Posted on 11/01/2005 6:27:26 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
A president who consults religious lunatics about who should be on the Supreme Court... Judges who want prayer in school and the "ten commandments" in the courtroom… Born-Again fanatics who bomb abortion clinics… bible thumpers who condemn homosexuality as "sin"... and all the other Christian fascists who want a U.S. theocracy….
This is the force behind the assault on evolution going on right now in a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Last year, the Dover city school board instituted a policy that requires high school biology teachers to read a statement to students that says Darwin's theory of evolution is "not a fact" and then notes that intelligent design offers an alternative theory for the origin and evolution of life--namely, that life in all of its complexity could not have arisen without the help of an "intelligent hand." Some teachers refused to read the statement, citing the Pennsylvania teacher code of ethics, which says, "I will never knowingly present false information to a student." Eleven parents who brought this case to court contend that the directive amounted to an attempt to inject religion into the curriculum in violation of the First Amendment. Their case has been joined by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
The school board is being defended pro bono by the Thomas More Law Center, a Christian law firm in Ann Arbor, Mich. The case is being heard without a jury in Harrisburg by U.S. District Judge John Jones III, whom George W. Bush appointed to the bench in 2002.
In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not teach the biblical account of creation instead of evolution, because doing so would violate the constitutional ban on establishment of an official religion. Since then Intelligent Design has been promoted by Christian fundamentalists as the way to get the Bible and creationism into the schools.
"This clever tactical repackaging of creationism does not merit consideration," Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer for the parents, told U.S. District Judge John E. Jones in opening arguments. "Intelligent design admits that it is not science unless science is redefined to include the supernatural." This is, he added, "a 21st-century version of creationism."
This is the first time a federal court has been asked to rule on the question of whether Intelligent Design is religion or science. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which opposes challenges to the standard model of teaching evolution in the schools, said the Pennsylvania case "is probably the most important legal situation of creation and evolution in the last 18 years," and that "it will have quite a significant impact on what happens in American public school education."
Proponents of Intelligent Design don’t say in the courtroom that they want to replace science with religion. But their strategy papers, speeches, and discussions with each other make it clear this is their agenda.
Intelligent Design (ID) is basically a re-packaged version of creationism--the view that the world can be explained, not by science, but by a strict, literal reading of the Bible. ID doesn’t bring up ridiculous biblical claims like the earth is only a few thousand years old or that the world was created in seven days. Instead it claims to be scientific--it acknowledges the complexity and diversity of life, but then says this all comes from some "intelligent" force. ID advocates don’t always openly argue this "intelligent force" is GOD--they even say it could be some alien from outer space! But Christian fundamentalists are the driving force behind the whole Intelligent Design movement and it’s clear… these people aren’t praying every night to little green men from another planet.
Phillip Johnson, considered the father and guiding light behind Intelligent Design, is the architect of the "wedge strategy" which focuses on attacking evolution and promoting intelligent design to ultimately, as Johnson says, "affirm the reality of God." Johnson has made it clear that the whole point of "shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God" is to get people "introduced to the truth of the Bible," then "the question of sin" and finally "introduced to Jesus."
Intelligent Design and its theocratic program has been openly endorsed by George W. Bush. Earlier this year W stated that Intelligent Design should be taught in the schools. When he was governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution. And he has made the incredibly unscientific, untrue statement that "the jury is still out" on evolution.
For the Christian fascists, the fight around evolution and teaching Intelligent Design is part of a whole agenda that encompasses reconfiguring all kinds of cultural, social, and political "norms" in society. This is a movement that is fueled by a religious vision which varies among its members but is predicated on the shared conviction that the United States is in need of drastic changes--which can only be accomplished by instituting religion as its cultural foundation.
The Christian fascists really do want--and are working for--a society where everything is run according to the Bible. They have been working for decades to infiltrate school boards to be in a position to mandate things like school prayer. Now, in the schools, they might not be able to impose a literal reading of the Bible’s explanation for how the universe was created. But Intelligent Design, thinly disguised as some kind of "science," is getting a lot more than just a foot in the door.
