The times are not a-changin'

Lifted this from Crystal Downing's Book Changing Signs of Truth.  Sounds very familiar.

Summarizing contemporary culture in an essay titled "Signs of the Times,"  one cultural critic put it this way:

"public principle is gone; private honesty is  going; society, in short, is fast falling in pieces; and a time of unmixed evil is  come on us."

This apt statement appeared, however, in 1829, describing the  English culture of its author, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881).   With apologies  to Bob Dylan, it would seem that the times are not a-changin'.

One Voice For Change

One Voice For Change: A movement seeking gender equality in Churches of Christ

OUR VISION

Taking Semiotics to Church

I just came across a review titled Taking Semiotics to Church in the Other Journal by Carl Raschke of Crystal Downing's new book Changing Signs of Truth:  A Christian Introduction to the Semiotics of Communication.  The last two paragraphs are below.  I highlighted the next to the last sentence because it strikes a chord with me.   I decided to download the book to my Kindle.  Carl wrote "Next Reformation." A book I found very helpful.  I also read Crystal's other book How Postmodernism Serves My Faith.  It was great.

Changing Signs of Truth is a valuable contribution to the academic and semi-academic literature on cultural semiotics, if only because it portrays in a thorough and engaging way the glaring problem of how language is intertwined with culture and, more importantly, how language evolves over time. Interestingly, the same kinds of points Downing makes about contemporary Western culture would be a no-brainer for missiologists having to contend with the challenges of making the gospel intelligible to non-Westerners. It is a genuine sign of our current age that the controversy over language and culture has come down to whether the meanings of religious terms are somehow set in stone, as the more orthodox instinctively assume, or whether they are simply episodic types of language games, conditioned and rendered contingent by present-day attitudes and practices.

The view that these meanings are set in stone, as I have remarked extensively in my earlier work The Next Reformation (2004), relies on a pseudo-universalistic and hyperrationalistic version of epistemology that is neither biblical nor ancient but thoroughly modern, dating no later than the late eighteenth century. The notion that they are merely historically contingent amounts to an uncritical and inconsistent form of intellectual laissez-faire fostered during the late industrial era by social scientists who somehow fell under the delusion that they were in the business of solving classical problems of theoretical knowledge, when in fact they were merely substituting a naive descriptivism for what used to count as a philosophy of knowledge.
God will undoubtedly not allow the future of Christianity to endure as an interminable mud fight between shallow inerrantists and smug liberals. But in the meantime, readers will take away from this little book some genuine insights in how to rise above the fray.

gender, God, and spirituality

This is deep and profound.  An article from last year by Richard Rohr. 

Do men approach spirituality differently than women, have different starting places and different symbols? My studied opinion is that we do have quite different entrance points, but nevertheless end up much the same, because the goal is identical -- union, divine union, where we are being guided by One who is neither male nor female, but "all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28). 

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Anthropologists suggest that the majority of male initiation rites were concerned with leading the young male on journeys of powerlessness, whereas female fertility and puberty rites had the exact opposite function: to sign the young girl with emblems of power and dignity. The rites gave them both what they needed to get started, but from opposite starting places. The male could not be trusted with power unless he had made journeys of powerlessness; the female would not even know she had power unless she was taught and encouraged to trust it.

This could seem shocking, but read the four Gospels and note Jesus' consistently distinctive attitude toward the two genders. He is invariably calling the woman upward: "Go your way; your faith has restored you to health!" (Luke 8:48) and "Neither do I condemn you" (John 8:11). To a woman who has just spoken "up" and "back" to Jesus, he says, "Woman you have great faith!" (Matthew 15:28).

Conversely, he is steadily calling the males downward: "Zacchaeus, come down!" (Luke 19:5); "If anyone wants to be first, he must be last" to the Twelve (Mark 9:35); and "Get behind me, Satan" to "the prince of the apostles" who wants to avoid suffering (Mark 8:33). Our selective memory is really rather amazing, that we have not noted this clear pattern in the Scriptures. Could that be what we mean by patriarchy?

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This is the unique area of male and female spirituality, as I see it: the differing symbols, stories, images, rituals and metaphors that get us to enter the temple. We must honor the need for action, movement, building, repairing, rescuing and heroic hardship that men love. We must honor the community, relationships, empathy, intimacy, healing and caring that women value. We know, however, that the final spiritual question, and the goal, is to get men and women to love and live both of these.

All things being on course, the genders tend to be much more alike than different by the second half of life. This illustrates much of my lived experience: men start hard and get softer, whereas women start soft and get harder. It can often be a quite difficult dance of missteps, misinterpretation and mutual hurt until we meet somewhere in the middle. 

I learned of this from the excellent blog of Len Hjalmarson  Next Reformation.

Interesting Site: The Governance Lab and “Participation is Law”

Just discovered The Governance Lab

GovLab Research convenes an interdisciplinary network of thought leaders across academia, government, and industry to analyze novel forms of collaborative problem-solving in public and private institutions.  Despite advances in collaborative governance, there has been little systematic study of what approaches work best under varied conditions. We produce scholarly research and map real-world developments to create a robust understanding of how scientific and technological advances can be harnessed to improve 21st century governance.

