The Desert Nights are Cold Indeed
You must be careful, when you leave your tent-door open at night. All sorts of things may creep in while you are not looking; a camel who feels cold, for example, or Sitaram with his bizarre ideas.
I spent several years debating and arguing and studying religions full time on the Internet. I remember one of my early encounters with a Muslim whose screen name was "Titanium," a very strong metal immune to rust and tarnish. Titanium attempted to assert that Hindus condone poor treatment of women, and therefore Hinduism is bad because such perpetrators are a product of that belief/ideology. I raised the subject of Sarah giving her handmaiden Hagar to Abram. I pointed out that nowhere is it said whether Hagar had any say or consent in all this. Various onlookers cheered at the brilliance of my rhetorical fencing parry.
One day, a Christian was trying to criticize Hinduism on various criteria. I pointed out the great irony, which one rarely sees mentioned, that in the Old Testament, one of the most heinous crimes was to join in the worship of Moloch and pass one's own child through the fire as a sacrifice. Yet what do we see in the New Testament but a monotheistic God who is a Trinity of a Father offering His only begotten to the sacrifice of a crucifixion.
I suppose my point in all this, aside from amazing and entertaining all of you, is that there are always ways to get inside of any religion or philosophy or ideology, and find that it contains within its very fabric the contradictory seeds of its own destruction.
Mathematician Kurt Gödel did this with the axiomatic systems of mathematics, in his dispute with (oh who was that? Ah yes, Hilbert) another mathematician who asserted that any proposition which is TRUE must certainly be PROVEABLE. For millennia, mathematics was considered to be the one hope of humanity to access absolute truth. Socrates and Plato and the Pythagoreans looked to number and geometry as the haven and refuge of eternally infallible assertions. There seemed to be only one little flaw in Euclid's geometry, namely, the Fifth Postulate, that, given a plane, with a line in it, and a point in the plane not on the line, there can pass through that point one and only one line which is parallel to the first line, never intersecting with it in either direction, though we extend it as far as we please. The word postulate comes from the Latin "postulo" meaning, "I demand or require." In monasteries, the POSTULANTS are those of whom demands are made as the are tested for suitability to make life-long vows. Hence, in geometry, a POSTULATE is something which we demand that you accept without any sort of proof in a theorem, but simply on the strength that it is intuitively obvious. And, may I add, it is intuitively obvious that were we to attempt to prove EVERY assertion in some axiomatic system by means of a theorem, why then the number of theorems would be INFINITE, and we abhor an infinite regress on the grounds that we haven't the time for such nonsense. By the way, this little tale which I am narrating, of the incompleteness theorem and the failure of mathematics (failure to live up to our expectations) is far more important a tale to be included in every young person's curriculum vitae than any tale of angels, or apples, or gardens, or flying mounts, or nights of power or third heavens. Yes, those were the "good ole' days" when we were certain that the earth was the absolute center of the universe, about which all else revolved, and mankind was the special concern of the Almighty, and mathematics was the pristine reservoir of absolute truth unsullied and untainted by the corruption of the material world below the lunar sphere.
For centuries, generation after generation of mathematicians tried their darnedest to PROVE the fifth postulate of Euclid. They thought, "If only we could PROVE it, then geometry will be perfect, without that little blotch of doubt on it's otherwise irreproachable escutcheon of convincing accuracy." One day, a Russian chap by the name of Lobachevsky said, "I know! I will ASSUME that there is MORE than one line passing through the point which never meets the first line, and I shall reason on and on from that premise, until I arrive at some obvious contradiction, and then I shall have PROVED the Fifth Postulate by REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM." But Lobachevsky's clever tactic never yielded the much desired fruit of contradiction. Instead, Pandora's box opened again, and a swarm of different geometries flew out like a swarm of Harpies to defile our mystical last supper feast of communion with the Logos. How disillusioning. Geometry was no longer the unassailable bastion of certainty. The earth was no longer the center of the universe. Soon, humankind itself would be dethroned from the seat of honor by notions of Evolution.
http://www.math.yorku.ca/Who/Faculty.../lecture.shtml
When does questioning and doubt become disrespectful? My suspicion is that it becomes disrepectful the moment it becomes too successful and persuasive. Was Copernicus disrepectful to Ptolemy? Was Darwin disrepectful to Moses and Aristotle?
I should have entitled this post "Respect and Science" but I find cold desert nights and nomadic tents far more romantic, don't you?
