Worth Reading

The ORIGINAL Scientists and Religionists

Les Ruins ("The Ruins"), by Constantin Francois de Volney, is the publication that resulted from this Frenchman's visits to the middle east (Syria, Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean) in the late 1700's.  He cites the words of the ancients in his descriptions of those lands, and his passages on the ancient, ancient Ethiopians as described by Diodorus of Sicily (Greek historian, 90-21 BC) and also Strabo (Hellenized Roman from Turkey, 63 BC - 24 AD) and Lucian (Syrian Roman, 125-180 AD - like the others, also wrote in Greek), who in turn cite previous Greek historians as well as the subject peoples themselves.

While meditating on the fates of formerly fabulous civilizations that have been reduced to uninhabited ruins, which struck him very deeply as he wandered through those very desert ruins, he writes of a "Genius" who imparts much knowledge to him.  Here's what he has to say about Ethiopia, which is simply and utterly fascinating to one who was not aware that this line of thought existed through the millennia only to be recounted in a famous French work over 200 years ago:

    "And the Genius proceeded to enumerate and point out the objects to me: Those piles of ruins, said  he, which you see in that narrow valley watered by the Nile, are the remains of opulent cities, the pride of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia.* Behold the wrecks of her metropolis, of Thebes with her hundred palaces,** the parent of cities, and monument of the caprice of destiny. There a people, now forgotten, discovered, while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe."

His notes on the above passage elaborate as follows:

    "* In the new Encyclopedia 3rd vol. Antiquities is published a memoir, respecting the chronology of the twelve ages anterior to the passing of Xerxes into Greece, in which I conceive myself to have proved that upper Egypt formerly composed a distinct kingdom known to the Hebrews by the name of Kous and to which the appellation of Ethiopia was specially given.  This kingdom preserved its independence to the time of Psammeticus; at which period, being united to the Lower Egypt, it lost its name of Ethiopia, which thenceforth was bestowed upon the nations of Nubia and upon the different tribes of blacks, including Thebes, their metropolis."

Finally, further along in his notes with citations of Diodorus and Lucian of the Ethiopians as Fathers of Science and Religion:

    "What Diodorus says of the Thebans, every author, and himself elsewhere, repeat of the Ethiopians, which tends more firmly to establish the identity of this place of which I have spoken.  "The Ethiopians conceive themselves," says he, lib. iii., "to be of greater antiquity than any other nation: and it is probable that, born under the sun's path, its warmth may have ripened them earlier than other men.  They suppose themselves also to be the inventors of divine worship, of festivals, of solemn assemblies, of sacrifices, and every other religious practice.  They affirm that the Egyptians are one of their colonies, and that the Delta, which was formerly sea, became land by the conglomeration of the earth of the higher country which was washed down by the Nile.  They have, like the Egyptians, two species of letters, hieroglyphics, and the alphabet; but among the Egyptians the first was known only to the priests, and by them transmitted from father to son, whereas both species were common among the Ethiopians.""

    ""The Ethiopians," says Lucian, page 985, "were the first who invented the science of the stars, and gave names to the planets, not at random and without meaning, but descriptive of the qualities which they conceived them to possess; and it was from them that this art passed, still in an imperfect state, to the Egyptians.""

Couldn't have said it more succinctly myself!

Via, Veritas, Vita

Or, if you prefer Greek to the Latin title of this post, then "hodos, aletheia, zoe" would be the closest concepts to "way, truth, life" - as in the Gospel of John's recounting of Christ's statement (in English):  "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life."

The Greeks were not recognized by other civilizations as a particularly "truthful" people; in fact, they did not even have a word that strictly translates to the English "truth" or the Latin "veritas."  From Greek mythology and history, it would seem that they valued guile and slyness over honesty (the gods "tricking" [lying to] humans into doing things they were not otherwise inclined to do; the ruse of the Trojan Horse to end that war; these are but a few drops of water in a vast sea of examples).  The Persians, on the other hand, as well as the Romans, were known as possessing the virtue of being truthful, but virtue is a relative term.  The Greeks simply did not see it as being as virtuous as the ability to cunningly outwit adversaries in any of life's encounters.

The word "aletheia" is an interesting study unto itself, and rather than meaning the same thing as the English word "truth," would more accurately be translated as the quality of not being hidden:  e.g., the revealing of everything that is known about something.  This original spirit of the Greek version of truth has clearly been lost on today's leaders, be they political, executive, or otherwise inclined to sway public opinion in one way or another.  Now, telling the truth has become (for some) only the strictest, most literal revelation of facts or details that are inquired of, and a very far cry from the speaker "revealing all that is known about something, leaving nothing hidden."

When you communicate with people, do you deal with the "truth" of our modern conception, attempting to reveal as little and non-incriminating as possible without resorting to outright falsehood, or do you attempt to fully engage with the notion of "aletheia" as set forth by the ancient Greeks?

Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?  April DeConick, Professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University in Houston, has called for posts today on Church Father Tertullian's famous question.  Apparently Tertullian was frustrated with the assault of Greek reason on the early Church and wanted to make the point that subjecting scripture to philosophical reasoning in the tradition of Platonic, Stoic, or other Greek schools was not applicable, as faith and reason are two distinct realms (as I have pointed out in this space on more than one occasion!).

I will look at this question from another perspective, the perspective of Greek vs. Judeo-Christian societal tendencies.  The Hellenic peoples had never been content with a homeland, and had always sought to expand outwardly into the unknown world around them.  This seems to have been born purely of the desire to expand their horizons, geographically as well as experientially, and this would characterize the Hellenes for centuries to come.  It would also be the blueprint for Western civilization to follow for the remainder of human history up to and including today.  Athens, of course, would eventually become the center of this world by the 5th century BC.

Meanwhile, the Jews, a "wandering" race of people, only did so in pursuit of the Promised Land.  While the Hellenes had a land of their own yet wanted more, the Jews were continually trying to get to the land they called home.  The Jews were focused on their individual relationship with God, doing what they were personally instructed to do through Abraham and Moses and sticking to that plan with as little deviation from it as possible in terms of behavior and custom.  The Greeks, on the other hand, seem to have been more focused on the polis and on citizenship with their fellow humanity, things that could be and were continually improved upon if they kept open minds regarding all that they experienced.  So when Christ died as a Jew in Jerusalem, His message was one of personal salvation and how to personally achieve it for oneself; when the Apostle Paul got a hold of that message, however, he applied all of his Hellenic tendencies to it and transformed it into something that needed to expand beyond Judea, beyond Jews, to the entire world for all to access.

The West is continually referred to as "Judeo-Christian" in its values and tendencies, but I would strenuously disagree with that; the message itself, one of love for neighbor and acknowledgment of the one true God and Savior of mankind, is certainly Judeo-Christian, but everything else about the West's intellectual and psychological makeup, including the very way that Christ's message has developed and spread, is undoubtedly Greek.  That, to me, is what Athens has to do with Jerusalem.

Data Visualization of "God" in The Timaeus of Plato

This is something I created at IBM's Many Eyes data visualization tool site.  Thanks to Paul Kedrosky for sharing this amazingly cool and simple technology's existence via his financial blog.

I've frequently heard The Timaeus of Plato cited by religious scholars as a source of references to God by the Greek philosopher, so I copied and pasted it in its entirety from the Internet Classics Archive at MIT into this data viz tool, then chose Word Tree as the method of visualization, then picked the word "God" as the word to visualize in all of its appearances throughout the text in tree form.  Here's the result:

Toughest Test of Faith

Reason.  The human intellect is, for me, the most difficult obstacle to overcome in my struggle with faith.  It's not the bad day, or the hard week, or the unlucky month, or the crappy year that can and does happen to anyone and everyone; no, it's my brain telling me what's logical, what makes sense, or what simply cannot be.  When one falls into the trap of asking "why?", then one can quickly start sinking into the mud of faithless human reason as his or her driving force.  The only way out of or around this is faith, the ability to accept things without knowing why. It's actually strikingly similar to trust, but I would differentiate the two as being either of this world (in the case of trust) versus not of this world, not of our direct personal physical experience (faith).  Trust can eventually be borne out, or demonstrated that one was correct or incorrect in the decision to place the trust in what it was placed; faith, on the other hand, will not be rewarded until after the death of the body.  That's what makes it so difficult:  we base our trust on the experiences and words of those communicated with by God in direct, intelligible ways, whereas we do not have that direct or intelligible experience.  There have been, perhaps, hundreds, or even thousands, who have had that type of experience, while there have been billions who have not.  So the odds are not good.  But don't ask "WHY would God do it this way?" or "HOW does He choose whom to communicate with, HOW to communicate, WHEN to communicate?"  It does not, it cannot, make sense to us.  The more I uncover in the history of faith in general as well as in my specific faith, the more questions I have, not the fewer.  My intellectual arrogance is tangible at times, and it is at these times that I (hopefully) catch myself and hit my spiritual RESET button by asking myself, who am I to question God?  It's a simple question, and unlike other faith-related questions, it has a simple answer:  I am who God made, and He created me to seek answers to questions that have none.  I freely and passionately accept and embrace that answer, as must everyone who has these types of questions.  If they do not, then their faith will not endure, they will live possibly happy and content lives, they will die, and they will cease to exist.  As irrational or superstitious or backward as it may seem to the rational faithless types, I choose to put my faith in an alternative ending, or shall I say beginning, to my existence, and I thank God for creating and instilling that faith in me!

