Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist [one who believes that God’s divinity is manifested in all of Creation]. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.
May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe.
We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God.
We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations
There is a lot of whining going on over the movement of a large slice JD production to Mexico. The Daily Mail has an extensive write-up detailing all of the hurt this brings to middle America. There is much crying and gnashing of teeth.
First two lines in the article: –John Deere is sparking outrage by laying off American workers and moving more of its agricultural equipment manufacturing to Mexico. –Since October 2023, more than 1,000 John Deere workers have either been laid off or pushed into an early retirement across several plants in Iowa and Illinois.
The JD folk were not all pleased with what they gained in the 2021 negotiations, almost a full third wanted to hold out for more than was was finally settled on: –a 10 percent pay raise –a $250 a month increase for retiring employees –100 percent coverage of medical insurance costs –a one time $8,500 cash incentive — a $2,000 dollar bonus for each previous year worked at the firm
Well shit folks, you didn’t think that John Deere became a 187 year old king of jungle by rolling over every time the natives became restless did you? In this instance the natives were all upset about the company making good profit and the CEO making his millions. Consider this:
The CEO managed to triple the value of the company stock and improve the quarterly dividend it pays to all stockholders. Given that level of wealth creation I think the CEO was worthy of his pay.
When the union made the employee-employer all about the money and promoted a we vs they mentality among their members they also promoted that same mentality in the leadership of JD. If it’s all about the money then there is a much greater value proposition to be found in dozens of far flung locales on this planet.
Congrats to the union and the union employees, you’ve proven that Adam Smith’s invisible hand was correctly extrapolated by Samuelson: —–Free markets are self-regulating systems that create economically optimal outcomes, which can’t be improved upon by government intervention. —-The idea of trade and market exchange perfectly channeling self-interest toward socially desirable ends is a central justification for newer versions of the laissez-faire economic philosophy which lie behind neoclassical economics.
Unfortunately for the those in Iowa and Illinois the ‘economically optimal outcome’ favored the folk in Mexico. Had the legal tender, the value proposition, been based on mutually favorable outcomes then this would never had happened.
There is a good read by Melissa Harl Sellew floating around and I thought it informative for a couple of reasons: because it provides insight into the differences between Thomas and the Synoptic Gospels and because it demonstrates a different approach to understanding those differences. Her words in the ‘Abstract’ (introduction) provide a tidy description of this, her approach.
“This article moves away from questions of dependence or autonomy to show that comparison of the texts’ style and content is fruitful for understanding both Thomas and the Synoptic Gospels. When we read the Synoptics against Thomas, some of the central characteristics of Mark, Matthew, and Luke stand out in higher relief. Differences in theology, narrative structures, genre, and approaches to community formation combine to confirm that early gospel writers had a variety of choices about their modes of representation of the meaning(s) of Jesus. As part of its pattern of distance from Judaism, Thomas shows that it was possible to present Jesus as somehow removed from the thought world of Scripture, even as a source of revelatory or prophetic information.”
Here (below) is a teaser from the article that, when well considered, gives good cause for pause and contemplation.
“The Jesus of Thomas, in great contrast, though he speaks proverbs, macarisms, and parables alike to those of his Synoptic counterpart, nonetheless performs no deeds of power, encounters no opposition from either Jewish or Roman leaders, makes no threats or warnings of imminent divine judgment or eschatological crisis. Only by foreknowledge of the New Testament Gospels (or for argument’s sake, the Gospel of Peter) would a reader of Thomas realize that Jesus was to meet a gruesome death at the hands of the Romans, framed as a divinely required sacrifice to redeem the world of sin, and yet was somehow able to transcend death through resurrection. In other words, the “Jesus Christ crucified, and him alone” preached by Paul (1 Cor 2:2) is not the subject of the Gospel of Thomas.“
In contemplation, if you decide to go there, there’s a lot more to unpack than you might first think.
The motion to vacate is the House’s procedure to remove the speaker. The current rules allow any one member, Democrat or Republican, to introduce the motion. If it is introduced as a “privileged” resolution, the House must consider it at some point, although it could be delayed with procedural votes. It only needs a simple majority to pass.