The strategy for promoting intelligent design includes an aggressive and systematic agenda of promoting the whole religious worldview that is the basis for ID. And this assault on evolution is linked up with other questions in how society should be run.
Marc Looy of the creationist group Answers in Genesis has said that evolution being taught in the schools,
"creates a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness, which I think leads to things like pain, murder, and suicide."
Ken Cumming, dean of the Institute for Creation Research's (ICR) graduate school, who believes the earth is only thousands of years old, attacked a PBS special seven-part series on evolution, suggesting that the series had "much in common" with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the United States. He said,
"[W]hile the public now understands from President Bush that 'we're at war' with religious fanatics around the world, they don't have a clue that America is being attacked from within through its public schools by a militant religious movement called Darwinists...."
After the 1999 school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, Tom DeLay, Christian fascist representative from Texas, gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, blaming the incident in part on the teaching of evolution. He said,
"Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud."
The ID movement attacks the very notion of science itself and the philosophical concept of materialism--the very idea that there is a material world that human beings can examine, learn about, and change.
Johnson says in his "The Wedge Strategy" paper,
"The social consequences of materialism have been devastating…we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist world view, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."
Dr. Eugenie C. Scott, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, points out:
"Evolution is a concept that applies to all sciences, from astronomy to chemistry to geology to biology to anthropology. Attacking evolution means attacking much of what we know of the natural world, that we have amassed through the application of scientific principles and methods. Second, creationist attacks on evolution are attacks on science itself, because the creationist approach does violence to how we conduct science: science as a way of knowing."
The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (another Christian think tank) says that it "seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."
Teaching Intelligent Design in the schools is part of a whole Christian Fascist movement in the United States that has power and prominence in the government, from the Bush regime on down. And if anyone isn’t clear about what "cultural legacies" the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture wants to overthrow--take a look at the larger Christian fascist agenda that the intelligent design movement is part of: asserting patriarchy in the home, condemning homosexuality, taking away the right to abortion, banning sex education, enforcing the death penalty with the biblical vengeance of an "eye for an eye," and launching a war because "God told me [Bush] to invade Iraq."
I had an (associate) grandson of the namesake of Knox Theological Seminary whom is a hebrew scholar.. Well he or his father translated Genesis(dont remember which maybe both) and recounted that the word translated as create in Genesis could also be translated as re-create.. I say this because if true and it probably is.. then re-create could have immense ramifications toward Genesis.. That would mean that the earth might have been RE_created or re-modeled.. but Re-modeled from WHAT.. You get my drift.. He wasnt not interested in this at the time since its purely speculation.. He honed in on accuracy not IF'n..
Interested me a LOT.. still does.. also impacts this dialog.. i.e. science, evolution, dinosaurs etc.. Where did Satan come from in the Eden anyhow?.. like that.. Did he have a hand in causing the earth to HAVE to be re-modeled.?. Minutia, not important to some, but could be the answer that atheists/agnostics and some psuedo-christians WILL GET when standing ( they think) before God saying what about them Dino's God what about them.. LoL.. Course it won't be played out like that, I don't think.. But since I'm IF'n... Lol..
Theres verses in Jeremiah that George Pember brought out about this too.. What if the earth was not created on the Jews time schedule(6000+years) but RE-created IT.. i.e. remodeled.. there was something before maybe with cultures and all that.. maybe some beings too..
How does that impact us, it don't.. but thats not the ONLY scenario that could have been totally overlooked by mankind in this paradigm.. Mans arrogance is breath taking in its scope.. The smallest error in deducing the impact of the metaphors of Genesis correctly would be a rock in a pool affecting the whole vision later.. Fortunately Jesus came for the re-start of the vision.. not only fullfilling the Jewish vision but trumping it.. and expanding it.. making it far simpler and updated.. NO man has any excuse any longer.. NONE.. What happens when this paradigm is over.. AH! that the stuff dreams are made of.. Soon maybe I can share with you what "I"' think that will be.. Time for the Universe to wake up from its slumber..
