A day in the Galilee

One thing is for sure, and that is that Capernaum is a small and inconspicuous place, especially for the origins of an entirely new faith. Visiting the ancient village and then discussing Jesus’ teachings helped me to make what I think is an important connection. Jesus’ teachings represented and were intentionally a reversal of traditional social values in his day. He emphasized this reversal in his avoidance of the larger towns and cities in the Galilee. A significant religious movement would be expected to begin in a politically significant place, like Tiberias or Sepphoris. Of course, Jesus may have been conducting his ministry in a subtle way so as to avoid disproportionate imperial attention. However, it is just as likely that he meant to “say something” through his attention to the small villages and hamlets of northern Israel.

I think it's also important that I say this. I spent much of the day prior to our time at the Jordan River wondering how I might feel as I abstained from being baptized, or more accurately, from re-enacting my baptism. My reason for abstaining in the first place is multi-faceted, but is ultimately theological in scope. I have no problem with commemorating an important religious event. Memory is, of course, integral to the life of a community. And although the Bible seems to mandate one baptism, I’m sure the ontological legitimacy of the event (whatever that might be) is not hampered by re-enactment. No, my reason has to do with what is an emerging and simultaneously strong element of my identity. I am, insofar as cosmological conviction is concerned, a non-theist. I do not, at present, believe in the existence of a supernatural being or beings. Neither do I imagine the divine to be some sort of “ground of all Being” or “No-thing” as Paul Tillich suggested. I simply do not hold to the conviction that such forces or entities are foundational to reality. Therefore, by abstaining from baptism I felt, in a way, spiritually strong. Despite a waning desire to participate in the life of the church, I conducted myself in a manner faithful to what I feel that I know. And for this, I have no apology.

fede di origine

I'm leaving for the UK in two days. Apart from my obvious excitement to see my one true love again, my enthusiasm has a religious flavor. Yes, I mean a trip to Scotland, England, and Italy will be historically enlightening with regard to my 'faith of origin'. But I am also quite sure that it promises something a bit deeper than educational reflection. Walking where the church patriarchs and leaders of classical and medieval Europe made monumental contributions to the development of Christianity, seeing the places where these men and women made courageous (and often fatal) stands for what they believed in, and, no less, visiting the locations of grotesque and horrific acts that were committed in the name of κυριος και σωτηρας should, I hope, give me greater affirmation for my desire to promote collaboration and peace among religious traditions and ethnic groups. I imagine that it will also deeply re-impress upon me a feeling of godlessness and mistrust in any conceptions regarding the supernatural.
But other than that, I hope to be very much surprised. Whatever mystical feeling, rational sentiment, or conglomeration of the two comes my way, I hope to embrace it with open arms and be willing to preserve it for future reflection. A wise woman once told me that international travel changes everything about you, not least your cosmology. In preparation of this (if that is even possible), I am conditioning myself to let the waters of Derrida's neologism, diffèrance, to wash over me in waves of cultural ineptitude on my part and objectively decentralized significance on the part of the visit. In short, I cannot wait. However, there are two more sleeps between me and my journey.

Thing am I, No?

Let us examine the beauty of no-thingness together
See how it is so richly empty of everything
Watch it slide and spin serenely into immobility
Hear it sing its hymns of silence from peaks of formless mountains
And place your fleshy pink hands on its massively minuscule corpus

It is celestial and uninterrupted space
For the forming of that which is
And if it Were, then we would not Be
For our being is birthed from the no-thing all around and within
And we swim in it until the drowning that all thing-ness things endure

Cosmic journey through the void
How many of us do not even see it?

my favorite excerpt from Waking Life

If we're looking at the highlights of human development, you have to look at the evolution of the organism and then at the development of its interaction with the environment. Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life perceived through the hominid coming to the evolution of mankind. Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man. Now, interestingly, what you're looking at here are three strings: biological, anthropological -- development of the cities -- and cultural, which is human expression.

Now, what you've seen here is the evolution of populations, not so much the evolution of individuals. And in addition, if you look at the time scales that are involved here -- two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, 100,000 years for mankind as we know it -- you're beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then when you get to agricultural, when you get to scientific revolution and industrial revolution, you're looking at 10,000 years, 400 years, 150 years. You're seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time. What that means is that as we go through the new evolution, it's gonna telescope to the point we should be able to see it manifest itself within our lifetime, within this generation.