With R’s controlling the house by only one or two votes this means it only takes two or three malcontents to successfully remove the speaker, providing the D’s all vote to to toss him out as well (as they did with McCarthy)
My view is that these idiots the R’s have elected to office are to smart by half. That is to say they’re so stupid they would give away the keys to the kingdom just to get that rush that only the exercise of power provides.
We should have elected adults and problem solvers instead of characters of outrage and outrageous characters.
I’ve been taking a little time lately to catch up on my reading, the most recent read to capture my attention is Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time‘.
I’ve managed to locate a pdf copy of Hawking’s work and thought I’d pass it along to those that may want to look over his simple approach to a damn difficult subject.
If you’re going to read it on line (choose not to download) then you can removed the left sidebar by pressing on the upper left icon on the frame of the pdf viewer (immediately below). Enjoy.
Some time ago I posted a large collection of ‘Gnostic’ writings in a volume titled The Gnostic Bible. It contains 47 complete works by various authors or are ‘gospels’ of some sort or another.
47 is bunches and this volume runs 860 pages. An index at the back end makes it more useful than what otherwise might be.
A very informative introduction by Marvin Meyer and Willis Barnstone provide an excellent backdrop on how/why nonconforming people, doctrine and documents were treated by ‘The Church’. These folk (church leadership) could not be safely crossed because the church had cornered the market on religion, faith and salvation and were one of the most powerful agencies in the world. They were not about to give away the keys to their kingdom to any upstart spiritual movement. The simple act of translating the scriptures (for consumption by the laymen) was prohibited.
The fates of John Wycliffe, Etinette Dolet, and William Tyndale testify to what the punishment for translating the New Testament out of Latin and into English or French might be. (See page 25 of the document)
I’ve found that I’m partial to authors who do a good job of providing an unbiased rendition of competing thoughts on the knot that’s formed from the confluence of the many esoteric/religious/mythological/philosophical/theosophical traditions and beliefs. Dylan Burns did a good job of keeping it clean and making it readable.
An interesting sentence in the text caught my eye, it reads: “Nonetheless, despite its lack of Gnostic myth, the Gospel of Thomas has been marketed and received as the most popular ‘Gnostic’ text recovered from Nag Hammadi, generating controversy and commentary amongst churchgoers, scholars, and even New Age exegetes alike, who ‘find’ in it what they ‘seek’.”
The last phrase struck me as odd because it implies that the ‘truths’ found in, or the ‘truth’ about it (or authenticity, or value), is dependent on what the reader/examiner seeks.
Beyond being an easy to read and solid survey of ‘Ancient Esoteric Traditions‘, its list of references is a chocked full of goodies for those delving into the history and conflict between the many traditions and the societies they formed in. Enjoy.
I’m thinking that the Gospel of Thomas is designed to drive folk along a path where it is the journey itself that’s the destination. If so then the more obscure the passage is, the greater the value derived in considering it’s meaning.
If each man must find his own truth then words that lead us to search (vice provide us with answers) have the greatest value.
I’ve seen several (many?) different portrayals of Plato’s Cave and just now have noticed that many of them use monks (or similarly attired such folk) as the standard bearers. Given the timing (Plato vs Christian Church) it certainly could not have been the intent of Plato to suggest deception as a method of the church, but it appears to be the object of the artist(s).
A rational man might suspect that a rogue would welcome the sociological cover that the robes provide.
I’ve been off-line for a little more than a month. I didn’t post so often and so wildly that a well deserved break was warranted and, no, it’s not a swarm of doldrums that held me at bay. I’ve been off-line in deep thought about the future of mankind. The good news for readers is that I don’t do the ‘deep thoughts worthy of lengthy narration’ type of thought, I’m more the ‘let’s just jump to the bottom line: we’re fucked’ type of deep thinker.
