Monthly Archives: May 2014

The Great Revivals

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Brother Abraham, the Semitic cleric and Biblical scholar, was telling me the other day about the great Revival Movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He said the movements began as a reaction to the scientistic attitudes brought about by Enlightenment thinking which the faithful found to be atheistic and involved a return to the fundamental beliefs of Christian doctrine and an irrefutable belief in the inerrancy of the Bible.

The revival meetings, Abraham told me, were heavy on emotional content with lots of singing and praising and pretty light on intellectual substance which, I guess, was a real crowd pleaser because the revival meetings became quite popular with a lot of people finding God and looking forward to the next event.

The good brother said that these fundamentalist Christians were for the most part dispensational premillennialists, which means, among other things, that God will make good on his promise to establish Jewish dominion over the world, which, Abraham said, will certainly be good for him and that he’s looking forward to it.

As I think about what these meetings might have been like, I think I could have enjoyed the energy and reverie, the coming together of like-minded people in a celebratory gathering. As long as no one asked me whose fault it was that apple got picked.

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Something or Nothing

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I find myself spending a lot of time lately in the black void of the covered toy chest and despite the faint Sounds of Music coming from somewhere in the playroom the situation has got me thinking about the notion of complete nothingness.

People have thought, for a long time, about why there is something rather than nothing. Some have found the question a small problem easily answered by an existent creator God, rationalizing that the order in nature demands a creative intelligence. But, these folks are hard pressed to explain who created the creator.

Over the centuries this intellectual conundrum found temporary ontological solution in the notion of a Self-created Infinitely Perfect Being whose perfection demands existence. But, this, of course, begs the question of how something can come from nothing; an idea that can be thought about in mathematical abstractions but is a lot harder to figure in terms of matter and substance.

In the context of time the eternal is pretty impossible to think through and unless we are willing to abandon the search for a reasonable answer in favor of blind faith the dilemma will probably always remain an enigma………….unless we entertain the solipsistic notion that there is indeed nothing; no material reality at all; only consciousness, which seems initially to work pretty well until I encounter another consciousness. From there it’s only a short mental hop to the collective unconscious and the archetypes that make up our illusory universe.
So, here I lie, in total blackness, contemplating a question I can probably never know the answer to, not knowing whether there is something rather than nothing and unable to get that annoying tune out of my head………………which brings us back to Do, a deer,……………….. or maybe I’m just not an asset to the Abby.

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Free Will

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I was thinking the other day about the nature of free will-whether it was truly a viable concept given the determinist position that everything we do we do because it’s in our nature to do it and we really have no free choice in the matter.

So, I was thinking that in order to exercise free will I’d have to do just the opposite of what I was inclined to do; so that when making a decision, if it made total sense to do A-that A would be the best choice for my well-being-would be preferable to choice B in every way-that I would instead choose B in order to exercise said freewill even though it would result in a bad outcome for me.

I suppose the determinist would respond that the likelihood was I harbored masochistic tendencies and therefore perfectly natural and predictable that I would choose B.
So, given my said masochistic tendencies I instead choose A, I suppose the determinist would then respond that it is only natural to preserve one’s well-being and therefore no freewill will have been exercised in that case either.

So, what if I embraced the absurd-if I imagined a preternatural essence hovering about me-something that I interact with on a daily basis-a sort of magical companion? That would certainly take the wind out of the determinist’s sails wouldn’t it?

I guess, in the end, the freewill thing might depend on how carefully I listen to my invisible friend.

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God-likeness

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I was thinking back to my school days recently.  Doll school was really a lot less about acquiring information than it was about seeking truth and the nature of doll existence.  We spent a lot of time contemplating the big questions, you know, like, does the universe have a purpose, What can we know for sure, Why is there something instead of nothing, does evolution explain human nature, does the free market erode moral character?

One day we got to talking about Plato’s belief that universal, Ideal forms underlay all our observable phenomena; that the things we see around us as well as we, ourselves, are imperfect representations of these transcendent perfect Ideals.  So that, the apple there on the table is a manifestation of the Ideas of redness, roundness, hardness and if we were to bite into it sweetness or tartness-it is an imperfect representation of the Idea of Appleness.

Our professor, Leonard D., then got us thinking about what universal ideals were existent in each of us; imperfect as we know we are, he asked, what are some of the ideal forms each of us exhibit?

My immediate thoughts were to my physical appearance which I am fully aware are far from ideal, at least in terms of Beauty although that does seem to be a bit relative to the times.  But certainly there is more to me than that.  There’s my personality and intellect: I think I’m reasonably intelligent, pretty compassionate, somewhat humble and unassuming and mostly friendly.  And then there’s my sense of responsibility and social participation: I pretty well keep things clean and orderly and I usually do my best to be a functional member of our doll community.

So, when I tried to envision Ideal universal DeiDei-ness, I supposed she might be more beautiful, smarter, more caring, friendlier and altogether more god-like, which got me wondering what it meant to think of myself in terms of god.  Should I be humbled by the realization of my obvious inadequacies or do I think of my relative god-likeness as an ego boost?

Well, that was all quite some time ago but I still think about the dilemma occasionally and how my behavior might reflect one position or the other.  I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion there are places and times for both behaviors.

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The Rapture

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Sister Chloe was enlightening me the other day about what to expect when the end times descend upon us.  At some point, she said, the quick and the dead, provided they are/were true believers, will be raptured heavenward to live for eternity in paradise.

I got to wondering what ‘paradise’ might consist of; is the weather always temperate, the days sunny?  Will the food be exceptional?  Is exercise part of the equation even though it can be a bit painful sometimes?

Anyway, I was reading this book, The Leftovers, about these folks who didn’t get raptured so were left to their daily grinds.  Well, the question that immediately arose after the rapture was why them and not us. It seemed that some of those folks raptured didn’t appear to have led all that great of a life in moral terms and some of those left had been fairly devout church goers.  It was a real conundrum which led to the development of an extremist cult aimed at dealing with the leftovers’ apparent rejection.

Sister Chloe seems to think if I follow my conscience and try to always do the right thing I’ll be just fine-will have nothing to worry about when the Rapture happens.  She’s so compassionate; naïve but compassionate.

The Rapture