Why is G-d so cruel in the OT?

[Spiritus_Mundi]

Lib
I think I can connect the dots. Let’s see what the picture looks like.

Egads. That is the whole implication that Godel makes. As he himself summarizes: “Throughout this work we have virtually confined ourselves to the system P, and have merely indicated the applications to other systems. The results will be stated and proved in fuller generality in a forthcoming sequel.”

As you yourself noted, that sequel never appeared. Extending GIT to generalized epistemologies is not a trivial exercise. If Godel ever managed to do so, he left no record. Many people have “rephrased” GIT to apply to whatever general sphere they wish to call udecidable, but without the logical demonstration such extensions are not valid.

It seems like GIT should extend generally to complex epistemologies, but I do not believe it has ever been demonstrated.

The only epistemological system that cannot contain an antinomy is one with infinitely many axioms.

That is not the correct question, though. The question is must a finite epistemology contain paradox? The answer to that question is no. It is not difficult to construct a finite epistemology which contains no paradox. It is difficult to construct one which contains no paradox and is complex enough to be useful. It might be impossible to do so, as you assert, but I know of nobody who has proven that.

Well, I wish you would say what you mean rather than pretending you’re Plato and I’m Aristotle. Since we’re talking about morality, whatever else a brain does is not relevant. Numbers do more than represent quantities, too. (They are both cardinal and ordinal). But that does not exempt number theory from Godel’s propositions.

I have been saying what I mean. Do you object to my asking you questions which are intended to illuminate an area in which we disagree?

“Whatever else” the brain does is not irrelevant when speaking of proving the consistency of a set. “Whatever else” is exactly how we demonstrate that any particular set is consistent. As I noted, this process of supersetting to demonstrate results has no finite end, and thus no end accessibly to the human mind. The existence of an absolute external authority does not provide an escape for this, since the human understanding of said absolute remains bound by the epistemological shell.

As you know, a Peano algebra cannot be proved consistent. But that is, at root, because its axiom set is not transfinite. I don’t know how you make the leap from God’s infinite morality axioms to what He might say about Peano. It seems irrelevant to me.

Actually, Peano Algebra is demonstrably consistent under ZFC. That is, in fact, why Godel’s theorems are called incompleteness theorems rather than inconsistency theorems.

The relevance is that PA provides an example of how the human brain uses something outside of PA to demonstrate the consistency of PA. No god required. It is also an illustration that “undecidably consistent from within” carries no implication of “inconsistent”.

Interestingly, one element of ZFC which allows us to demonstrate the consistency of PA is the ability to speak about infinite sets.

most everybody who (correctly) summarizes Godel’s theorem as applicable to general epistemologies phrases things the same general way.

GIT is second only to quantum dynamics as a source for loose “summary”, IMO.

Siegfried carefully includes “sufficiently complex” and “consistent” in his formulation. Sufficiently complex, in discussion of GIT, is almost always shorthand for “capable of forming a Godel statement.” Now, you have already denied your ability to frame a generalized Godel statement over the set of all moralities (or epistemologies). To the best of my knowledge, nobody else has formulated such a statement.

This is not a minor quibble. Without such a formulation, you abuse GIT by applying it generally to all epistemologies/moralities.

Again, I would like to rely on a consistent morality whose judgments never contradict. Wouldn’t you?

Yes. But I also understand, and have tried to emphasize, the distinction between undecidably consistent from within and consistent. More than that, using GIT[sub]2[/sub] to argue against a finite moral set on the grounds of inconsistency is absurd. GIT holds only when the set is consistent. It can be used to show that a set is inconsistent only if a proof of consistency for the set appears within the set.

In my ironic moments, I like to contemplate the consequences of GIT[sub]2[/sub] on the infallibility of books which claim to be infallible.

It is not necessary that I understand God’s absoluteness . . . It is reliable because it is absolute. God’s axiom set is transfinite and therefore reliable.

Hmmm, doesn’t “reliable” imply that someone is relying upon it? I thougt we were discussing the limits of human knowledge. Neither of us has anything rigorously meaningful to say about the nature of God’s knowledge.

Nothing is revised. What I said originally was: “Without an absolute, nonarbitrary basis for morality, there can be no moral distinction drawn from the very set that presupposes itself to contain not only its own elements, but its own rules.” By its very nature, morality must be consistent and reliable, else it is immoral.

Well, if nothing is revised then your statement remains invalid.

Nothing in GIT lets you conslude that no moral distinction can be drawn from a finite moral set.

And I’m not even going to begin the process of examining how a human being declares a moral set to be immoral. It’s turtles all the way down.

Any moral set with a finite number of axioms is not provably void of any antinomy.

{X:“reading this sentence is the only good”}
Not particularly useful, but finite and devoid of antinomy.

More to the point, though, even if your statement was true it does not carry the consequence of paradox to any arbitrary finite moral set.

[Liberal]

Spiritus

I think I finally get your point. Correct me if I’m wrong. Are you saying that the materialist morality set is not sufficiently complex to contain a paradox?

(By the way, would you agree that one reason the second paper never arrived might be because of the inanely complicated strings that would be required to generalize incompleteness?)

[Spiritus_Mundi]

Well, I am saying that some finite moralities (whether material or not) are not sufficiently complex to contain paradox. This is offered in response to those places where you make universal claims for the characteristics of finite moral/epistemological sets.

I am saying other things, too, which I hope you are also getting.

would you agree that one reason the second paper never arrived might be because of the inanely complicated strings that would be required to generalize incompleteness?

