Posted on 09/24/2003 11:25:56 PM PDT by betty boop
Excellent! But aren't you arming the enemy a little giving them to me?
(Just kidding.)
Hank
Good point, Hank. Yet I suppose eventually more will be "seen" as more of the universe is "lit up" when the light from what is the present Hubble horizon eventually gets here. Maybe not by you or me, but by some future generation. So the question isn't really answerable as a flat-out negative, as far as we know.
It has nothing to do with feeling.
Questions like this don't have much to do with "feeling."
I’m glad you mentioned the fig tree. Speaking of what one can or cannot know, it is an example of something which requires spiritual perception.
The fig tree is a metaphor for Israel which is “a type” for the Christian walk. In the firstripe Israel was full of promise, but then she went astray:
For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.
Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive [them], and ye shall have [them]. And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses. Mark 11:20-26
Nathanael answered and saith unto him, Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel. Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these. And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. - John 1:47-51
Mark wrote:
... And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon. He did not say it was a charade to provide a spiritual lesson. I believe Mark.
Your view agrees with most of the commentaries. I think the commentaries are mistaken.
Men come to the Bible assuming they know what it teaches, and when they find something that doesn't quite agree with what they expect, they "interpret" it to mean what they want. I only take the plain meaning where it is clear.
The only lesson Jesus himself made from this incident is the lesson on prayer. That's sufficient for me.
People have a very strange Idea that Jesus was not really a human being like other human beings. The Bible says he "became" flesh and blood, that is, a human being. He was not God in a man, He was God become a man, completely a man. Do you suppose Jesus did not have to look where he was walking, find his sandals, and look when he was pouring wine? If he was really a man He would have to, and if He was really a man, he would not know what was on a fig tree until He looked.
Hank
To drive my point home wrt spiritual discernment, I aver that I consulted not a single commentary in coming up with post 124. The meaning was known to me.
Well, that's what's so nice about belonging to the human race. What we cannot do in our generation might well be done in a future generation. The point is the evolution of human consciousness and knowledge does not stop when either you or I do.
I guess to have a "comfort level" WRT such an observation requires, as Eric Voeglin said (quoted above), an experience of transcendence.
For me, the take-away from an experience such as that is the knowledge, seen in the spirit and by the spirit, that there really is -- ontologically speaking -- a human community, there really is a brotherhood of mankind.
To judge by what I see all around me today, human societies become increasingly unlivable in the degree they depart from what the transcendent vision reports as the truthful norm of human being and existence.
Some have put the point more crudely, bluntly: Man is by his nature a "social animal." The point ought to be clear.
Here's where Platonists and Autonomists part ways, even if they agree the point that sends them out onto different roads is true.
The reason I am not drawn to Objectivist or Autonomist perspectives is that neither spends much time or effort elaborating the problem of human society. One even gets the feeling that the main reason O+As want to elaborate a system of laws is to protect them from society.
While I can well understand why and how that is a reasonable concern these days, it does not follow that any body of thought that pretends to be philosophy or science can profit much from an extreme preoccupation with the discrete, individual self. Balance is needed.
Which is not to say that individual people aren't important and loved by other people. And moreover, each person is individually, uniquely, and eternally beloved and sacred to God. To say that balance is needed at the human/social scale is merely to recognize that "parts" have relations to "wholes," whether they want to have them or not.
There have been times -- say, reading Ayn Rand, and contemplating the wonderment of a Dagney Taggert or even Hank Reardon -- when I realized the relentless egocentric self-preoccupation of such characters seemed to border on the monomaniacal. I hardly regard them as "role models" myself.
It was like Romanticism on steroids, of the "Invictus" type. You know the poem I mean: "I am the Master of my Fate, I am the Captain of my Soul." (Or did I get that backwards?) Here we have the romantic picture of the Byronic individualist, manifesting an indominable will to always ACT, to always PREVAIL against ALL ODDS!
Well this would be all well and good, except for the untidy fact that human existence and experience universally includes more than just the ACTION PRINCIPLE!!!
It also includes suffering. The Greeks had a name for this: pathos: Our human feeling for the suffering of other human beings.