2,000 Years Ago Isn't As Far Away As It Seems

Think back about 1,850 years, in the city of Rome, at the height of the Roman Empire.  You are the Emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.  What do you suppose your deepest, most personal thoughts revolve around?  After all, this is a cruel and brutal age, is it not?  All the world is nothing more than an epic struggle between civilization and murderous barbarians, blood games in the coliseums around the Empire, mutilation, torture, crucifixions (and not just for peaceful Jewish teachers), and on and on.  Yet if one takes it upon him/herself to peruse the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, those very deep and personal thoughts of the Emperor (and philosopher) himself, one could easily be taken with aspirations of becoming talented enough to author such a work in his or her lifetime during our present era.  Filled with gratitude, humility, diplomacy, the value of hard work, freedom of speech, and all manner of insightful observations and ideas concerning the human condition (then, as now - hardly the stuff of our preconceived notions of Roman Emperors), it is an eye-opening journey into the mind and soul of a man with a good deal of the world at his command, a man whose words one would do well to take to heart during each and every day of life's journey.

I recommend George Long's translation from the mid-1800's, from which follows the opening lines of The Meditations:

"From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper.

From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character.

From my mother, piety and beneficence, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich.

From my great-grandfather, not to have frequented public schools, and to have had good teachers at home, and to know that on such things a man should spend liberally.

From my governor, to be neither of the green nor of the blue party at the games in the Circus, nor a partizan either of the Parmularius or the Scutarius at the gladiators' fights; from him too I learned endurance of labour, and to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people's affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander.

From Diognetus, not to busy myself about trifling things, and not to give credit to what was said by miracle-workers and jugglers about incantations and the driving away of daemons and such things; and not to breed quails for fighting, nor to give myself up passionately to such things; and to endure freedom of speech; and to have become intimate with philosophy; and to have been a hearer, first of Bacchius, then of Tandasis and Marcianus; and to have written dialogues in my youth; and to have desired a plank bed and skin, and whatever else of the kind belongs to the Grecian discipline."

Review of Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art

Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art is a remarkable Kimbell Museum exhibit of creative expression dating to the first few centuries A.D. Although touted as a “spectacular display of many of the greatest treasures of early Christianity from around the world,” the collection is almost entirely comprised of pieces from throughout the Roman Empire. Avid enthusiasts of the early history of the Church and its development, as well as casual museum-goers, will undoubtedly be moved as well as surprised by the depth and complexity of the thought and output produced by the earliest proponents of the New Testament. It is striking to witness the countless examples of popular and powerful themes of the day, themes that have been lost to the intervening centuries from then until now. These include the importance of the story of Jonah and the “leviathan” (which we commonly refer to today as a whale, but which the earliest artisans of both the Old and New Testaments invariably represented as a sea monster in their carvings and impressions); the apocryphal story of Peter, imprisoned in Rome, striking a rock wall in his cell and causing it to spring forth with water which was then used to baptize one of his Roman prison guards and which was a direct attempt to equate Peter with Moses accomplishing the same feat in his desert wanderings; and the constant, consistent use of the icthys (fish) symbol as their identifier, many decades before the use of the crucifixion symbolism that has been used up through present times.

When one is confronted with these earliest Christian symbols, representations, and practices, before the Church was “the Church,” one cannot help being transported back to that time and stepping into the physical and spiritual reality of the early Christian Roman Empire. Followers of Christ’s life and teachings had to rely on each other for understanding and interpretation of these strange tales and how they related to each other and to themselves personally, as there was no mass printing or distribution capability. It is fascinating and humbling to see a sampling of the seeds that were sown thousands of years ago, seeds that have grown into the faith and infrastructure of a religious tradition practiced by over a billion people throughout the world today.

Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art is on display at the Kimbell Museum of Art in Fort Worth, Texas through March 30, 2008. It features “major loans from the Vatican, the Bargello and the Laurentian Library in Florence, the British Museum, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a number of other international institutions.” More information can be found at www.kimbellart.org.

Why Science Is Wrong About God

Inspired (yet again) by an Edge.org exchange pitting scientist/person of faith Paul Davies against many other scientists ("Taking Science On Faith"), I have come to the realization after much searching that the undeniable truth of the matter has shown itself.  And that truth is that SCIENCE IS WRONG.  On which side it errs, I'm not sure yet, but it most certainly contradicts itself.
How does science accomplish this feat?  On one hand, it searches for how things work.  Not necessarily WHY things work, but HOW.  This can only be decoded if one accepts the principle of cause and effect, i.e., everything is caused by something.  Why does so and so happen?  Because such as such happens, or because of this "law's" existence, or - you get the idea.
Once we agree that scientists accept that effects are the results of causes, we can quickly jump to the beginning of the universe, which of COURSE scientists agree exists, correct?  And that's where the contradiction comes into play!  There CANNOT BE a "beginning" if everything is caused by something, can there?  Clearly, no, there cannot.  The beginning must be caused by something, thereby making that other something the real beginning, which would then lead to THAT something needing something else, in an infinite regression.  The contradiction is that since science asserts that there is no "supreme power" (not supreme "being", mind you, but simply something that causes everything else to come into being without itself being caused by something else) and also that things are caused by other things (processes, events, whatever the case may be), then it must be wrong on at least one of those counts.
Which is the incorrect assertion?  Or are both incorrect?  I don't know.  But I do know that they cannot both be true; therefore, science is wrong.  And, I might add, once again Aristotle is probably correct (with his "first mover" line of reasoning, echoed by Thomas Aquinas over a millennium later, and still plausible/reasonable almost 750 years after him).

