical typewriter. In fact, I watched a documentary on Hitchens and it showed him at a mechanical typewriter typing with two fingers, hunt and peck. I suppose each of us becomes frozen in our ways.

Giving up smoking

2011-11-29T23:25:00.001-08:00

A pipe is only slightly better IF one does not inhale. Many former cigarette smokers continue to inhale the pipe smoke which is more harmful than cigarette smoke. Also with pipes there is an increased risk of cancer of the mouth and/or throat. I worked for a man in his 70s who quite literally smoked one pound of SAIL tobacco each month. He would order 5 one pound cans at a time and I would date, stock and rotate them. A lit pipe was CONSTANTLY in his mouth. I used to smoke pipes but I could never smoke with his frequency. Finally he was treated for throat cancer. He continued to work each day and went to radiation treatments. His neck became black, I imagine from the burning of the radiation treatment. He stopped smoking. He is still alive today and has the use of his voice and the surgery took place about 8 years ago. I stopped tobacco and alcohol four years ago. I had to stay clean for 1 month to permit anesthesia for kidney stone surgery, and I never went back to drinking/smoking. But the last few years of tobacco use were Redman Chewing tobacco because my sinus problems made smoke intolerable. My boss from Paris HATED tobacco users and he never knew I was one because I only did it once or twice a day for several minutes in the restroom, and rinsed my mouth, so he never knew. Now I honestly say that I never crave alcohol or tobacco. I started on both when I was age 7 but only very infrequently and in secret until I was in my teens.

Axiomatic

2011-11-28T01:32:00.001-08:00

"Axiomatic" comes from the Greek "axios" (worthy) an in geometry it means something WORTHY of being accepted as intuitively obvious but without proof because if EVERYTHING were proven in theorems then that would mean an infinite number of theorems. In a sense an axiom is something we accept as being true but cannot PROVE true yet that which is proven is more cogent and compelling.

Accepting God's Will

2011-11-28T01:19:00.001-08:00

There is a different sort of answer for your friend's problem. There are various passages in the Bible which suggest that everything which befalls us is part of God's will and as it says in the Epistle of James "count it all joy when trials befall you" ... Job is tried with all sorts of sufferings. Even Tobit in the Deuterocanonical books risks his life to bury the dead in defiance of a pagan king's orders and yet a tragedy befalls Tobit which causes him to go blind.

If we keep getting pregnant until we have ten children, then that is God's will. If we cannot conceive or even adopt, then that is God's will.

At a certain point a believer should simply surrender to circumstances and accept God's will. A person who is in a state of "friendship with God" and is able to receive communion but cannot because of some mitigating circumstances beyond their control is still much better off than someone who receives communion unworthily and as Paul says, eats unto their own condemnation.

We who mystically represent the Cherubim

2011-11-27T23:03:00.001-08:00

When, during the Greek liturgy, the priests and deacons come out of the altar iconostasis bearing "the gifts" the bread and wine to be consecrated, and this is called "the great entrance" then the choirs chant a long slow solemn hymn which says "We who mystically represent the Cherubim, and offer to the live-giving Trinity the thrice holy hymn... let us relinquish all worldly concerns so that we may receive the king of all" (its hard for me to remember it exactly.. I used to know it in Greek) ... now let us compare this to a Protestant notion of church. Modern people are not interested in "mystically representing the Cherubim" ... modern people want an inspiring person who can be an engaging speaker (the sermon) and an effective social worker (pastoral counseling)... SO ... women can be great at that.. perhaps better than males... and why bother with candles and incense and what is the point of the eucharist because, after all, it makes crumbs, and is unsanitary if a lot of people drink out of the same cup. SO, why not just create your own church and write your own rules, and have your own method of governance and why worry whether it's valid or invalid or what the rest of the world thinks. There is one long avenue that runs the length of Brooklyn from North to South, Dekalb Avenue, and literally every block has anywhere from one to three store front churches and one of those has a billboard which says "founded by Bishop Sally" so, we already have female bishops... no problem

Jain and Buddhist traditions

2011-11-27T22:14:00.001-08:00

Now, to really understand the female ordination issue, one may consider the long history of the Jains (there are about 3 million Jains in the world mostly around Gujerat, India) whose founder was Mahavaira who was a contemporary of Siddhartha Gautama who is the historical Buddha. In ancient times the Jains split into two sects; the Svetasambra (white sheet clad) and the Digambra (sky-clad... i.e. bare naked). The Digambra are far more strict, conservative whereas the Svetasambra are liberal. Among the Digambra only MALES may become ascetic monks. Females must wait until they are reincarnated as a male (no I am NOT joking). The Svetasambra do allow female renunciates (nuns if you will.) Now lets look at Siddhartha Gautama. He starts off as a wealthy prince living a privileged life of luxury. He abandons the luxury and begins to practice every known religious teaching moving from guru to guru and sect to sect. Finally he is at the point of starvation when he sees a boat pass by on the river and hears the master musician instruct the apprentice who is stringing an instrument "Do not make it too tight or it will snap BUT do not make it too slack or it will not sound its note." From this Siddhartha realized that "the middle way was best" ... then he experienced enlightenment... then I went about preaching far and wide but ordained ONLY MALES to his religious order. After some years one woman complained and so he founded an order for women. BUT, there was no role for the married laity other than to give alms of food. As the centuries passed there was a schism between the way of the elders, the Theravadin, and the Mahayana or Great Vehicle. To this day there are orders of women whose ordination (sampradaya) lineage traces back to Siddhartha. At a certain point in history, all the Theravadin convents were destroyed. Theravadin women continued to practice renunciate life in viharas (convents) BUT they could never take ordination BECAUSE the lineage had been disrupted. During the 19th or 20th century one Mahayana order of nuns with a valid lineage offered to ordain the Theravadin women and let them continue in their Theravadin practices and beliefs but the Theravadin women declined because they felt the Mahayana lineage was too tainted. I know some LGBT people who gravitate to Buddhism because they do not perceive any negative criticisms of same sex love in Buddhist teachings. What they fail to realize is that the origins of Hindu and Buddhist religious practice ASSUMED ascetic renunciation and so no mention is made about sexuality. Only gradually over the centuries was some practice carved out for the participation of laity.

Male Ordination

2011-11-27T21:36:00.001-08:00

The Greeks have a special, long ceremony to vest a Bishop in the Church. Once the Bishop is vested and begins to serve then a deacon or priest INCENSES the bishop NINE times. The icon of Christ is incensed only three times under any circumstances (bishop or no bishop present.) The REASON that a bishop is incensed with the censor NINE times is because the bishop, mystically, from the time of vesting until the service is over is THE LIVING ICON OF CHRIST whereas the wooden painting on the iconostasis is NOT a living icon. The Greeks and Russians may in theory only consecrate Bishops from among monastics because the monastic life of the ascetic renunciate IS the mystical life of Christ. It is true that in recent centuries widowed priests have been given a nominal monastic tonsure and then consecrated as bishops but this is not a good practice. Monasticism is a way of life and you cannot learn it by reading "Monasticism for Dummies" or taking a semester of "Asceticism 101" and doing some multiple choice, true or false and essay questions. For a male to be ordained as a priest he is allowed to be married BUT he must have been a virgin prior to marriage and must marry a virgin. Once he is ordained, should his wife die, he is expected to enter a monastery. A man who marries a widow may not be ordained as a priest. A man who is physically imperfect, missing fingers, limbs, eye, ear, may not be ordained because the males animals sacrificed in the Old Testament must have no obvious imperfections. Once a priest or bishop is ordained/consecrated then even if he is maimed he may continue to serve. IF a male is bleeding, say from some wound or hemorrhoids he is ritually unclean and may not celebrate the liturgy/mass nor receive communion and this is the same reason why a woman who gives birth may not enter the church for 40 days and after 40 days there is a brief churching prayer. A woman may not receive communion during menstruation. A priest may not hunt or slaughter animals. IF a priest should be driving a car and kills someone in an accident then he may never serve another liturgy/mass. If a male seeks ordination but as a child was molested and penetrated then he is ritually unfit for ordination. All this is very ancient tradition. I am not making it up. I have a copy here of the 1000 page Pedalion (The Rudder) ... a rudder guides, steers a ship so the Pedalion is all these traditions written down. I am dredging all this up from my memory to illustrate how there are reasons why no female and even many males are unsuitable for ordination. Eastern Orthodoxy has always been driven by mysticism. The West, Rome, retained a fair measure of mysticism but introduced a lot of Aristotelian type logic and legalism. The center piece of worship is always the mystical supper of the eucharist. The sermon is kind of a side-show event. Once the Reformation comes along then the sermon and the bible are front and center and the eucharist takes a back seat until gradually, it vanishes into a monthly or quarterly or perhaps even yearly token event (depending on the denomination) .

Ordination of Women

2011-11-27T21:02:00.001-08:00

I realize your original question had to do with what my WIFE thinks about ordination of women. Of course, living with me she hears all these ancient Greek Orthodox arguments which almost no one in the world knows including many Greeks. Being male I can testify to the fact that in a certain way all males are rotten. I was the one who make up the saying "All men are dogs but some dogs are Lassie." Oh, and if you want to argue that Lassie was FEMALE, then Google and find out that ALL 14 Lassie dogs were male because males are larger and do not have a problem with seasonal molting. There were monks in the Greek monastery who had been there thirty years and complained during confession that every time they see a woman they are afflicted with carnal thoughts. Males are afflicted by testicles and testosterone. Certainly it is true that women experience sexual temptations but their batting average is a lot better than males in the area of sexual misconduct. My wife would be 100 per cent in favor of women ordinations.

There are some Protestant denominations who criticize Catholics saying "If Jesus were electrocuted would you wear an electric chair around your neck?" and "if you celebrate a Mass every day then you are crucifying Christ over and over." What such critics fail to realize is that there is only one Crucifixion in a pre-Eternal moment and mystically celebrants are transported to that moment.

There will always be innovations and schisms BUT... for some reason Mt. Athos and St. Catherine's Sinai have continued unchanged stretching back to Apostolic times. As long as somewhere in the world there are a few people doing what has been done since the beginning then it really does not matter if there are groups who start ordaining women or robots and have a Eucharist of cheerios and kool-aid.

There are Reform Jewish synagogues which have female lesbian Rabbis and since the Torah says "thou shalt not lie with a male as with a female" the gay couples have sex standing up and feel that they have fulfilled the mitzvah (NO I am NOT joking)

What to do? What to do?

2011-11-27T18:03:00.001-08:00

A Catholic is now celiac and cannot have gluten, so what to do. I was just asked this. My reply:

How strange you should mention this, since I was thinking of that during my cheerios and kool-aid homily.

Simple-minded answer. I went with a Greek priest monk once to an emergency ward where an old man was in minutes of death. The doctors and nurses parted like waves in the wake of so huge ship as this black robbed priest-monk with a long beard approached with a chalice (containing both wine and bread, body and blood, whatever) .... the old man had all these tubes in his nose, mouth, arm.... his eyes OPENED WIDE cause he knew this was it, the end of the trail... the priest dipped his index finger in the chalice, perhaps a drop, and placed it in his mouth next to the tube. Ten minutes later, the man was dead. Now back to your friend. SINCE the RC Church says that the wafer is sufficient, the wine is not necessary... she can go and sip from the chalice. By the way their are a few alcoholic priests I know who use grape juice. Now let us imagine the situation of someone who has their mouth sewn shut (or perhaps has no mouth or jaw) and lives on intravenous. What to do, what to do? In the vision of Prophet Daniel (I think it was Daniel) he was feeling faint and an angel took a burning coal, touched it to Daniel's mouth, and said "this has touched your lips and taken away your inequity." Consider the life of St. Mary of Egypt who was one of the greatest harlots, even forcing sailors to do things which embarrassed them. When she went into the desert for 40 years, she had no priest, no communion, and only just before her death did a priest find her in the wilderness and give her communion. To an alcoholic I say, eat the wafer, to a celiac, I say, sip the wine. To Donovan's brain living in a glass jar, I say, Believe and ye have already eaten. And what of the several children born with TWO HEADS. Suppose one wanted to convert to Islam and the other wanted to chant Hare Krishna... what to do?? what to do??? What is impossible for humans is possible for God (if there is a God, and no one can prove that there is or there isnt.) There are people who take communion ever day and are not Christians. There are Christians who can never take communion once in their life. And then there is the rest of us.

