You know how two stars can get close enough to have a special relationship? wobble each other, wobble planets, confuse astronomers. Think of other possible pairings:
How many companion intelligences would a god have to have to be truly intelligent? Two stars can light a planet round the clock. Three satellites can cover the earth: 24/7. Two gods could watch each others' back: three might watch heads and tails as well. But would it be enough? What meta-dimensions apply? Time, for sure.
Is that why there's a Trinity? How the hell would a human know?
Or a god?
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Who Pulls the Strings?
The important question to ask in any religion is Who Pulls the Strings? The Jews say God controls everything but the Jews keep that god in a box: and they, the Jews, control the box. The Christians say that God controls everything, but all the evidence is controlled by priests: the Bible is gathered by priests, edited by priests, published by people connected to priests ... What independent verification do any of the claims have?
When the Chinese of a couple of millennia ago wondered if their emperor had lost his mandate of heaven, they broke some pots to read the shards; but the shards were read by priests: and the priests said, you guessed it, that the emperor was no longer divine. The priests controlled who was or wasn't a god. Some island people once were convinced by priests to sacrifice all their wealth to pray for some boon. The people gathered all their treasure and dumped it in the sea: convinced that their god would return all to them tenfold. Their fortunes didn't improve. But it turned out that the spot in the ocean the priests had chosen to dump the treasure was shallow and calm, so all their treasure was easily recovered: so much for the people's or the priests' trust in their god.
When physicists wanted to test Einstein's god's behavior they measured light passing by a star. Classical physics said the light would come straight, at c; Einstein said the light would bend around the star, and bending, arrive a little later than classical physics predicted. They measured the light, the evidence wasn't 100% clear, but they decided that it had bent: Einstein had god more clearly than the classicists. Now that test I see as objective. The Scientists, priests of a sort, really were trying to determine the truth. They were letting nature pull the strings, without interfering themselves. At least they were trying to the best they could. Very unusual, for humans.
My favorite illustration comes from fiction: Kipling, not surprisingly (who dealt with gods and tests and evidence marvelously). In The Man Who Would Be King a couple of soldiers of fortune, Peachy and Danny, play on superstition and luck to control the people and the priests of Kafiristan. First they parley themselves into kings, then Danny gets named a god. The priests have been amassing treasure for Alexander, the Macedonia warlord who'd passed that way twenty-four hundred years earlier. The priests had hailed Alexander as a god, and the treasure belonged to him. Convinced that Danny is Alexander returned, the priests actually turn all of the gold and jewels over to him!
Fiction! You see? Can you imagine the priests of the Roman Catholic Church turning the treasures of the Vatican over to a resurrected Jesus?
Priests control the gods by controlling the evidence which is allowed to reach them.
These days universities do the same: funded by the same forces that have always controlled the evidence which reaches anyone.
Jesus' halo ought to be enough; except the priests would take his halo away from him. With mirrors.
When the Chinese of a couple of millennia ago wondered if their emperor had lost his mandate of heaven, they broke some pots to read the shards; but the shards were read by priests: and the priests said, you guessed it, that the emperor was no longer divine. The priests controlled who was or wasn't a god. Some island people once were convinced by priests to sacrifice all their wealth to pray for some boon. The people gathered all their treasure and dumped it in the sea: convinced that their god would return all to them tenfold. Their fortunes didn't improve. But it turned out that the spot in the ocean the priests had chosen to dump the treasure was shallow and calm, so all their treasure was easily recovered: so much for the people's or the priests' trust in their god.
When physicists wanted to test Einstein's god's behavior they measured light passing by a star. Classical physics said the light would come straight, at c; Einstein said the light would bend around the star, and bending, arrive a little later than classical physics predicted. They measured the light, the evidence wasn't 100% clear, but they decided that it had bent: Einstein had god more clearly than the classicists. Now that test I see as objective. The Scientists, priests of a sort, really were trying to determine the truth. They were letting nature pull the strings, without interfering themselves. At least they were trying to the best they could. Very unusual, for humans.
