Quote for Today from Thomas Barnett

I am enjoying this commentator, Thomas Barnett. He has been syndicated a couple of years in our local paper, the Knoxville News Sentinel. Here lifted from the paper and in italics is how he closes out today's column. I highlighted the thought that jumped out at me.

It is a theme with me that all of us, me included, are gut-level programmed at an early age to perceive religion, politics, interests, and the World in a certain way and it is difficult, the older one gets, to see things differently from that.

--------------------------

Let me tell you about some things we can say goodbye to once we re-start the Cold War.

Say goodbye to a strategic alliance with China. As a fellow autocracy, it'll get swept up in the us-versus-them mania.

Say goodbye to India, too. It didn't kowtow our way in the first Cold War, either.

Finally, say goodbye to capturing the ideological flag of that rapidly expanding world middle class - the real strategic prize out there. Arguably the greatest potential force for spreading democracy around the planet, we'll end up antagonizing that, too.

No surprise, folks. When you ask old men old questions, you get old answers.

Thomas P.M. Barnett (tom@thomaspmbarnett.com) is a scholar at the Howard Baker Center (U. Tennessee) and author of "Great Powers: America and the World After Bush."

Cao Fang sings the magical GE Olympic Commercial

This music is simply precious. From the commercial where the guy crashes the local market while he is mesmerized by a woman doctor.

Emergent Church of Christ

Fajita noted here that there is a Facebook group now for the the Emergent Church of Christ.

So I joined.

Logic

I continue to read Reality. I understand very little of it, and find continued reference to "scholars" who have got it wrong annoying. But feel compelled to continue. Here is a pithy statement regarding "logic" that I find interesting. He says that it is easy to define logic and..

It's the expression of a reality which is utterly impersonal, which is governed by an absolute necessity that has nothing to do with our ideas or beliefs. And it gives us more than we could ever hope for, but also much less.

Reality

Not sure how I stumbled across the book Reality by Peter Kingsley. It explores the Western mystical tradition that according to the author stems from the very beginning of western culture. The book is a 500 page explication of a single poem by Parmenides. Here is an interesting excerpt from chapter 17 one fifth of the way into the book.

We can cite as many reasoned arguments as we want. But in our hearts none of us believes we only live for thirty or fifty or eighty years, because we all know there is more to us without even understanding how we know. And this is the knowledge Parmenides was working to bring to life, in our minds as well as hearts.

Without it, all the beauty and the wonder that we are able to experience are nothing. They are just a film being shown to prisoners, hovering between existence and non-existence, as they wait to be executed on death row.

Darwin on Biogenesis

I've been out and haven't done much reading. Did come across this in the Origin of Species that I recently began. Some methodological humility of Darwin comes through in Chapter IV on Natural Selection.

Looking to the first dawn of life, when all organic beings, as we may believe, presented the simplest structure, how, it has been asked, could the first steps in the advancement or differentiation of parts have arisen?

He then relates conjecture by Herbert Spencer and next emphasizes that whatever the case, natural selection should still function at this early stage. Then he closes the paragraph with:

But, as I remarked towards the close of the Introduction, no one ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained on the origin of species, if we make due allowance for our profound ignorance on the mutual relations of the inhabitants of the world at the present time, and still more so during past ages.

Traveling

Leaving by myself in a few minutes traveling west to Pocahontas, AR for the funeral of my only aunt, my Dad's only sibling. A great-aunt died last week at age 96. Back in a few days I hope.

Change - Closing Words from Michael Talbot

I picked up a book recently by Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the new Physics. He wrote it in his twenties and it concerns quantum physics and mysticism. It was difficult to follow the narrative because he handwaves through quite a number of difficult to understand topics rapidly. My feeble mind needed a little more detail in order to tie together the double-slit experiment, Schroedinger's cat, and the holographic nature of the mind. Nonetheless it was a fun read. The best part of the book was an Afterword he penned for the 1992 edition where he describes how he wrote it and what came in the intervening years. Unfortunately, that was the year that he died at age 39 of leukemia.

He closes the book with thoughts about the difficulty of changing minds to his way of thinking, a new metaphysic, and gives us a wonderful metaphor. These are the final sentence of the book.

"Only now I realize that it is a shift that will take some time. When one wants to train the trunk of a miniature bonsai tree to turn in a new direction, one cannot simply bend it in that direction all at once or the trunk will break. One must wrap the trunk with wire and slowly, ever so slowly, shape it in small increments. Only then can it survive the stress."

"Living things resist precipitous transformation. Organic things - from cellular organisms to the belief systems that take root in the fertile soil of our thoughts - prefer homeostasis. In a living universe, a universe constantly awash with restless and dynamic forces, resistance to change even has a certain amount of survival value. That is why change often takes such a long time. But in a dynamic universe, change is also inevitable, and this too is how it must be. It is like growing bonsai."

Blog on Koine Greek

Just found this fascinating site.

http://evepheso.wordpress.com/

Here's the result of a long blog on Ephesians 4:17=19

Conclusion: Thus, the Gentiles are walking with empty heads and cloudy thinking on the wrong path, the path of ignorance, separated from the life of God. Their hearts are so calloused that they indulge themselves in sensuality - all sorts of impurity and all kinds of greed.

Translation:
[17] So now I must urge you in the Lord not to walk as those gentiles walk with their empty heads, [18] blinded by their own thoughts and alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and the calloused hearts. [19] These Gentiles, having lost all feeling, have betrayed themselves to sensuality with all kinds of sexual perversion and greed.