The Multidimensional Gestalt of Ordinary Cognition

2011-11-27T15:57:00.001-08:00

I am 62 years old and have had curious and diverse experiences, a Liberal Arts education at St. John's, living in a Greek and a Russian monastery, learning to get by in modern Greek, Russian and church Slavonic, studying 2 years of Integral, Differential Calculus, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations (and I mean 16 hours a day every day), working as a computer programmer in the 1970s through 90s in Mfg, Wholesale, Retail, Engineering, Service, spending 2 years in a Guyanese Hindu temple and two years in a Korean Zen temple, reading several hundred books on psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, (I am probably the only layperson to have read books on Rorschach from every decade and learned to administer and interpret tests).... MY POINT BEING that whenever anyone asks me ANYTHING.... I answer based upon the GESTALT of all these multidimensional experiences over 50 years, and I can think about them all at once, and there is nothing marvelous about this for it is quite naturally how the brain works... BUT... sutras, threads, sentences, syllogisms are ONE DIMENSIONAL, so even though I can realize something in an instant, it takes me hours or days or months to do a transformational projection from that multidimensional gestalt into the linear one dimensional nature of speech, argument, narrative discourse.... because essentially what one tries to do with discourse is to RECREATE that multidimensional experience of years in the audience. For me to truly UNDERSTAND the notions of, say, Hans Kung, it is not sufficient for me to simply read a book by Hans Kung but rather I must in some sense BECOME Hans Kung with all his years of experiences. This is the truth which Hallaj, the first Sufi martyr, martyred at the hands of Orthodox Sunni because he exclaimed "I am one with Allah" - as he was being led to the gallows he said "if I had had YOUR experiences then I should have no choice but to execute me BUT if you had had MY experiences then you would have no choice but to exclaim I AM ONE WITH ALLAH."

Simon's Sin of Simony

2011-11-26T21:29:00.001-08:00

I wanted to look up this passage regarding Simon's "simony" (his attempt to purchase ordination) and I see in various passages that PERHAPS his sin will be forgiven IF he repents, but there is some reservation and forgiveness is NOT a certainty. http://bible.cc/acts/8-22.htm Yet it seems that earlier Simon "believed" and was baptized, so why did Simon not have the "eternal security of salvation" (once saved, always saved, OSAS) ? Also, it would seem that Simon DID NOT REALIZE his request was sinful else why would the sin be named after him (since this was the very first occurrence ) ?

Why Does the Obvious Need a Prophet or Revelation

2011-11-26T19:34:00.001-08:00

So, IF truth and goodness are univalent, unambiguous, persuasive, transformative then WHY are we not explicitly, didactically told what is true and good in declarative syllogisms which predicate with algorithmic precision (why are we spoken to in figures and parables) and FURTHERMORE if the truth is ONE and it unambiguously persuades then why are we not all Republicans (or Democrats) or Calvinists or Sufis? Calvin in his Institutes of Divine Religion and Mohammad in the Qur'an both make occasional appeals to "common sense" ... "for DO YE NOT KNOW" or "all men agree..." BUT if everything is intuitively obvious then why the need for prophets to be sent and divine revelation. For THAT matter, IF the verses of Paul in Hebrews, Chapter 11, http://bible.cc/hebrews/11-1.htm , about all things things in the Old Testament wrought by faith are not Paul's brilliant, persuasive rhetoric but are truly the meaning of the Old Testament then WHY do we not find those express statements in the Old Testament. Why must we wait for Paul to state the obvious?

A Word of Wisdom Fitly Spoken

2011-11-26T19:21:00.001-08:00

I remember Jacob Kline at St. John's College, Annapolis speaking about the first word of Plato's Republic, KATABAINEIN, Which means "I went down" or "I descended" ... it is Socrates saying Katabainein xthes (I went down yesterday) ... to the Piraeus, to a religious festival. Jacob Kline said that this one word, descent, contained the entire Republic in microcosm since in a sense the high-point (or low point) is the Myth of Er and the DESCENT into the underworld for a vision of karmic rebirth. Kline suspected that Plato had re-written page one of the Republic 50 times so that form would imitate content. Paul Valery calls Pascal's pense the "perfect poem" (I cant really spell from memory) 'Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m'effraie - The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens.” Two immensities, the silence and the spaces, balanced upon DES and the self, the I, which is frightened, is OUTSIDE of that structure and frightened because of said exclusion, alienation. So page 1 of Plato's Republic conformed to Leo Strauss's "Persecution and the Art of Writing" in that "A word of wisdom, fitly spoken, is like apples of gold in silver fittings." From a distance, it appears a silver apple, that is it appears to say one thing, but upon closer inspection, meditation, it reveals itself to the eye of the worthy beholder (not the hoi polloi) as a golden apple concealed in a fine silver mesh filigree.

Is Goodness Absolute or Relative?

2011-11-26T18:40:00.001-08:00

Alexander the Great, George Washington, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther, Saddam Hussein, Cotton Mather, Osama bin Laden and Mohandas Kirmachand Gandhi all had AT LEAST one thing in common: all by nature desired the good. Perhaps they were all mistaken in their understanding of what constitutes goodness, but Alexander never said "hmmm it is better to sit in a hut and meditate but I instead I will conquer the known world. "

George Washington never said "Hmmm... I think I should seize autocratic power and be a dictator, but I guess I will step down from public office."

That is the tricky, deceptive nature of Socrates's dictum that all by nature desire "the good." We ASSUME that there is an absolute good. We assume that the law of excluded middle (or whatever they call it) is true and universal ... ok I googled (The rule of excluded middle asserts that : Either a statement P or its negation (~P) holds.)

http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/is-euclidian-geometry-complete-699.html

Socrates's statement is... what should I call it... solipsism? tautology?

The Jain (a small religious sect in India similar to Buddhism) notion of "anekantavada" (no one single view) offers an alternative way to see things http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada

The Weapon of Self

2011-11-26T17:27:00.001-08:00

Aristotle's definition of the great-souled (megalopsychis) person includes HUBRIS (if I remember) and hubris is related to PRIDE. Also of interest is that the Greek New Testament term for sin traces back to Aristotles' Poetics and is origin...ally a term from archery which means "missing the mark" : HAMARTIA. This may seem like quite a non sequitur but these days I study Chinese Hanji characters and the character for "I, self" 我 Wǒ INCLUDES on the right-hand side, the character for spear, weapon, 戈; pinyin: gē , halberd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halberd ... I suspect that the ancient notion of self/personhood involved a sort of egoism or pride which is at odds with the Christian notion of humility and especially with the notion of divine kenosis or emptying of self in death upon the cross.

It is ironic that the Christian government closed the Academy and the scholars retired to Persia and Baghdad where the Muslims acquired the much of the learning to preserve it and bring it back to the West indirectly. Moses Maimonides did such a massive job of codification, redaction, consolidation of Jewish thought and died about 20 years before Aquinas was born. Aquinas in his Summa seems to quote Aristotle as frequently as he quotes Paul. The Greek Orthodox by contrast never seem to refer to Plato or Aristotle even once. One startling watershed/divide between East and West is if we compare what 6th century Maximus the Confessor (who wrote more than 1/3 of the Philokalia) says about faith with regard to understanding, which is DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED to what Aquinas says in the Summa. Aquinas decides that understanding is prior to faith and that faith proceeds from understanding. Maximus states that faith comes FIRST as a gift from God given through God's foreknowledge from his pre-eternal vantage point beyond time/space and the causal matrix, give to certain individuals with the foreknowledge of how each individual will receive that give of faith with their free will (which is no way impaired by Gods foreknowledge) and that FROM THE GIFT of faith proceeds UNDERSTANDING, but ONLY as much understanding as is necessary to be salvific for that individual. It is also ironic that Maimonides great opponents in Muslim Spain were the Mutakallim who were a very Aristotelean Muslim sect and yet later Islam (and present day Islam) is very much unlike the Aristotelian Mutakallim.

Jesus - (Ye) 耶 and He ”provides us with our daily food- fish plus wheat or rice”(Su) 穌

2011-11-25T14:38:00.001-08:00

I had blogged some while about about the curious characters chosen in Chinese for the name Jesus Christ, namely that one of the characters is a composite of two characters that mean grain and fish - I google and found this: (Yesu or Jesus) whose “ears are always open to our prayers”(Ye) 耶 and He ”provides us with our daily food- fish plus wheat or rice”(Su) 穌. ... I am not implying that there is some symbolic significance in the characters chose for Jesus name but simply that the world commences with cave drawings (icons), proceeds to pictograms/logograms, then to phonetic alphabets (Logos), and in the case of Chinese, back to the logograms. WHAT I am thinking about in a formative sense is HOW we live our daily life, the manner of our living, as somehow an IMAGE of something higher. Hans Kung on page 1 of "On Being Christian" asks an important question: WHY do we need Christ? Why not simply live a good life in the humanist sense?

Word Become Flesh

2011-11-25T13:57:00.001-08:00

I am thinking about written, redacted traditions vs living oral traditions with regard to the notion of LOGOS as "word become flesh or incarnate." The earliest attempts at recording informations were NOT phonetic alphabets, nor were they hieroglyphs of the Egyptians or the Hanzi Chinese characters, but rather the cave drawings and paintings. In Plato's cave analogy, those in chains in darkness are deceived NOT by written words but by shadowy IMAGES upon the cave wall. Glyphs and logograms came much later (China circa 8000 - 5000 BCE) and phonetic alphabets much later still. Archaeologists have found some fragments of what appear to be phonetic Hebrew writing, created by slaves or a working class as a furtive kind of rebellion from the formal hieroglyphs of the priestly ruling class. BUT in the Torah we are presented with the notion that God inscribes Hebrew letters in a stone tablet, and one of those letters has a part in its center which is believed to have FLOATED in mystic fashion as a piece of stone suspended in the hole of the tablet. So, when Jesus says "No man has seen the Father at any time; he who sees ME sees the father (as a living IMAGE or icon of the Father)." I am thinking of Logos as a pictogram or glyph or icon, and it is a image or shadowy representation of A WAY OF LIVING ONE'S LIFE from day to day. Cardinal Newman's term "illation" brought to life in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited has some bearing upon this logos.

Oral Tradition vs. Written Documents

2011-11-25T13:16:00.001-08:00

I am aware of "the mandate" under which instructors work and I certainly would not want to criticize any seminary. These days when there is such a decline of vocations or callings it is sufficient that there are still seminaries and programs to train people for the religious life. I think I remember reading in Jaroslav Pelikan's "History and Development of Christian Doctrine" that on 2nd century bishop (whose name will come to mind eventually) actually DOUBTED the wisdom of WRITTEN documents in the same way that Socrates doubted, in the sense that the author is not present to defend, explain, guide as a living tradition, and hence the document becomes subject to the caution of II Peter ( is it 3:16) "Paul has said some things which are difficult to understand and those weak in understanding, lacking a proper foundation, twist and distort such verses to their own destruction as they do many other scriptural passages." AHA... Bishop Iranaeus was the bishop who questioned the dangers of written tradition. Even today among the conservative Greek Orthodox, monastacism is transmitted as a way of life in a community rather than academically with courses in "Monasticism 101" with essays and multiple choice exams.

Philosophy and Theology in Seminaries

2011-11-25T13:06:00.001-08:00

I WAS the one who imagined, guessed "Introduction to Phil. 101" but it might very well be simply a history of philosophy. I was startled that Euthyphro was covered BUT no mention was made of the famous, mind-boggling "Euthyphro Problem" namely, does God love "The Good" because of it's intrinsic nature or is "The Good" simply good by FIAT because God arbitrarily chooses to like it.

This morning I awoke with the question in my mind "what is the inception and history of academic corporate effort for learning?" It struck me that military and religion are two ancient sources of group learning TRADITION (in the sense of something handed down or passed along) .. I was reading Gibbon Decline and Fall of Roman Empire and he describes how the military were like constant school boot camps even in time of peace and the soldiers used instruments TWICE as heavy as what is necessary so as to be strong in times of real battle. Then I was thinking of secret societies like the Pythagoreans, Eleusinian Mysteries, etc as an organization which passes on learning, theories, methods, liturgics, etc.