GovLab Academy inspires, trains and catalyzes the next generation of leaders, entrepreneurs, and problem-solvers in collaborative governance. Through project-based work, multidisciplinary teams of graduate students hone their analytical, empirical and design skills by developing, iterating on and implementing innovative platforms and projects. Members of the Academy take charge of their own learning and develop new and diverse skills under the mentorship of a wide-ranging network of professional advisors.  Members will also have access to a unique curriculum that synthesizes insights from social and behavioral sciences, history, public policy, design and engineering to inform the project-based learning experience.

And here is a recent blog post.

“Participation is Law”

Cyborg Selves III

Excerpts from the Chapter "The Cyborg Manifesto"  by J. Thweat-Bates

Her (Donna Haraway) interest in cyborgs is driven, not out of a desire to conceptually define what is human (and not), but to encourage the creation of alternative social practices – “for responsibility in[ boundary] construction.

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Haraway’s posthuman discourse is organized around the central figure of the cyborg, a simultaneously epistemological, ontological, political, and moral position deliberately taken up outside the categorical boundaries of nature and culture, science and politics, man and woman, human and nonhuman.  This posthuman figure is a harbinger of the dissolution of those boundaries, a reality both threatening and hopeful.  Haraway’s hope lies in the possibility of transgressive power and potential agency of the cyborg and its posthuman kin, the threat lies in the possibility of the continuing exploitation of those who find themselves already out-of-bounds with respect to the powerful discourses defining identity with technoscience.  

We will not be able to turn back the clock.  The postmodern world will continue to push us in directions that many will fear.  At the same time medical science helps us to live longer and well, it will be by becoming cyborgian.  But it will be at the cost of altering how we look, how we live, and what is inside us.  New capabilities will transgress boundaries we thought were clear and distinct and make us uncomfortable.   We think we know who we are and we do not want to change that.  "This is not how it oughta be" we will tell ourselves.   There will be a new normal and before we are acclimated to that another one and another one. 

Quote from Dorothee Sölle

from Theology for Skeptics Chapter 6

Jesus' attitude toward life was that it cannot be possessed, hoarded, safeguarded.  What we can do with life is to share it, pass it along, get it as a gift and give it on.

Measuring gas turbine engine component temperatures using thermographic phosphors | SPIE Newsroom: SPIE

This is the kind of work I do.

Measuring gas turbine engine component temperatures using thermographic phosphors | SPIE Newsroom: SPIE

The Provisional Nature of Truth As Illustrated by Fashion

From an insightful post by Rachel K. Ward over at The Church and Postmodern Culture.   I bolded two sentences that especially applied to me.

Postmodernity has continued a clash of absolute truth with relativism. Relativism, or varying perspectives on variable truth, dominates media...........We are now viewing the world provisionally, embracing a stream of teasers of what may be true, without responsibility to understand a matter or its implications because we expect it to change.

The provisional view is to consider something, without conclusion. It is diplomatic, and free of allegiance. It is the most fashionable perspective today because it has the permissiveness of relativism but without the weight of accountability.  

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A teaser is a glimpse into a story. It is the ultimate provisional view that entices a viewer to screen a full film or buy a product. The teaser is pure suspense, the initial look at a love affair or drama to unfold........Reading a full article, getting the whole story, is less and less possible or interesting. We prefer the provisional, since tomorrow there will be more.

The fashion industry is made of teasers, not just in film shorts but editorials that do not preview something to come but simply glimpse a fantasy. Fashion stories propose a narrative, but they never conclude.

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Perhaps our current stage of advanced relativism known as the provisional is a teaser for the return for the unspoken absolute. While our ongoing interest in mere glimpses can rest on nothing, it can also open to the eternal.

I've been conservative and I've been liberal.  And both at the same time in certain ways.  It seems to me that conservatives tend more to shoehorn all events into their pre-determined view.  Events and comments must be interpreted within that framework.  I think my framework is more provisional in the same way as the author relates.  I do note that oft times in recent years, when an event or statement is made that seems clear cut to me to validate my view or my guy, the other side surprises me with an interpretation or new facts that have to be considered.  After I dig into the issue further for more information and answer that objection and look at how the other side responds, I find there is more information that needs to be considered.  This goes on and on and back and forth till I get exhausted and give up for the time being.  So quite often I do not go that far.  It just takes too much time.  I just hit the high spots.  This illustrates the provisional nature of some of my opinion/feelings. 

Pithy Quote for Today from Andre Gide

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” - Andre Gide

Yes, Aliens Do Exist, in My Opinion

In my own thought experiments about life on other planets, I arrived at the opinion that yes, there must be life on other planets. As I grew up there was no proof that other stars had planets. I was in my forties when we received the first indications and I excitedly relayed the information to my sons.  It was the X-Files era and they were interested in the possibility of whether aliens really existed.  Now it is clear that there are many within our range of observation. There is now evidence though it is definitely not yet positively established that simple life may have once existed on Mars. Life evolved here in our solar system, so, why should not there be evolving life out there in others? And if so, and there is sentient life on some of these planets then will they not evolve along the same paths? The capability for flight developed at least three times on earth here in the past. First insects, then reptiles (birds), and then mammals (bats). So then it was meant to be and therefore it must be God’s will. It is part of That-Which-Brings-About's plan that nature unfolds to achieve flying creatures. And the same could be hypothesized for the movement of sentient beings from being pack animals to, after verbal communication becomes possible, tribal culture. Will they not arrive at culture, religion, politics and the whole wonderful expression that brings. I cannot imagine that they will not have their Christ. This line of reasoning helps me to believe, to believe in the cosmic Christ.

