Hi, Everybody.
30 March 14
Hi Troy and Mia:
When Mr. Ross writes towards the end of
Appendix A
The Hebrew word for faith, emuna, means a
strongly held conviction that something or someone is certainly existing,
firmly established, constant and dependable.
The Greek word for faith, pistis, means a strong and welcome
conviction of the truth of anything or anyone to the degree that one places
complete trust and confidence in that thing or person.
I think that's certainly a couple of very
true descriptions, but very much at variance with what could be described, scientifically,
as invariable scientifically supported evidence. I think it's more than a bit disingenuous to
house these observations in an Appendix with the compelled inference that they
are irrefutable support for what is stated in Chapter Three rather than just a
different way of paraphrasing the earlier opinions -- basically using opinions
to support opinions and calling that science.
I think all we are capable of doing here in
our inherently limited and limiting physically incarnated construct -- planet
earth -- is to say: here are things that
appear to be generally true HERE. Which
strikes me as a very limited form of understanding: "understanding".
"Generally true" qualified by
"HERE" because virtually no scientific proof is 100% and practically
everything that we deem to be true breaks down outside of our specific context
-- our "here on earth" context -- once you move outside of the unique
circumstance within which and to which we are subject.
We are, I think, most accurately described
as being in the eye of the cosmological storm, the existence of water in
gaseous, liquid and solid form, simultaneously, serving as a pretty good proof
of the assertion: there are, so far as
we know, not many contexts in the universe where that is even remotely
possible, certainly none elsewhere in our solar system which has a pretty wide
variety of contexts to pick from.
So, this seems to me a very poor place from
which to be saying "Here is what General Reality is like" and
extrapolating that Reality from within our unique circumstance.
That seems to me the point of Genesis
1: Here, God is saying, is how what you,
my creations, are aware of -- General Reality -- was created. And here is how
that General Reality was enacted in order to create your specific reality --
the-earth-as-enactment of General Reality made up of the earth, the seas, the
earth's atmosphere, plants, living creatures and yourselves. You are inside this
experiment/enactment. All that you are
required to do is to "be fruitful and multiply" and you will have
fulfilled your purpose.
What you were created to be will enact
itself over the course of your lifetime, but your lifetime won't be remotely
long enough to fully stage and enact the experiment in order that conclusions
will be able to be drawn.
And that's true, I think, of all the
"players" in the enactment.
This is as much about the earth and the seas "being fruitful and
multiplying" as it is about us as human beings. Genesis 1 is addressed to all of us. Wheels within wheels within wheels. Genesis 2 and 3 seem to me to be the earth
dissenting from the process and suppositions, the earth holding the view,
Genesis 1 isn't how things were created. I, the earth, the Alpha and the Omega,
was there when everything was created and here is how it happened.
But the earth is basically just an observer
-- and, as we now know for a fact, a tiny cosmological latecomer --
misconstruing his/her/its self to be Instigator and Perpetrator, which is why
Genesis 1 makes a great deal of scientific sense and Genesis 2 and 3 make only
tangential scientific sense.
But, that's getting ahead of the story.
I think that "be fruitful and
multiply" has much in common with "an infinite number of monkeys with
an infinite number of typewriters will eventually type the complete works of
Shakespeare". Which I don't think
is true: more like, "trillions of
monkeys with trillions of typewriters will eventually type a lucid sentence or
two strictly by accident".
As distinct from our own situation:
"an exponentially expanding and expressive population in a limited
construct, sheltered from serious harm will, over the course of billions of
years, arrive at a relatively accurate perception of Reality" and that,
further, we are billions of years away from that taking place.
I see us right now as being in a
cosmological Sargasso Sea where half of the population is determined to prove
that the earth IS the sea and the sea IS the earth -- i.e. men are women and
women are men, completely interchangeable -- no matter how self-evidently
lunatic that view is.
It is, I think, built in. You make a
certain amount of progress towards Reality and then you go around and around
pointless lunatic circles for extended periods of time.
I don't picture any forward progress in my
lifetime back towards Reality: just this (seemingly) endless and pointless
digression into a prime circuitous argument: everything is the same. The light is darkness. Darkness is light. Day
is night. Night is day. Trees are grass
and grass is trees. Men are women. Women
are men.
(which I suspect is what actually powered
the Big Bang and the outward expanding universe: again, God's Overview allowing him to see
lemonade where there was only His first creation's lemons, "This going
around and around and around in the same stupid circles over and over. If you could harness that, and accelerate it,
you could create quite a light show, quite a big tapestry…and somewhere in
there -- once you were up into quintillions of orders of magnitude going around
and around the same stupid circles, someone might actually come up with a lucid
thought or two.")
It would be nice to think that I'm that
person. I can't say that I'm convinced
of my own opinions. I do tend to think
that they fit the known facts better than the other constructs of which I'm
aware -- but that isn't the same as saying that they are True or even
"true". Many people have been
wrongfully convicted of crimes they didn't commit because an artful lawyer was
able to manufacture a false scenario out of the known facts in a case and
persuade a jury that his version was True whereas all it might have been is
more artful.
