'Sick of Being Sick'

My cousin Cindy posted on Facebook that she was "sick of being sick" and wanted to get better so she could accomplish some things. Her phrase struck a chord with me and put me in mind of the human condition, generally, according to Biblical teaching and thinkers, theist and atheist, who build on that foundation. Every schoolboy knows that Adam and Eve sinned, disobeyed God, in the garden of Eden, and were exiled from paradise; and so all humanity is living in exile. All of us are infected with original sin, a spiritual disease that requires divine intervention and remediation. Whether or not one accepts the Genesis version of human alienation, the Marxian, Freud's cultural psychoanalysis of the human malaise, Hindu, Buddhist or Islamic paths to salvation, the point here is that many, many wise people agree that something is fundamentally wrong within the human way of being. Many do not realize they're spiritually sick. The first principle of Buddhism is to become Buddha, that is, wake up. This was also the zeitgeist of the 1960s in western nations (raising consciousness, implying the human mind is not sufficiently aware), an era I passed through to today, 2010. What's the answer? Where is the solution, the cure? Here's the hypothesis: become sick of being sick, investigate self-loathing, self-disgust, examine yourself. Are you morally or spiritually sick?

Time Travel

Time travel is a leitmotif of science fiction; it's an imaginary wonder to go back in time to witness some important event or to go forward to witness what the unknown future has in store. In reality, we all travel through time (and space), but at the speed of 'life,' the speed of earthly existence involving seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years. What I am today is not quite the same as yesterday. What I'll be tomorrow I can guess, but only God knows. God knows past, present and future!

Think about travelling through eternity, living in a place where time is not. First of all, to live in eternity is to live outside of the present universe. What's it like outside the universe? No time. No aging. No development. No, wait, that's wrong, there is development. There are things happening in eternity. The great One lives in eternity. The Almighty speaks. Angels exist. What do they do? They serve God. Some angels rebelled against God, the Bible says. So there is independence and freedom, even in eternity, in God's presence. There is what we call 'evil' outside the cosmos, but it has escaped into our world. So there are pathways between heaven and earth, so to speak.

Living in eternity means living with God, but with the imaginary possibility of living without God. Living in time means living without God, but with the possibility of going to Him. In eternity there is no death, beings there live forever. This world was created to bring death or cessation to reality. This world is the garbage dump of heaven.

[Naturally, we want to escape this world. We want to enter eternity. The Devil is not allowed back into heaven. We were made to draw the evil one out of heaven, to expose him, so to speak. Travelling through eternity is ourselves, perfected, with wings, awestruck at the creations of God.]

The Purpose of Art and the Purpose of Creation

I recently gained a small insight into the nature of reality. This revelation came from pondering some new artwork I became aware of on the Web ( see http://www.christinesoccio.com/) and online conversation w/the artist. It comes under the heading, 'things are not what they seem.'

The artwork impressed me with a sense of beauty and mystery and goodness and consisted of landscape painting in an impressionistic style, panoramic scenes of ocean, lake, desert, sky and also still-life subjects and other subjects. The artist told me she tries "to keep the wonder and awe about our existence and all that God has created in my heart as much as I can." Fine. "Wonder and awe." Note that wonder and awe are temporary feelings, they fade and go away. The artist likes these feelings, but it's a struggle, not easy to retain them. The human 'heart' is the center of individual existence. It is an open space inside us for the storing of what is most important to a person. "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matt. 6.21). The artist, like most of us, puts high value on wonder and awe, but these emotions don't stay in our hearts. A child experiences wonder on seeing and touching a flower garden, but later, older, walks by, day after day, without a thought or little thought for the flowers. This tells me that something is wrong w/the human heart. It can't keep safe these highly valued emotions. I would guess that people do drugs to try to rekindle these emotions. Also, think ye not that art, whether literary or pictorial, attempts to rekindle these emotions in us?

What if Adam & Eve felt wonder and awe every instant of their lives in Paradise? This, maybe, was their, and hence our, natural emotional state. The serpent lured them away from well-being to knowledge of evil. Deprivation is evil. Being without wonder and awe is evil. The Garden of Eden is far from modern man.

'2001: A Space Odyssey,' a Film that Explores the Darkness

Stanley Kubrick's landmark sci-fi film, '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) is a movie that explores the philosophical darkness that surrounds humankind. This is the very same darkness referenced in the first chapter of Genesis and the first chapter of John's Gospel, a darkness so deep, so extensive, that the universe can't contain it. One may properly term this darkness, metaphysical, or, to borrow a phrase from the film itself, "beyond the infinite." Only, "beyond the horizon" (Eugene O'Neill) does the darkness end.

