Random Ideas
9/1/06 - Most of us have heard the phrase, "And Thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory forever" as is sometimes added to the Lord's Prayer (even though these words were not in the version of the Lord's Prayer presented in the Bible, supposedly by Jesus). This blurb here discusses those words.
Kingdom -- noun
Power -- verb
Glory -- adjective
Nouns are matter. Verbs are manifestations of energy. Adjectives (and adverbs) describe how the matter and energy are organized.
All these are aspects of each other. The Kingdom (that is, everything that exists) is the manifestation of God's Power and Glory, while the Power extends over all the Kingdom and is a sign of God's Glory. The Glory, according to something I read in a Biblical dictionary of Hebrew words, would refer to chabod, which roughly translates as "weight" or otherwise "importance". God has Power over all of the Kingdom, so God is pretty important. Each of these aspects are theoretically infinite; the Kingdom is infinite if you count the spiritual realm of Heaven as well as the material realm, referred to as "Earth" elsewhere in the Lord's Prayer, but not restricted to just this blue ball.
Nearer the beginning in the part that is in the Bible, the Lord's Prayer says, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven." Let's say that Heaven is like the "ideal" realm, kind of like in Plato. This is were everything that should happen, happens. In our realm, "Earth" or the material world (real world?), this does not seem to be the case. Morality/ethics asks us to try to do what should be done (I'm a genius, huh?). In my notes, I speculate that the fulfillment of what should be here in the "Earth" realm would making the Kingdom infinite, which I tie to the Buddhist idea of nirvana as samsara.
Whether the monotheistic idea is literally true matters less to me in this analysis than what it says about our moral/ethical role and general approach to the universe and spirituality.
Maybe a week or two after posting this in January, it occurred to me that monotheism is an important model (although of course, a partial and limited one) because it allows us to see the gulf between the ethical ideals we should strive to manifest on one hand, and the way the world actually is on the other. It occurred to me that this is why traditional Abrahmic monotheism pictures God as "holy" -- in Hebrew qodesh or separate from the unclean. There are valid critiques of this view of divinity, which is why I don't make it my only model. However, the idea of God's separate, pure holiness -- coupled with the ancient Jewish idea of sin as "missing the mark" brings home the idea that we have a lot of work to do to make the world a better place, but also that we can't expect our labors to make things perfect.
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12/24/06 - The same way that the market only works if certain conditions are met, and can't be applied to areas where those conditions aren't met, democracy (in the sense of majority rule) can only be applied in certain situations as well. These situations' conditions would include times when the behavior of an individual or a numerical minority would impact the majority of individuals around them. In situations where this is not the case, majority rule -- while the best form of "governmance" -- cannot be applied. (Thanks to Corporation Nation by Charles Derber for inspiration here)
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Back to contents:
http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2006/07/contents.html
Kingdom -- noun
Power -- verb
Glory -- adjective
Nouns are matter. Verbs are manifestations of energy. Adjectives (and adverbs) describe how the matter and energy are organized.
All these are aspects of each other. The Kingdom (that is, everything that exists) is the manifestation of God's Power and Glory, while the Power extends over all the Kingdom and is a sign of God's Glory. The Glory, according to something I read in a Biblical dictionary of Hebrew words, would refer to chabod, which roughly translates as "weight" or otherwise "importance". God has Power over all of the Kingdom, so God is pretty important. Each of these aspects are theoretically infinite; the Kingdom is infinite if you count the spiritual realm of Heaven as well as the material realm, referred to as "Earth" elsewhere in the Lord's Prayer, but not restricted to just this blue ball.
Nearer the beginning in the part that is in the Bible, the Lord's Prayer says, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven." Let's say that Heaven is like the "ideal" realm, kind of like in Plato. This is were everything that should happen, happens. In our realm, "Earth" or the material world (real world?), this does not seem to be the case. Morality/ethics asks us to try to do what should be done (I'm a genius, huh?). In my notes, I speculate that the fulfillment of what should be here in the "Earth" realm would making the Kingdom infinite, which I tie to the Buddhist idea of nirvana as samsara.
Whether the monotheistic idea is literally true matters less to me in this analysis than what it says about our moral/ethical role and general approach to the universe and spirituality.
Maybe a week or two after posting this in January, it occurred to me that monotheism is an important model (although of course, a partial and limited one) because it allows us to see the gulf between the ethical ideals we should strive to manifest on one hand, and the way the world actually is on the other. It occurred to me that this is why traditional Abrahmic monotheism pictures God as "holy" -- in Hebrew qodesh or separate from the unclean. There are valid critiques of this view of divinity, which is why I don't make it my only model. However, the idea of God's separate, pure holiness -- coupled with the ancient Jewish idea of sin as "missing the mark" brings home the idea that we have a lot of work to do to make the world a better place, but also that we can't expect our labors to make things perfect.
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12/24/06 - The same way that the market only works if certain conditions are met, and can't be applied to areas where those conditions aren't met, democracy (in the sense of majority rule) can only be applied in certain situations as well. These situations' conditions would include times when the behavior of an individual or a numerical minority would impact the majority of individuals around them. In situations where this is not the case, majority rule -- while the best form of "governmance" -- cannot be applied. (Thanks to Corporation Nation by Charles Derber for inspiration here)
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Back to contents:
http://jlhart7.blogspot.com/2006/07/contents.html
posted by jlhart7 at 9:41 AM
1 Comments:
I like your random ideas, in particular the way of looking at theological ideas as "models" that we can play with to see how they fit with reality or see how they fit with ethical objectives. It is a refreshing change from seeing them as truth, or seeing them as imposing obligations upon us to believe or behave in certain ways.
I like the analysis of the words into noun, verb and adjective, in defiance with conventional grammar, which is old-fashioned, boring and based on the study of dead languages. Wittgenstein has a different idea of grammar too, which was not fixated on the relationship of parts of speech, but the way we use words, and what can or cannot be said. Chomsky too has his idea of grammar, based on the notion of a universal grammar, present in all languages.
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