In
fact, to me, that participates of the lunatic circuitous argument presented by
Genesis 2 and 3: here is what I saw,
here is what I experienced, here is what I have decided is the relevant
information to the discussion, therefor "Here is Truth".
I've already written twice as many pages about
THE GENESIS QUESTION as Mr. Ross has written in THE GENESIS
QUESTION. The same thing happened with
my writing on Pastor John's book. Somewhere
up ahead, when I'm finished critiquing THE GENESIS QUESTION, I'll go on-line
and attempt to find the latest contact information for Mr. Ross and send him my
commentaries on disk. As I did on a
weekly basis with Pastor John. And I'm
pretty sure I'll never hear from him just as I was pretty sure I would never
hear from Pastor John (and never did).
"This is what works for me"
pretty much sums it up. Pastor John's
THE SOUL REVOLUTION works for him. Hugh
Ross' THE GENESIS QUESTION works for him.
LATTER DAYS and THE LAST DAY work for me. Why you, Troy, were interested in my
religious opinions, I don't know or why you were willing to pay me $10,000 for
them I don't know.
I have always had this compulsion to a)
understand and b) after understanding, explain what I understand. That certainly applies to my religious
faith. The difference being that my
religious faith is the only context in which my understanding and my explanations
seem secondary in importance to my behaviour.
Get rid of vice and sin -- err on the side
of caution if, as with professional sports, I'm not sure if it's a vice or a
sin and get rid of it anyway (coming up on the first anniversary). Fast, pray, work, read Scripture aloud,
observe a Sabbath.
Read Scripture aloud because, if it is
God's Word, in whole or in part, it's really the closest that a human being can
come to being co-existent with Truth.
"I have no idea what any of this means, but reading it aloud is the
best possible use of my time: internalizing and externalizing Reality
simultaneously."
"Convince people my opinions are
right" doesn't really enter into it. First of all, it isn't going to
happen. For a good two decades I've been
talking to myself. The last decade of CEREBUS and the decade after CEREBUS
ended.
I can -- and do -- talk to myself with
other people within my "hearing" (as I'm doing here) but that doesn't
alter the fact that there is no difference between talking to myself and
talking to someone else. No one can hear
me if I just write this stuff on my own and no one can hear me if I write it to
them. People, it seems to me, only hear
themselves in the context of "be fruitful and multiply" which seems
to me the driving force behind "be fruitful and multiply". Incarnate and Do. And how you end up will establish the
validity of your DO choices.
This is universally true in my life at this
point. No one hears a word I say and no
one responds to any question I pose. No
one "gets back to me". Again,
I think that's built in. That is who and
what we are as God's creations. Although
we certainly don't perceive ourselves that way.
We are created "good" and then we spiral off into whatever we
are going to spiral off into through our own construction/misconstruction
hybridizations. We end up where we end
up. And virtually all of us think of
ourselves as being Good People or, at least, "good" people.
I wonder why that is.
I don't see myself as a good person. I see myself as a -- how would I put this? --
a less existent person. The best evidence
available to me suggests that I don't actually exist. I did exist at one time roughly 25 or 30
years ago and then began to exist less and now I'm existing less and less as
each day goes by.
I don't have any point of identification
with any of the things that people generally hold as evidence of their own
existence. Family, friends, hobbies,
interests, preferred entertainments. Of course, I've also come to the
conclusion that those are illusory constructs having more to do with people
feeling a need to establish their own existence for themselves -- as I did 25
or 30 years ago -- than with actually establishing their existence.
I try to do what I think is right but the
more things that I do that I think are right the less I seem to exist. Looking on the bright side, this could be
what Enoch was all about: "he was
not and God took him". Looking on
the less bright side, "I'm doing it wrong".
Possibly it's like the concept of
"signal-to-noise". God is
Signal. Everything else, to one degree
or another, is noise. If you get
yourself and your life over in the direction of signal -- which I've been
attempting to do for 17 years -- your noise quotient drops and you can no
longer be heard because people are far more attuned to noise than they are to
signal or Signal. People seek out noise
of various kinds -- music, movies, sports, conversation -- and attune
themselves to it with the idea that if they unite their own noise to this other
noise, meaning will result.
Noise+noise=signal.
When you choose Signal exclusively -- as
exclusively as is possible and God alone knows how possible it is -- it seems
to me that even if you don't become signal or become attuned
completely to signal you, at the very least, become "less noisy"
or "less noise-like" or "less noise compatible" or all
three to the extent that you are "off the dial" and no longer
"register" in the context of noise.
Which becomes somewhat problematic when your own nature is to a)
understand and b) explain. The more I
understand -- or I think I understand -- the less audible my explanations
become.
Sorry for the digression. I'll get back to Chapter Three next week.
Best,
Dave