Impressionist Review of Soderbergh's 'Solaris'

Steven Soderbergh wrote and directed the film, Solaris (2002), based on the science-fiction novel of the same name by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, published in 1961. It is fitting to include a review of this film in this blog, 'Mystery of Existence and God,' because it deals with the philosophical issues of the meaning of life and the debate about the existence of God. The movie includes a scene wherein friends sit around a table arguing back and forth the existence of God or a "supreme intelligence." The concept of 'mystery' comes up in that discussion in ways that show 'mystery' to be a fundamental category of rationality that points toward God, though the majority at the table back the atheist viewpoint. The movie is about humans in a space station orbiting a planet, Solaris, attempting to assess its value as a potential source of energy. Strange happenings aboard the station lead to madness and deaths. A psychiatrist named Chris Kelvin is sent to the space station in a last-ditch effort to salvage the mission. The story unfolds from this character's perspective.

I saw Solaris at a movie theater with my nephew, Michael, when it came out and also several times at home on dvd. I like the movie very much and think it brilliant in portraying humans confronted by an alien power, trying to understand that power. In this case, the power emanates from Solaris and involves creating beings that appear to be human, based on Solaris somehow delving into the minds of the inhabitants of the orbiting station while they're sleeping. Thus Kelvin's deceased (by her own hand) wife Rheya is recreated in his cabin at bedside. The planet Solaris seems to be alive and intelligent and capable of creating life-forms.

As Kelvin reminisces and dreams of his life on Earth w/Rheya, we notice that it is continually raining. When we first meet Kelvin, at the film's start, carrying on his psychological practice before he's asked to visit Solaris, rain falling in an urban setting is a big part of the background. The film's opening credit - "Lightstorm Entertainment" - is accompanied by audio of rainfall and the first image of the film is a windowpane w/raindrops falling outside and on the glass. What is the meaning of this preponderance of rain in this film? How do the phenomena of rain, the absence of sun, gray cloudy skies, raincoats, umbrellas, wetness, enveloping Kelvin and Rheya, relate to the science-fiction themes of the movie, Solaris and its mystifying creative power, the terror and puzzlement and madness of the occupants of the space station? This is called an 'impressionist' review of the film because the rain sets the mood of the film for the viewer and mood is impressionistic, something inside an individual caused by something outside, special to him or her, like how stars made van Gogh feel, evident in his painting, 'Starry Night.'

Rain connotes different things for people at different times, of course. For a farmer in a drought, rain is a godsend, saving his crops; but too much rain may cause grapes to rot and the vintner to sigh and maybe shake her fists. Rain in Solaris is like rain in Elmore James' 'The Sky is Crying,' ". . . can't you see the tears roll down the street . . .," something emotional, a feeling sad and wistful. This is the context of Kelvin's past w/Rheya and his present w/the Rheya of Solaris. Rain has large power on planet Earth. Rain and water are necessary for life. How rain became associated with sadness, I'm not sure, but I can remember intoning the words to that child's rhyme, 'rain rain go away, come back another day' numerous times and there is sadness and wishing for sunshine that goes w/the words. I propose an analogy between rain's creative power on Earth and that of Solaris in outer space. We have forgotten the mystery that is contained in the rain (because we think that h2o and meteorology explain it), but the mystery of Solaris points to the Creator. Ask Chris Kelvin.

God=Intelligence+Eternity

What or who is God? The many religions of man have answers to this question, but I wish to propose an answer not based on religion, but on logic and experience. A simple answer I've come up with is encapsulated in the title to this post, God is intelligence alive forever. Intelligence and eternity are logical concepts, and so too is existence. Each idea may be explained in a sentence amenable to analysis and understanding. Intelligence is the quality of beings knowing things. Eternity is persistence of something forever. Existence means being alive or actual. Each concept has an opposite which helps to define it. The opposite of intelligence is dumbness or not being able to know things. Eternity's opposite is a moment in time. The antithesis of existence is death or not being alive or being unreal. God is everlasting intelligence. Imagine your own mind, not subject to time and death, alive forever. Your mind would not grow tired, but could sleep. Your mind would know how it works, having figured that out and would figure out a lot more, like how to make things, other minds for instance. This is a crude way of understanding intelligence existing eternally. If we persist in imagination, examining the thesis of intelligence existing forever, like counting numbers without end, in sequence, we're dumbstruck by the realization that anything is possible and the possible contains eternity, a kingdom without time. YHWH. (If the most intelligent species in the universe has the idea of possibility, then there must be a knower beyond them. Without the notion of possiblility, there is sameness, no development.) Look at human science grappling with the universe and how it got here and how it works. How the universe is working indicates to scientists that the universe started in an infinitesimal big bang, yet we may ask, was this explosion of matter just a quantum fluctuation in a vast void or perhaps the result of a prior contraction of material or maybe two bubbles colliding. Wherever there is a horizon, there is something beyond the horizon, no?