Santayana once said, I think, something about how one of human-kind's greatest abilities is the ability to feel self-contempt, self-loathing. He may have also been the one to say that our skepticism is like our virginity, and we must not too easily surrender it to the first idea which comes along.
Our writings, ideas, theories, heritage and culture are very much like children to us. We are very proud of them and very attached to them. We are very protective. It is often difficult for a mother to see her child as really quite naughty and culpable.
An idea or theory must earn our respect. Even a God must earn our respect and become worthy of worship in our eyes. Ever since Eve took her famous bite from that apple of knowledge we have been saying that a tree is known by its fruits.
Of all the Deities who have ever claimed omnipotence, none has ever claimed the power to force or enforce belief. Belief is a banquet table which is "invitation-only" and no invitation is effective unless we exercise our freewill, accept and R.S.V.P. It took the genius of a Kierkegaard, the father of Existentialism, to point out, in "Fear and Trembling," that it is Abraham's free will choice, and THAT FREEWILL CHOICE ALONE, which ultimately empowers the voice from heaven commanding sacrifice.
Now, you may well ask, "What sort of tapestry is this Sitaram weaving for us with his work-in-progress allegory of his about a cold desert night and a tent with the entrance left open?"
Well, a desert is barren. Cold is lifeless and enervating. The darkness and gloom of night obscures all details. A tent is a shelter which harbors warmth and light. Now a cold camel, as we know, is a crafty beast who at first begs that only one hoof gain entrance to warm for a moment. But the end of all rhetoric is that the camel winds up filling the tent, and we are pushed out into the night cold.
A lobbyist for the interest of the Boxing League once spoke out against those who would ban the sport by demonstrating how boxing is really of universal interest. He explained, "Suppose you are walking along a street, and you notice that, on the other side of the street, a husband and wife are having an argument which suddenly breaks out into a knock-down-drag-out fight, with kicking, biting, scratching.... no holds barred. Well, do you look straight ahead and keep on walking? No, of course not. Your eyes are glued to the spectacle, along with all the other passers-by, until a huge crowd gathers."
We like fights. We enjoy seeing something or someone get the daylights beat out of it. This is way all those Survival shows and Trump shows are now so popular.
People enjoy a good fight, a good argument. Hmmm.... well, let us be somewhat discriminating. Fighting is not good, because violence is a poor way to settle differences (unless we annihilate all opposition to the status of extinct, at which point all disputation ceases.) But reasoned argument is interesting and educational and is sometimes actually instructive, whenever we can learn something new, or see things in a different light, from a different perspective.
One thimbleful of Truth is always seasoned with bushels of falsehood. Wheat is always rubbing shoulders with Tares (weeds). The famous Homilist, John Chrysostome (the golden mouthed), of the 4th century, once stated that the Tares are left side-by-side in the Wheat until the final day of harvest precisely because until that final judgment day, mystically, tares may be transformed into wheat and, conversely, wheat may be transformed into tares.
The "proof of the pudding" is knowing a tree by its ultimate fruits of a lifetime.
Maximus, in the Philokalia, wrote "Do not say that you are the temple of the Lord, writes Jeremiah; nor should you say that faith alone in God can save you, for this is impossible unless you also acquire love for God through your works. As for faith by itself, 'the devils also believe, and tremble' (Epistle of James, 2:19)"
What is your "Persuasion?"
We should note with some interest the word "persuaded" in Paul's statement: "For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 8:38-39
Who was it that persuaded Paul? What was it that persuaded Paul? What does the word "persuasion" mean to you?
Paul lists many and mighty things in his verse above, angels, principalities, powers, the whole of heaven and earth, BUT Paul does NOT mention PERSUASION, since the key which opened the door to let us enter is also the same key which can lock the door and keep us out.
Kierkegaard once observed that a suicide does not end their life with deliberation, but rather, they die from an EXCESS of deliberation (they think too much.)
Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation (as well as father of a number of children with a former nun) said that we must "pluck out the eyes of reason" lest we become, no longer PERSUADED but disuaded, and made appeal to the words of Jesus who said, "better to pluck out one's eye and enter into paradise maimed then for the entire body to enter into hell."