Lets reference the miracle of turning water into wine. When Jesus did it we can conclude that it was more or less an instantaneous miracle. If we placed it on the time line I'd say that it probably took no more than a millisecond. Now if man were to go about the process of turning water into wine it would be a long process on the time line. First of all one would need grape seeds. Let us assume for a moment that through genetic engineering man were able to create a grape seed from a mixture of inorganic chemicals, he would still need to take the time to plant it. He could then add the water necessary to make the vine grow. This would probably take about 2 years before wine quality grapes could be produced. So man would have to add water to the seeds for about 2 years before he got a crop of grapes. He would then have to pick the grapes and crush them and add the necessary bacterium (which he would also have to create in his laboratory). Then he would have to let the mixture sit for a couple of years in order for all the necessary chemical changes to take place to make the mixture into a fine wine (The Bible says that the wine was premium -- probably the finest wine ever produced). So we are looking at a period of 5 years of time which would be necessary to "naturally" turn water into wine.
But Jesus did the whole operation in a millisecond. When the result was completed, Jesus presented the wedding party with a cistern filled with wine that, by all appearances, was at least 5 if not 10 years in the making.
If Christ could do all that in a mere millisecond, then just think of what wonders God could create if he had SIX DAYS!
Six days is obviously a metaphor.. If "someone" could create a world in six days, why not six minutes, or six seconds. or six whateverons.. Manipulating matter is a hardly studied "science".. We have oh! so much to learn..
If God in the future gave you the power to do that (manipulate matter)..
What would YOU do with it(that GIFT).?.
If I had the foggiest idea what the Gosse Omphalos hypothesis was I'd retire just on the conceit and I'm too old to look it up 'cause I don't think I have the time left to enjoy whatever understanding I could get out of it. But I do thank you all for the compliment for including me in on the idea.
Obviously? I don't think so. God himself stated while giving the Ten Commandments -- you know the ones that contain the commandment not to bear false witness -- that He created the heavens and the earth and all that in them is in "six days." He intended to convey the idea that it was the length of physical time equal to six literal spins of the earth on it's axis, as he then used that "fact" to justify keeping the seventh day (that's the 24 hour kind) as holy.
So the implication in Genesis 20 is that the days he was speaking of were the same length on the time line as the seventh day he now commanded the Israelites to rest on.
Is there anything else spoken by God in Exodus 20 that was "obviously" a metaphor?
Sorry, I was replying primarily to 592. Here I'll try to respond to both 602 and 629.
Freedom of choice is unique because it involves justice.
Rather: our sense of justice depends on whether or not we believe in free will; whether or not we truly have freedom of choice seems to me another question altogether.
Now, if our experience of the world generally leads us to believe that we have a degree of freedom in our actions (and indeed, we are aware that there are only degrees: we are aware that is, of certain restrictions - natural forces; the varying shapes and durabilities of our individual bodies; the other, often conflicting wills of other creatures); if our experience of the world generally teaches us that we may choose to walk or run, drink or not drink alcoholic beverages, stick or not stick a knife into our sister's or brother's nape or (more choice) his or her thigh; if the world as we know it (and what other world are we to speak of?) consists in large part of experiences of will, of interactions of will, then the so-called Truth of the matter, insofar as it may differ from our experience, seems to me quite beside the point.
Where freedom is concerned - and here, of course, is where justice is concerned - humans are clearly limited. That our free will is limited in any number of ways, however, does not leave us out to sea with regards to justice or morality or a sense of reality. What I object to in post 592 ("If agency is not really a choice then the game is over and the reality of human nature is an illusion") is the either/or of your argument and the primacy you give to the problem of agency. Agency is not really a choice. Either we have agency and are able to make choices, or we do not have agecny and cannot make choices. Without agency a priori we cannot choose agency. Abstractions aside, however, it seems to me simple foolishness to deny oneself the validity of one's own experiences, or to deny the obvious character of our experiences, which is as "agents" in this world.