Yes. It might also be that the problem was not in the complexity of the string but in the difficulty of defining a general subset of epistemologies over which GIT holds that is not circularly defined. In other words, how do you eliminate those “simplistic” epistemologies which allow no paradox. Sure, “we can all agree” that they are not generally useful, but that is hardly a rigorous categorization. And I cannot imagine that Godel would have been happy with anything less than a rigorous categorization. After all, he had already proven that any epistemology[sup][/sup] sufficiently complex to imply PA was incomplete. The quotation you cited makes the clear implication that he was expecting to be able to produce a much more general result.
[sup][/sup][sub]insert standard restrictions[/sub]

[jab1]

*Originally posted by Libertarian *
I could have done without the mental picture that I would stand and watch in existential amusement while a man drowns, particularly since I have watched both my father and my mother drown in their own lung mucous.

How was Gaudere to know this? Have you ever told her? (That was quite a tragedy, by the way. I’m sorry to hear about it. My mother is alive, but my father died in 1985 of a stroke.)

What I would do and what I should do might both depend on many many factors, which we’ve covered at some length. Such is the nature of hypotheticals.

Surely you understand how this makes you look like you’re trying to avoid the question.

How do you determine what’s God’s will is?

You don’t “determine” it as by some process of deduction; you either accept or reject it. His will is absolute and axiomatic.

How do you know it’s God’s will you’re accepting or rejecting? How do you know it’s not Satan’s will you’re accepting or rejecting? How do you know it’s not your own subconscious?

There is also the moral implication vis-a-vis the man crying for help. But I cannot know what it is, and you told me nothing about his spirit.

Since a man picked at random is more likely to be a good man than an evil one, you can assume he is worth saving and do so without hesitation.

But let’s say you know he is evil. Are you saying that you would watch him drown? Would you save the pig and turn your back on the drowning evil man? Don’t you believe that evil people can be made good (and vice versa)?

Actions aren’t good or evil. Spirits are. A good spirit cannot do an evil act; and an evil spirit cannot do a good act.**

Waitjustafreakin’minutehere! You say that actions are neither good nor evil and then you say a good spirit cannot do an evil act. Well done, Lib! You are hereby awarded the SDMB Award for Inconsistency with oak-leaf clusters! Or are you saying that a good spirit cannot do an evil act because there are no evil acts (and vice versa)?

Besides, this leads to the questions: Do you believe each person is either wholly good or wholly evil? If so, which are you? Have you never, in your entire adult life, committed an evil act? If so, does this mean you are evil, or does it merely mean you are a good person who has, understandably, faltered? (I pick the second option. But you know yourself better than I know you.)

[Liberal]

Spiritus

A couple of follow-up questions, please:

1. Would you agree that incompleteness applies to any deductive system that permits a modus ponens construct and has a finite number of axioms?

2. Would you agree that an epistemological system that is not deductive, and that is transfinitely axiomatic, cannot be incomplete?

3. Do you think that a materialist morality is drawn from objective deduction, subjective intuition, or something else?

4. Given God’s existence and absolute infinite goodness, would you consider His system of morality to be arbitrary in any nontrivial sense?

5. Can you show the lines of reasoning in deriving a nonarbitrary morality from any known properties of particles and waves?

[cmkeller]

Spiritus Mundi:

So, you are saying that your God punishes not for the sins of the parents but for the sin of parentage? (It isn’t because your father was a sinner; it’s because he was a Sodomite.)

Just to make this point first: not “punishes.” Kills, yes, but it is not punishment for that child, but protection for others.

Otherwise, you’re pretty much correct. Although I wouldn’t say the criteria is specifically parentage, but “ability to evoke nostalgia of sin.” Parentage is probably a subset of that criterion.

Opus1:

Sadly, it seems that he’s decided to sling about anti-Christian urban legends in an attempt to defend the morality of God in the OT. Libertarian has already parsed the Hebrew (thank you very much, BTW). Virtually all Christian Bibles are translated from the original Hebrew.

Anti-Christian? Just because I don’t think many Christian translations accurately reflect the original Hebrew? Sheathe your fangs, buddy, I’m as civil and un-bigoted as they come around here, and anyone will back me up on that.

Libertarian has corrected me on that point. However, it remains true that many of these more modern translations were done with some degree of reference to the KJV, which is an indirect translation in the manner I described.

Furthermore, cmkeller has failed to explain what ideological slant would cause a Christian to mistranslate a verse so as to defame God, if the proper translation actually exculpates him.

Not that I am accusing Christian translators of doing this intentionally…but, just to play devil’s advocate, if they were doing it intentionally, it might be to make “the Father” seem overly harsh to contrast him with “the Son,” who is merciful.

But I make no such accusations. It’s a simple enough mistake to make. And, as I mentioned earlier, Lib’s parsing of the Hebrew, as well as the translation in the link you provided (and yes, it’s a Jewish web site, I intend on asking its creators the translation source, as it is out of line with all other Jewish sources I’m familiar with) are in error.

As I said to Lib, the proper form for future tense active (i.e., “He will rejoice”) would have been “Ya-sos.” The form used in the verse, “Ya-sis,” is causative.

Just to give another Hebrew example (although I don’t want to hijack this thread with translation issues), the word for “he will come,” the active form, is “Ya-vo.” The word for “he will bring,” which is the same root in a causative form (i.e., “he will cause to come”) is “Ya-vi.”

