Examining the Machine

Last, in my description of the operation of the Machine:

The refinement of aspirations beyond instrumentalities and language leads to what I will call urges.  It will be jarring to some to have a recounting of the progresses of religion end with “urges.”  Religion is not supposed to end with something so base as an “urge” to this or that.  Then again, Jesus’ mortal life was not supposed to end with “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Jesus’ cry of agony has been endlessly recounted over the centuries in varying modes of analysis, but it has not typically been the case that Jesus’ piteous question has been called less than genuine.  Indeed, “genuine” is the key word—“genuine” is truthful, irrespective of the objective validity of an utterance or of a speaker’s understanding.  In John’s gospel, Nathanael (whose credulity Jesus seems to find amusing) is granted one of Jesus’ greatest compliments: “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!”

Jesus’ plea for an understanding about his agonizing fate is rivalled in intensity by his plea to his listeners throughout his ministry to forsake willful blindness.  A lack of understanding is bad, but a disinclination to understand is damnable.  Or as I wrote in the previous post:

“Much might be said about the pursuit of truth—it is perhaps the noblest of aspirations.  It must always be remembered, however, that truth can never be more than its progressively more perfect iterations.  Truthfulness, on the other hand, might at any moment or any place—in any person, God willing—be the greatest it has ever been, or greater than it ever will be.  Truthfulness might—in any time or place—be so great that only the reality of the Ultimate abuts it.”

Conversely, truthfulness—in contrast to any relative merit that might be assigned to a person’s accomplishments in establishing truth—is not properly treated as a relative matter.  In religion especially, truthfulness must be pursued without compromise.  As an incredible counterpoint, however, the essential nature of religious thought is—unlike the firmer and firmer understandings we expect in worldly knowledge—liable to be thoroughly re-cast by an addition or a change in one foundational premise.

It is entirely to be expected, then, that the experiences of religion are not cumulative nor gradual (the less so as they are the most crucial) but rather unsettling by their nature.  Only in this mode of understanding can we begin to grasp the importance, say, of Peter’s wild vacillations of experience before his Master.  At one moment in Matthew, Peter, having identified Jesus as “the Christ,” is responded to with, “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona.”

However, at the next point in the flow of the narrative, Peter responds inappropriately to Jesus’ prediction of the Crucifixion, and Jesus says, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”  It is terrifying to think that our existence might be fundamentally shaken at any moment, yet the very notion of attempting to grasp a worldview presumes that the greatest of our presumptions might be as fragile as the least.  The Machine of our existence—the ceaseless progress of time, the ceaseless press of necessity, the innumerable cycles of cause and effect, the innumerable layers of complexity—is a Machine that we can simultaneously find amazing in its interactions and awesome in its intolerance for aberration.

More awesome still is the fact that we can run afoul of the Machine in the most fundamental ways with the least of warnings.  Of course, we resist that fact.  As regarding our earthly fate, for example, we want to take Jesus’ admonishments not to worry about tomorrow as admonishments not to worry.  That, of course, is not what Jesus tells us.  He tells us not to worry about tomorrow because today we might suffer the most horrible of fates.  And he tells us not to worry about how we will answer our tormentors, but his assurance that we will be given at that moment what we must say should impress upon us foremost that we must concentrate on ever being truthful—not on possessing the truth.  What we might understand to be the truth could change in the most fundamental ways in a moment.

The unfortunate extent to which we bow to the progress of the Machine is revealed in our tendencies to take for granted just about everything about ourselves and everything about our world.  We have no reason to imagine that those tendencies were less apparent in Jesus’ followers than in us.  As I wrote about Jesus and his ministry in the preceding post, “it is incontrovertible that he intended both to accomplish an end, and also to relate to his disciples beforehand what that end was.  In this latter task (getting through to his disciples) Jesus was—by the estimation of virtually every critic—spectacularly unsuccessful.  Jesus’ description to his disciples of what lay before him was uncomfortable, but it would be simply untrue to contend that it was too fantastic to be grasped in its particulars.  The Twelve—grown men by any reasonable assessment—had lived their entire lives in the company of stories about heroic witnesses, martyred prophets, tortured innocents and—in the ‘ferment’ so often used to describe their era—resurrected gods.”