Pathos isn't about what a man does; pathos refers to what is "done to" a man. It is passion, in the sense of the experience of "suffering" from causes that one did not create. Examples: the loss of a loved one; the desperation of disease, or unrequited love. Victimizations of the self of multifarious description by unscrupulous, disordered others. And then the "final insult," physical death. You get the picture.
The point is: In a certain sense, pathos is the common feature of universal human existential experience, just as much as the "action principle," which gives impetus to the achievements of human reason and creativity....
Man's fate is that he, as an individual soul, participates in reality through action and passion. This is human nature.
This is also the human condition.
We may say that we have no way of knowing what another person knows or feels in his own consciousness. But do we not know the contents of our own? And make some "reasonable" guesses -- given our common humanity, our common existence -- that would make our (yet unacknowledged) neighbor into our brother?
Does that seem too "idealistic" for you, Hank?
Surely you realize by now that precisely this is the language of God's Call to His faithful.
In every age, I might add.
Good point, Hank. [Thank you!] Yet [I knew it couldn't last] I suppose eventually more will be "seen" as more of the universe is "lit up" when the light from what is the present Hubble horizon eventually gets here. Maybe not by you or me, but by some future generation. So the question isn't really answerable as a flat-out negative, as far as we know.
Yes, of course, but then, we cannot know there will be anyone here to see it when it does arrive, even though we suppose there will.
(You might check something for me. Isn't the Hubble horizon the theoretical point at which all matter is moving away from us at velocities that preclude the light from ever reaching us? I really cannot remember, but believe there is such a theoretical "border," if not the Hubble horizon.)
Hank
The MAXIMA, BOOMERANG, and DASI collaborations, which measure minute variations in the CMB, recently reported new results at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. All three agree remarkably about what the “harmonic proportions” of the cosmos imply: not only is the universe flat, but its structure is definitely due to inflation, not to topological defects in the early universe.
The results were presented as plots of slight temperature variations in the CMB that graph sound waves in the dense early universe. These high-resolution “power spectra” show not only a strong primary resonance but are consistent with two additional harmonics, or peaks.
The peaks indicate harmonics in the sound waves that filled the early, dense universe. Until some 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was so hot that matter and radiation were entangled in a kind of soup in which sound waves (pressure waves) could vibrate. The CMB is a relic of the moment when the universe had cooled enough so that photons could "decouple" from electrons, protons, and neutrons; then atoms formed and light went on its way.
Well, if we keep up this kind of intellectual equivocating in the face of urgent existential problems, Hank, then perhaps the human race will die with us (i.e., with our generation). And then the question would be moot.
On your second question, if you haven't read the Tegmark article on quantum multiverses, please do yourself the favor, for it clears up some of the relevant issues WRT theories of universal "horizons." As I recall it was the Level II multiverse model that provided scope for the expansion of the universe to forever outrun human observation. That's a possibility. But there are other even more interesting possibilities (IMHO) as well.
I read that one of the names for our entire expanding (it appears) universe -- encompassing nebulae, galaxies, solar systems, planets, moons, ecosystems, etc. -- is "the Hubble volume." A volume must have a "border" or container of some kind; or it couldn't be a volume.
Earlier on this thread, bigcat00 made an observation about Eros in connection with Plato's thought, and characterized it -- most accurately in my view -- as the passionate love of Truth, which to a Christian like me is another Name of God.
Plato's Eros was taken "to the next level" in Christian faith, where it was christened in the name Agape.
Humans tend to have a nose for truth. That is, if they're paying any attention at all. Which the distractions, din, and sheer cacaphony of life in the present culture often makes difficult.
Still, maybe we just need to "follow the scent" more....
Amen to that, Alamo-Girl!
I often have the acute sense that the signs of God are quite obvious -- in the sense of being "out there 'in plain view'." All you have to do is take a clear-eyed, good-faith look at the human and natural world all around you, and you will see His "signature" everywhere. Or so it seems to me.
Of course, if one is "determined" (i.e., self-determined) to be adverse to "looking" in principle, one won't see anything.
I guess that's the main problem for a whole lot of people these days.
Earlier I had mentioned one of the things that we could not know were the details of the universe beyond a certain distance, because the light from those parts of the universe has not reached us yet. In her response she mentioned the Hubbel horizon.
The horizon I was interested in is the "cosmic light horizon".
Sorry for the confusion.
Hank
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