I stand by my translation and my knowledge of Hebrew grammar. If you wish to not accept it, there’s nothing I can do to convince you, but the second sample, which you might (I hope) be able to corroborate, illustrates that the translation I have told you, and not the one your sources have, is consistent with the rules of Hebrew grammar.

Your response to my questions about unsubstantiated Bible claims was really a non-response. Nowhere did I mention prophecy. My question is simple: how could the Israelites possibly have known that the people they were killing were that evil?

I see I’ll have to spell it out.

Q: How did the Israelites know?
A: A prophet told them. (Samuel, in the relevant example)
Q: How did they know the prophet was telling the truth?
A: He passed the tests listed in Deuteronomy for evaluation of a prophet’s truthfulness.
Q: How did they know Deuteronomy was true?
A: It was a prophecy from Moses.
Q: How did they know Moses’s prophecy was true?
A: Because of divine trust granted to him at Sinai.
Q: How did they know about that?
A: The entire nation witnessed it.

This just reiterates my point: you accept blindly the Bible’s claim that entire societies composed of millions of people were evil to the one, but we have no evidence of any society in history ever being anywhere near that evil, except for those described in the Bible!

And by the same token, we have no evidence that these societies existed at all, much less were wiped out completely, except for the fact that they’re described in the Bible.

Your interpretation is not the one most scholars take, and is not supported by the evidence. 2 Kg. 23:24 certainly implies that the contents of the discovered scroll were not before known.

Having re-read it, in both the original and in the translation, and I still don’t see that implication. It does say that the scroll was discovered, and that he fulfilled the laws therein. It does not say that those laws were previously unknown, merely that they had been not been observed…no small wonder, considering that the prior two kings (Manasseh and Amoz) were Baal-worshippers.

Heck, if the contents were previously unknown, how did they know it was a scroll of law? How did they know to attribute it to Moses?

Ezra’s “discovery” of a law that was previously unknown can be found in Neh. 8:13-15. When we look at the placement of this “discovered” law in Leviticus, it is quite awkward. The list of appointed feasts appears to be wrapping up at Lev. 23:38, then bang!–another festival just stuck in there.

You’ve got to be kidding. The festival of Sukkos is consistently included in every festival listing in the Bible. Exodus 23:16, Exodus 34:22, Numbers 29:12-40, Deuteronomy 16:13-16. If it’s a later addition, it certainly isn’t “stuck into” Leviticus!

But even if we accept that Ezra really did just discover this law rather than invent it, we’re left with the troubling fact that for hundreds of years, nobody noticed it!

Who didn’t notice it? It wasn’t observed so joyously on a nation-wide scale in centuries, but it was certainly known about. Look carefully at Nehemiah 8:17 (bolding mine) - “From the days of Joshua son of Nun until that day, the Israelites had not celebrated it like this.”

Responding to the rest of your (and others’) posts will have to wait until Saturday night, as I’d better leave work before I’m late getting home for the Sabbath. Have a good weekend!

Chaim Mattis Keller

[Liberal]

Jab

How was Gaudere to know this? Have you ever told her? (That was quite a tragedy, by the way. I’m sorry to hear about it. My mother is alive, but my father died in 1985 of a stroke.)

Thank you, Jab. I know you dislike me, which makes your kindness all the more dear to me. I did not expect Gaudere to know about that, nor did I know that she is shy about peeing in jars.

Surely you understand how this makes you look like you’re trying to avoid the question.

What I understand is that things sometimes look however we color them with our perceptions and our preconceived notions. The story of the Prodigal Son is one good example. The Theory of Evolution is another.

How do you know it’s God’s will you’re accepting or rejecting? How do you know it’s not Satan’s will you’re accepting or rejecting? How do you know it’s not your own subconscious?

Open your heart and look. Who is there? Whoever is there, that is the entity whose will you follow.

Since a man picked at random is more likely to be a good man than an evil one, you can assume he is worth saving and do so without hesitation.

In fact, you can save him even if you know that he is evil. That’s one of the points I’m trying to make. No moral judgment of what is behind your action can be made based on his morality. Surely you are not saying that you would let a man die simply because you believe he is evil.

But let’s say you know he is evil. Are you saying that you would watch him drown? Would you save the pig and turn your back on the drowning evil man? Don’t you believe that evil people can be made good (and vice versa)?

If he is evil, then his cry for help is nothing more than an action motivated by evil. Nevertheless, I would save him (given ordinary conditions). And not because I thought I could judge any future (or past or present) condition of his moral journey.

Waitjustafreakin’minutehere! You say that actions are neither good nor evil and then you say a good spirit cannot do an evil act. Well done, Lib! You are hereby awarded the SDMB Award for Inconsistency with oak-leaf clusters! Or are you saying that a good spirit cannot do an evil act because there are no evil acts (and vice versa)?

Please, please, please, Jab. Just this once, cast off your prejudice and hatred of me. Consider me like the evil man you would help out of the ditch and give me a chance to be heard. Consider once more what I said: “Actions aren’t good or evil. Spirits are. A good spirit cannot do an evil act; and an evil spirit cannot do a good act.” If you’ll stop squeezing at the gnats, chomping at the bit to discover some tiny nuance that you may use against me, you’ll see that I am saying (and actually have said many times in the past) that an action is neither good nor evil in isolation. That is, you can’t just grab an event out of thin air and go, “Wow! That was a really moral (or immoral) act!”