In post 602 you set up a relativist perspective against an absolutist perspective and go on to note that, from the relativist position, "[o]ur identification with one choice or another is indeed a fulfillment of being, but this being is Janus-faced. And it never minds that the world, as it is, is justifiably cruel, whenever. You can blame someone or something for this, but that's just because its an odd day."
That is, that the very existence of the world, as it is, justifies the cruelties it inflicts on its inhabitants. "The other view," you continue, "holds that there is a criterion of justice that underlies the statement "Tortue is not consistent with American values." And this criterion should underlie Hopi values. This other, Platonic, view, is not the only other view. And the set-up is problematic. When we speak of justice, in the first place, I assume we are speaking of justice among humans. More specifically we are speaking of the behavior of humans with regard to other humans, and the goodness or wickedness of this behavior, and the punishment or reward that certain behaviors might merit. The justice of "the world," by which I assume you mean "the natural world" and perhaps, by extension, the cumulative circumstances surrounding human existence, is another question entirely - though it brings certain facts to bear on the question of human agency within the natural world. Was Job's punishment just? Not by any human measure. Certainly not by any Platonic criterion of justice that might underlie "Torture is not consistent with American values." The world is cruel, whenever; rocks fall and land on people's heads, and there is neither justice nor injustice in this. To speak of justice in such a case amounts to, in my view, a categorical error. Not only because the world that might be guilty of such an unjust action lacks, in our understanding, agency; not only because the world could neither be punished or rewarded for such an action; but also because we recognize that a great deal of life - and a great grand portion of the natural world - is beyond human control. There it is: a criterion of justice. And indeed, if it were a man up there on the cliff, throwing rocks on people's heads, we would punish or reward him according to certain criteria. If he were our countryman and we were in time of war and the people's heads were the heads of our enemy and the cliff was our border which was being transgressed, we would likely put a medal on the man's chest and sing him a song; if he were our neighbor and the people's heads were the heads of our wives our children, we would likely bring him to the hangman. We have criteria, but so do our criteria have criteria, and of justice practiced in the real world, among humans, very rarely are criteria absolute.
You want to say it isn't crucial, you say it isn't crucial, and still you face the crux: you choose to privilege concrete experience--and even then you couldn't help but put it in parenthesis as "seeming"...
Perhaps my post seemed glib to you. I did write it rather quickly but I meant it in all seriousness. I do not use the word "seem" parenthetically - or derogatorily, for that matter. I do not believe that we must privilege "what is" over "what seems to be," since our experience consists entirely of the latter (which is fluid) and knows nothing of the former (which is static). Hence my problem with "revelation" and other kinds of knowing by knowing.
Nature has been carrying you along its own merry way to the grave.
Indeed! But my way too has sometimes been merry...
Nature is no abstract postulation.
No, but Justice is.
Whose concrete experience anyway? I smell the ghost of Descartes, who shrunk his world in the dryer of common reason all for the sake of practical certainty.
"Common reason" as opposed to...? I don't consider myself a Cartesian, nor am I in any way an advocate of "practical certainty"; on the contrary, I believe - as should be rather obvious from my posts here - that there is very little about which one may be certain. But if we conduct ourselves in this world according to the occasional "practical certainty" - i.e. when I feel a certain sort of pang in my lower abdomen, I remove myself to the gentleman's lounge - it is with good reason. What reason? Experience. Whose? Mine. Yours. Anybody's. My body, on its way to becoming dust, is already - constantly - exchanging molecules, energy, etc. with the world around it, and as far as that goes I can see why one might question the validity of a subject "I" - and I can see why assuming myself a subject at all might amount to a "practical certainty" - but "practical certainty" in that sense is hardly the craven "practical certainty" of, for example, a Raskolnikov, whose delusion, whose faith in a corrupt idea, allows him certainty enough to practice wickedness on another human.
Either we resist, resign, or we play illusory games of seeming. The last is chocolate fudge. It's language is sweet and soft.