Shit is rapidly going sideways and there is not a damn thing that can be done about it. This nation alone could have halted the world-wide slide into tyranny and subjugation. Coulda, woulda, shouda be damned, we’ve crossed the tipping point as a nation and will now never be able to recapture the moment when rights and freedoms outweighed the ‘good of the masses’.
The time of man’s reign has ended, now comes the time of the gimmedats. The gimmedat era is the precursor to thousands of years of oppression. The endless march of technology ensures the oppression will be both enforceable and complete.
It seems appropriate to do a little fiddlin as Rome burns.
This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end Of everything that stands, the end No safety or surprise, the end I’ll never look into your eyes again
Can you picture what will be? So limitless and free Desperately in need Of some stranger’s hand In a desperate land
Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain And all the children are insane All the children are insane Waiting for the summer rain, yeah
There’s danger on the edge of town Ride the King’s Highway, baby Weird scenes inside the gold mine Ride the highway west, baby Ride the snake, ride the snake To the lake, the ancient lake, baby The snake, he’s long, seven miles Ride the snake He’s old and his skin is cold The west is the best The west is the best Get here and we’ll do the rest The blue bus is calling us The blue bus is calling us Driver, where you taking us?
The killer awoke before dawn He put his boots on He took a face from the ancient gallery And he walked on down the hall He went into the room where his sister lived, and then he Paid a visit to his brother, and then he He walked on down the hall, and And he came to a door And he looked inside “Father?” “Yes, son?” “I want to kill you” “Mother? I want to…”
Come on baby, take a chance with us Come on baby, take a chance with us Come on baby, take a chance with us And meet me at the back of the blue bus Of the blue bus, on the blue bus, on the blue bus
(Note: I shit-canned the 19 Fu** on 17 lines)
This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free But you’ll never follow me The end of laughter and soft lies The end of nights we tried to die
Some folk are saying prep time is over and the dance is about to begin. I do wish that were not so and that we could find a way to step back and become a civil society once again. I hate to say it, but it does not look like that’s in the cards.
Keep your heads up, your ammo dry, and live life to it’s fullest each and every day!
I had a birthday yesterday. The most recent of those long running, annually repeating, milestones that seem to tick by at a faster and faster pace. How old? 27 (again). Yesterday I celebrated the 40th anniversary of my 27th birthday.
I told myself that I wasn’t going to get bogged down in reflection this year, but I’ve heard that lie coming from the same source so many times that I knew it wasn’t true. What did me in this year was a large, heavy coffee cup with a colorful cow painted on it that my wife gave me as a gift.
I had, for the last 17 years, a collection of heavy black Harley Davidson mugs, and now a cow! The picture above is taken at Yosemite in 2010, the bike is a 10′ Ultra. The one below is/was my 03′ Road King.
I had about 20K miles on the Ultra when I sold in in 2013 and a little more than 78K on the Road King. I rode the shit out of those bikes, once I rode the Road King through all lower 48 States on a single trip. I was the ultimate ‘manly man’. Both bikes were sold off to generate the funds to build my cabin.
Now I’m sitting here, with a cow on a coffee mug, marveling at how quickly the years have flashed by.
About twice a year I wander over to the Gutenberg site and download bunches of books. Some of the things I snatch I have no current interest in, rather I’m trying to determine if I could gain an interest in the subject. Normally my downloads are on philosophy, religion, math, science, gardening or photography. I’ll download 30 or so volumes of which I may eventually read one or two. The others are abandoned after a few pages.
There is one subject that I’ve struggled to understand across the years and even though I’ve downloaded several books related to subject I still cannot wrap my head around Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. A download from my last visit to the Gutenberg site has gone a long way in helping me both understand the Theory and to help me understand why I have such difficulty in understanding the Theory. (Does that make sense?)
Interestingly, even though the volume was written in 1921, the author used a ‘crowd sourcing’ technique to flesh out contributions from roughly 300 different authors. Anyway, here is a brief excerpt that expertly expresses the challenges with understanding the Theory:
The conceptual difficulties of the theory arise principally from attributing to space and time the properties of things. No portion of space can be compared with another, save by convention; it is things which we compare. No interval of time can be compared with another, save by convention. The first has gone when the second becomes “now”. It is events that we compare, through the intervention of things.