What Jesus is saying is that if a man has an evil heart, then any action he does is evil (i.e., motivated by evil) even if it is something that appears, on the outside, to be something good. Likewise, a man with a good heart is incapable of any evil deed (i.e., any deed interpretable as having an evil motive).

Besides, this leads to the questions: Do you believe each person is either wholly good or wholly evil? If so, which are you? Have you never, in your entire adult life, committed an evil act? If so, does this mean you are evil, or does it merely mean you are a good person who has, understandably, faltered? (I pick the second option. But you know yourself better than I know you.)

Well, I’ve covered this before somewhere (I think with Gaudere), but for purposes of review, I’ll answer it again. Only God is good. I am not yet fully God. My heart yearns to love, but my flesh yearns to hate. Whenever I close my heart, I do evil. Whenever I open my heart, I do good. If I could will it, I would leave my heart always open. That’s why I so adore Gaudere. Her heart is good and beautiful, and it is so open so much of the time.

[Spiritus_Mundi]

Would you agree that incompleteness applies to any deductive system that permits a modus ponens construct and has a finite number of axioms?

No. I do not see modus ponens as impyling Godelian complexity. I do think that if we could demonstrate such a result we might very well have achieved what Godel promised for his follow up paper.

Would you agree that an epistemological system that is not deductive, and that is transfinitely axiomatic, cannot be incomplete?

Yes, with one caveat: if the set of possible constructions were transinfinite to a greater order than the set of axioms, the set could still be incomplete.

Do you think that a materialist morality is drawn from objective deduction, subjective intuition, or something else?

I think that materialist morality can be drawn from subjective intuition or objective deduction based upon axioms which are (at the deepest level) subjectively intuited or arbitrarily asserted.

Given God’s existence and absolute infinite goodness, would you consider His system of morality to be arbitrary in any nontrivial sense?

Given that God is predicated as infinitely good, I think questions about God’s morality reduce universally to axiom 1. God’s system might be inductive, deductive, arbitrary, or inconsistent, but I do not think it could be incomplete under the given conditions.

Can you show the lines of reasoning in deriving a nonarbitrary morality from any known properties of particles and waves?

No. Until/unless consiousness can be demonstrated to be a purely material set of phenomena I cannot derive any morality from known properties of particles and waves.

[Liberal]

[Bowing in the direction of Spiritus Mundi…]

[jab1]

Lib, the fact that I find you irritating beyond words does not mean I hate you.

Then again, it might.

[Spiritus_Mundi]

[Bowing in the direction of Spiritus Mundi…]

???

Did I miss something?

[Gaudere]

Quite honestly, I could have done without the mental picture that I would stand and watch in existential amusement while a man drowns, particularly since I have watched both my father and my mother drown in their own lung mucous.

My apologies, again.

In every case, you appeared to be asking for moral judgments without giving me the benefit of any data that is significant from the point of view of the Moral Judge.

Me, previously (2nd post regarding this, I think): “So, Lib, what would you do?”
There I asked what you would do–which you can answer quite well, apparently, even if you know nothing of the man’s spirit, or know the man is evil–and you still refused to answer.

You don’t “determine” it as by some process of deduction; you either accept or reject it. His will is absolute and axiomatic.

How do you accept or reject it unless you know what it is at least at some point? How do you know when you are accepting God’s will, and when you are rejecting it, if an act you do out of love may or may not be moral?

But I assumed you were calling on me to judge the whole morality of the situation. Don’t forget, there is more than one spirit at work in your scenario. There is also the moral implication vis-a-vis the man crying for help. But I cannot know what it is, and you told me nothing about his spirit.

Well, when a man is drowning, he is hardly likely to submit to being quizzed about his Spirit. But are you saying that if he was evil, you saving him would be immoral? And if it is immoral, is your spirit evil for saving him, even though you did it out of love?

What I would do and what I should do might both depend on many many factors, which we’ve covered at some length. Such is the nature of hypotheticals.

A simple, “I would save the man, unless doing so would result in the murder of someone else” or something would have been acceptable.

nor did I know that she is shy about peeing in jars.

Descriptions of me peeing, shitting, farting, masturbating, etc. just seem kind of …inappropriate in a relatively formal debate setting, unless strictly necessary, while pit-and-pig hypotheticals are commonplace. Your disgust with the flesh certainly seems to leak through clearly enough in your posts as to make your remarks seem inordinately icky to me, but perhaps that’s simply my personal perception.

My heart yearns to love, but my flesh yearns to hate.

How? You have been arguing that flesh is not real, and neither moral nor immoral. How can your flesh yearn to hate? And speaking for myself, my flesh doesn’t seem to yearn to hate anything. My flesh yearns for dinner right now, but that’s about it.

I don’t think Jab hates you either. You are sometimes a wee bit too dramatic; someone can be quite irritated and not hate a person. Someone can even dislike another person and not hate him/her. You are losing all the finer nuances of the great panorama of human emotion by making it all pure love/hate; maybe it’s necessary for your theology, but you’re going to do a rather poor job at guessing people’s motivations and actions if you can’t recognize the compexity of their emotions.

OK, so have we established that it is moral for you to save a man’s life out of love, and that you’d save the man’s life rather than the pig’s because he is a vessel of the spirit. I admit I am still confused that apparently life and death of flesh mean nothing, but preventing death of flesh out of love of the spirit housed within is a loving act. If the flesh really means nothing, why preserve it, when all you are doing is preventing the spirit from rejoining God?