Jesus and the Word

Jesus and the word, the word spoken which changed lives 2000 years ago and ever since, are interchangeable, that is , the man, Jesus, is somehow contained in his word. This is true for all figures of the past, who have their words recorded. We learn of them from their recorded words and for words that are not self-recorded, but by others, historical critics try to determine what is authentic and what isn't. Words from the past, recorded in written media, are subject to errors of transmission, even in the oral stage before they're written down. Jesus, did he say, the kingdom of God is at hand and among you and in your midst or inside of you? Rudolf Bultmann, 20th cent. NT scholar, wrote a book entitled, Jesus and the Word. He said, Jesus' word is basically eschatolgical, God's kingdom is finally here and every person is subject to God's kingdom. Bultmann claimed this message is valid today and always. Other NT interpreters emphasize other aspects of Jesus' word, but what a layperson should realize is that in reading the gospels they will encounter the historical Jesus, in this passage or that passage, but not know it for sure. Jesus died and millenia have passed and yet the word is still there in the NT and followers still come and go in every century. The church exists as an institution of Jesus' followers, but the informal attachment between Jesus and the quick is what is vital. This attachment comes through the word, the message of Jesus which is the gospel, the good news of salvation, transformation of self from ordinary worldly existence to God's royal rule. This rule subsists in the heart.

John Henry, Character in American Folklore

Growing up in the 1960s, one of my children's books was a restatement of the legend of John Henry, steel-driving man on the American railroads of the 1800s, as these were built to supplement and partly replace the use of horses as a mode of transport. John Henry was a mighty man swinging the hammer, driving those steel stakes that held the rails in place. One day, the invention of a steam engine that could mechanically drive in these rail stakes arrived on the scene where John Henry and his fellows worked. A contest between the machine and John Henry was arranged and John Henry outperformed the machine, winning the race, completing his assigned steel-driving before the machine finished its allotted task. Unfortunately, John Henry died, with his hammer in his hands, in the midst of this victory. This story engendered within my breast profound sympathy and sorrow for John Henry and his loss of life. I've never forgotten the legend of John Henry and as a fan of science fiction, have often noted the theme of man versus machine in that genre of literature. Now, as an old man working as a clerk at a major shipping firm, I've learned that a device will soon replace human labelling of packages as they whiz by on the conveyor belts. I guess I'll have to find another job or some other task to do within the company. May God help me. I've realized that such an ingenious device was coming, probably inevitable. Now, I face it. The future, what will be man's place in the future? Time, the schema of past-present-future which encompasses our lives, do we really understand it? Humanity measures time, but isn't time measuring us?

Jesus and Sinners

I've read the book review by Burgert De Wet of Sinners: Jesus and his Earliest Followers by Greg Carey (RBL; see bookreviews.org). De Wet states that "Carey also introduces another point of interest right at the end of this chapter [i.e., chap. 1]: even though Jesus forgives her sins, he does not require repentance." This statement interprets Luke 7: 36-50, the pericope of Jesus at the home of Simon the Pharisee, involving a woman who washes Jesus' feet (the woman is a sinner to Simon & Jesus). De Wet goes on: "Carey continues to develop this line of thought in chapter 2 and concludes that, rather than calling on individual sinners to repent, Jesus is presented as one who encourages repentance in general. We are thus left with the challenging thought that Jesus is continuously seen in the company of sinners, accepting them unconditionally, without criticizing them or calling upon them to repent." This is a valid point, considering the testimony of the synoptic gospels. The witness of John is different, to wit: "Quit your sins, or something worse may happen to you" (5.14, TEV), to a sick man lying by the Bethzatha pool, or "go, but do not sin again (8.11, TEV), to an adulterous woman. Does John's Gospel conflict with the synoptics? I think not. John's testimony is more personal. What do you think?