My favorite illustration comes from fiction: Kipling, not surprisingly (who dealt with gods and tests and evidence marvelously). In The Man Who Would Be King a couple of soldiers of fortune, Peachy and Danny, play on superstition and luck to control the people and the priests of Kafiristan. First they parley themselves into kings, then Danny gets named a god. The priests have been amassing treasure for Alexander, the Macedonia warlord who'd passed that way twenty-four hundred years earlier. The priests had hailed Alexander as a god, and the treasure belonged to him. Convinced that Danny is Alexander returned, the priests actually turn all of the gold and jewels over to him!
Fiction! You see? Can you imagine the priests of the Roman Catholic Church turning the treasures of the Vatican over to a resurrected Jesus?
Priests control the gods by controlling the evidence which is allowed to reach them.
These days universities do the same: funded by the same forces that have always controlled the evidence which reaches anyone.
Jesus' halo ought to be enough; except the priests would take his halo away from him. With mirrors.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Either / Or: First Draft
Christians say that God has a name and that his name is Jehovah. Jews say Jahweh (and Christians who've read more than one book say there's no difference: so let's ignore that.) Muslims say God has a name and that his name is Allah. Well, which is it? And why do Arabs have a say in the matter? So it's got to be Jehovah, right? As Hitler used to say, There's aways one of two possibilities. Jehovah.
There couldn't be three possibilities, could there? Could God's name be Harry? Or Barbara? Or Beeblethrux? And it couldn't be that God has no name, could it? How could a magical entity exist without a name?
Never mind, that's all trivial throat clearing: here's my real dilema: I don't care about names. What I care about is consciousness, awareness, sentience. I know that humans are hardly more aware than caterpillars, look at an ad sometime if you doubt it. So I'm used to that; but I can't stand the idea of there being no consciousness: just as I can't stand the idea of there being no God (of whichever name I don't care).
So: either there is a God (whatever his name), and he is conscious, and therefore, at Judgment, the truth can be known (at least by God) (even if he can't share it with caterpillars). Or, there is and will be no Judgment, no awareness, no consciousness, no truth: not among caterpillars — and not among gods either.
Few have ever understood anything I've said: and at universities (or barrooms) where a few have understood varying degrees of what I've said, no quorum developed, no synergy, so I write, justifiably, with irony so heavy you may call it sarcasm.
There couldn't be three possibilities, could there? Could God's name be Harry? Or Barbara? Or Beeblethrux? And it couldn't be that God has no name, could it? How could a magical entity exist without a name?
Never mind, that's all trivial throat clearing: here's my real dilema: I don't care about names. What I care about is consciousness, awareness, sentience. I know that humans are hardly more aware than caterpillars, look at an ad sometime if you doubt it. So I'm used to that; but I can't stand the idea of there being no consciousness: just as I can't stand the idea of there being no God (of whichever name I don't care).
So: either there is a God (whatever his name), and he is conscious, and therefore, at Judgment, the truth can be known (at least by God) (even if he can't share it with caterpillars). Or, there is and will be no Judgment, no awareness, no consciousness, no truth: not among caterpillars — and not among gods either.
Few have ever understood anything I've said: and at universities (or barrooms) where a few have understood varying degrees of what I've said, no quorum developed, no synergy, so I write, justifiably, with irony so heavy you may call it sarcasm.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Fortune For and Against
Believers in deities seem regularly to believe that the god is responsible for gifts received, gifts denied, rewards and punishments, good fortune or ill. Believers seem to believe that prosperity is proof of favor with a god.
Such beliefs seem to be universal, yet such beliefs are not supported by the Testaments of the Jews, and they seem flat out contradicted by the Testaments of the Christians.
Examples to follow, and more exposition. Meantime, think for yourself: Adam, Noah, Abraham ... Esau, Sampson ... Job: and John the Baptist, Jesus himself, St. Peter, etc. And think since the Gospels: Martin Luther ...