That is what the Twelve had lived: “lives in the company of stories.”  Jesus’ disciples, like us, were foremost children--not of God, nor of Adam, nor of Abraham, nor of their countless ancestors or their parents.  They were children of the stories they told themselves.  Jesus seems to refer carelessly to the Scriptures of the Jews—now recognizing this or that writing as if “canonical,” now saying of this or that writing, “Ye have heard that it hath been said.”  Jesus’ emphasis is on how his audience has absorbed ideas about the world, and absorbing ideas about the world without questioning their apparently-necessary validity merely sets the person on a course of establishing a larger and larger story-set, until that story-set engulfs the person’s conception of God.

Like us, Jesus’ listeners made their stories about God into machines—or worse yet, into subfunctions of the Machine.  Stories about God have become perhaps the most horrid machines of all—the machines of Inquisitions and witch-hunters and heretic-burners, making the curse-hurling, hung-over Noah seem small.  Like us, Jesus’ listeners were children of time and place—of dimension.  Like us (at least as we unfortunately tend to be) they were children not of God but of God’s world.

As they were creatures of time and place, creatures (as I have said) of stories about “heroic witnesses, martyred prophets, tortured innocents,” it seems odd that Jesus’ followers were so obtuse about Jesus’ descriptions of his execution and his resurrection.  Our assessment, however, might reveal more about ourselves than about them.  Do any of us know what it is to live a life that is constantly questioned in every regard?  For that is what was happening to Jesus’ disciples, though the retrospective accounts of the Gospels—and even more the distanced appraisals of commentators—would scarcely seem to so indicate.

Jesus told them that eating wasn’t what they thought it was; that digesting wasn’t was they thought it was; that working wasn’t what they thought it was; that charity wasn’t what they thought it was; that oppression wasn’t what they thought it was; that heritage wasn’t what they thought it was; that parentage wasn’t what they thought it was; that scripture wasn’t what they thought it was; that prophecy wasn’t what they thought it was; that murder wasn’t what they thought it was; that marriage wasn’t what they thought it was; that adultery wasn’t what they thought it was; that ritual wasn’t what they thought it was; that wealth wasn’t what they thought it was; that authority wasn’t what they thought it was, that life wasn’t what they thought it was, that death wasn’t what they thought it was.

This all can just seem like a list of minutiae, particularly if the idea of a prescription of “saving faith” is brandished and pronounced upon as “what really matters.”  This prescription—to use a “machine” analogy—can then be fed into a person’s life like a perforated roll might be fed into a player piano, and indeed such a thing is practiced.  In the last half of the twentieth century, when the established churches were trying to decide what to do about the (sometimes biting) criticism from “the kids,” it became a trend for mainstream clergy to eagerly talk about the “radical” requirements of Christian morality.  Several times a year, comfortable middle-class church-goers would leave comfortable homes in comfortable cars, to be told for part of an hour how their faith stood out from all others in the “radical” requirements of morality that were entailed.  Then the church-goers would get back into their comfortable cars and proceed to live lives that were predicated upon nothing more strongly than their expectations of comfort and security.

It would be difficult enough to imagine how the issue of material security would sit with us if we had Jesus looking us in the face, and by the list of other concerns (the wasn’t-what-they-thought-it-was’s), we can see that Jesus’ disciples were not being asked by him to understand his prophesied end while they lived their lives.  Jesus was asking them to understand his prophesied end while they were careening through existences that they could scarcely understand as their lives.  They would scarcely have known how to live from moment to moment, and they would probably have learned very quickly that Jesus could hit them with some other unexpected idea at any of those moments.

This is why the one thing on Earth that ought to matter to us is truthfulness.  Truth is the province of God, and our contention that God is a loving God can be a well-intended contention, but it can scarcely be a well-informed one.  What do we know of love?  We can, however, throw ourselves into the pursuit of truth—into the practice of truthfulness—and there is no better way to show God that we believe he loves us.

This is what brings us back to the subject of “urges.”  The urge to pursue truth is of one piece with the infant’s urge to pursue comfort.  Like the infant’s self-centered yet un-self-conscious desire for comfort, our own desire for truth cannot claim to be selfless, and in religious terms that is not the point.  When we pursue truthfulness we direct the greatest of our worships toward a God we presume to be a loving parent, even when all of our other presumptions waver or fall--even when they waver or fall in the face of our own inquiries.

To the Limits of the Machine

Next, in my description of the operation of the Machine:

The intelligent creature projects immediacy of time and surroundings into a horizon of aspirations.  There is perhaps no more concise description of humanity’s approach to traveling through time and space than the casually-offered query about any belief system: “Where is all this leading?”  It would be unsettling enough for any answer to “Where is all this leading?” to amount to “Nowhere—there is no place for us to go, and no hurry to get there.”  Even Taoism—sometimes described clumsily by outsiders are merely a philosophy of “going with the flow”—can scarcely be described so in its totality.  After all, the ancient description of Lao-tzu as “sick at heart at the ways of men” (or some such) is inconsistent with a satisfaction with any concrete state of affairs.  For humanity, there is always somewhere to go and some need to get there before too long.