That Which Causes to Be

This is from an interesting article by Ray Waddle in the March 16 issue of The Tennessean, the Nashville newspaper.  He quotes a new book by Richard E. Friedman.  I highlighted in red what struck me as poignant.   Richard takes up a theme that is apparently similar to that of Jack Miles' God A Biography.

In both the Exodus and the Resurrection stories, God intervenes at a crucial public moment on behalf of embattled people in a dusty corner of the world. In both cases, unpromising human material is forged into a band of believers who change global history, succeeding against all common sense and sociological norms.

And in both cases, decisive actions of God are never repeated again, not in the same way. In his book “The Disappearance of God,” Richard Elliott Friedman argues that God slowly removes himself from the Hebrew Scriptures. Friedman is not attacking the Bible. He argues that public contact with the divine recedes in order to give human beings room to come of age. After the birth of modern science and skepticism, the “death of God” triggered a crisis for Western civilization. But Friedman resists despair. Contemporary physics, cosmology and Big Bang theories suggest mystical new points of divine contact, a restoration with God. “The name Yahweh probably means ‘that which causes to be,’ ” Friedman writes. “And that which causes to be is what we are seeking. It is what we have been seeking all along. We may be very close to it. There is some likelihood that, as some of the conscious matter of the universe, we are created more in the divine image than we have suspected. There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.”

God as that which causes to be.  I like that. That is a definition to sink one's teeth into. We are here.  No doubt about that.  How did we get here and why?  Well, science has told us quite a bit about that story.  The Big Bang.  Galaxy formation.  The development of the different generations of stars.  Then the planets.  Ocean life.  Land life.  Emergence.  Consciousness.  Most of that narrative is from the past two hundred years and opaque to previous generations.  We are lucky to be here now to become aware of it.  But however it happened, we give a name to that which is behind the process and call that name God. 

It fits with a growing interest of mine in Process Theology.  I've got to delve further into it.  And that is the topic of Rob Bell's new book What We Talk About When We Talk About God which I learned about from Homebrewed Christianity:  Rob Bell:  Out of the Process (Tillichian) Closet.  I've gotta get that one and maybe Friedman's too.

Disavowed Unbelief

Peter Rollins teaches me with a blog post titled "The Problem with Unbelief is that it Enables Us to Believe Too Much."  The main point is that "unbelief ... supports and sustains belief".

We commonly think that unbelief is what prevents us from believing in something.  He points out that there are times that disavowed unbelief actually sustains belief. He gives examples from his earlier experiences in the fundamentalist community but points out that other groupings of people also practice it. 

Disavowed unbelief allows us to erect barriers to stop us from believing too much.  Examples of barriers are that what we need to do is pray more or leave it in God's hands or we lack understanding or the Devil is at work.  Barriers serve to prevent us from going too far and actually being true to expressed beliefs.  There are people who believe too much and they are the ones that can cause problems.   For example, Biblical Literalists who physically injure children based on perceived sanctions of that in the Bible.  Also, people who won't allow medical treatment of loved ones because they actually believe in  healing.  The "Faith" in the term "Faith Healing" is a barrier that allows one to believe that miraculous healing will occur if one only has enough faith.  This even though it only works about .001% of the time.

Now I should ask myself where in my life do I exhibit disavowed unbelief?  Do I only visit web sites that support my views?  Only watch news and other media expressions that give support and comfort to my feelings?  Do I go there because of insecurity in myself that needs bolstering? 

Fuzzy Realism

Over at The Church and Postmodern Culture blog, I responded with a tongue-in-cheek reply to a post titled Postmodernism vs Critical Realism which I enjoyed reading and found helpful.  I had some fun with it.

When I first heard the term 'critical realism' and before I learned the definition I thought it was a great name for a philosophy and good PR. It appeared like an upgrade from the everyday bland form of realism. It is always great when something is new and improved. One expects that of everything these days. And if you don't sign on what are you? A naive realist? Yet, I perceive the value and virtue of epistemological humility. And while the extreme postmodernists initially threw me off with their aplomb, "The Gulf War Never Happened" and unnecessarily dense writing, I now get some of it and it has been an aid to me in breaking out of the straightjacket of modernism and its reductionist gray flat world. But yet, I'm a research and development professional. And understanding and working with the shared perception of a real world is important to serving my customers and sponsors. So I guess I still need a form of the real in the name of my philosophy. Science and technology, with a hat tip to Kuhn, still seem to work, you know, the blind see and the lame walk. But, the boundaries are blurry. I see through a glass darkly. Thus, with a little pragmatism thrown in I guess my vision and philosophy may be designated "fuzzy realism".

Knoxville is the No 1 Bible-Minded City in the U. S.?