To this VERY DAY there are very conservative old calendarist Greek monastic groups (and Russians) who train their own priests and bishops outside of any formal academic environment and without benefit of certification or degrees.

Even the ancient original oath of Hippocrates FORBIDS a physician to do bone setting since that is a skill taught upon the battlefield through experience to a technician/artisan bone-setter.

Wisdom, Number, Measure, Hunger, Thirst

2011-11-24T10:08:00.001-08:00

(written 9-29-2000)

When we dwell as pedestrians in a land, we behold the scenery from the most intimate detail and perspective, but that very closeness and intimacy in perspective prevents us from seeing symmetry, intention and design on a grander scale, bearing profounder implications. If we ascend to a mountain peak, we lose discernment of much of the finer details, but we can begin to recognize the "lay of the land" and its geography. From an orbiting space station, we can perceive global structure. And from vantage point of another galaxy, we may comprehend cosmic design.

When we seek Divine intention, design, laws, and principles in Nature, we consider NUMBER to be the highest authority of truth. We seek mathematical certainty. Mathematical proof is the hallmark of modern science.

The Bible also associated "wisdom" with "number". We find "wisdom" and "number" mentioned together in three verses of the King James Bible:

Job 38:37 Who can number the clouds in wisdom? or who can stay the bottles of heaven,

Psalms 90:12 So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Revelation 13:18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

In Job, it is our inability to number and measure creation which exhorts us to humility and surrender to the Divine Will.

In the Psalms, it is the measure of our temporal finitude which gives us pause for the reflection which leads to wisdom.

In the Book of Revelation, it is a precise number which reveals to us that person who is an embodiment of evil.

We never find "wisdom" and "measure" mentioned in the same verse in the Bible, not even in the Books of Apocrypha. Measure is a human activity and not a Divine activity.

We first encounter the word "measure" conjunction with "cubit" in Exodus 26:2 "The length of one curtain shall be eight and twenty cubits, and the breadth of one curtain four cubits: and every one of the curtains shall have one measure." When King Solomon is in the act of consecrating the newly finished Temple, he suddenly exclaims: 1 Kings 8:27 "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded? "

A "cubit" is the length of a man's forearm, which is subjective and variable, not objective, absolute and unchanging.

In Hebrew, cubit is 'ammah; i.e., "mother of the arm," the fore-arm, is a word derived from the Latin cubitus, the lower arm. It is difficult to determine the exact length of this measure, from the uncertainty whether it included the entire length from the elbow to the tip of the longest finger, or only from the elbow to the root of the hand at the wrist. The probability is that the longer was the original cubit. The common computation as to the length of the cubit makes it 20.24 inches for the ordinary cubit, and 21.888 inches for the sacred one. This is the same as the Egyptian measurements. A rod or staff the measure of a cubit is called in Judg. 3:16 _gomed_, which literally means a "cut," something "cut off." The lxx. and Vulgate render it "span."

The earliest mention of "measure" is in conjunction with the precise instructions for building the Tabernacle: Exodus 26:2 The length of one curtain shall be eight and twenty cubits, and the breadth of one curtain four cubits: and every one of the curtains shall have one measure.

The third mention of "measure" occurs together with the first appearance of the word "unrighteousness" in relation to dishonesty in trade: leviticus 19:35 Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight, or in measure.

Mathematicians consider "Number Theory" to be the Queen of all Mathematics. Number Theory deals with such properties of number as Odd or Even, Perfect numbers (which are the sum of their prime factors), and with such properties as "excess" and "deficiency" in multiplication.

The number Nine is a number with several very interesting properties. Nine is a Trinity of Trinities, in the sense that it contains the number three thrice times. In a Greek Orthodox liturgy, the priest or deacon will incense a Bishop NINE times, but the icon of Christ only three times because the Bishop, when vested and serving in his sacerdotal capacity, is considered to be the "Living Icon" of Christ.

Hindus consider NINE to be a divine number, because it may interact with any other number in multiplication, and yet somehow, retain its identity. Two times Nine equals 18, and 1 + 8 = 9. Three times Nine equals 27, and 2+7 = 9. Four times Nine equals 36, and 3 + 6 = 9. So Nine is perfect in this respect, whereas the other numbers are sometimes "excessive" in this respect and other times "deficient". Two times Seven equals 14, and 1+4=5. Three times Seven equals 21, and 2+1=3. Therefore Seven is deficient in these equations. Three times Five equals 15, and 1+5 = 6. Five times Five equals 25, and 2+5=8. Number Five is excessive in these equations.

If you look at all the sacred scriptures of all the Religions, you will discover that there are only certain sentences or phrases in which is a WHOLE WORLD OF THEOLOGY.

For example, Mother Theresa put Christ's final words from the Cross, "I thirst", on her convent wall.

John 19:28 After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, "I thirst".

How many times in our lives might we read this verse, and pass it by, not seeing the entire world hidden in two words?

A world hidden in a word is a pearl hidden in a field.

Hidden, amidst all the other verses of the Gospels, "out of context", is something which opens up a whole world in the mind.

In a certain way, the very nature of our thought processes, is a non-sequitur. Hence, structure and form in writing is, in a sense, illusion, or maya. But we come to think of that ordered "structure" as the nature of reality.

Regarding the "I Thirst" of Mother Theresa, Jallaladin Rumi once said, "Do not seek water, for water is EVERYWHERE! Seek THIRST!" For without the THIRST the water is of no value to you.

In the Psalms, "O Lord, I have thirsted after Thee like a deer in a waterless land."

I have written the preceding as a prelude to the consideration of the motif of "hunger" and "thirst" in the Scriptures.

It is most curious that there are a total of NINE verses in the entire King James Version which mention "hunger" and "thirst" in the same verse. The word "hunger" always appears first, followed by the word "thirst".

It is significant that the word hunger should always appear first in these verses. We know that thirst will afflict us much sooner than hunger, and the pangs of thirst are far more intense and severe than hunger pangs. We can endure a much longer period of time without food than we can without fluids. Why is it that Hunger is always mentioned first, and not Thirst? Perhaps "thirst and hunger" is the human order, whereas "hunger and thirst" is the Divine order.

The word "hunger" makes its first appearance in Scriptures (Exodus 16:3) PRIOR TO the first appearance of the word "thirst" (Exodus 17:3 ).

This same consistent word order may be observed in the Apocrypha as well; "hunger" always precedes "thirst". In the Apocrypha, we also find this most unusual verse: 2 esdras 15:58 "They that be in the mountains shall die of hunger, and eat their own flesh, and drink their own blood, for very hunger of bread, and thirst of water." We may see in this verse the beginnings of the imagery of the Eucharist.

Because NINE is an ODD number (rather than an EVEN number), there is a mid-most verse, the FIFTH of the verses: 5.) John 6:35 And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.

Indeed, this is a most central verse, portraying Jesus as the Bread of Life and the Living Waters.

The first occurance of hunger, (which appears BEFORE the first occurance of THIRST), Exodus 16:3 "And the children of israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.

The first occurance of thirst, which inspires murmuring against Moses and God: Exodus 17:3 "And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst? "

We see here the totally Human aspect of hunger and thirst, the fallen nature of humanity, driven by appetites and desires.

The second occurance of "hunger and thirst" is 2.) Nehemiah 9:15 "And gavest them bread from heaven for their hunger, and broughtest forth water for them out of the rock for their thirst, and promisedst them that they should go in to possess the land which thou hadst sworn to give them."

This is the totally Divine aspect of God, who provides food and drink, and sustains all creatures.

The third occurance of "hunger and thirst" is 3.) Isaiah 49:10 "They shall not hunger nor thirst; neither shall the heat nor sun smite them: for he that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even by the springs of water shall he guide them."

Here we see a prefiguring of the Book of Revelation, the New Heaven and New Earth, where there are no more tears, no more hunger or thirst or desire.

The fourth occurance is 4.) matthew 5:6 "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled."

We see a UNIFICATION of hunger and thirst as ONE, no longer two, and the object of the desire is no longer physical food and water, but Righteousness. But what or Who is that Righteousness?

The fifth occurance is 5.) John 6:35 "And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst."

Remember that this is the MIDDLE-MOST of the nine verses, about which the other eight verses are symmetrically balanced. This verse answers our previous question "Who is that righteousness for which the blessed hunger and thirst."

We may note that at the Last Supper, or Mystical Supper, the Institution of the Eucharist, Christ offers the broken bread FIRST, and afterwards the Cup. It is logical that the Bread or Body must be broken first, before there is Blood.

The sixth occurance of "hunger and thirst" is 6.) Romans 12:20 "Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head."

This is the fulfillment of seeing the Divine Image of God in all others, even enemies. And it is We, the Mother Theresa, who now assume the role of the God-Man Christ, as we minister unto our enemies and are perhaps rent asunder, bleeding. St. athanasius said "God became man, so that Man might become God".

The seventh occurance of "hunger and thirst" is 7.) 1 Corinthians 4:11 "Even unto this present hour we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling place", which is the Disciples/Apostles in "imitation of Christ", taking up their cross.

The eight occurance is 8.) 2 Corinthians 11:27 In weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.

The ninth occurance is 9.) Revelation 7:16 "They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat.". Here we see that time and space, heaven and earth, pass away, and all souls dwell in the very fabric of God, which now becomes their space, light, raiment, sustenance and all things. These souls dwell in "the bosom of abraham".

The verses 'The Kingdom of God is WITHIN' and 'in my Father's house are many mansions' are thought provoking verses. I recently learned that it may also be translated "the kingdom of heaven is AMONG you" , which has very different implications.

If we look at the Book of Revelation, in the chapters surrounding ch. 10.... (where it says...'God shall wipe away every tear').... we see that THERE SHALL BE TIME NO LONGER (CH 10, verse 6), and "heavens and earth shall be rolled up as a scroll" (no more SPACE).

So, time and space ceases, and God becomes raiment, light, air, food, etc. An image which is faithful to St. Paul's words, "..in HIM we live and move and have our being--Acts 17:28" and, Acts 17: 27 "That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us."

This passage, Ch. 10:6 in Revelation, depicts time and space itself passing away, and all dwell WITHIN God, within the "fabric of God" so to speak.

We do see in the parable of lazarus and the rich man that Lazarus is "in the bosom of Abraham", which is metaphorical, but supports the notion of what is described in Revelation

What is interesting is that Christianity condemns notions of Pantheism, that God IS the universe; yet in the final analysis, based on what the Book of Revelation describes, God literally BECOMES the Universe, once the Universe passes away.

In light of the above understanding of Revelation, it would seem that the "many mansions" are WITHIN God Himself.

(a reader's reply):

Interesting study! Indeed

John 4,10

10. Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knowest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.

11. The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; from whence then hast thou that living water?

12. Art thou greater than our father jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle?

13. Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again:

14. But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. (!)

I have come across a nine pointed form of star. It could be called a master blueprint.

The Seal of Solomon (six pointed star) is said to be all time and space.

Is not the manifest universe a great cycle arising out of the Source? Is not this cycle eternal? Who could count the number of mansions within Gods creation?

The God of the Ant Farm

2011-11-23T14:45:00.001-08:00

Imagine me as caretaker of an ant farm and it is my duty to see to the well being of thousands of ants. I like ants. I care about them. I study them. I give them food and water and medicine. I am very close, physically, to all of them because I stand and watch over them day and night and yet for them I am invisible because I am so huge and they are so small. Many of the ants doubt my very existence. I cannot recognize any individual ant. If one and dies I do not grieve because I know that their life span is short. IF the entire colony were to die then I would grieve. I have an IMPERSONAL relationship with each individual ant. Now some of the ants might imagine a giant in the sky who provides for them while others find such a notion to be rubbish. But those ants who DO imagine an invisible caretaker cannot possibly comprehend my true nature or personality, my occasional weariness, impatience or sense of humor.

Imagine that one day an ant wanders on to a huge driveway. I watch the ant move in ever increasing circles. I "foreknow" or foresee that the ant will eventually reach the cool protection of the grass. The ant is unaware of my presence. The ant assumes it is walking in a straight line. My FOREKNOWLEDGE from my hyperdimensional vantage point in no way ROBS the ant of its free will to walk in any direction.