I don't accept the trichotomy. I don't think we play "illusory games of seeming," and I don't know why the games, if we are playing them, are illusory. But even so. Now we either resist or resign? Resist what? Resign to what? In the Kierkegaardian sense? Too many big books stacked together here. If you just want to get down to the question of Good and Evil, fine, but you have a very roundabout way of doing it. I will join you in disdaining the exchange of meaningful for meaningless, and I will join you in disdain for confusing the bad with the good. I will not join you, however, in saying the Good is good and the Bad is bad, and never the twain shall meet. Such a position, to me, has its own stink of "practical certainty," and if that makes me neutral or sweet or soft or somehow shrinks my experience of the world, so be it.
Ok, so its not obvious.. to you..
How did we get from Gen 1-3 to Gen. 20.?.. Did I fall asleep.?.
Just re-read the historical account of Abraham and Abimelech.. (Gen 20..) don't see any metaphorical images there.. We maybe not so obviously have a different understanding of "God breathed"... as in what scripture is.. but thats O.K. with me.. I'm not too smart and have to rely on what appears real and practical to me.. I love hearing what seems real and practical others.. Who knows.. maybe you can learn me some new stuff.. And God Bless you if you can get something thru my thick skull.. God has been trying for years.. it ain't easy..
The thought of a tree with good and evil fruit hanging on it seems laughable to me though, unless observed through a metaphorical instrument.. then it seems so logical deep and far reaching in scope.. Jesus taught mostly in metaphor you know.. Is Jesus God.?.. If he was he still is, if he wasnt he still isn't..
Sorry, that's EXODUS Chapter 20. (verse 19).
My Bad.
No problem.. keep on churchin..
Here we have an unspecified number of persons who have been blind since birth who agree they would like to know something about elephants. So they find one (or more accutately one has been found for them), and each goes about exploring it, recording the incoming sense impressions of it, from whatever part of the elephant is most accessible to him. One man has the trunk, another, the tail, another a leg, and so forth. Each is supposed to digest his experience, and report back to the group. In this way, a “composite picture” of the elephant can be formed. At least that is the expectation: For each blind man “testifies” to what he has “seen,” and the group duly records his report.
But does any of this really tell us anything about the elephant? For first of all, the elephant has been “reduced” to a part to be investigated by men whose sensory apparatus is hampered. Then they make their reports. The presupposition is that all the blind men speak a common language, and so the several reports are completely intelligible to the group as well as to their respective speakers. But I haven’t seen the elephant yet….
Is this what we mean by illusion — the expectation that wholes can be known by their parts, by men who are blind; and then their work product will be communicated to the rest of us as a comprehensive account of “elephant?” In other words, can an elephant be understood in terms of a process like this?
I think the problem with the “blind man approach” is that it takes the stance of the observer supposedly being “apart” from what he observes, and not “a part” of the system he observes. But both relativity theory and quantum field theory, it seems to me, strongly imply that the observer is a part of and participant in the system he observes. And so, what would the “elephant analogy” look like to someone who is consciously a part and participant of the system he observes?
Here’s a “horse analogy,” from Dr. Grandpierre. I like it a lot because it understands the universe as an “organic unit,” which is what field theory seems to suggest (for fields are spatially and temporally universal).
“If the Universe is an organic unit, it must be more than just the sum of its parts. That given, to what extent can the Universe be understood by examining its elements? The Universe cannot be imagined after the fashion of an imaginary creature who, for instance, living inside a horse, and knowing just a few molecules of the horse, tries to imagine, on this basis, what the horse itself could look like. If this hypothetical observer gets to know, let us say, three or four protein molecules, it might say that the horse must be an enormous protein molecule. For an elementary creature sitting inside and getting acquainted with a couple of horse molecules, it is not easy to find out the essence of a horse: what “being a horse” means, what it is like, what it looks like, what it does, what it feels and thinks, how its life goes, what kinds of pleasures and experiences it has. It is uncertain that this creature could imagine what a fiery steed this horse is; and when a man is riding it at full gallop, what kind of experiences are lived by the horse. Then again, can we hope at all to somehow understand the universe as a whole? At least this example shows that we can see the structure only by recognizing the relationships, by understanding, for example, why a horse is a horse, what its structure and construction are like, what kinds of relationships and existential qualities it has. Therefore, in order to understand the real nature of the horse — and by the same token, the real nature of the Universe — we must examine the relationships that give its substance.”Our imaginary observer here seems to have the same problem as the passel of blind men. And its reports about its intended object are just as suspect. Or so it seems to me.