Just learned of this on the Stone-Campbell list.  According to a survey by the Barna Group, Knoxville, TN is, by their criteria, the most Bible-minded city in the U. S.  Here is a quote from the Barna Site:

The report ranks the most and least “Bible-minded” cities by looking at how people in those cities view the Bible. The study is based on 42,855 interviews conducted nationwide and the analysis of Bible trends was commissioned by American Bible Society. Individuals who report reading the Bible in a typical week and who strongly assert the Bible is accurate in the principles it teaches are considered to be Bible-minded. This definition captures action and attitude—those who both engage and esteem the Christian scriptures. The rankings thus reflect an overall openness or resistance to the Bible in the country’s largest markets.

Top Cities
Regionally, the South still qualifies as the most Bible-minded. The top ranking cities, where at least half of the population qualifies as Bible-minded, are all Southern cities. This includes the media markets for Knoxville, TN (52% of the population are Bible-minded),.....

I have some reservations about the assumptions of the survey.  Most of these Bible-minded people have their pet regions of the text and their knowledge is limited to within certain prescribed boundaries.  They bring their common-sense realism to it and while they may think they are reading it objectively and properly as independent and rational individuals, it is their upbringing and their community that is reading it for and with them.   If they were really truly Bible-minded they would engage and wrestle with it more.They would know more about the Bible and their religion than they do. 

Also, Bible-minded may not be the best way to describe the results of the survey.  We could think of other designations like Most Biblicist.  For the definition of this and problems related to it I refer you to Scott McKnight's  Jesus Creed Blog and an 8-part series on the topic which he wrote there in July and August of 2011.  The first on is here.  And the second here.  The impetus and motivation of Scott's critique comes in part from thoughts inspired by the book The Bible Made Impossible by Christian Smith. 

Regarding Cyborg Selves: Part Two

I continue to read and think about Cyborg Selves by Jeannine Thweat-Bates (JTB).  Here are a few notes on Chapter 1 titled “The Cyborg Manifesto”.  In it, she  informs us that the thinking about the future posthuman tends toward two separate visions, the cyborg and the transhumanist.  The people who actively dream about and promote the transhumanist future tend to stay true to their Enlightenment roots.  That would be expected from techno geeks.  The contrasting Cyborg vision was launched by Donna J. Haraway with her “A Cyborg Manifesto:  Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women:  The Reivention of Nature (New York, 1991).  I suppose with this we are moving more into a postmodern (fuzzy term I know) consideration. 

Haraway discusses the blurring and crossing of several boundaries made possible by the march of technology:  human/animal; human/machine; and the physical/nonphysical.  The second is obvious and the first thing that pops into mind when thinking of our future.  I had never considered the first, that we would and are augmenting our animal friends and changing them also.  The last one has to do with the fact that as technology gets better, it becomes invisible.  JTB quotes Haraway who says 

Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile….People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque.” (Haraway page 153).

In these discussions and considerations, redefining and revisioning the role and even the definition of ‘nature’ is unavoidable.  To those of us who have not moved out of enlightenment and its associated science and technology, nature is a given that is there to be exploited and utilized.  JTB informs us in the quote below that the thinking promoted by Haraway and the turn to the Cyborg future see things differently.  

Nature herself becomes a coyote trickster-figure, an active participant in humanity’s technoscientific investigations and not at all the passive resource and recipient of human construction previously presumed.  In this way, Haraway maintains the importance of material reality as something to which our conceptual categories must conform ---a redefined objectivity which becomes a necessary component of her cyborg arguments, for it is the observable, material existence of cyborgs which forces the redrawing of our ontological boundaries in acknowledgement (Cyborg Selves page 29).

We are becoming hybrids.

Cyborg hybridity challenges not just notions of ontological boundaries and natural givens, but also the religious structures, narratives, symbols, and beliefs which frequently and authoritatively articulate and undergird those notions. (Cyborg Selves page 32).  

If we are to be responsible and true to our better "natures" ( a little irony here) and our desire to be good, then we must consider the above so that we can survive and then thrive in the future.  

We Are Becoming Posthuman Cyborgs, We Must and Will Deal With It

My big expense item for this Christmas was a book, Cyborg Selves:  A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman.  It is by Jeanine Thweatt-Bates.  Her blog is Rude Truth.   During the Holidays and after, I read the first two chapters in small pieces with TV on and dogs barking, etc.  This morning I woke early and in the peace and quiet slowly perused the first chapter again to get a better grasp and poke it deeper into memory.

The "posthuman" refers to the fact that there is

     "a new and growing appreciation for the
      plasticity and flexibility of 'human nature'
      spurred by discoveries in biotechnology  
      and virtual, information and communication
      technologies."

Like it or not we humans are changing ourselves.  It is going to happen, no it is happening already.  We can already replace some organs with manufactured  versions.  A person can change their gender.  Technology continues to expand the range of human senses and performance.  It cannot be imagined that this will not continue.  Not unless there is a world wide catastrophe casting us back into a dark age and our technical skills forgotten.  It is inevitable.  Jen's book assumes this and aims to engage it.  She informs us that the term "posthuman" is an open one.

 "In this book, I argue that these multiple and competing notions of the posthuman currently crystallize around two distinct and promising visions, cyborgs and uploads." 