What makes you think that a being is a vessel of the spirit? What if you meet an alien, how do you determine whether it is a vessel or not?

[Arnold_Winkelried]

Gaudere, that’s the question I wanted to ask! Libertarian said (on page 3)

I help the man. But you haven’t given me enough to know whether my decision is a moral one or not. I am making a brain decision based on quick reasoning that the man is a vessel for the Spirit of God.

How do you know that a man a vessel for the spirit of god, and a pig isn’t? Is a chimpanzee a vessel for the spirit of god? A person in a coma?

[Liberal]

Spiritus

Did I miss something?

Not all. You answered every question.

I bowed because I recognize in you an intellect and a character worth bowing to. I don’t always get your points on first blush, partly because I sometimes have to guess at careless misspellings and missing or wrong words and what-not, but mostly because it takes me some time to shed my prejudice enough to comprehend what you’re saying. I have cited you before as an example of a man who is capable of expositing difficult concepts in understandable ways. I’m in awe of you, and greatly respect you for what you do.

[Liberal]

Gaudere

There is a difference, in my view, between assessing what I might do in a hypothetical and assessing the overall moral implications of an event. Even once I understood that you were simply asking whether I would likely help the man or the pig, I thought it was important that you understand that the answer I gave still was not an assessment of the situation’s morality. You could not get a reasonable assessment of the value of a house from a man who can inspect nothing more than one room.

Your question about vessels of God’s Spirit, I answer in the next post, to consolidate it with Arnold’s. I do this because I owe Arnold, whose toes I had regretably stepped on before when he caught me in the middle of a heated debated about libertarianism.

[Liberal]

Arnold

How do you know that a man [is] a vessel for the spirit of [God], and a pig isn’t? Is a chimpanzee a vessel for the spirit of [God]? [Is a] person in a coma [a vessel for the spirit of God][sup]1[/sup]?

Bear with me. The short answer is “God says so,” but you deserve more than that.

[/quote]
Disclaimer: What follows are my own opinions that are an expression of my own moral journey that I view through my own reality tunnel, my own closed reference frame, my own consciousness that no one else, including you and excepting God, can experience. Though you may feel free to debate the minutiae of what follows, dividing it into line by line quotations and rebutting, it is not this point or that point that has formed my opinion. It is the whole, the gestalt that led me one fateful day to a grammatical construct that rocked my world and changed my perceptions at once and forever. Nor will I give, for every point, an exhaustive analysis. I might give one reason or two, partly because it is problematic to compress decades into a few thousand bytes of data, but mostly because a lot of it might likely mean nothing to you, since we will not share a common frame of reference from which they can be viewed as making sense. Therefore, I submit this not as a debate, but as a witness. It is a composite of what I went through to get where I am. Take it or leave it as you deem appropriate. Others get to the same destination in very different ways.

[/quote]

Searching for Bobby Fischer

If there is to be a determination of God’s will, it must be nominative of God. That is, God Himself must tell me what His will is. This requires two things: (1) that He speak and (2) that I hear. How will these two be accomplished? Even if number (1) is accomplished, what is to prevent me from poking my fingers in my ears and yelling, “La la la la, I’m not listening!” Can I assume that God either can or will speak over my objections and force me to hear? Dunno. That is easy enough to test.

“God, if you exist, show me a sign!”

[waiting… waiting… nothing…]

Perhaps I wasn’t clear. Perhaps God is anal and wants me to specify exactly what might qualify as a sign. Or perhaps He gave me a sign that I didn’t know was a sign. Try again. Easy does it, here. I’ve heard the warnings before about being careful what you pray for because it might just come to pass. No making the sun disappear or that sort of thing…

“God, if you exist, make my shirt green.”

[waiting… waiting… my shirt is still red…]

Ah ha! Oops, hold on. How do I know that God won’t make my shirt green thirty years from now and then sprout a shit-eating grin. Dammit.

“Okay, God. You can cut the crap. You make my shirt — the one I’m wearing right now as I stand here on this spot — green, and I mean discernably green — not cyan, not aqua-marine, not teal — green. Green like the grass. And do it now, not thirty years from now, this very instant.”

[folding arms… tapping toes… waiting… waiting…]

Perhaps I ought to abandon the notion at this time. However, as I am a melancholy temperament, and am quite anal myself, I press on, intent on exhausting the various possibilities that arise from (1) and (2) above, His speaking and my hearing. And then it dawns on me, suppose I were making this same request for a sign to someone else. I mean, if I want to get the attention of the Emperor of Japan, it is not enough that I call out to my dog because my dog is not the Emperor of Japan. Therefore, looking my dog in the eye and saying, “Show me a sign that you are the Emperor of Japan,” doesn’t really say anything about either my dog or the Emperor of Japan, but rather about my own intellectual density. Being close doesn’t count either. I can’t go to Queen Elizabeth and ask her for a sign that she is the Emperor of Japan.

What is God?

Perhaps it is a matter of the focus of my mind. Perhaps I should preface my demand for a hearing with greater specificity. After all, I wouldn’t walk up to her majesty and begin a question with “My emperor”. Maybe I should phrase my address to God more precisely. (I am becoming annoyed that there might actually be an entity more anal than I.)