Do Not Be a Quote Machine

2011-11-20T19:57:00.001-08:00

It is better to say things in our own words than to be a quotation machine and frequently stumble across mis-attributed and spurious quotes.
Search engines can make anyone seem smart or philosophical or devout.
Remember my analogy of the demagogue who is like the surfer riding the huge wave before an admiring crowd. It is sad that a majority of people will be impressed by such things. There are reasons, I suppose, to seek the admiration of many but we should be careful not to fool ourselves in the process.

Remember that little parable about the two sons and a father who commands them to do a certain thing. One son pays lip-service and says yes, but then does nothing. The second son says NO, but later repents and does what was asked of him. Words are cheap. Deeds, actions, works have value.

Faith and Love in the Old Testament

2011-11-20T14:28:00.001-08:00

The word "FAITH" occurs first in Deuteronomy ch. 32 IN THE NEGATIVE "because of your FAITH-LESSNESS" and the only other occurrence is the famous Habbakuk which is CORRECTLY translated in the Septuagint to say "because of GOD'S faithfulness" but is mistranslated in KJV as the faith of the person saved. The first occurrence of the word LOVE in the Old Testament is Isaac's love for the tasty game flesh which Esau hunted and prepared. SO if love and faith are SO important then why are they hardly mentioned? And the word in Hebrew for "faith", emunah, means "faithfulness to a covenantal agreement or bargain" rather than faith "pistis" in the sense of Apostle Paul in Hebrews 11:1-40

1) Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

http://concordances.org/hebrew/530.htm

emunah: firmness, steadfastness, fidelity

Original Word: אֱמוּנָה,

Transliteration: emunah

Phonetic Spelling: (em-oo-naw')

Short Definition: faithfulness

Word Origin

from aman

Definition

firmness, steadfastness, fidelity

NASB Word Usage

faith (1), faithful (3), faithfully (8), faithfulness (25), honestly (1), responsibility (1), stability (1), steady (1), trust (2), truth (5).

NAS Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible with Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Dictionaries

faithful set office, stability, steady, truly, truth, verily

or (shortened) >emunah {em-oo-naw'} feminine of 'emuwn; literally firmness; figuratively security; morally fidelity -- faith(-ful, -ly, -ness, (man)), set office, stability, steady, truly, truth, verily.

Swiss Army Knife Syndrome

2011-11-19T14:15:00.001-08:00

We can be certain that no matter WHAT we buy or when we buy it, in six months there will be something newer, better, cheaper: Murphy's and Moore's laws.

On the other hand it can be a mistake to look for a Swiss Army Knife which can be all things to all people. It is fun to read a Kindle, light weight, small. If 5 hours of battery life is not enough then perhaps you should take a physical book rather than an electronic device. If you have desktops at home then you can do desktop things on the desktop. IF you live out of a suitcase and travel then you want the most powerful and sturdy laptop and perhaps cloud storage.

Kindle vs Nook vs Notebook vs Laptop vs Desktop

2011-11-19T13:59:00.001-08:00

I do subscribe to http://skritter.com which allows one to study Chinese characters by stroking them with the mouse or on a touch screen and it works fine on the Kindle Fire. I would say that if money is no object then one should get the most powerful Ipad or Laptop available. If money or size/weight IS a consideration (along with battery life) then obviously one must weigh alternatives carefully. I found one Youtube tutorial on EZpdf (for $1) for android which demonstrates how college students take the professor's slide show presentation, load it as a pdf into EZpdf and then make notes and draw on it. EZpdf can also READ ALOUD through the speaker and the volume/quality is exceptional. One must grow accustomed to the robotic voice but we grow accustomed to anything with enough time and the desire to "make do." Amazon Kindle Fire only has about 6 gig of physical storage and no room for expansion. Of course only your PERSONAL documents use up device storage. All the Amazon books are on "the cloud." Kindle Fire has a jack for headset but lacks microphone or webcam. The Kindle Fire only gets about 5 hours on battery. BUT, the Kindle Fire is small, light, easy to read. My wife wants a Catholic Bible (NAV or Douay-Rheems but not KJV or NIV). I can download various Bibles for her BUT I am thinking of getting something in PDF and loading it to her personal storage BECAUSE then EZpdf will be able to open it, read aloud, copy and paste, etc and she will have more versatility than a Kindle book would offer. I am also thinking of looking for a PDF of the 960 page Catechism. When you purchase EZpdf then they give you a Windows printer driver which will produce PDF's suitable for mobile devices. I had one minute on the phone with her sister to choose between Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook, so I said Kindle BECAUSE in my mind (and I could be wrong, I have not researched) Amazon seems like a larger organization than B&N. The Nook seems larger, heavier. It has more slots available or memory cards. BUT, I can plug the Kindle USB into my Ubuntu and upload/download files. AND there is the option to use CLOUD storage. I downloaded some free essays by Chesterton (one on Catholic Conversion and another "Tales of Father Brown") and he is such a brilliant writer but perhaps dated for today's tastes. I downloaded a free Vol I (edited) of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire because his prose is so "magisterial" and as an historian he was the standard for a century. As far as language learning, using a Kindle is like using a shovel when you could have a front-end loader steam shovel. Unless resources are limited, go with a $2000 laptop. And if you do NOT need portability then go with a desktop or tower.

Computer problems and recovery

2011-11-19T10:59:00.001-08:00

In college in the 1960s, we had to read some Kant, and people would make dumb jokes about words ending in "keit" so I coined "karmakeit" . I had done a few seemingly simple things with computers which had devastating and unforeseeable effects. One recent example was two old Dell XP Windows machines. On one I installed Microsoft Asian Language Fonts and pinyin input method so I could type Chinese characters. I had no idea that such an installation is IRREVERSIBLE and that the only precaution is to set a SYSTEM RESTORE POINT prior to installation so that you may roll back to that point and undo the installation. I contacted a helpful fellow called pinyinjoe.com who informed me of all these things. The install caused a minor annoying bug in that the mouse FREEZES several times a day and I have to unplug and replug the USB to fix it, so I can use the system but it is annoying. SO, on a second Dell XP, I set the restore point, installed Asian Fonts and pinyin, had even worse experiences, did the rollback, and the whole system died (became unusable). It was a very old machine and the 80 gig Seagate drive seems to have died so that might be coincidental. I purchased a 380 gig drive for $70, plugged it in and then did a free Ubuntu Linux install. I didnt feel like spending several hundred dollars for Windows XP. The only REAL safety with computers is to always have essential data backed up somewhere and always be prepared to REINSTALL the operating system and start from scratch. But it can take hours or days or even weeks to reinstall and configure everything that you want on your machine and configure drivers for printer/scanner/webcam, etc.

The Political Power of the Open Source Community

2011-11-14T11:49:00.001-08:00

I would be a miracle of +Linus Torvalds would notice this post and would take an interest in this cause of unifying all glucose meter manufacturers under some kind of ANSI standard and making Linux open source the backbone of a universal agnostic Glucose meter software. IOGEAR, the mfg of a usb-serial converter would certainly be in a position to engage in this project. I am certain that any door would open wide if someone of Mr. Torvalds' stature knocked. Such a project would greatly benefit the open source world because it would bring to public attention the realization of what a powerful force the open source community can be. The world would realize how foolish and short sighted is the proprietary selfishness and greed of private enterprise Corporations. If there were contests and scholarships then young students around the world would become more involved in science and technology. Diabetes is a serious problem around the world even in countries too poor to afford expensive hardware and software. Ubuntu and other varieties of Linux have come so far already. There is no reason why Linux cannot become the OS to serve all the worlds needs. Source Forge has demonstrated that if it runs on Linux then it can easily be ported to other platforms. So why develop in some proprietary platform to begin with. And if you get it working in XP 32 bit then you find out it wont work in Windows 7 64 bit.

ANSI Standards for Glucose Meters and Open Source Software

2011-11-14T10:36:00.001-08:00

What the world needs is glucose meter software which

will run on any platform, especially Gnu/Linux (Ubuntu)

which will talk to an IOGEAR USB-Serial adapter

and which will work with any glucose meter capable of

RS232 communication. GUC232A uses the Prolific 2303 chipset.

All manufactures of meters (e.g. Abbott Labs) should be encouraged

to adopt a uniform standard to allow the creation of

a universal software.

Manufactures in general should begin to take Linux seriously and

not develop simply for proprietary software (Microsoft, Apple)

Sourceforge.net might be a logical place to start.

David Weisgerber started a project Glucomodul Project around 2002 but may no longer

be active.

I suggest that IOGEAR manufacture a simple RS232 device which

programmers may use to TEST

Serial adapter GUC232A so that Linux programmers may

become fluent in routines which talk to devices using

the IOGEAR GUC232A

Efforts should be made to publicize this project on the internet and perhaps

even establish a contest similar to Google's yearly programmer contest, perhaps with a scholarship as a prize.

All the technology and expertice already exists to make such open source

universtal glucose meter software possible. Companies can cooperate

to establish ANSI standards for connections, specifications, protocols and it should all be available in public domain.

There is plenty of money to be made in service and support in the open source world of MySQL and PostgreSQL without becoming proprietary.

The bulk of the Internet technology is already driven by Linux, Apache, PhP, Python, etc.

The Problem with Discussions and Politics

2011-11-14T00:12:00.001-08:00

I do not find discussions troubling. What does trouble me is the naive assumption that electing a different leader or passing some laws or repealing some laws or levying some taxes will change the course of history. How much has really changed in the past hundred years or the past thousand and I mean change that was directly attributable to some individual's leadership or some ideology or philosophy (apart from science and technology and we do not control THAT beast; we are at its mercy and it has a life all its own.) Is there really a chicken in every pot? I happened to catch Ron Paul on TV. He sounds like a decent person. But everything he said in response to all the questions were clever formulaic answers and he is SKILLED in rolling with the punches, but nothing he said was of any real substance that would make someone hope for some profound change or improvement. All these politicians are smooth talkers. But human nature is pretty much the same as it was in Homer's time of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It took until around 1870 for the world population to reach one billion. By 1930 (less than a century) it had DOUBLED to two billion. By the 1960s it had tripled to six billion. Ecologists estimate that the Earth cannot support more than one billion without the ecosystem being seriously affected. We live in a world which depends NOT upon earning its daily bread but rather upon ever accelerating growth of profits. There are only so many forests to exploit; only so many 3rd world countries to colonize. I personally see the entire world as a pyramid or ponzi scheme which is doomed to collapse at some point. I don't see how any ideology or ideologue is going to change the inevitable.

A Hunger We Can Never Feed

2011-11-13T17:35:00.001-08:00

Our greatest gift AND our greatest curse is our imagination for in that we can imagine something something better we are innovative and make progress but in that we can imagine a perfection and a pleasure beyond anything that is feasible we are always miserable and dissatisfied. This is why Bob Dylan sang "I started out on burgundy but soon it was the harder stuff." This is why no one can have their fill of sexual partners or erotic extremes. This is why the Bible speaks of "the wickedness of the imaginings of the heart which knows no boundaries." This is why the Way of the Tao says in the 33rd stanza "that one who finds satisfaction in whatsoever one possesses has achieved true wealth."

You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting

2011-11-13T15:56:00.001-08:00

Whenever we hear the expression "the handwriting on the wall" we think of something portentious and obvious to all. But the original Biblical handwriting that appeared upon a wall was a mystery, a puzzle (mene mene tekel upharsin) and only the prophet Daniel, skilled at dream interpretation could decipher it as "you have been weighed and found wanting." Although perhaps it was not at all obscure but simply the sort of message that no one cares to understand as addressed to them.

Surfers and Politicians

2011-11-13T13:34:00.001-08:00

A surfer is a perfect metaphor for a politician-demagogue. Surfers are our heroes. They see a great wave coming, catch it and boldly ride it in a death-defying manner. They have no idea what causes the wave. They have no control of the wave. Riding the wave accomplishes nothing constructive. The surfer basks in the admiration of the ructive multitudes.