She also says,

"If, as N. Katherine Hayles contends, we are at a crucial historical juncture with regard to our emerging posthuman future, such that we bear a moral responsibility in the visioning and construction of our future selves, the stakes are high; theologians must know precisely what is at stake in order to contribute helpfully to the process of fashioning a faithful posthuman future.

The reader may experience some discomfort in thinking about the changes that may and will occur.  Time honored notions of what is normal and what is natural and what is human nature will no doubt be questioned and violated.  What does this mean for religion and theology?  This book aims to clarify the state of things and prepare for and is an example of rational engagement across the boundaries of technology, science and theology.

More on the Nature of God from Dorothee Soelle

My days are quite busy with my new business, the Holiday Season, and the pandemonium related to getting our house repaired from the recent insult to it.  And then there was the Sandy Hook school incident.  Haven't had time for sustained thought and meditation.  Dorothee has a distinct version of feminist theology and it makes sense to me, what I understand of it.  

From Theology for Skeptics (Dorothee Soelle)

- Highlight Loc. 401-5 | Added on Friday, November 30, 2012, 06:33 AM

Carter Heyward, one of the leading voices of systematic theology between Christianity and post-Christianity, speaks of God the "power-in-relationship" which lets us take part in the power of life.4 In fact God is power, but precisely not the relationless, self-sufficient power of the ruler who also uses force when necessary. Modernity has given its answer to this authoritarian God: it has made him superfluous. He no longer has a role to play. He is not scientifically applicable. But is the authoritarian male God all that has been meant within the Jewish and Christian traditions by the title "God"? What happens with these other traditions, and how do they relate to the scientific model of control?

 

- Highlight Loc. 414-19 | Added on Friday, November 30, 2012, 06:38 AM

Unresisting submission to the force that does not allow justic in trade relations, that builds peace on the basis of militarism, and that further destroys or replaces creation has two roots.  One is patriarchal Christianity, which is fixated on authority: the authoritarian God is still implored helplessly in the expectation that sometime he will yet intervene. The other root of subjection is the post-religious belief in male science - no longer understood humanistically - which governs over those subjected impotently to it in the manner of an ancient god of fate. The old God can at most represent a kind of protection from catastrophes for true believers, as Christian fundamentalism imagines; he does not have liberating qualities.

- Highlight Loc. 428-31 | Added on Saturday, December 15, 2012, 09:27 PM

In feminist theology, therefore, the issue is not about exchanging pronouns but about another way of thinking of transcendence. Transcendence is no longer to be understood as being independent of everything and ruling over everything else, but rather as being bound up in the web of life. Goethe says in his aphorisms about love: "Voluntary dependence, the most beautiful state, and how would it be possible without love?" God is no less voluntarily dependent than all of us can be through love. That means that we move from God-above-us to God-within-us and overcome false transcendence hierarchically conceived.

Flood Stories

On Friday after Thanksgiving while in Arkansas we heard that a water line break occurred in our Knoxville home with water coming out from under the front and back doors.  Neighbors peeking through the door window could see that the ceiling had come down in places.  So, we began a chain of phones call with insurance, a mitigation company, a helpful neighbor and family and hurried to cover the five hundred miles home expeditiously.  Fortunately nothing of importance, like pictures, books, cherished objects, etc. was damaged.  Mainly floors and ceiling.  The origin was a plastic nut attached to a commode water tank that failed and allowed water to be sprayed in the upstairs master bath.  Likely occurred not long after we left on Wednesday.  A neighbor cut the water off on Thursday.  Mitigation began Friday evening.  The picture to the left was taken in what we call the office room.  We are not worried much about this.  We are being treated fairly by our insurance and service companies.  It has been quite disruptive to our routine but, so be it. 

It has been my privilege to hear a number of flood stories from various people I have run into since then.  For whenever I describe what happened to us, the ones with whom I'm discussing will have their stories to tell.  I never knew water leakage problems were so widespread.  There must be a fascination with this type of problem that other difficult house situations do not exhibit.  There is something about water and what it can do that goes deep into the human psyche and this has been manifested to me by this event. 

I never watched the Phil Donahue show much.  It was the precursor to Oprah Winfrey and earlier in the day so I only had the opportunity if sick or on vacation.  One thing he said in one of those rare shows made a very big impression on me.  He related why he was oriented toward communicating with women and what he admired about them.  He said that if you have a group of women meeting together and one of them shows up with a cast on her leg, the other ladies will ask how it happened, how does she feel, what did the doctor say, ie. focus on the person with the cast.  He said when a man with a cast joins a group of men, it will be a competition of each saying in essence, "you should hear what happened to me"  or "I've got one better than that."  Some of my acquaintances have been like that but others have been more empathetic.  There are a couple of guys I know that if I were to tell them I had won a Nobel prize in Physics, they would have to top it with some story of theirs. 