The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence. The analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism. And you knit the two together with neurobiology. Before on the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate. But under the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, noncompetitive grouping. Okay, independent from the external.

And what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, you produce a neo-human, okay, with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that's only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until we reach a crescendo in a way could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human? human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences. Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space.

And the manifestations of this neo-human-type evolution, manifestations could be dramatically counter-intuitive. That's the interesting part. The old evolution is cold. It's sterile. It's efficient, okay? And its manifestations of those social adaptations. We're talking about parasitism, dominance, morality, okay? Uh, war, predation, these would be subject to de-emphasis. These will be subject to de-evolution. The new evolutionary paradigm will give us the human traits of truth, of loyalty, of justice, of freedom. These will be the manifestations of the new evolution. And that is what we would hope to see from this. That would be nice.

Eat this Book

In the beginning: A song about Jesus,

Felt boards, Moses, plagues and Sinai,

Children's church, costumes, Israel is a stage,

Sunday school lessons and a sponge for a brain,

Then came the questions- what is the Book is saying?

Metaphor, story, history, fact?

Narrative, allusion, typology, interpretive act?

Did the patriarchs live? Did the chabod come down?

Is the Torah composite or God's great monolith?

Read the Bible again for the first time,

Took Borg's advice, devoured Crossan once more,

Beat Empire with God,

Beat God with Dawkins,

Beat the Bible with Source, Form, Redaction, History,

Literary- modern, postmodern, post-structural, post-colonial, post-everything,

Beat myself over the head with Spinoza, Reimarus, Strauss, Schliermacher, Schweitzer, Wellhausen, Kasemann, this man and that man,

When will this end?

Niebuhr made me doubt, Barth made me hope,

Tillich gave me the courage to be and Moltmann gave me all,

Commentaries, dictionaries and lexicons,

Excursus, prolegomena, hermeneutic,

Waddell's Spirit gave way to Fiorenza's suspicion and Bultmann's doubt,

And in the end that's all I could ever hope to have,

No more song, only text,

Only confusion, and a mind that never rests.

An Excursus over iced cofee

I'm the most thoughtful in two places- Lake Hollingsworth (especially when running it) and Mitchells. I'm downtown in that familiar coffeehouse today, at the same wooden table where I usually find myself seated. Iced coffee (house blend), book (The Memoirs of God), and of course, Macbook (surrendering my auditory canal and tympanic membrane to Colour Revolt) . And while I enjoy all of these trappings, they are just that. I am encumbered by their demands for my attention and feel fettered by the cognitive engagement they drain from my frontal cortex. If I had any strength of will, I would make my own thoughts and voice louder than the waves of light and sound that they emit without repentance. This is so much easier though. It helps me sneak back further and deeper into the cave of individualism, where I don't have to look anyone in the face, speak to anyone, feign interest, or pretend that I'm not bothered by Romanticism and the illegitimate children of postmodernity.
[Excursus- Today's college student is a paradox. She is realistic about her limitations, yet dares to dream of apocalyptic utopia. He doesn't believe in the devil, but believes that God loves him. She acknowledges the fact of natural selection, but will never abandon her pre-Enlightenment belief in love and hope as cosmic forces. I can't stomach any of that. The post-structuralists tell us that either/or is a false question, that your reality is as veritable as mine. I would agree to the extent that our realities are for the most part optical delusions. Yes, delusions. Illusion is acceptable and inevitable. But unless people recognizes the illusion, their worldview is absolutely and entirely misled and deformed.]
I would rather be running. There, all of my dormant frustration can be transferred into kinetic energy. There, I am impervious. Life's discomforts are no longer threatening, even to this chemically-imbalanced freak. I embrace the cold wind, the beating heat of solar radiation, the pain caused by the slow and steady build-up of lactic acid in my calves, the insects making their way into my outer ear and mouth, humidity and precipitation. I "feel" alive.
But . . . when it's all said and done, nothing has really improved. So, back to the books, the coffee, the music, the blogs that serve as a receptacle for mental vomit. Life is rather monotonous, isn't it?