When we pay lip service to champion noble causes

2011-11-13T10:06:00.001-08:00

Socrates points out that all people by their essential nature desire only "the good" but this is a bit of a tautology since the very fact that we desire something means that we deem our desire good. It just now occurs to me how closely this phenomenon is related to "The Euthyphro Problem" - namely, does God like "the good" for its intrinsic properties OR is the good "GOOD" by fiat simply because God chooses to like it. We should always have the courage to examine reality and also ourselves from different perspectives/angles and always doubt and question. More dangerous than the unanswered question is the unquestioned answer. But IF we are like a machine-gun shooting 60 rounds per minute at every evil that pops up in current events we must give pause and ask ourselves WHY we do this and what it accomplishes. If we look at any number of gifted politicians (aka demagogues) we notice that they do not have unusually high I.Q.s for the most part. Ron Paul is a medical doctor so he is one exception I suppose. What they do have is charm and the gift of gab and they say things and champion causes in part to increase their influence and not necessarily to permanently solve age-old problems of human suffering. Perhaps Jimmy Carter is another exception, who has devoted his life in part to eradicating the fire-worm in African drinking water.

Augustine in the light of the Philokalia

2011-11-08T21:55:00.001-08:00

I read Augustine in college at SJC around 1968. A few years after graduation I read through large portions of the Philokalia and when you examine Augustine in that light of Greek Orthodox monasticism then Augustine appears to be what Greek monastics would call "planamenos" (the Russians call it "prelest") and this word comes from the same root as "planet" meaning "wandering" , i.e. Augustine is wandering in a deranged spiritual deception of egocentric emotionalism. Certainly Augustine was a gifted writer and a brilliant mind and certainly people like Augustine and Aquinas and Luther shaped Western thought but the Greeks see Augustine as a heretic for good reason and Augustine provided plenty of fuel for Luther's Reformation.

Augustine and Pelagius

2011-11-08T18:47:00.001-08:00

The first time I read Augustine, I saw the part where he wished that his old Manichean buddies could WATCH (see) him praying ... I found that passage a real turn-off. Augustine laid the foundations for the Reformation and no one really scrutinized him until the counter-Reformation. The Greeks have always called Augustine a heretic. The Russians who were heavily influenced by the West called Augustine "Blessed" but not "Saint." As the years passed I came to see Pelagius as more convincing than Augustine. It is interesting to read Steinbeck's "East of Eden" and see how pelagian Steinbeck was. The final poisoned apple from Augustine's tree of knowledge is Charles Stanley's "Eternal Security of Salvation"

人人网 - Rén Rén Wǎng - Everyone Network - China's TWITTER

2011-11-07T19:32:00.001-08:00

I just now spent four hours joining RenRenWang which is China's answer to Twitter. It took me several hours BECAUSE the signup is all in Chinese, naturally, BUT the hardest part is the CHINESE CAPTCHA and here is a screenshot of the tool I used and the captcha which finally worked.

Here is the first message I received upon sign-up (translated by translate.google.com)

Hi, � 威 � (My name in Chinese which is REQUIRED in Chinese and can be no more than 6 characters), everyone is welcome to join network family!
Here you can create a personalized space, post the log, upload photos; understand the Friends of the latest developments,
Play games with them. We believe you will like here!
This is a guide, I hope you can help Oh!

The name I chose for myself in Chinese is Bì Wēi Lùn which sort of means: Complete Prestige Theory

人人网 - Rén rén wǎng - Everyone Network

The most popular site for this is www.renren.com (人人网 – rén rén wǎng), which translates literally as the “Everyone Network.” (The THIRD character, WANG, 网 , means WEB or NET) With over 160 million users, the site is extremely popular amongst college students. Just like Facebook, users create a profile with information about their education, hobbies, and hometown. The popularity of this site is extending outside of the Middle Kingdom, as Renren is geared up to make an IPO in the US. If you want to find your friends in China, this is probably the best place to look!
人人网，中国领先的实名制SNS社交网络。加入人人网，找到老同学，结识新朋友。

http://www.renren.com
And here is the link to the site that let me draw the CAPTCHA characters free-hand with the mouse, which was difficult when I was not certain of the proper stroke-order, plus CAPTCHA intentionally distorts slightly. It took me 4 hours and 20 attempts before I finally got in with 一丝一毫, Yīsīyīháo, "shred"

http://www.nciku.com/

I was greatly assisted in all this by what I have learned about writing in Chinese at http://www.skritter.com

That Paltry Eternity, Posterity

2011-11-07T11:30:00.001-08:00

Only today does it dawn upon me, after all these years, the puzzling irony that when Odysseus travels to Hades and speaks to the soul of Achilles, Achilles says that it is better to be a humble person alive upon the earth than king of all the dead. No mention whatsoever is made of the possibility of rebirth. Perhaps by Plato's time there was some influence from India. The Noble Lie of the Republic seems to describe a caste system similar to the Hindu Varnas (and the word Varna has the same root as VARNISH, and suggest that color, hue, race is an inherent part of the caste system. ) In the Iliad the battlefield dialogue between Glaukos and Diomedes suggests that all a person can hope for is a glorious memory in the lore of future generations. Camus utters such a potent phrase in his Sisyphus essays; "that paltry eternity, posterity" . Odysseus' rejection of Circes' offer of eternal life is such a contrast to the Christian and I suppose Egyptian desire for immortality.

Odysseus and the middle way of mean between extremes

2011-11-07T10:46:00.001-08:00

Aha! In the 3rd book of the Iliad, the "catalog of ships" Odysseus ship is mid-most on the lineup along the shores, with Achilles being farthest from Troy, since he was swift enough to meet the enemy first, and Ajax (The Wall) was closest to Troy since he was such a lumbering bulwark. Odysseus is the very embodiment of mean between extremes or middle way. His legs are short but his trunk is tall so seated at council he towers above the rest. Now it is Odysseus in the myth of Er who chooses the LAST lot, but chooses the best life for rebirth since all are conditioned to choose based upon their previous life and each tended to veer to the OPPOSITE, the weak chosing a tyrant's life, and tyrants becoming swans. Odysseus chose the life of a free middle-class member of a Democracy AND Odysseus rejected the opportunity which Circes offered for IMMORTALITY.

Work Hard to Gain your own Salvation

2011-11-05T20:51:00.001-07:00

Theravadin = "Way of the Elders" - was first to develop around 400 BCE and then Mahayana = "great vehicle" developed (I think around 100 BCE) ... vehicle means a teaching which brings the practitioner across the river of Samsara (10,001 concerns/things) to Nibbana (extinguishment, no further rebirth). The Theravadins taught that only an individual practitioner can work out his "enlightenment" and that there are no Bodhisattvas or lending of merits. The Mahayana "Great Vehicle" means a teaching/practice capable of delivering ALL sentient beings rather than just one lone practitioner. So the Mahayanists called the Theravadins "Lesser Vehicle" or "Hinayana" which Theravadins see as an insult. One Theravadin abbot asked me "can you IMPART to anyone your knowledge of how to ride a bicycle" and of course the answer is NO, each person must learn and practice on his own and fall down many times until, suddenly, the practitioner grasps how to ride a bike, and then they never forget.

Then the Buddha addressed all the monks once more, and these were the very last words he spoke:

"Behold, O monks, this is my last advice to you. All component things in the world are changeable. They are not lasting. Work hard to gain your own salvation."

The Swords of the Apostles

2011-11-02T22:57:00.001-07:00

Only TWO swords, and Jesus healed the ear of the centurion who was struck. I think the point of the swords (only two) was symbolic to demonstrate that he was not helpless but chose to surrender to his fate. Jesus only made TWO destructive gestures. One was to THREATEN the money changers with a whip, but he never struck them, and also when Jesus told the fig tree "zeranthesate" (be thou withered) ... but it was only found withered on the next day and did not wither immediately. OHHH and if I remember correctly Jesus did not COMMAND the apostles to take swords but rather permitted them to take two when they asked. If resistance by violent force was Jesus intention then why not arm all the apostles? And Jesus mentions that he could command a legion of angels so why bother with armed apostles. And there is some verse about how those who approached to seize him were briefly blown down by some invisible force. I think all this was to demonstrate that Jesus had the means to escape but freely chose to submit to his fate. All the crap that took place in the Middle Ages and the Spanish Inquisition and Salem witch burnings and Senator McCarthy's witch hunts have no bearing upon the essence of Jesus life or message but only show how clever human nature is at twisting and distorting facts to support their own selfish and evil agendas.

Christian Clergy and Lethal Force

2011-11-02T22:31:00.001-07:00

Speaking of rioters ravaging gardens, pillaging, plundering... I went through college with someone who went on to a seminary. The Vietnam draft was going strong so I expect that was one incentive because the life he was leading was not a spiritual one. He leads a kind of double life, straddling the fence. Some days he tells people to "ratchet up their rosary prayers" but other days he talks about his arsenal of assault rifles and ammo and how he is prepared to dole out his conservative Republican vigilante style justice when the unwashed multitudes come to pillage his larder of provisions, and he even posts bizarre photos of himself wearing strange hooded costumes and pointing his assault rifle. I don't think he grasps the fundamental message of Christianity. No military chaplain is allowed to carry a weapon. The Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church will not allow priests to serve if they use lethal force. I know for a fact that if a Greek Orthodox priest is involved in an automobile accident and is guilty of involuntary manslaughter they must stop celebrating mass/liturgy. King David was celebrated as a warrior saying "Saul slew his thousands and David slew tens of thousands" but David was not allowed to build the temple. Only Solomon who never used lethal force was allowed to build the temple.

Tribals using Rome as a model for Government

2011-10-29T12:07:00.001-07:00

I would imagine tribal peoples LIKE being tribal and view republics in the same fashion that conservative Republicans view large government. Who would want to go from a condition of more freedom (lawlessness, being your own law) to a condition of less freedom ESPECIALLY if they suspect all power is corrupt. They would prefer to exercise that corrupt power themselves.

U.S. Congress mentions Sharia Law

2011-10-28T15:39:00.001-07:00

The other day I needed to spend some time at a neighbor's apartment and they subscribe to cable TV (we do not) and have accesss to C-Span so I listened for several hours to a broadcast of a Foreign Affairs session where Hillary Clinton spoke. One of the congressmen spoke at some length about his concern over the spread of Sharia Law in North Africa and elsewhere. He mentioned (or asserted) that Sharia permits the rape of the wives of defeated adversaries as part of the punishment. I am not certain how accurate it is to say that Sharia itself promotes such a punishment and perhaps those who practice such things falsely use Sharia as an excuse. I have heard that Qur'anic law forbids the execution of a virgin woman and therefore in some places it a practice to rape a virgin prior to her execution. I am reminded of the Hindu woman bandit, Phulan Devi, who was raped by many men in a certain town and returned with her gang to execute the men of that town. I suspect that some sects of Hindus in some regions have been influenced by the practices of some Muslims and those Hindus will practice a form of honor killing. Honor killings are not committed in every Muslim society and I read that they are unknown in Tunisia as one example.

I do find it interesting that congressmen in the US House of Representatives would discuss some aspect of Islam at length. It is quite understandable that Americans see Islam as an ideological threat and it is equally understandable that many Muslim societies view the colonial aggression of the unbelievers as an ideological threat.

The transcript of that meeting is possibly available on-line
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/
possibly here:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/302353-1

Prince Charles Related to Dracula

2011-10-28T15:14:00.001-07:00

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2011/10/prince-charles-says-hes-related-to-dracula/

Prince Charles is claiming that he’s related to Dracula.

“The genealogy shows that I am descended from Vlad the Impaler,” Charles said.

Vlad the Impaler was also known as Dracula, which means son of the dragon (dracul) in the Romanian dialect of the time. Vlad’s father was a member of the Order of the Dragon.

Vlad, 15th-Century Romanian warlord, also inspired the 1897 novel “Dracula” by Bram Stoker.

The heir to the British throne was making the connection during an interview that will air as part of an upcoming TV show to promote the preservation of forests in Romania’s Transylvania region. “So I have a bit of a stake in the country,” the prince said.

Charles, who owns a home in the region, has said Transylvania’s pristine landscapes and rural farming traditions make it a national treasure.

We know that the various royal families of Europe would arrange marriages with other royal families in order to forge bonds/allegiances in part and partly I suppose from the notion that all royalty was different both in kind and degree from peasants/serfs/commoners. It was this practice of consanguineous inbreeding which contributed to the genetic disorder of hemophilia (bleeding) which traces to the Romanov lineage in Russia. Since education and cultivation of arts was a privilege of the wealthy and powerful it was probably considered more appropriate to arrange a marriage with a member of a royal household.

It is interesting to note that in the Greek language the word for vampire is "vreekolakas" and the Greek Orthodox Church in its theological document "Pedalion" (The Rudder) mentions that such things as vampires do not exist.