Re: Theology for Skeptics by Dorothee Soelle

My interests roam around randomly.  The Kindle makes this easier to do.  After the football games Saturday and with my wife asleep on the couch I would read one thing for a while and then another.  Ended up reading from five different books that night.  I'll be perusing something and the reference they give causes me to shop the Kindle bookstore and then that leads me to other interesting things and on and on.  Somehow convinced myself that I needed to download Theology for Skeptics by Dorothee Soelle.  Why would a Southern white guy geek like myself be interested in her?  Well, amazingly, I was introduced to her by an article in Wineskins!  This publication is relatively progressive for the Churches of Christ.  I was quite surprised to discover a book review of another of her books, The Silent Cry - Mysticism and Resistance.  Which I bought and read six years ago.  Loaned out my copy.  Dorothee was born the same year as my Dad, 1929.  She came from the same Protestant group as Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  She was Protestant and a Mystic.  She was a feminist.  Come to think of it.  I've never read anything by an authentic feminist.  Only bumper sticker type snippets from the right and the left.  Here are some interesting quotes I've encountered so far in Theology for Skeptics. 

Theology for Skeptics (Dorothee Soelle)
- Highlight Loc. 91-96

I am reminded by this way of thinking about God of  a cheeky song from Vienna, in which a young man  from a wealthy home carries out all possible mischief at the expense of others and then in the refrain sings  reassuringly: 'Papa will set things right." Many  believers have never gone beyond this childish image of  God; they have never learned to assume responsibility  themselves. Their relationship to God remains childish;  they do not want to be friends of God but want to  remain subordinates and dependents. But must we really speak in this way? God is mighty,  we are helpless - is that all?

- Highlight Loc. 101-4

This woman (whom Dorothy met at a church meeting in Hamburg) did not look up to heaven in order to be  comforted by an Almighty Father. She looked within  and around herself. She found "that of God," as the  Quakers often say, in herself, the strength for resistance,  the courage for a clear no in a world that is drunk  on the blood of the innocent. And she found another  gift of the Spirit, the help of other brothers and sisters.  She was not alone. She did not submit herself to a God
who was falsely understood as fate.


- Highlight Loc. 112-13 |

I did not  rid myself of God like many who had handed over  responsibility to God alone; rather I grasped that God  needs us in order to realize what was intended in  creation.


- Highlight Loc. 185-88

The most important questions about the dominant  theology posed by an emerging feminist theology are  directed, iconoclastically, against phallocratic fantasies,  against the adoration of power. Why do people venerate  a God whose most important quality is power, whose  interest is subjection, whose fear is equality? Why  worship a being who is addressed as "Lord," whose  theologians must testify to his omnipotence because  power alone is not enough for him? Why should we  honor and love a being who does not transcend the  moral level of contemporary culture as shaped by men,  but instead establishes it?


- Highlight Loc. 208-12 |

When it is understood that we can speak only symbolically   about God, every symbol that sets itself up as  absolute must be relativized. We cannot live without  symbols, but we must relativize them and surpass them  iconoclastically. God in fact transcends our speech about  God, but only when we do not lock God into prisons  of symbols. Feminist theology does not deny that  "father" is one mode of speaking about God, but when  we are forced to make it the only mode, the symbol  becomes God's prison. All the other symbol words  which people have used to express their experience of  God are thus repressed by means of this obligatory  language or else pushed down to a lower level on the  hierarchy.


- Highlight Loc. 220-21 |

To be free of images of dominance,   theological language can go back to the mystical  tradition. "Wellspring of all good things," "living  wind," "water of life," "light," are symbols of God without   authority or power and without a chauvinistic  flavor.

==========

Supernatural Rationalists?

Some ten or so years ago I learned of a Church of Christ thought leader who said that "we" were unique among conservative religious groups in that "we" have a both a high view of scripture and a high view of reason.  It struck me as expressing a lot of truth.  Most of the rest of the religious world holds that the two are mutually exclusive.  I think our spiritual primogenitor, Alexander Campbell, could be characterized both as a rationalist and inerrantist.  From a hundred years ago comes an illustration pertinent to my personal history.  My Dad related to me many years ago that his Grandaddy as a young man was taught by his older brothers, who were Baptist ministers, that he needed to have a conversion experience in order become a Christian.  However, as he related to my Dad, he could not seem to get it the Spirit or the feeling they said he should have.  Eventually Grandaddy found the Church of Christ where an emotional experience was NOT required for getting right with God and where emotions, feeling, and the miraculous in the modern world are downplayed.  He was told to just follow clear and easy steps culminating in baptism and that would do it.  Grandaddy was a fan of a minister named Bynum Black.  I have a 1960's  facsimile of a periodical, the Eye-Opener, published by this minister back in 1900.  I grew up in the county where this originated.

It is common even today for people to communicate that they have had a call to the ministry.  Usually it is not conveyed as a direct communication from the spirit world or from God but sometimes, I'm not sure.  My Dad in my younger years would preach a skepticism that people received a supernatural communication to preach.  It was part of the family heritage evidently.  Below is a cartoon from the issue making fun of this.

The cartoon mocks a man who is out plowing his field who interprets sounds made by his donkey to be a message from God and his call to preach. 

This and other examples I may describe sometime later illustrate how our group downplays feelings and the supernatural in comparison to other religious groups.  Accounts of the miraculous that occurred after New Testament times were/are always met with skepticism.

Thoughts on Consciousness

Three Quarks Daily is a web site that presents numerous interesting comments and links to thoughtful and thought provoking writings.  Yesterday I came across a TQD link to a discussion of Thomas Nagel's new book, Mind and Cosmos.  The Amazon blurb summarizes: 

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.