“Hey, Jehovah, the God of Abraham, the Father of Jesus! Yeah, you! Change the color of my shirt, the one I am wearing right now, from red to green. And do it now this instant. And no tricks. No changing my retinal signals so that I can’t discern red from green. No claim that there are multiple universes and that you changed it in one of the other ones. No fudging, no hedging, no placing this burden on me when clearly the burden is on you. No weaseling, no backtracking, no shirt, no shoes, no service. I want a water-into-wine miracle here. You’re God, aren’t you? You should know what the fuck I mean here. I’ve studied linguistics, and I know that there are a million different ways that you could construe my request in some way other than the way I intend it, but then you would be an asshole. Am I gonna see a damn sign here, or what?”

[fuming… waiting… waiting…]

Oh, I want to quit so bad, but reason just won’t let me. Going back to the drawing board, let’s see. (1) He speaks and (2) I hear. Ah! I see the problem now! I’ve gotten it all bassackwards. It’s not (1) I speak and (2) He hears. I suppose what I have done is quite the opposite of what I set out to do. I set out to discern His will, but instead, I have told Him my will, namely, that he change the color of my shirt.

Damn. Now what?

(continued in subsequent post…)

[/quote]
[sup]1[/sup] I’m assuming that Arnold was asking what I have paraphrased, and was not asking whether a chimpanzee is a vessel for a person in a coma.

[Liberal]

The Holy Grail

If I am to discern God’s will, (1) He must speak and (2) I must hear. Either I have tried, unsuccessfully, to provoke Him to speak, or else He did speak in some language or some way that I could not comprehend. But if number (1) only was satisfied, I do not yet know His will. For all I know, God is speaking to me right this moment and I am deaf. I’m fairly certain that I have heard nothing, at least nothing of significance, but I have no idea, really, whether He said anything. Perhaps His answer to my demand to change the color of my shirt was simply, “No, I won’t.” Fair enough. Irritating, but fair.

Surely, I am not the only person who has ever had this problem. Switching my concentration from number (2) to number (1), I set out to learn what I can about the language of God. This is something, given my interest in linguistics, that I find truly interesting and worthy of spending some time and effort. I entertain fantasies of headlines: “Lib deciphers language of God”. Nobel prizes. Recognition of being one of those formally uneducated yet profoundly influential lone-star contributors to fields of science. Think Ramanujan. But since I cannot seem to stir up God to speak, I decide to seek out others who claim they have done exactly that.

“Mr. Street Preacher, what language does God speak?”

“You vile and vacuous whore! You’ll know what language God speaks when your rotten soul is burning in Hell!”

Mmmkay. Thank you, 'preciate it, have a nice day.

“Mr. Minister, what can you tell me about the language of God?”

“God speaks Hebrew and Greek. Sometimes Aramaic.”

[Hmmm… File that one for future reference…] Maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree here.

“Rabbi, when God speaks, what language does he use?”

“He uses the language of your heart.”

My heart is a rhythmically pulsating muscle that pumps blood to my vital organs. [this one will come back to haunt me later…]

“Mr. Zen, tell me please about the language of God.”

“”.

Thanks. You’ve been helpful. Not.

“Mr. Tris-like Christian Apologist, what language does God speak?”

“He speaks Love.”

This one strikes me really hard. At first blush, I find it evasive. But then I think about all the sorts of languages that are possible without being the traditional phonetic vocal utterances. I am intrigued. The purest form of linguistics study, language theory, akin in principle to number theory in math, is my favorite. Love as a language. Weird and interesting. Crazy and thought provoking. Utterly new and challenging. Instantly, I can get tiny glimpses of this. A mother holding her baby and gazing upon him in wonderment and ineffable joy. In an odd but undeniable sense, she is speaking and he is hearing.

Hey! Wait a minute… (1) and (2)…

“Mr. Tris-like Christian Apologist, how do I learn this language of love?”

“Read this.”

He hands me a small paperback book. It is written in Greek. [quick file search… hmmm…]

“Er, Mr. TCA, this is not love, this is Greek.”

“My young friend,” he says, “that’s like saying those aren’t words, they’re blotches of ink. You will find this book to be a catalyst of a sort. The love is not in the words per se, but from the words, love will arise.”

“But I don’t know Greek,” I protest. “I would have to do possibly months of research to read this book.”

“Yes,” he smiles. “Likely, you would. And you would enjoy every minute of it.”

Dammit. He’s right.

(continued in subsequent post…)

[Liberal]

Waiting for Godot

Determined, I go out and procure the necessary supplies: a brand new cool pen (always necessary for important research), a notebook, a small introductory primer on the grammar of New Testament Greek, a larger intermediate volume of the unabridged New Testament Greek vocabulary, and a huge reference tome, showing simultaneous translations of the New Testament in translated English, paraphrased English, transliterated (word for word) English, and pictures of the Greek scrolls. I intend to get to the bottom of this, and there are spin-off benefits as well. I will get to see how accurate other Bible translations are. I will get to learn yet another language, in fact, a very important one that forms the basis of many other languages. So even if nothing else happens, the effort will not have been a waste of time.

I spend two or three weeks in the primer, studying the text and working out the exercises. Though I spend nearly every waking moment on the project, it is taking some time. There is not only a new vocabulary but a new alphabet. There is not only a system of cases and moods, but a very complex one. Nevertheless, I am indeed enjoying myself, and have learned that I can even use this same ancient language — practically unchanged — to make primative conversation with the Greek restaurant owners down the street. They are delighted with what I am doing, and help to correct my pronunciation and grammar. I spend a lot of time on my work at their place.