Politicians and Insider Trading

2011-10-28T13:06:00.001-07:00

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/capitol-gains/8692/

by Megan McArdle, an Atlantic senior editor

Excerpt:

IN 1995, WHEN Alan Ziobrowski was an associate professor of finance at Lander University, in South Carolina, he found himself at home one night watching “one of those 60 Minutes–type shows.” That evening’s story caught his interest: Gregory Boller, a professor of marketing at the University of Memphis, had found some striking coincidences in which members of Congress, between 1990 and 1995, bought or sold stock in companies that could be affected by ongoing government activity.

According to Boller’s study, which Mother Jones also covered, Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D–Texas) had bought stock in a dairy processor and sold it 10 months later, days before the Justice Department began investigating the company for rigging bids to sell milk in public schools. Senator Bob Dole (R–Kansas) had purchased stock in Automatic Data Processing four days before President George H. W. Bush signed a law with new rules for military data processing. Representative Newt Gingrich (R–Georgia) bought Boeing stock just before he helped kill amendments that would have cut funding for the International Space Station—an outcome that helped Boeing secure a contract.

- END of excerpt

The Story of Chinese Character : 耳

2011-10-28T12:41:00.001-07:00

Here is my post at the http://skritter.com/ forum regarding this Youtube series

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qHNmnXJz7Y

The Story of Chinese Character : 耳(漢字的故事 : 耳) on the etymology/origin of various interesting Chinese Characters:

I have a Wordpress blog and a Facebook group on the beginners experience learning Chinese. This youtube series seems like a good way to spark some interest in readers; attract their attention. And I occasionally mention the virtues of http://skritter.com/ in my posts. The study of Chinese characters is for senior citizens (like me) a much better hobby than crossword puzzles to keep the memory active and also learn something new. The more we blog about skritter, yellowbridge, chinesepod and other resources to the general public the more likely it is for interest to spread. I think the average non-Chinese speaker just goes "out of focus" to anything Chinese because they simply assume that they cannot understand. I was astounded when I began to Google search and saw what a wealth of material their is on the Internet on Chinese. It is a shame that the Youtube series did not make an effort to fine a variety of tunes to make them more interesting.

I think the main point we can make in our blogs to the world is that Chinese is NOT something inscrutable and out of reach AND it has the longest continuous spoken and written history of any language in the world (Greek is number 2 so Greek is the longest in the West.) AND there is a kind of romance and mystery to the logograms which reaches back into the dawn of prehistory.

Quotable Sitaram

2011-10-24T00:33:00.001-07:00

Quotable Sitaram - Page 386

(3-20-2001)

Let us say that Divinity is Consciousness; Consciousness is divine, imagination is an aspect of consciousness, and within the realm of imagination dwell all things, and at imagination's borders, all impossibilities, absurdities, unicorns and horned rabbits, await admission and entrance. Hence, Imagination is the threshhold of existence, and the unimaginable is non-being.

Sitaram's Koan -

If only one human remained alive in the universe,
Then which is the "One True Faith"?

Tohu Bohu - Page 241

Let us look about in the world, and behold all the anguish and bitterness in people's hearts concerning the uncertaintity of why the universe exists, why we are in it to suffer, desire, and aspire and what is the relationship between our own personal individuality and that ultimate cause of All: THIS is RELIGION.

The Perennial Anguish and Bitterness of Religion - Page 211

Someone who wallows in "physical proofs" and the material world, and desires for food and sex, is forever banished from reaching the spiritual realms. They do not have the "spiritualized" vision which Lord Krishna grants to Arjuna, to allow Arjuna to see the Universal Form. That is why, the spiritual can NEVER by arrived at by logic or argument, but only by faith and devotion, which is a GIFT, by God's grace or kripa. The spiritual is arrived at by BHAKTI, devotion, not syllogistic reasoning. Certainly it is possibly to apply logic to anything, even theology. Logic is NECESSARY, but not SUFFICIENT.

from Perpetuation of This Website - Page 357

Humans (and the institutions that they found or inheret) are inherently flawed (and yet contain that which is Divine). So my advice is summed up in title of my post "Temple in your mind/ Tirth in your heart" namely, listen to your own heart, find the Divinity within. Use the externals of temple/gurus/ satsang as necessary, but do not seek perfection in other people. Seek perfection in yourself, in the midst of your own imperfections.

from A Crisis of Parampara/Lineage/Succession - Page 272

Happiness through sense pleasure is an illusion. You will always feel an emptiness and a dissatisfaction. Only when you turn your attention to the ultimate cause of that emptiness and dissatisfaction will you begin your journey on the road to peace.

This perennial emptiness and dissatisfaction in the aftermath of all enjoyments and indulgence is the real point which lies at the heart of your dilemma, and not moral issues of what is right or wrong in your actions.

The physical world is a process of BECOMING; it is not BEING. As long as there IS a physical world, as long as we are born repeatedly into physical bodies, then nothing can be COMPLETE but rather everything is BECOMING.

The NOW moment is always filled with NEEDS. This is the source of our suffering.

from Teenage Girl Questions Sexual Morality - Page 293

As we gaze into the waters of evil, we see the good world reflected in a fascinating,perverted reverse order of precise symmetry.

from Evil Is A Mirror Image of Good

Even if foolishness exists in the world, foolishness can still be a powerful force.. and can have distructive effects and therefore needs and deserves to be studied in its own right.

from Website Feedback - Page 65

There is never any shortage of finger-pointers... to blame others... except when we make a fist to resort to violence, and then, all ten fingers are pointing at OURSELVES, or... very rarely, when a philosopher raises one finger in the air, to say "Aha!" at some new insight, in which case only one finger in the world is pointing upwards, directing the world's attention away from self and towards higher things....

from What Would Gandhi Do Today?

"Zen Koan practice is an attempt to break through the noise of the rational mind's lust for comprehension and reach the silence of simply Being." - Sitaram

from The Silence of Simply Being - Page 397

The real treasure, the only treasure, is non-attachment and the realization of the futility of the fulfillment of any and every gratification. This does not mean that we cease to gratify desires, but only that we cease to view gratification as our goal.

from The Broken Tray Koan and Commentary

The only truly miraculous power which any religion or belief can possibly possess is the power to transform the inner nature, the inner self of an individual believer.

In Defense of Mother Theresa - page 130

The mere recognition that there is such a thing as holiness and that it is to be desired is the beginnings of holiness.

In Defense of Mother Theresa - Page 130

Each of us holds a piece of the puzzle, an aspect of the truth: the fool and the philosopher; the begger and the king; the harlot and the renunciate. The Truth is too big for any one person, or to be put in "layman's terms".

God's Party Game of Souls

Have no doubt, that just as your spiritually ripe questions appear on this page, they also echo through those infinite universes, those countless worlds, through the hearts of those myriads of sentient beings. That is why you are beyond birth and death. It is the very nature of Consciousness itself.

Jalaluddin Rumi - Page 124

Death is our "final exam"...not multiple choice... but an essay.

from Chopping Wood in the Whorehouse

Religions are many, languages are many, races are many, but grief is one, joy is one, love is one, birth is one, death is one. From the one, comes many, but many never diminish the One.

from A Mother Grieves the Death of Her Son - Page 165

It is most fitting that a rainbow be chosen in the Old Testament as symbol of the covenant between God and man: no two people see the same rainbow, and one can never arrive at its source, no matter how long one journeys.

A Blue Beyond the Rainy Hyacinth - Page 415

The REAL omnipotence and omnipresence of God lies in God's ability and willingness to BE to each individual, for each individual who turns towards God with sincerity, hope and expectancy, to BE that Truth, to REVEAL that One Truth, in all of its manifold diversity, to IMPART that Truth to that individual, in the fullest measure which that person is able to comprehend, and in sufficient measure for what that individual needs at any given moment in their life.

from God and Jimmy Carter - Page 289

One of the fundamental messages of our modern Democracies is that Truth lies not simply in the consensus of the majority, but also in the sheltered sovereignty of that small minority who hear the beat of a different drummer and march accordingly.

Was Hitler a Christian? - Page 372

If three people say "apple" or "stone" or "water", we know that they are all talking about the same thing; such is the nature of language. Moses said "I", Pharaoh said "I", and God said "I", so if God can say "I" and man can say "I", then what is the difference between the divine "I" and the mortal "I"?

from The Spirit of Man is God's Candle - Page 349

The purpose of CONSCIOUSNESS, (being alive and having a soul and self awareness) is no more benefited by a gluttonous orgy of physical pleasures, than it is by a ghoulishly morbid torture chamber of unending pain.

Each of us is a complex sum total of our life experiences, triumphs and frustrations. As some sage in India might say "God wears many masks of Good and Evil." Perhaps the Universe is a reflection of God, or perhaps human concepts of God are a reflection of ourselves and the Universe. But certainly humanity reflects all of this, itself donning many masks of Good and Evil, kaleidoscopically, as we metamorphosize from sinner to saint, back to sinner, struggling in this Divine Drama to emerge from the pupa of our egos and spread our wings of selflessness and equanimity.

We read a line a thousand times. We look and do not see. Then, suddenly, one day, we read and see and understand, as if we had never read before. The verse has always been the same. It is we who have changed, ripened, become ready, receptive.

Some make iconoclasm their idol. Others use image and symbol to reach beyond to the nameless and formless which is beyond time, the Akal Purakh of the Adi Granth.

But cynicism never fails to make its regular pilgrimage to the citadels of Orthodoxy, their to make its abominable offering and sacrifice on the altar of Reason.

If I am ugly, yet I know that beauty exists.
If I am foolish, yet I know there is Wisdom.
If I am mortal, yet I know there is something Eternal.
If I am unclean, it is Purity which teaches me of my uncleanliness.
If I am sinful, yet I am not so sinful as to say there is nothing Holy.

from Sulekha Weekly - Page 292

Wisdom, Number, Measure, Hunger, Thirst - Page 311

If you wish to call the viper and the scorpion "brother",
you must take some venom with your tea, smile, and say "Delicious!".

Expressions of our TRUE SELF are fleeting. But, when captured UNDISTORTED in words, they are EVERLASTING. In singing the words of the Lord's Katah (Sacred Scripture), we strive for the UNDISTORTED Image of the Lord's Lila (Passtimes). When we truly become a PART of that Lila, we need not return here in rebirth to this world. Then, we dwell eternally in the Lila itself, we BECOME the Lila.

from The Undistorted Image of the Lord's Passtimes - Page 93

Whatever path we choose, whatever scripture, whatever Name of God, with form or formless, we must become the very embodiment of that scripture, that Name, that Form. It must become as natural as our breath and it must flow from every pour like our sweat. And when we pass through a room, our presence and passing should leave that fragrance of divinity.

from Gita Take-Home Lessons- Page 277

Have no doubt! Whenever Dharma declines, my voice will arise. My voice is the Voice of Ram. My voice is the Voice of Krishna. My voice is the voice of Buddha, Nanak, and Rumi. My voice is the voice which echoes the eternal unchanging message of Dharma and Rta whose vibrations the Rishis echoed in the Vedas. I shall pass away, but these Words will never pass away. This Voice and these Words will arise in every persecution, in every holocaust, in every tyranny and oppression of individual religious freedom of expression. And have no doubt that the history of this Voice and these Words is the Divine Lila of the Lord.

from In What Way is Guru Bramha, Vishnu and Maheshwara? - Page 153

It is by THOUGHT, and EQUANIMITY that we transcend the unpleasant physical realties of our mundane corporeal existence. Mind makes suffering. Mind makes all things, in a way, all things that matter.

from Consatantly marvel in wonder at the ordinariness of it all! - Page 361

Perhaps one of the greatest religious truths ever stated is simply that 'The Judgement of God is a Mystery to Man". Who can know or say, in the ultimate scheme of things, after all the eternities of time have played themselves out, what is the value and purpose of any single human life and effort. Who can say what constitutes victory and defeat?

from The Repose of Father Lazarus - Page 362

Let us hope that the power of the offering of our will and ego and self, or even the gesture of such an offering, is in itself so pure and powerful that it transcends all dogma and doctrine, that even the flame of such an intention and resignation is fiery enough to burn away any sin of human frailty." - Sitaram

from The Repose of Father Lazarus - Page 362

Perhaps that Compassionate Lord of the Vineyard, who paid the penny wage to those who labored only the final hour of the day, will also have compassion upon those who labored in the heat of the afternoon, but fell weakened before the close of day.