Our measurements are never of space or of time, but only of the things and the events that occupy space and time. And since the measurements which we deal with as though they were of space and of time lie at the foundation of all physical science, while at the same time themselves constituting, as we have seen, the only reality of which we are entitled to speak, it is in order to examine with the utmost care the assumptions underlying them. That there are such assumptions is clear—the very possibility of making measurements is itself an assumption, and every technique for carrying them out rests on an assumption.
Is there an infinite amount of time? Must matter exist for time to exist? Will the universe continue to replicate?
Here are some of Roger Penrose’s thoughts
An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics. He says he has found six ‘warm’ points in the sky (dubbed ‘Hawking Points’) which are around eight times the diameter of the Moon. Sir Roger believes that ‘dead’ black holes are from earlier universes or ‘aeons’ and are observable now.
The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future.
“We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon. So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points.”
I’ve got very little sympathy for the folk being harassed, they chose to live in that den of inequity. Shit is about to get real in the major metropolitan areas and all the while these sheep will plod along believing better days are right around the corner.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1307473644470169600
And what a bunch of idiots the BLM/Antifa crowd has become. Don’t they realize that the folk they are harassing are their own advocates? This just goes to show that for individual members of these mobs it is more about the ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ to rant, rage, and rave than it is about any do-good social cause. The day is coming when these folk are slapped down hard.
I see through my daily go-to sites that another good man appears to have passed. The anxious posts over the last few days sorta set the stage for today’s news. I was going to say ‘grim news’ or even ‘bad news’, but the years are piling up on me and there is (I suppose) a pandemic pacing the land, so I’ve chosen to look at death as an event that carries little less tragedy and a little more opportunity than in years past.
While the passing of Ol’ Remus is tragic for those that knew him and counted as a loss for those who read his many poignant posts, for me not so much. I absolutely do not intend to diminish the value of the feeling of loss or sadness others have and I know that those feelings and emotions are both healthy and healing. But for me his passing, or the passing of anyone for that matter, leaves me more pensive than melancholy. It causes me to reflect on life and explore my own faith. This then is some great goodness that comes from the passing of a man I barely knew. How could such a benefit befall me if not by the guiding grace of God?
When we string together our explorations, blend in the memory of seemingly random events (occurring across many decades) and sprinkle in the absolutely exact amount of God’s love and grace, we have what will one day be called a life lived. Ol’ Remus and billions of others have lived, died, and moved on. They’ve left the rest of us to pace through this life doing the best we can.
I guess the simplest way to look at life (absent evocation of any deity) is to equate it to the game of golf. That is to say that the game can never be beaten, only played. It follows then that because no one can win and no one gets outa here alive, the only thing that matters is how you play the game.
Third in the series: historical context is crucial to understanding the New Testament. Alexander the Great, in his conquests, spread Greek culture throughout the Mediterranean world. This would shape the structure of city-states, which would share characteristically Greek institutions, such as the gymnasium and the boule. This would also give rise to religious syncretism, that is, the mixing of different religions. The rise of the Romans would continue this trend of universalization of Greek ideals and religious tolerance, as well as implement the social structure of the Roman household. The Pax Romana, and the vast infrastructures of the Roman Empire, would facilitate the rapid spread of Christianity.
Churches and Christian statues continue to be targeted in ever increasing numbers across Europe. I guess that’s exactly what any rational man would predict if you were to throw your doors open to all comer’s from the Middle East.
So another church in France was destroyed by fire last night, another clueless population wonders why so many churches are aflame. Another day closer to the demise of Europe.
Mini Mike looks like a complete ass as he fails to recognize the hypocrisy of his gun grab policies. He deserves gun toting protection but the little folk don’t.
An old (October 2017) article from Huffpuss shows that their outrage is not a new phenomenon. I feel sorry for all of the electrons that were harmed in producing this blather.