Finally, after several weeks, I decide that I have enough under my belt that I can begin. Anything I am lacking, I can always refer to my reference sources. I open Mr. TCA’s book, pen in hand, distractions eliminated. It’s time to seek out in earnest this language of love. Here we go…

[pretend these are Greek letters…]

en arxi in o logos kai o logos in pros ton theon kai theos in o logoc

Huh. Surprising. I imagine that the rest of it is probably not as simple as this. I begin to write:

by … the first … was … the word … and … the word … was … among … God … and … God … was … the … word

[Scratching my head…] What the hell? Okay, I know how translation goes. It’s not transliteration, not word-for-word equivalencies. The trick was to make sense of the words as phrases. Thank God for conjunctions. Let’s see. I consult my references. "By, in, or with… a preposition indicating a fixed place or time… first, origin, or beginning… with, by, or among… a preposition indicating inclusion… the predicate nominative case…

I’ve got it! “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” Consulting the index, and then flipping madly through the compendium of scriptures, I finally see it. There it is. They translated it exactly as I did! Oh rapturous joy! I am not a moron. This is not beyond me. And this is a lot of fun!

And so it continues.

ovtos en in arxi pros ton theon

he … was … in … the beginning … with … God

He? He who? What did I miss? I’m only two lines into the thing. Damn. [consulting reference…] nominative masculine pronoun… he… the same… the one referenced… this man… Huh? What man? Wait a minute. Did they mean God? No. God wasn’t nominative case. Word was. And then I look back again at the scripture reference. They had capitalized “Word” in the first verse. I hadn’t noticed this. I stop what I am doing for a moment to get a sense of this context. And then I see it. “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Is that right? Can that be right?

I look back at the little paperback. And there it is, down just a tad…

…logos carx eleneto kai eskinosen en imen…

The Word was a person? Someone who became flesh? Did they mean Jesus? In the beginning was Jesus? Jesus was God? I take a break to roll a joint and think this through a bit. As I drift into a happy stupor, I imagine being a literate man back in ancient times, seeing this for the first time, not having the language barrier to contend with, scratching my head and going, “How clever. The logos became a carcass, eh?” Before long, I drift off to sleep.

(continued in subsequent post…)

[Liberal]

Jesus Christ Superstar

My skills sharpen considerably as time goes by. It becomes easier and easier to translate whole passages. It turns out that the vocabulary in the New Testament is a reasonably small set of words, a couple thousand at most. I have long ago abandoned most of the work in my notebook, scribbling transliterations and struggling with them, and am now reading from the Greek, and processing it with relative ease, though from time to time I use the notebook to write down and check various interpretations. I have discovered that, in every case where I check, the modern translations are reasonably faithful representations of the text. Debunking their veracity is no longer a goal.

I am noticing a pattern emerge. This man, this Jesus, appears to fancy Himself in some way having a special relation with both God and Man. I am the one he sent. I am the vine, you are the branches. The Father is pleased with me. I do the work of my Father. The Son of Man this, the Son of God that. I am the Bread of Life, the Living Water, the Way, the Truth. I begin to realize that, once I have gotten through weird interpretations of evidence, I am faced with a dilemma. Is this man Who He says He is? I’ve already gotten past the hemming and the hawing. I am convinced that there is no reason to believe that what I am reading is not a faithful representation of what Jesus said. I am satisfied that ancient people were as anal about getting these kinds of things right as I am, probably more so, and because of little more than necessity, they had to be. They handed down stories for generation upon generation, using a variety of techniques (including song) to do so, and we’re only talking a few years here — not centuries. All these points are arguable, and I won’t begrudge anyone coming to some other conclusion, but for me it had come down to this: He was one bold son of a bitch, or else He was the Son of God. He was lying, or he was telling the truth.

I understand how this can be viewed as a false dichotomy, particularly if all one does is raise questions without answering them. But suffice it to say that I don’t believe there could have been a more critical and melancholy dissection of the matter than the one I gave it. Again, I must compact a lot of time into this small space, so grant me that I didn’t fall willy-nilly into a pit of logical fallacies. I am, in this story, at the place where I am beginning to read, not so much with doubt, but with incredulity. Who is this man?

I go to the library and consult a reference called Strong’s Concordance. I decide that if this man Jesus is God, then it is necessary that He have the attributes of God. After much research, I learn that God’s name is a derivative of the word for “to be”, and means literally, “the existing One”. I find in the very ancient scriptures a reference to this. Thank God I now trust the modern translations, at least for the most part. I don’t believe I could withstand having to learn Hebrew on top of the project at hand. I find a passage where Abraham asks God, “When people ask me who sent me, what shall I say?” God’s answer is at once shocking and mysterious. “You tell them I AM sent you. That is who I AM.”

I smoke several joints over this one. I spend several days, researching Jesus’ alleged Father so I can determine whether He indeed is like Him. “To be” is one of those very interesting linguistic topics. It isn’t even found in some languages, but in others, where it is found, it is a special type of verb that takes, not an object, but a predicate nominative. It expresses, not action, but identity. To say that your name is “I AM” is tantamount to declaring yourself to be “Axiom 1”, “The Unified Field Theory”, and “The Alpha and the Omega” all rolled into one. It means that you not only were and will be, but that you always are. You are way back then. You are now. You are way in the future. You had no beginning; you are already there. You’ll have no ending; you are already there. And you are already everywhere in between.