But if these sorts of experiences are what define “illusion,” then every observer who thinks, speaks, or writes about his observations is in the illusion business. I just prefer to recognize this phenomenon as an example of human limitation, which is cognitive (or epistemological) in these cases. For every observer has only a very partial view of the whole; and his understanding of it is further complicated by his utter dependency on it, as part and participant. The accounts of different observers will differ accordingly.
And so it seems the best course is to “examine the relationships that give its substance.” Now we are in the realm of non-phenomenal reality. Again. But hopefully this time we can say that truth is not a human construct; it is a human discovery, and yet again a quest. Truth is the exclusive province of God. He reveals it to us freely; we can reliably be guided by His Truth in our search for the truth of reality, by the light and grace of the Holy Spirit.
The alternative is to put man in charge of “the truth business.” Which I think is a thoroughly contemptible idea. If you disagree, just look around you — at the poisonous and poisoning “climate of opinion” that is regnant today. There are just too many people in public life today who are either outright liars, or adepts in “telling the truth skillfully”; meaning they shave the truth wherever possible, and very carefully; but still use it as “the front” for their operations.
May the Lord save us from this horrific, hideous Kultursmog -- which is a prime example of how the collective illusions of second-reality dwellers seeking dominance in our culture and political society have become actually effective in our everyday world.
To sum up: This “blind person” who “swims” in universal fields (that would be me) concludes that the Light (that casts the “shadows” in Plato’s Cave) is the Truth, the Logos of the Beginning that is “beyond” the human world; and speaking as a Christian, it is the Word of God in and by which human souls participate in the divine Life bought for us by the Sacrifice of our Lord, Jesus Christ; which is communicated to human souls by virtue of the Grace of God which is the Holy Spirit.
One is, of course, always completely free to try to make a life and a world in and by means of the Kultursmog. To such I heartily say: Good Luck and buona fortuna.
Thank you so much, Alamo-Girl, for your outstanding essay/posts today!
Lady, that was just crystal singing.. Thanks..
Like that abstract line of numbers, I hope this sublime discussion goes on forever. Especially through the weekend, where I will surely intersect with it . . .
In the the translations of Genesis from ancient Hebrew here and the commentary here I find the overarching theme of chaos to order to be most interesting.
We're all Christians on this ping, so I'm sure none of us would suggest that anything could be beyond God's power though there may be things excluded by His will.
Concerning the Gosse Omphalos hypothesis, if anyone is interested:
The omphalos hypothesis was named after the title of an 1857 book by Philip Henry Gosse in which he argued that in order for the world to be "functional", God must have created the Earth with mountains, canyons, trees with growth rings, Adam and Eve with hair, fingernails, and navels (omphalos is Greek for "navel"), and that therefore no evidence we can see of the presumed age of the earth and universe can be taken as reliable.
The Schroeder article(s) were interesting.. Thanks..
I'm concerned more with the future.. but thank you for an interesting insight.. I tend to think the Universe begins at mankind is arrogant.. or even the earth.. Biblical mankind seems to not care about this planet before the Garden of Eden.. like "the Painter" painted only one painting "the Earth with the Universe as Landscape".. can't prove that there were more "paintings", but then we can't prove the Garden of Eden either... Jesus on the otherhand proves that earth is something special.. else why the drama.. I don't see an intelligent God as a drama Queen King..
Who knows maybe earth is a re-worked painting because of some de-facing of some sort..(holding to the metaphor).. We may never know, or care, in the future.. its the future that counts.. thats where my heart is.. Marana tha..
