“Ultimately, it's looking less and less like we have any sort of basic right to control our personal information—our identity—and how that information is used by business and government.” Arstechinica.com
You may recall the entry a few weeks back about the transit line poster titled “Protect the Motherland.” Arstechnica.com relays a nice post on a related topic: Big Brother is not just watching - he is pulling out the night-vision binoculars. National ID badges and loss of property rights, oh the USA! Additionally, you may want to checkout the CNN story about today’s ruling, and I quote: “The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that local governments may seize people's homes and businesses -- even against their will -- for private economic development.” Link News like this makes me nauseous. It's either that or the burrito I had for lunch...
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Comments on "Rise of The Motherland Vol 2"
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Ronaldo said ... (9:44 PM) :
post a commentI can visualize Nick’s nun story very clearly—here is a young man whose fresh, new mind has been ordered and structured in the time-honored pattern of education: by being given nice, easy black-and-white absolutes (ie, “Jesus walked on water. Don’t think about it, just accept it”). Nick’s mind is stronger and more fertile than most, though, and he sees a problem—“how is it that everything I’ve learned about the Bible says that this Man walked on water, but everything I’ve learned about science says, the miracle of surface tension aside, water is a liquid whose molecular density makes it incapable of supporting an object with greater molecular density?” Being the thinker that he is, he realizes that these two are mutually exclusive—they can’t both be true, and therefore one must be thrown out. “Well, that’s an easy one. “I’ve put enough crap into water (literally and figuratively—ha ha) to know that the density thing is true, but I have never seen a man walk on water.” Enter wise old(er) nun.
Back in the Nun Cave, the Scepticism Board lights up like an Anglican Christmas tree. This nun is older and more experienced, which on its own means nothing. More importantly, she sees in this young man the richness of his mind, and most importantly, she recognizes the theological crisis he is having as perhaps reminiscent of her own. A lot time, a lot of thought, a lot of prayer, and maybe even a wise mentor got her through to the other side of hers, and on the journey she came to realize that without the Space Within, the clay pot would implode. The spiritual reality inside exerts precisely the same outward pressure as the clay pot exerts inwardly, and so balance is achieved.
Her great fear though, the thing that causes her heart to leap when she sees the Nick light flashing, is that his pot has clearly solidified faster than the others, and if she doesn’t rush in and fill that sucker with some Space Within, its imbalance might actually cause it to crack and collapse, sending Nick on a lifelong journey of frustrated agnosticism, or worse, Libertarianism. Nick’s crisis called for quick action, and the nun called on all her years of experience to take it. She explained to him the cool stuff about the Space Within, took his focus off the cracking and imploding pot and put it squarely on the mysterious symbolism of myth. As Nick himself says, he was rescued, liberated from the crumbling cliff and taught how to fly.
I love the Space Within, and have found it to be as liberating as Nick (or you) did. In fact, when I spent two years in college majoring in computer science and physics, I realized that my Space Within was starving. I became an English teacher, not because I wanted to be a crusader for proper grammar, not because I wanted to teach the teeming masses the craft of writing, not because I wanted to impress everyone with how many authors and works of literature I could drop into casual conversation, but indeed because I simply believed in the power of myth and wanted to explore its mysteries. I am deeply and profoundly aware of the symbolism of Jesus’ stroll across the water. I understand that what the water represents is as important to the allegory as the fact that an earth-bound mammal defied physics to walk on it. But I believe in the historical fact that Jesus actually did walk on water across the Sea of Galilee to the boat in which Peter quaked in terror. More importantly, I believe that the symbolism enclosed therein is NOT more important than that historical fact, any more than the Space Within is more important than the clay pot that surrounds it. How is minimizing the physical historical fact in order to emphasize the spiritual Space Within any different from minimizing the symbolism in favor of the literal? To lean too heavily to either side is to define imbalance.
To a blind world whose only comprehension is the pot itself, one must place more emphasis on the Space Within in a desperate (futile?) effort to achieve balance, or at least to get it (the blind world) to even imagine there is an imbalance to begin with. But it’s all tottering on the tip of the cone. Simple poorly-educated fisherman Peter saw a literal storm, physical helplessness and impending death. Jesus walked to him on the water, not to show him a cool trick, but to introduce to his literal mind the temporal nature of the physical world. However, it seems to me that His intent was not to instruct Peter to leave or dismiss the physical world, but rather it was to point out the imbalance in Peter’s understanding. But Jesus HAD to actually, physically, historically walk on water for the same reason that we HAVE to have an actual physical relationship with a woman in order to understand love. We can talk all day about the abstract symbolism of love, but without the warmth and immediacy of a physical embrace, our understanding would be unbalanced because we (at this moment) are physical creatures. Jesus Himself was never married and never had any type of romantic or physical relationship with a woman. Why? Because in embodying perfect balance, He doesn’t need the metaphor to understand the Truth. So yes, the physical embrace of a man and a woman is a metaphor, but it’s real and literal as we know it. The blood that pours from us when we are cut is real and physical and literal, and if we lose enough of it, we will die (physically). But what is blood really? It is not life, as the ancients supposed, because one can lose all of it and die, yet continue to live. It might as well be grape juice for all its ultimate relevance to life, and yet something tells us we had better respect its indispensability lest it leak out of us and we upset the balance at the wrong time.
So we return to: Did He walk on water? Sure. And that is precisely as important as the rich symbolic/metaphorical message within the act.