Jesus - The Man Just Doesn't Like Religion

This may not be much of a jolt to those who have actually read some or all of the New Testament of the Bible in context (i.e., entire books of it from start to finish rather than jumping around from chapter to chapter or verse to verse to extract quotes that can then be used out of context to bolster one's case in just about any matter), but from what I've read so far in the 1st 2 1/2 gospels (Matthew, Mark, and part of Luke), what seemed to really be under Christ's skin more than anything else was mankind's religious constructs.  Particularly the Jews, which he and all of his Apostles were.  He railed against what transpired in the synagogues, He criticized the rules against eating certain foods, He addressed with contempt the strict adherence to practices such as washing before meals.  In a nutshell, the thing that troubled Him the most deeply was that mankind had become so caught up in the rules and regulations of "religion" as set up by mankind that they had lost sight of the only things that mattered, which were having one and only one God and loving/treating everyone else as you would be loved and treated.  If people would just follow those two guidelines in all that they did, things would be great and we'd all get along while on earth and then enjoy eternal bliss when that day comes.

Makes me wonder about my Catholicism, but I'll get into that later today or tomorrow.

Apparently Less Is More When It Comes to Words

Local library + Audible.com + iPod + daily commute = more book "reading" over the past year or so than I've done since I was in college and basically read books for my "job" as a student.  The Arlington Public Library system has lots of branches, all of which have a decent selection of audio books on cd and cassette.  I used to just listen to these through the car or truck stereo, which was fine.  But I realized that I was more focused on listening when I wore headphones, so I started using personal cd players and an old Sony Walkman for cassettes, which was fine.  Then, after I finally got my first iPod this past spring, I started ripping the audiobook cd's into iTunes and having entire books on the iPod, which I ALWAYS carry with me, so I could listen in the car, walking through downtown, sitting outside or in the food court for lunch, lying in bed at night, anytime, any place.

So going back to the books to which I've listened, all unabridged, there have been classics such as St. Augustine's Confessions, Thucydides's The History of the Pelopponesian War (I'm actually only 8 hours into this almost 30 hour extravaganza), several books each by the religious historians Karen Armstrong and Elaine Pagels, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, Freakonomics, a few books by G.K. Chesterton, popular science books, general philosophy books, you name it.  Hundreds of hours, months or even years worth of reading time (I'm one of those slow and thorough readers that re-reads passages to absorb and fully understand every word rather than just skimming for the general concepts and main points, which carries over to rewinding and re-listening to passages when necessary).  Seriously, I have listened to more books over the past year than in several previous years worth of reading combined.  And I LOVE my daily commute now, because it's about the only time when I can read for long stretches of time uninterrupted by household duties, family obligations, work, tv, etc.!

This morning, I commenced listening to the New Testament of the Bible, 16 cd's of about 70 minutes apiece, with the Old Testament waiting in the wings on the library's bookshelf (another 48 cd's for that baby - and did I mention that all but 2 of the audiobooks I've read have been free except for a few dollars in late fees, since I checked all of them out from the library?).  I'm about 40 minutes into Matthew, and I can honestly say I know more about that gospel as of right now than in all of my previous Catholic upbringing.  You see, when you read the Bible, you tend to skim over sections containing long lists of crazy-sounding names, or places you can't pronounce, or archaic styles or writing.  But when you listen to and concentrate on every single word, you get the whole picture, and it comes together in its entirety, the way it was meant to be communicated in the first place.

One of the things I listened to this morning was Jesus instructing people about prayer, telling them that when they pray, to avoid lengthy words and sentences and so forth; rather, open your heart to God, for He already knows what's in it, and all that needs to be said is the Our Father.  Those are the only words we need to worry about when we pray, about 60-70 words total, with the rest being in our hearts.  Just something to keep in mind when you know you need to communicate with God but are frustrated because you can't find the "right" words to use.  Don't worry about it - He already knows.  But you DO need to make the effort to at least open up the lines for the unspoken conversation to take place.  And that isn't too terribly much to ask, is it?