from The Repose of Father Lazarus - Page 362

All the universe is consciousness, all consciousness is a mirror. When you look into that universal mirror of consciousness, and see your own reflection, you see Saguna Brahman. Once you see THROUGH that reflection, you experience Nirguna Brahman. If you ultimately unite with Nirguna Brahman, which is reabsorption of jiva into Brahmajyoti, the cessation of rebirth. This is Moksha.

from To Untie All The Knots - Page 377

Do we not all have wounds and doubts to be healed by a nurturing and comforting Parental song at our bedside; existential wounds of the coldness of the Infinite Universe and the obscene absurdity of daily life, society and governments?

from The Sounding of the Divine - Page 376

The human problems which we deal with are unchanging. No matter how fast computer chips might become, patience will always be a virtue. The more powerful and effective weapons and missiles become, the more essential it is to learn meekness and nonviolent methods of resolving disputes. No matter what progress science makes in birth control, genetics and cloning, our primordial sexual desires will always present a profound challenge to us as a source of temptation, misconduct and addictive behavior. No matter how many continents or planets we conquer and colonize, we will always have to face the emptiness and loneliness of a Universe in which we seem out-of-place and extraneous. No matter how wise and ancient we become, medically and genetically extending our life span indefinitely, there will always remain buried somewhere deep within us a weeping child seeking the consoling love of a heavenly parent.

from A Guide to Gurus - Page 373

A theory or hypothesis is a "story" which is SO GOOD that it HAS to be true, and if it isn't true, then a Universe should be created in which it BECOMES true. Faith is telling that story, and hearing it, again and again, with perennial freshness and joy. In the heart of the devotee, Ram is always returning to Ayodiya; there is always a "Festival of Lights"

from Festival of Lights - Page 365

When Individual Self perishes; Universal Self is Born. Only when your particular individual self perishes may that Universal Self be born in its stead.

from Dialogue with a Psychiatrist - Page 299

The world is transformed with words, one person at a time.

Finding Peace in a Religion

2011-10-24T00:10:00.001-07:00

A friend asked : It seems you have sampled many religions. Did you finally found peace in one of them?

My reply:

Regarding "finding peace" I am better able to cope with life's sorrows and the gradual loss of old age, ending in death, because I have studied many religions and seriously practiced several (Greek Orthodox, Korean Zen Buddhism and Guyanese Hinduism) BUT my life is not free of suffering, regret, anxiety.

Also I read many books on psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, self-help and between that and the religion studies I came to understand myself and others a little better.

It helps to realize that everything passes, everything is transitory, nothing is permanent.

We must not say "I am sorry that it is over" but rather "I am glad that it happened and I experienced it" whether we mourn the end of our school days or childhood or the loss of a loved one.

The Way of the Tao in the 33rd stanza says "he that can be content with whatsoever he has; he has attained true wealth" - that desire is the source of all suffering - we suffer because we want things that we do not have (a sports car, better job, sexy lover) and we have things that we do not want (e.g. cancer) - and that mind makes all things which perhaps was first expressed by Schopenhauer in the West.

I practiced Greek Orthodox Christianity for 20 years (one of which was as a novice in a monastery in Boston)... 2 years as Buddhist, 2 years as Hindu ... and gradually I ceased to feel the need for corporate worship but am content simply to think and write each day.

Most corporate human endeavors are corrupt and corrupting. Power, fame, wealth corrupt.

Another thing I realize is that whatever we come to understand in life is for the most part subjective and based upon years of small experiences; hence we may WRITE about our experiences all we please but the simple READING of what we write cannot convey to anyone the precise convictions that we have come to hold through our experiences.

Cardinal Newman coined the phrase "illation" to denote the gradual effect of years of experiences which slowly bring us to our values, views, principles, convictions. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh is an excellent illustration of illation in the life of the protagonist Charles Ryder as we follow him from his carefree college days and through his marriage and affair, and into World War II.

What is the Liberty in the Liberty Tower?

2011-10-22T20:45:00.001-07:00

Some tourists, walking near me, pointed at the WTC building and said "Look, the LIBERTY TOWER." l laughed to myself as I wondered "What exactly IS liberty and who has it." Those who destroyed the WTC on 9/11 had liberty in the sense that no one stopped them and they did not fear death or crave life. It seems to me that those with the most wealth and or power are at liberty. Mostly "liberty" is an empty buzz-word most often on the lips of those who would enslave.

Muammar Gaddafi

2011-10-22T10:49:00.001-07:00

I saw Gaddafi as a negative and destructive force in the world. Two of my friends, educators, one in India and another in Pakistan, held Gaddafi in higher regard. The educator in South India saw Gaddafi as a champion of socialism and an opposition to European and American imperialistic exploitation. The educator in Pakistan complained that Gaddafi was a "king" and his body should have been treated with more respect. I resolved to read up on Gaddafi and see if I could find some positive facts to justify their admiration. My main source is Wikipedia.

Here are my comments plus Wiki excerpts :

I cannot admire a mentally disturbed narcissist like Gaddafi. Like I said, they should have assassinated him 30 years ago. Such tyrants exploit their nation as their own personal treasury to gratify their ego and their base desires. I can'...t understand why a nation puts up with such a dictator for years. I don't know the details of Gaddafi's death but I bet if anyone mistreated his body it was Muslims driven by tribal discord and not the non-Muslims. Read up on what the Italians did to Mussolini.

When you read about someone being beheaded or a woman having acid thrown in their face, or sending a brother to kill a sister in an honor killing, or chopping off a hand and a foot, it isn't something that happened in America and it isn't n...on-Muslims who do it. Think about that fact for a while. I have a lot more admiration for someone like Osama bin Laden than I do for Gaddafi for the following reasons: Osama was a wealthy man who gave up a life of pleasure to pursue an ideal he believed in. Gadaffi enslaved his own people in order to indulge his sick ego and enjoy a life of luxury. I dont agree with Osama's beliefs or the means that he employed to achieve his ends but one must admire a brave and clever enemy. I see nothing brave or clever in Gadaffi's or Saddam Hussein's life worthy of admiration.

The educator in India states: William Buell, you speak of Qadafi's ego, his wardrobe, his women body guards..but let me tell you all his clothes were stiched by his Arab tailors...that way he gave them employment, food ans shelter......what of the French President is h...e all clean ? Have Us Presidents given us a record of their personal and public lives that we can grant them a clean chit ? And for the Englishman's formal clothes and the branding that goes along...fortunes have been spent..they are not as crude as Qadafi's glittery fancy robes.If you know that he is "narsicisstic" I know that he was a socialist at heart as well (because a good friend lived in Libya for twelve years when there was a US embargo). Islam has its great side as well..is very equitable and advocates fraternal love. It is great to see that in practice. Fundamentalists are there in all pockets and we cant have the founding fathers of so called "democracy" killing for the "establishment of democracy" because such acts are undemocratic. And we heard Qadafi's pan Am bombing case over the news so many times yesterday as if to say "today we avenged" .

If democracy believes in "fair trial" can we have democracy in Libya founded on th gory death of a "dictator" as Muammar Qadhafi ? Does your newspaper or other media sing any paens of the establishment of democracy in Iraq-Iran after the "d...ictatorial regime" of Saddam Hussein ? Before that, is the popular media fair ? While the perpetraters of democracy had the time, interest, energies, resources and resolve to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, I do not see them showing the same concern about the victims of the floods in the Sindh province ? What does the WHO say about its relief operations in Sindh ? There are enough atrocities that are taking place in the far West and the so called advocates of establishing a "democratic world" -who were themselves brutal and savage around 500 yeras ago and have killed a Galilio for what he said, and who needed a "Copernican Revolution" to reveal what the East knew eversince- must learn to mind their own business and leave things in the Middle East to nature and evolution ! this "humanatarian" farce is getting f too far and is a new form of colonization...and this time it is for "crude oil" . Beware of the media and employ your own senses to understand the world around you !

Thank you for liking what I have to say and it takes a man like you to actually empthasize. Any others may call me fanatic, because the media is now on its rounds making Qadafi the scapegoat.Good people should lead public affairs,media and education, like the Raja-rishi's of yore or what you call philosopher-kings...and that could make all the difference !

William replies:

Wikipedia is not a bad place to start

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafi

After seizing power in 1969, he abolished the Libyan Constitution of 1951. He established laws based on the political ideology[5] he had formulated, called the Third International Theory and published in The Green Book.[6][7] Rising oil prices and extraction in Libya led to increasing revenues. By exporting as much oil per capita as Saudi Arabia, Libya achieved the highest living standards in Africa. However, at the same time similarly oil-rich Gulf countries improved their living standards much further, and this fact was visible to ordinary Libyans.[8][9] Early during his regime, Gaddafi and his relatives took over much of the economy. Gaddafi started several wars and acquired chemical weapons.[10] The United Nations called Libya under Gaddafi a pariah state.[11][12] In the 1980s, countries around the world imposed sanctions against Gaddafi.[13] Six days after the capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2006 by United States troops,[14] Gaddafi renounced Tripoli's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and welcomed international inspections to verify that he would follow through on the commitment.[15] A leading advocate for a United States of Africa, he served as Chairperson of the African Union (AU) from 2 February 2009 to 31 January 2010.

In February 2011, following revolutions in neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia, protests against Gaddafi's rule began. These escalated into an uprising that spread across the country, with the forces opposing Gaddafi establishing a government based in Benghazi named the National Transitional Council (NTC). This led to the 2011 Libyan Civil War, which included a military intervention by a NATO-led coalition to enforce a UN Security Council Resolution 1973 calling for a no-fly zone and protection of civilians in Libya. The assets of Gaddafi and his family were frozen, and both Interpol and the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants on 27 June for Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam, and his brother-in-law Abdullah al-Senussi, concerning crimes against humanity.[1][16][17][18] Gaddafi and his forces lost the Battle of Tripoli in August, and on 16 September 2011 the NTC took Libya's seat at the UN, replacing Gaddafi.[19] He retained control over parts of Libya, most notably the city of Sirte, to which it was presumed that he had fled.[20] Although Gaddafi's forces initially held out against the NTC's advances, Gaddafi was captured alive as Sirte fell to the rebel forces on Thursday the 20 October 2011, later he had been beaten and killed soon after.

Although often referred to as "Colonel Gaddafi", he was in fact only a Lieutenant when he seized power in 1969.[31] He was, nonetheless, a holder of the honorary rank of Major General, conferred upon him in 1976 by the Arab Socialist Union's National Congress. Gaddafi accepted the honorary rank, but stated that he would continue to be known as "Colonel" and to wear the rank insignia of a Colonel when in uniform.

On gaining power he immediately ordered the shutdown of American and British military bases, including Wheelus Air Base. He told Western officials that he would expel their companies from Libya's oil fields unless they shared more revenue. In his warning, he alluded to consultation with Nasser. The oil companies complied with the demand, increasing Libya's share from 50 to 79 percent.[34] In December 1969, Egyptian intelligence thwarted a planned coup against Gaddafi from high-ranking members of his leadership. Many of the dissenters had grown uneasy with his growing relationship to Egypt.[35] In response to the failed coup, Gaddafi criminalized all political dissent and shared power only with his family and closest associates.[citation needed]

Gaddafi committed ethnic cleansing, expelling Italian settlers in Libya in 1970.[36] Despising the Christian calendar, he replaced it as the country's official with an Islamic calendar.[37] He renamed the months of the calendar. August, named for Augustus Caesar, was renamed Hannibal, and July, after Julius Caesar, was renamed Nasser, for Gamal Abdel Nasser. From 1971 to 1977, Gaddafi approved the Arab Socialist Union, modeled on Egypt's Arab Socialist Union (Egypt), to function as a political party in Libya.