One thing’s for sure. Jesus might have balls, but Jehovah has mega-balls. No mere pretense here. You tell them I AM sent you. You tell them the Always Existence sent you. You tell them the First Person Eternity sent you. You tell them that the One Who sent you is so ineffably Infinite that no scale you have can measure Him. No structure, not even the universe and all of time can contain Him. No force can withstand Him. And no principle can deny Him.

Damn. Okay. I get back to work.

One day, I get a call from a buddy. “Hey man, you wanna go with us to the Fiddlers Convention?”

“I’d love to, but I’m working on a project.”

“What project.”

“I’m translating the Bible.”

“No problem, man. You can translate it in the van, can’t you?”

Well, I suppose I can. So I gather my materials and wait to be picked up.

Creedence Clearwater, the Doobie Brothers, and other bands most of you have never heard of are blaring inside the van. We’re passing around a number, and I am caught up in my work. I’ve skipped around a bit, but I’m now working in the eighth chapter of John. The raucous hell-raising fades into echos. There is a passage where Jesus is telling the Pharisees that they should be more like Abraham, that Abraham knew who Jesus was, and that Abraham had seen him. They were mocking Jesus, and declaring him insane, saying, “See? We told you this man is crazy! He is not even fifty years old, yet he claims to have seen Abraham.”

Then I see this…

amen amen lego umin prim abraam genomai ego emi

Something doesn’t look right. I start to scribble.

truth … truth … I say … to you … before … Abraham … was … I … am

Clearly, I must have misread. [Checking…] No, I didn’t. Clearly, it is a misprint. [Flipping through the tome…] There’s the photo of the scroll. No misprint. Then my eyes catch the translation given there: “Before Abraham was, I AM”. It is the last perception that I would ever have as a nonbeliever.

I AM. That is who I AM. I AM sent you. You tell them that I AM sent you. Before Abraham was, I AM.

There are no words, no phrases, no meaningful way that I can convey to you what I feel at this critical moment in that hippie-van. Whirlwinds? Yes. Rapture? Yes. Out of body experience? Who knows? Time ceases. The universe turns inside out. My own spirit bursts forth into life and expands across and beyond the eons of space and time. I feel at once terrified and blissful, tiny and huge, wrong and right, horrible and wonderful. I die. And when I open my eyes I have never seen the world this way before. I cannot recall what physical reaction I had, but whatever it was, it catches the attention of everyone in the van.

“Man, are you all right?” My buddy tokes on the doobie.

“My God,” I cry out. “He’s God! {{{ Jesus is God! }}}”

“Cool, man,” he responds with bloodshot eyes and a friendly smile. For the first time since I’ve know that guy, I love him.

(continued in subsequent post…)

[Liberal]

Rock of Ages

God spoke. I heard. “I love you! I love you! I love you!” The Existing One, the One Who cannot be contained in space and time, the Eternal I AM loves me. Whew. My goodness I love this new language of Love.

Now, I’m sure that a certain California teenager might surmise that I have lived under a decades-long serotonin rush, but that’s okay. I know better. I’ve learned that whenever Jesus speaks, it is God speaking, and that whenever I love, I am hearing Him. Does this mean I always love without fail? No, and when I don’t, I know that I don’t hear Him. Does this mean I can make right moral judgments? No, only He can do that. Me, I just do what I do and leave judgment of it to Him. It is my hope that I please Him because I love Him so much. But when I see Him face to face, unencumbered by all the quantum farts, what I see will not be judgment, but Love. And I will run to Him to bask in His Truth and Light, to drink the Living Water, to eat the Bread of Life. And so will many of you who might not now think that you will. Love is love.

Okay, so what does all this have to do with the Spirit of God and chimpanzees? Jesus is the Son of Man, not the Son of Apes. He came as a man, not as an ape. This species, infinite in faculty as Shakespeare put it, is very special in God’s eyes. We are the chosen ones, the ones who have the marvelous and wondrous honor of housing His Holy Spirit. But even so, that which is truly alive about us, that which is eternal, that which is created in His image is not our bodies. It is our spirits. It is that part of us that we know is alive but cannot be accounted for by waves or dervived from particles.

And it doesn’t matter whether we’re brilliant or stupid, vibrant or comatose, atheletic or spastic, functional or retarded, normal or schizophrenic. We are accountable by whatever measure we have been given. “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.” — Jesus

God has loaned us our bodies; they are temporary and will rot. But He has given us our spirits free and clear. We may do with ourselves as we please. We may seek Him out or run away from Him. He will not punish us; we will punish ourselves. Over time, God’s relationship with Man has depended on what Man can comprehend and cope with. But time is something we experience as bodies. As spirits, we have always been — and will always be — either alive or dead in a very different, but far more real, sense than our bodies have been alive or dead. We are alive when we are one with God. Dead otherwise. There is no Life without Love, and He is the very source of Love.

So, I’ve likely frustrated you greatly, and I’m sorry. You see, I cannot give you one of those scientific answers about God’s Spirit and the vessels that contain it. I cannot say, “Look here, and you will see your answer.” I cannot say, “Read the measurement on this gauge, and there is God’s Spirit.” I know that we are His temple because Jesus said so. He spoke. I heard. You are free — utterly free — to believe that He said it or not, and to believe that, if He did, He was either lying or not.

In short, I know that God’s Spirit is in me, and that I am not an ape. But I am limited to my own frame of reference and all the constraints I covered in my disclaimer. The only epistemology I can offer to back my claims is my own experience. All I can say is that I AM told me.