There was a time in my life when I could not perceive a way out of reductive physicalism.    It says, in a nutshell, that our world is comprised of atoms and these atoms follow unyielding laws.   So, we are therefore  merely complicated robots.  Laplace perceived this and expressed this way back in 1814, (lifted from Wikipedia).

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

—Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

But I also knew that the way out of this would have something to do with the nature of consciousness.  The material reductionists like Daniel Dennet and Richard Dawkins are wrong.  Science, according to Nagel, has not been able to explain conscious experience.  I agree.  And, he contends that it cannot.  I'm an agnostic on that one.  But, the important thing to me is that wrestling with the issue helps to point the way to meaning, purpose, God, and spirituality in general.  The long history of the cosmos has been a development toward consciousness.  It must be a property of the universe and a non material one at that.  Or another way of looking at it is that the universe "desired" to become conscious.

Why include the picture above?  Well, it is good to show pictures at least once in a while and this is one I took recently.   It is of my wife gazing at olives on a tree in the medieval town of San Gimignano in Tuscany.  I'm fascinated by trees and their meaning.  The image produces as we look at it certain feelings, a whole wealth of them.  How?  That is the big mystery. 

The Second Coming of Christ: Our Role and Technology

This fascinates me.  Something to contemplate.

from Christ in Evolution by Ilia Delio

- Highlight Loc. 3000-3006 (Kindle)

In this respect, the consummation of the universe, the parousia or second coming of Christ, will ultimately be determined by the choices of the human community. Panikkar* writes that the parousia of Christ is not separate from the Eucharistic and risen Christ;it is not another incarnation or a second Christ appearing somewhere. We have been warned by Jesus in the Gospels not to believe in any appearance of the coming Messiah here or there. Rather, we are coworkers with God and stewards of creation. The second coming of Christ is the emergence of Christ in us, the human community, when we become reflective not only individually but collectively and live in the spirit of crucified love. Jesus came once;now the new Adam, the new earth, must be fully formed in us if this universe is to find its completion in God.

- Highlight Loc. 3124-32

Philip Hefner indicated that if we are to speak of religion, it must be a religion that can encompass cyborgs and technosapiens. It cannot be merely a religious way of dealing with technology, as if it were external to who we are; rather, technology has become part and parcel of who we are.** When we participate in this drive for new possibilities through technology, we participate also in God. This is the dimension of holiness in technology. The difference between a nontheological and a theological interpretation of technology, Hefner claims, is that the one says the transcending drive is epiphenomenal, a surface phenomenon, while theology says it is rooted in the very nature of things. The epiphenomenalist says that transcendence is evolution’s way of promoting fitness. The theologian asserts that evolution has itself been designed to enable a selftranscending system of reality. In Hefner’s view, the union of technology and humanity—the emergence of techno sapiens—is integral to the transcendent evolutionary trend.

*Raimon Panikkar was the son of a Spanish Roman Catholic mom and a Hindu father.  He was uniquely situated by birth and by his studies to pursue inter-religious dialogue.

**Technology and Human Becoming by Philip Hefner

Relevancy22: Emergent Christianity - Emergent Christian Topics, Issues and Biblical Studies: How Full Is Your Life? Is It Filled with the Important Stuff?

This is from:

Relevancy22: Emergent Christianity - Emergent Christian Topics, Issues and Biblical Studies: How Full Is Your Life? Is It Filled with the Important Stuff?

How Full Is Your Life? Is It Filled with the Important Stuff?

Lessons of Life

from a mayonaise jar, some golf balls,

and a couple of cans of Beer...

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and 2 beers....

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him.

When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.

He then asked the students if the jar was full.

They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly.

The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.

He then asked the students again if the jar was full.

They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar.

Of course, the sand filled up everything else.

He asked once more if the jar was full.

The students responded with a unanimous 'yes.'

The professor then produced two Beers from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand.

The students laughed....

'Now,' said the professor as the laughter subsided, 'I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life.

The golf balls are the important things---your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions---and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car.

The sand is everything else---the small stuff.

'If you put the sand into the jar first,' he continued, 'there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.

The same goes for life.

If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you.

Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness.

Spend time with your children.

Spend time with your parents.

Visit with grandparents.

Take your spouse out to dinner.

Play another 18 rounds of golf.

There will always be time to clean the house and mow the lawn.

Take care of the golf balls first---the things that really matter.

Set your priorities.

The rest is just sand.

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the Beer represented.

The professor smiled and said, 'I'm glad you asked.'

The beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of beers with a friend.

Joseph Campbell and Paul Broun

From Joseph Campbell's Myths to Live By and the chapter written in 1961 titled "The Impact of Science on Myth", referring to Sigmund Freud he writes:

His psychology, however, being of an essentially rational kind, insufficiently attentive to the more deeply based, irrational impulsions of our nature, he assumed that when a custom or belief was shown to be unreasonable, it would presently disappear. And how wrong he was can be shown simply by pointing to any professor of philosophy at play in a bowling alley: watch him twist and turn after the ball has left his hand, to bring it over to the standing pins.
....
And thus Freud, like Frazer, judged the worlds of myth, magic, and religion negatively, as errors to be refuted, surpassed, and supplanted finally by science.
.....