In 1969, Gaddafi created Revolutionary committees to keep tight control over internal dissent. Ten to twenty percent of Libyans worked as informants for these committees. Surveillance took place in the government, in factories, and in the education sector.[39] People who formed a political party were executed, and talking about politics with foreigners was punishable by up to 3 years in jail.[citation needed] Arbitrary arrests were common and Libyans were hesitant to speak with foreigners.[40] The government conducted executions and mutilations of political opponents in public and broadcast recordings of the proceedings on state television. Dissent was illegal under Law 75 of 1973, which denied freedom of expression.[39][41] In 2010, Libya's press was rated as 160th out of 178 nations in the Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders.[42]

During the 1970s, Libya executed members of the Islamist fundamentalist Hizb-ut Tahrir faction, and Gaddafi often personally presided over the executions.[43][44] Libya faced internal opposition during the 1980s because of its highly unpopular war with Chad. Numerous young men cut off a fingertip to avoid conscription at the time.[45] A mutiny by the Libyan Army in Tobruk was violently suppressed in August 1980.[46]

From time to time Gaddafi responded to external opposition with violence. Between 1980 and 1987, Gaddafi employed his network of diplomats and recruits to assassinate at least 25 critics living abroad.[39][47] His revolutionary committees called for the assassination of Libyan dissidents living abroad in April 1980, sending Libyan hit squads abroad to murder them. On 26 April 1980 Gaddafi set a deadline of 11 June 1980 for dissidents to return home or be "in the hands of the revolutionary committees".[48] Gaddafi stated explicitly in 1982 that "It is the Libyan people's responsibility to liquidate such scums who are distorting Libya's image abroad."[49] Libyan agents have assassinated dissidents in the United States,[50] Europe,[51] and the Middle East.[39][49][52] As of 2004 Libya still provided bounties on critics, including $1 million for one journalist.[53] During the 2005 civil unrest in France, Gaddafi called Chirac and offered him his help in quelling the resistors, who were largely North African.[54] There are growing indications that Libya's Gaddafi-era intelligence service had a cozy relationship with western spy organizations including the CIA, who voluntarily provided information on Libyan dissidents to the regime in exchange for using Libya as a base for extraordinary renditions.[55][56][57]

Following an abortive 1986 attempt to replace English with Russian as the primary foreign language in education,[58] English has been taught in recent years in Libyan schools from primary level, and students have access to English-language media.[59]

Campaign against Berber culture

Gaddafi often expressed an overt contempt for the Berbers, a non-Arab people of North Africa, and for their language, maintaining that the very existence of Berbers in North Africa is a myth created by colonialists. He adopted new names for Berber towns, and on official Libyan maps, referred to the Nafusa Mountains as the "Western mountains".[60] In a 1985 speech, he said of the Berber language, "If your mother transmits you this language, she nourishes you with the milk of the colonialist, she feeds you their poison" (1985).[61] The Berber language was banned from schools and up until 2009, it was illegal for parents to name their children with Berber names.[62] Berbers living in ancient mud-brick caravan towns such as Ghadames were forced out and moved into modern government-constructed apartments in the 1980s.[5] During the 2011 civil war, Berber towns rebelled against Gaddafi's rule and sought to reaffirm their ancient identity as Berbers.[63][64][65] Gaddafi's government strengthened anti-Berber sentiment among Libyan Arabs, weakening their opposition.

Gaddafi shares some things in common with Niyazov of Turkmenistan -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saparmurat_Niyazov

Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov; (19 February 1940 - 21 December 2006), (Russian: Сапармурат Атаевич Ниязов) (Turkmen: Saparmyrat Ataýewiç Nyýazow) was a Turkmen politician who served as President (later President for Life) of Turkmenistan from 2 November 1990 until his death in 2006.

Foreign media criticized him as one of the world's most totalitarian and repressive dictators, highlighting his reputation of imposing his personal eccentricities upon the country, which extended to renaming months, which had been borrowed Russian words, after members of his family.[3] Global Witness, a London-based human rights organization, reported that money under Niyazov's control and held overseas may be in excess of US$3 billion, of which between $1.8-$2.6 billion was supposedly situated in the Foreign Exchange Reserve Fund at Deutsche Bank in Germany.

This following excerpt on Gadaffi from Wikipedia paints the picture of a KLEPTOCRACY rather than a socialist paradise - The Economy of Libya was centrally planned and followed Gaddafi's socialist ideals. It benefited greatly from revenues from the petroleum sector, which contributed practically all export earnings and 30% of its GDP. These oil revenues, combined with a small population and by far Africa's highest Education Index gave Libya the highest nominal GDP per capita in Africa. Between 2000 and 2011, Libya recorded favourable growth rates with an estimated 10.6 percent growth of GDP in 2010, the highest of any state in Africa. Gaddafi had promised "a home for all Libyans" and during his rule, new residential areas rose in empty Saharan regions. Entire populations living in mud-brick caravan towns were moved into modern homes with running water, electricity, and satellite TV.[5] A leaked diplomatic cable describes Libyan economy as "a kleptocracy in which the government — either the al-Gaddafi family itself or its close political allies — has a direct stake in anything worth buying, selling or owning".[18]

Libya may have appeared socialist in name and theory - From 1977 to 2011, Libya was known as the "Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" at the United Nations. The official name during this period was "Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" from 1977 to 1986, and "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" (Arabic: الجماهيرية العربية الليبية الشعبية الاشتراكية العظمى al-Jamāhīriyyah al-‘Arabiyyah al-Lībiyyah ash-Sha‘biyyah al-Ishtirākiyyah al-‘Uẓmá

The above excerpt is from this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya

It occurs to me that if we survey severaly thousant years of Libyan history we will see that Libya under Gaddafi was not one of the high points.

Ubuntu and Digital Photo Uploads

2011-10-21T17:24:00.001-07:00

F-Spot Photo management for GNOME http://f-spot.org/

I had a pleasant surprise when I plugged the USB of my Panasonic LUMIX camera into my new Ubuntu machine and it automatically launghed F-Spot and copied the photos more quickly and with fewer mouse clicks than on Windows using the software that came with the camera. Before I tried this I googled on Panasonic Lumix Ubuntu to make certain it would not harm the camera. I noticed that some people had difficulties back in 2008. Now Ubuntu simply automatically handles the tast BUT I cannot navigate the the camera as a mass storage device nor can I find a command to eject, safely remove. The camera promps me to choose pict-bridge (the choice for Ubuntu) or PC (the choice for Windows.)

Death By China

2011-10-20T16:45:00.001-07:00

By Peter Navarro and Greg Autry - confronting the dragon - a global call to action - deathbychina.com

This book seems a little extreme to me. They don't like Fareed Zakaria one bit for his pro China comments. I find it hard to believe that China is pure evil. Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

1000 Chinese Characters

2011-10-20T15:15:00.001-07:00

Edited by Wang Guo'an - The Chinese University Press - http://www.chineseupress.com Barnes & Noble $27 - ISBN 13:9789629962838 - show stroke order, idioms - alt. ISBN 962-996-283-7 ... Page count = 829

Based on the outline of graded characters of the National Committee for Chinese as a second language. Index by pinyin and index by stroke count
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

You Reap What You Sow

2011-10-20T10:35:00.001-07:00

I trust Al Jazeera so I looked here first. Notice that the obituary has a quote from the Christian Epistles Galatians 6.1–10 "You reap what you sow" and not from the Qur'an because no similar sentiment to my knowledge is expressed therein.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/2011/10/20111020122439605285.html

Chinese Word Puzzle of the Day

2011-10-19T09:45:00.001-07:00

Each day it is possible to find some new word adventure or puzzle to solve.

I picked up one page of notes I had printed and I saw hui2 guo2 回国 which I guessed must be some country since I recognize guo2 国 ... so I went crazy looking in a small pocket dictionary (I was rusing to go out). I came home and found THIS link of words for countries in Chinese assuming it would be a piece of cake to spot hui2 http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/country_names_in_chinese.htm

but no luck. Finally I came across THIS page (which looks like a useful site) http://www.chinese-lessons.com/mandarin/vocabVerbs1.htm and realized that it means to "return from abroad" or "return home"

and when I look at yellowbridge dictioniary

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/partsearch.php?part=vo&pageno=10

I find various usages which imply "return"

182 回� 回电

huídiàn

to reply to a telegram; to wire back

183 回�� 回电话

huí diànhuà

return a phone call

184 回��史回顾历史

huígù lìshǐ

to look back at history

185 回� 回国

huíguó

to return to one's home country

186 回家回家

huíjiā

to return home

And when I look at the yellowbridge entry for 回

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/sentsearch.php?searchMode=C&word=%E5%9B%9E

Definition return, turn around; a time

Formation

Method

1. (象形) Pictographic. Originally, a picture of a swirl.

2. See 回, � to see etymology for traditional form of this character.

Simplification

Method Simplified form of 回, �. Created as unique simplification #100 (� » 回) via omission of part of the traditional character.

* 请回答我。

Please answer me.

* 我回到了日本。

I returned to Japan.

* 他六点回来了。

He returned at six.

* 你最好马上回家。

You may as well return home at once.

* 他从国内回来了。

He returned from China.

* 他从大陆回来了。

He returned from China.

What it takes to be President

2011-10-18T13:29:00.001-07:00

William: I suspect Bush and Cheney would have a hard time if they were brought before Hague tribunal on war crime charges.. and what gets me, Bush is such a big Christian, pays lip service, but he joined Yale Skull and BOnes, which they should consider demonic... and he dodged Vietnam, and was an alcoholic until he allegedly walked on the beach with Billy Graham.

I figure Jesus would have said turn the other cheek, forgive your enemies, repay evil with kindness, regarding WTC, but obviously Bush never asked what Jesus might do

Well I think we can end our conversation on Politics.

Friend: I don't like it when people bash others. You know only what the media allows us to know but people don't actually know him personally.

I like Bush and I think he's intelligent. So he didn't go to Vietnam. I wouldn't either.

EVERYONE has their faults. Including the politicians that you like.

William: this is true.... for the Bushes the "D" word is Dynasty, they dont like it, yet they set their sons up as Governors... so it can amount to dynastic control by one family

Friend: You're not angering me but I think it's harsh to judge someone like that and I won't do it and I don't want to read it.

William: my apologies.... but then, a conservative frined who bashes Obama all the time says thats what comes with public life,... constant criticism, so one must be thick skinned

Friend: I'm sure the politicians know that and are prepared.

Friend: oddly, Bush pays so much lip service to Christianity, yet Jesus said 'You shall be judged for every idle word which proceeds from your lips..." yet wannabe christians will balk at harsh, critical judgment.

I suspect America's superpower days are coming to an end, and the dollar may go the way of the Pound Sterling as far as an international currency

Friend: To talk about war crimes, alcoholism, and what not.

just isn't right.

William: but, people feel free to use ammunition against Obama, if they dont like him...

Christianity IS all about judgment, being judged, but they skew it to be about forgiveness.... like Newt Gingrich with his divorces and affairs... on an interview he said 'true, but I asked God for forgiveness" - so that makes everything ok...

I mean, if America were REALLY a Christian nation, Bible based, they would criminalize divorce,... since Jesus spoke against divorce... but Jesus didnt say much about same sex unions, stem cell, euthanasia... etc

i think Jefferson had it right with separation of church and state,.... not all these "faith based initiatives"

Bobby Jindal came as a Hindu from India and converted to Roman Catholicism as a calculated agenda... had he gone to Indonesia he would have become Muslim, and in Sri Lanka he would have become Theravadin Buddhist... of that I am convinced

gov. in Louisiana

which is the ONLY state with Napoleonic code.

I laughed because Jeb Bush married an Hispanic Catholic, but waited YEARS to convert... but did become RC... and I am convinced that it was NOT personal conviction, but rather problems in Episcopal/Anglican made it more politically expedient to be RC ... and now, 60% of House/Senate is RC... in 1960 with JFK that was not so

I was a kid and watched JFK on Face the Nation or Meet the Press explaining that he would not take orders from the Pope... ha ha

no one seemed to bat an eyelash that Nixon was Quaker... but they are terrified of having a Mormon / LDS president

and a Jew... FORGET IT... this country is so weird

Friend: Our country does have it's quirkes but that's just how it is. I guess it just depends on what they feel is the best for the moment.

William: a president must be tall, slim, male, clean shaven, Christian, married, not TOO intellectual, and appear on the night time talk show circuit (I cannot imagine Eisenhower doing that)

Tom Dewey was the last candidate to have a mustache

William Howard Taft (1909-1913) was the last president in office to have facial hair (mustache)

the very first female prime minister was in Sri Lanka in 1960s, she died a year or so ago, but she got in because of an assassination