Here is an elaboration on Martin Luther's teaching:
http://www.nobeliefs.com/luther.htm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Martin Luther on Reason
Luther openly advocated the abandonment of using natural reason (Luther considered his use of theological reasoning different from natural reason, i.e., scientific reasoning) . His theological message to live by faith and to abstain from listening to reason has mentally enslaved the lives of millions of Christians to this day. Throughout his literary life he wrote statements such as, "Whoever wishes to be a Christian, let him pluck out the eyes of his reason," "We must give reason a vacation and enter a different school. We must refrain from consulting reason. We must bid reason hold its peace; we must order it to be dead. We must gouge out its eyes and pluck its feathers...," "You must kill the other thoughts and the ways of reason or of the flesh, for God detests them."
I am about to say something in regard to the Mutakallimum Islamic school, and as I searched in google.com, I came across this url which may be of some interest, though it represents something of a digression:
http://www.emery.archive.mcmail.com/...2/occas16.html
What follows is a quote from "Islamic Theology: Traditionalilsm and Rationalism" by Binyamin Abrahamov, Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 0-7486-1102-9, Chapter 3, page 19:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Islamic Theology
We must bear in mind that some Muslim scholars have criticised the use of rational arguments in the interpretation of the Qur'an. They have prohibited the use of independent rational interpretation of the Qur'an (al-tafsir bi'l-ra 'y). A criticism of rational methods in the sphere of Islamic law is illustrated in the teachings of the Zahirite school of law which rebuked the use of analogical reasoning (qiyas) in deriving law from the Qur'an or the Sunna. In both cases, the criticism was directed against the VERY USE of rational arguments, not against their place in argumentation or interpretation.
The traditionalists' attitude towards rational arguments in theology is two-sided. On the one hand, rational proofs of the principles of religion, such as God's existence, His unity and attributes, are rejected by extreme traditionalists, but on the other, the traditionalists use rational arguments to prove principles derived from the Qur'an and the Sunna and to refute their adversaries. They oppose the tenets of the rationalists derived from Qur'an and the Sunna and to refut their adversaries. They oppose the tenets of the rationalists derived from speculative considerations, and also the inevitable consequence of using reason, namely, the diversity of the rationalists' theological solutions, as against the uniformity of the traditionalists' teachings.
The foremost target of the traditionalists was the Mutakallimun, the main body of Muslim scholars who used speculative ways of reasoning to formulate their theological tenets and also to attack the traditionalists' approaches.
We see how the traditionalists resemble Martin Luther with regard to "plucking out the eye of reason."
We must sometimes fight fire with fire. We fight Reason with reasoned arguments. A five volume study of "Fundamentalisms" from the University of Chicago observes on its very first page that, though Fundamentalists of every religion dislike science and technology, they all avail themselves of Internet and word processing to propagate their message.
Socrates was accused of making the weaker argument defeat the stronger argument as well as corrupting the youth.
An infant is such a blank slate. Place that infant in a Catholic home and in a few years it is saying the Rosary. Place the same infant in a Muslim home, and in a few years they are bowing towards Mecca and fasting the Ramamdan. Place them in an Hasidic household and they are studying the Torah and Talmud and facing Jerusalem in prayer.
If infants are such convenient, willing, cooperative blank slates, then why is it that culture and language and tradition are not inviolable and fixed but are ever changing and evolving and mutating?
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but a thousand inspired words are, for me at least, worth more than all the pictures in the world. Such inspired words are a dialectic process, which Socrates describes it as a weaver's loom, with warp and woof, and a shuttle with passes back and forth, creating a tapestry.
One of the greatests wonders is that, even though reality is build upon the random, bizarre twilight zone of Quantum, yet it remains intelligible and recognizable as a cohesive whole. Even if our perception of reality should ultimately prove to be illusion and error, yet it is miraculous if even illusion and mirage so orderly on a macroscopic level should arise from such frenetic discontinuity at a subatomic level.
"All things are possible, not all is profitable." Actually, that is not quite what Paul said. Paul actually said: 1 Corinthians 10:23 "All things are lawful for me,but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful, but not all things edify."
Now, an EDIFICE is something we construct, similar to a tent, but more substantial. Sometimes, an edifice is a fort and other times it is an ivory tower. Sometimes ivory towers become Towers of Babel.
Back to the tent, quickly!
Well, back to allegory of our well-lit warm inviting tent in the cold, dark, barren desert night. Existential absurdity is the bleak cold barren darkness which is torment to light-loving, warm-seeking, purposeful, rational creatures such as we.