An altogether different approach is represented by Carl G. Jung, in whose view the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends. According to his way of thinking, all the organs of our bodies—not only those of sex and aggression—have their purposes and motives, some being subject to conscious control, others, however, not. Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums. Thus they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analogously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.
==========

Yes, "imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends".  That is why when the literal nature of these important imageries are questioned, some people feel threatened.  Prime contemporary examples are such as Paul Broun who recently claimed that 'evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.'  Then there is Todd Akin who says evolution is not a matter of science.  And these two people sit on the House Science and Technology Committee.  Amazing.  You see it often, in our postmodern times.  In the nineties we were told by the postmodernists, who were usually considered to be leftists, that there is no truth only interpretation.  In the US,there is a subset of people who consider thermselves to be conservative who apparently agree with this and who think that if they believe hard enough, things they fear like evolution and climate change, will go away. 

We still need to learn to the right way to keep our myths alive while at the same time not lying to ourselves.

Update Sept 27

It has been an eventful past several weeks.  On Sept 5,  a Wednesday, my retirement date was moved up a week and a  half to Sept 19.  In the remaining two weeks I had a trip to Dayton, OH to the Turbine Engine Technology Symposium for  couple of
days.  Also had to plan and pack for a field test at the U. of TN Space Institute/Arnold Engineering Development Center.  Fortunately it was postponed to this week, ie after I retired from ORNL.  After leaving ORNL on Wed, I flew to Orlando on Friday for a weekend of International Automation Society business.  Flew home Monday where after a few hours I drove to Tullahoma for this week's tests.  On top of that, workmen are replacing brick on one get de of our house.  Our grandson had hernia surgery yesterday in Memphis.  That is part of the busy story of the last several weeks.  Did get to read the latest Phyllis Tickle book on Emergence Christianity:  What it is and Where it is Going and Why it matters.  

Here is an interesting link.

This is my first post from my Android Tablet.  Still on the learning curve with it.

John Caputo Quote

Postmodernism...is not relativism or skepticism, as its uncomprehending critics almost daily charge, but minutely close attention to detail, a sense for the complexity and multiplicity of things, for close reading, for detailed histories, for sensitivity to differences.  The postmodernists think the devil is in the details, but they also have reason to hope that none of this will antagonize God. 

John Caputo

quoted from the epigraph of Tony Jones' book The New Christians:  Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. 

Next thing to do is find out where Tony got the quote.

The Next Stage

This has been and will continue to be a big year of change for Steve and Dorothy.  Our grandson, Lucas, was born July 6.  Now I know why all the grandparents I've run into through the years are so happy.  What a rush it is.

Next thing. In two weeks I'm retiring from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  That is after company service of thirty three years.  I'm pumped, excited and don't plan to hang up my lab coat just yet.  My buddies who retired before me formed a company last year.  They got their first contract last month.  Will join Emerging Measurements Co.  Still plan to be active in the International Society of Automation (the ISA), the NATO Advanced Vehicle Panel on Test Cell Instrumentation, the Propulsion Instrumentation Working Group (PIWG), and research and development in luminescence based sensing.

And here is some fun.

Weather Girl Goes Rogue

For My Grandmother

My Grandmother and My Mom in early 1935.

My grandmother, Esther Pauline Goble Van Hooser was raised on a farm in SE Missouri outside of Poplar Bluff. The arc of her life has thus far seen the introduction of radio, commercial aviation, television, space travel and landing on the moon, the computer revolution, countless medical advances, the internet and smart phones.  Even when I was young she would talk about these changes and discuss them in the course of telling stories of what life for her family was like growing up.  It has been one of the means by which she conveys to her loved ones their heritage and identity as family and children of God. This sense of history and of progress is something I learned from her.  I have a distinct memory from when she came to visit us when my brother Tim was born. He was a few days old when this happened so it is sometime in August 1960.  The space program was in the news prominently and the Echo communications satellite had just been launched.  Mom, Grandmother, and the rest of us went out in the evenings and watched it cross the sky.  One evening as Tim was lying on the couch, she said to me, a nine year old thrilled at all things having to do with science and space, "Just think, he might live to see them land on the moon."   From that I learned optimism and justification for interest in such things as well at their importance.  Little did we know how soon that significant event would come about.  It would only take about nine years.  One of her favorite memories involves her family traveling across the US to California in a Model T when she was just seven.  She has told the story a number of times to me.  It was must have been a formative experience for her and a journey, not a trip.  She survived Tetanus as a child. She and my grandfather Mac were married in the midst of the depression and after a year of farming, they did as so many from the South, they migrated to Michigan where it was possible to find employment. They raised their family in Pontiac, MI. The extended families of Pauline and Mac often looked to them for assistance with their needs as they were stable, responsible, and supportive. They returned South to Searcy, Arkansas upon Mac's retirement in 1972. To this day, at age 95, she continues in various church activities, most recently she made dozens of dresses for a mission in Panama.  She still teaches Sunday school.  Her knowledge of the Bible is intimate and she discusses the various people in the Bible as if they are friends and acquaintances.