Truly we are all observer/participants in this universe with a finite view on our own worldline. And we see through a glass darkly. Our own abilities, imaginations and limitations may distort our view much like the observer in the horse or the ten blind men describing the elephant.
And so it seems the best course is to “examine the relationships that give its substance.” Now we are in the realm of non-phenomenal reality. Again. But hopefully this time we can say that truth is not a human construct; it is a human discovery, and yet again a quest. Truth is the exclusive province of God. He reveals it to us freely; we can reliably be guided by His Truth in our search for the truth of reality, by the light and grace of the Holy Spirit…
To sum up: This “blind person” who “swims” in universal fields (that would be me) concludes that the Light (that casts the “shadows” in Plato’s Cave) is the Truth, the Logos of the Beginning that is “beyond” the human world; and speaking as a Christian, it is the Word of God in and by which human souls participate in the divine Life bought for us by the Sacrifice of our Lord, Jesus Christ; which is communicated to human souls by virtue of the Grace of God which is the Holy Spirit.
Those who stay in His Light, ever aware of that structure, can be on the same page – listening with an open mind and contributing what they can – and maybe, just maybe, get a better idea of what that horse or elephant or reality “is”.
But those who hide from the Light or reject the Great Hierarchy of Being – have begun with a closed mind. Like in the original Buddhist parable and Christian poem based on it, they blindly determine their own “truth” and argue it bitterly.
A number of disciples went to the Buddha and said, "Sir, there are living here in Savatthi many wandering hermits and scholars who indulge in constant dispute, some saying that the world is infinite and eternal and others that it is finite and not eternal, some saying that the soul dies with the body and others that it lives on forever, and so forth. What, Sir, would you say concerning them?"
The Buddha answered, "Once upon a time there was a certain raja who called to his servant and said, 'Come, good fellow, go and gather together in one place all the men of Savatthi who were born blind... and show them an elephant.' 'Very good, sire,' replied the servant, and he did as he was told. He said to the blind men assembled there, 'Here is an elephant,' and to one man he presented the head of the elephant, to another its ears, to another a tusk, to another the trunk, the foot, back, tail, and tuft of the tail, saying to each one that that was the elephant.
"When the blind men had felt the elephant, the raja went to each of them and said to each, 'Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?'
"Thereupon the men who were presented with the head answered, 'Sire, an elephant is like a pot.' And the men who had observed the ear replied, 'An elephant is like a winnowing basket.' Those who had been presented with a tusk said it was a ploughshare. Those who knew only the trunk said it was a plough; others said the body was a grainery; the foot, a pillar; the back, a mortar; the tail, a pestle, the tuft of the tail, a brush.
"Then they began to quarrel, shouting, 'Yes it is!' 'No, it is not!' 'An elephant is not that!' 'Yes, it's like that!' and so on, till they came to blows over the matter.
"Brethren, the raja was delighted with the scene.
"Just so are these preachers and scholars holding various views blind and unseeing.... In their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome, wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality is thus and thus."
Then the Exalted One rendered this meaning by uttering this verse of uplift,
The Blind Men and the Elephant - John Godfrey Saxe
It was six men of Indostan To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation Might satisfy his mind
The First approached the Elephant, And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side, At once began to bawl:
“God bless me! but the Elephant Is very like a wall!”
The Second, feeling of the tusk, Cried, “Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp? To me ’tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant Is very like a spear!”
The Third approached the animal, And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands, Thus boldly up and spake:
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant Is very like a snake!”
The Fourth reached out an eager hand, And felt about the knee.
“What most this wondrous beast is like Is mighty plain,” quoth he;
“ ‘Tis clear enough the Elephant Is very like a tree!”
The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, Said: “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most; Deny the fact who can
This marvel of an Elephant Is very like a fan!”
The Sixth no sooner had begun About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail That fell within his scope,
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant Is very like a rope!”
And so these men of Indostan Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right, And all were in the wrong!
Moral:
So oft in theologic wars, The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen!
From your previous musings I figured that present and future were far more important to you than the past. Thank you for confirming that.
I join you in looking forward.
Maranatha, Jesus!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.