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?

IIIII

I see you coming to life,
In strange ways,
Inverted,
Ilks outward as if you don't mind,
Inwardly pining for what's already yours.

touching Heaven

Last night, I was minding my own business at a Starbucks in Lakeland (Lake Miriam) when I was approached by a homeless man who just began to talk to me. He said that he hoped I didn't mind if he spoke with me, that he was lonely and sometimes just needed to talk to someone. So I asked him to sit with down with me at my table and I began to listen to his story . . . a pitifully tragic story of repeated failure and defeat, of loneliness and dejection. From the heavy smell of alcohol emanating from his breath (along with all sorts of other scents), I could deduce that he had tried to numb the lifetime of pain that he had endured and was taking nearly two hours to tell me about. More than once he stopped and wept . . . a pathetic man in a pathetic condition. In fact, if this man had lived in first-century Palestine, he would be called cursed and not only avoided by choice but it would be a legal mandate to stay abreadth of his uncleanness. The poor and destitute were counted as nothing and had no place in society. So it is no difficult thing to understand that Jesus (who might very well have been a student of the great Pharisee Hillel) faced certain shame and ostracization for ministering to (touching) the shameful and ostracized ones in Galilee. He even proclaimed the cultural blasphemy that these unclean wretches were the greatest of the blessed membes of the Kingdom of Heaven. Obviously he wasn't speaking literally . . . these people would never enter into any real palatial inheritance. He was making an important societal metaphor concerning priority: how can a nation stand before its God or even stand at all if it forgets and even curses its less fortunate and destitute?So I put forth the same question in our context: How can we stand before God or even exist as a community of faith if we don't take the time to touch and declare blessed the cursed of our community?

Inadequate

As of late, I have felt very inadequate. It goes like this: As I venture further into my passion for biblical history and scholarship, I realize how much I don't know and how much so many people in the field do know. Simultaneously, I am feeling more and more disconnected from the call to ordained ministry. Don't get me wrong, I still feel a deep desire to minister to people and help them, but my emotional connection to the ministry itself is waning. . .quickly. Therefore, inadequacy sums it up. And I'm not going to attach some cheesy/tired platitude about God being adequate or sufficient when I'm not. It's true, I'm sure. . .but truthfully, at the moment, I don't feel it.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of Your waterfalls

I often wonder how God thinks and feels. Is He one to experience human emotion, or are our anthropopathisms a mere grasp at the unnamed and immeasurable emotions of the One? What can be said of a being or force that at once feels and acts for, towards, and because of a countless quantity of life-forms in Its own universe or creation? Obviously, we could never fully comprehend what He perceives or how He gauges existence (I use "He" because it is traditional). But I am confident that at times, He and I are one in thought or feeling. For a moment, His sympathy transcends His own transcendence, and we are one in the immanence of Suchness; and through that, I am able to, if but for a fleeting moment, know a bit of the "more than Presence" that I claim to serve. And of course, if I were to give more of myself, I might encounter more of these bittersweet jots of "it all". I imagine, then, that knowing or "having relationship with" God has very little to do with acquiescing to a system of soteriological dogma or practice (in other words, it's not about believing certain things to be factually true or behaving a certain way). This relationship is absolutely defined by acknowledging the Eternal, and consciously interacting with Him whose throne is in Heaven. We can learn the way of that celestial home, and with the Spirit, make it a reality here for the generations that come after us. That is the only Heaven we will ever know. . .