Think also of the real "saints," the truth tellers, the intellectual independents: Abelard, Galileo ... Think of me, pk, and my teacher, Ivan Illich. No: if god loves you, expect man to hate you. Expect to be the eaten, not the eater.
Such beliefs seem to be universal, yet such beliefs are not supported by the Testaments of the Jews, and they seem flat out contradicted by the Testaments of the Christians.
Examples to follow, and more exposition. Meantime, think for yourself: Adam, Noah, Abraham ... Esau, Sampson ... Job: and John the Baptist, Jesus himself, St. Peter, etc. And think since the Gospels: Martin Luther ...
Think also of the real "saints," the truth tellers, the intellectual independents: Abelard, Galileo ... Think of me, pk, and my teacher, Ivan Illich. No: if god loves you, expect man to hate you. Expect to be the eaten, not the eater.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Sunday, June 27, 2010
The Name of God
The Jehovah's Witness who rings your door bell makes a fuss over the god of their sect having a name: Jehovah. The Jews, from whom this god is derived, have been making a fuss for millennia over the name of their tribal deity: Yahweh. And of course Jehovah is an illiterate corruption of Yahweh: so, actually, they're talking about the "same" god. (Nothing is ever the same, pk, except to the blind.) (Note: translate derived as "borrowed" but translate borrowed as stolen!)
Now to this religious, me, pk, when I was a tyke, the name of my god was important: so said my indoctrination. God name was Jehovah (though we were also told that it was a mis-transliteration: from Yahweh). I soon saw that the Bible also used a few titles. Washington could be called "George," or "George Washington," or "Mr. Washington"; he could also be called "General Washington," then "Mr. President." So God, who was called Yahweh by the Jews, and was called Jehovah by the Christians, was also called "Lord" by the Jews (Elohim) and by the Christians (Lord, from the English, not the Semitic). (Note: Elohim in Hebrew is a plural! Think of the Bible's "let us ..." (Some monotheism!))
(Meantime the Arabs call their Semitic god Allah!)
Now the tyke pk believed (as he was indoctrinated) that God (or Jehovah, or Yahweh, or Lord, or Lord God ...) (or Allah) cared about these trivia: that God was a magical, old, male magician (whose name) was not Lilith, and certainly not Beatrice) who "made" the world with magical incantations. Eventually God manifested himself to me, after a suitable period of development, alternate training, and reflection, and communicated to me (not in words, and not by graphics either) that all that was primitive ignorant supposition, harmless if you think of thinking, particularly ill-informed thinking, as metaphor: as modeling. Thus I came not to reject the idea of god, neither to quarrel about diction in a theological semantics controlled by the intolerant and unimaginative) but to translate the terms into equivalents of theory: an idea never fully tested, always refin-able.
Think of this: To a magician, "abracadabra" may turn the water into wine. It must be spelled right. The sorcerer doing the translation must have fasted the proper number of days, have deprived himself of the company of women for the proper portion of his lifetime ... But: the mathematician calls the ratio of radius of a circle to its circumference, by the formula pi r squared, "pi." What if he called it "Sam"? or "Barbara"? Wouldn't the value, wouldn't the ratio, still be the same?
God introduced himself to me in terms of my developing, always imperfect, never fully mature sense of reason. "God" is a principle more than a principal.
More coming, but the alert reader should be able to develop the implications whether or not I drop dead before returning.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Nix Meta-Messages
Communication between the essence of existence (god as it were) and an individual human being is possible. Communication between that individual and his society (on that particular matter) is not. Jesus was crucified when he tried to pass such messages.
Even without a "Bible" I know this: from my own as well as others' experience.
Jesus' disciples meet the same fate: especially at churches claiming to represent Jesus. But it's the same with secular subjects: Galileo, for example. Ivan Illich. Yours truly.
Even without a "Bible" I know this: from my own as well as others' experience.
Jesus' disciples meet the same fate: especially at churches claiming to represent Jesus. But it's the same with secular subjects: Galileo, for example. Ivan Illich. Yours truly.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