It would be unsettling, as I have said, for any religious teacher to contradict our presumption that there are things in space and time to be done.  And of course, in the case of Jesus, it is incontrovertible that he intended both to accomplish an end, and also to relate to his disciples beforehand what that end was.  In this latter task (getting through to his disciples) Jesus was—by the estimation of virtually every critic—spectacularly unsuccessful.  Jesus’ description to his disciples of what lay before him was uncomfortable, but it would be simply untrue to contend that it was too fantastic to be grasped in its particulars.  The Twelve—grown men by any reasonable assessment—had lived their entire lives in the company of stories about heroic witnesses, martyred prophets, tortured innocents and—in the “ferment” so often used to describe their era—resurrected gods.

When we observe the disciples from our vantage-point, however, we are confronted by a selective distillation of the story—a distillation afforded both by the editors’ choices, and by our own predispositions.  Ensconced in a set of presumptions, we can divide ourselves into two camps about the progression of Jesus’ ministry: either that it does not make sense, or that it would be nonsensical for the Savior of Mankind to have proceeded in any substantially different way.  To frame my response to this situation, I will quote from my preceding post:

“The existence of reality does not make sense.  There is available to us—virtually by definition—no reason why anything should exist.  Fortunately, there is however available to us the capacity to employ thought in manners that we have come to treat as counter-intuitive.  My contentions about the teachings of Jesus rely on such approaches, and for what it is worth my contentions seem hardly more likely to satisfy the religious than the non-religious.”

Whether religious or non-religious, critics of the stories of Jesus in the Gospels have set themselves to seeing if the stories (or “collections of stories,” given the existence of four gospels) make sense.  In these endeavors, nothing is more crucial than the participants’ predispositions about what is necessary in order for something to “make sense.”  To state the participants’ position generally, Christians contend that it makes no sense to disregard the “evidences” of Jesus’ ministry, and their critics contend that the stories of Jesus’ ministry “make no sense.”

What these two camps share, however, is the presumption of the “time and space” aspect of describing the appearance of Jesus on the scene.  The story of Jesus is true or it is untrue—either the story really proceeded as it is described, or the story—possessing no substance—went nowhere, and never happened.  At this point I will inject what I referred to earlier: “thought in manners that we have come to treat as counter-intuitive.”  I will present the notion that nothing of substance about the ministry of Jesus would be altered if—in a manner reminiscent of the apparently truncated ending of Mark—all of the surviving manuscripts of all four gospels ended with the disciples scattering at Gethsemane, described in like terms as the disciples at that truncated ending: “they trembled and were amazed.”

What would have been lost if the “story” of Jesus’ resurrection had been lost, or never told?  And I will not fail to note that—in an extreme irony—in one sense, the story of the Resurrection was never told.  All we have is stories of the evidences of the Resurrection—of the event itself we have not even stories of Jesus resurrected within the tomb and first spied upon his exit.  Yet the entire force of the gospels consists of the contention that the disciples, listeners, and even opponents of Jesus ought to have seen him in life as the Messiah, ought to have understood him in his qualities, and ought to have understand that in his fulness as the Son of God he had—as he told his disciples in John before his betrayal—"overcome the world.”

Jesus, revealing himself in his earthly ministry, had related to people who and what he was.  The “time and place” aspect of his story was ancillary at best.  It is no slight to Jesus’ listeners (or to us) that they tended to seat the substance of Jesus’ ministry in their expectations about the playing-out of a narrative.  As I have indicated, it would be “counter-intuitive” for them to have done otherwise.  And as I began with “the intelligent creature projects immediacy of time and surroundings into a horizon of aspirations”—we want to see what is going to happen, and we want to be there when it happens.

In John, Thomas was not present at the first appearance of Jesus to the disciples, and when he was confronted by Jesus at the second instance, he was told, “because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”  In typical modern fashion, the application of “blessed are they that have not seen” is applied to the idea that the gospels (and other parts of the New Testament) ought even now to be taken as sufficient evidence of the truth of Christianity.

What is not typically remembered (because “time and space” considerations, rooted in our wishful thinking, are easily bent to our wishes) is the fact that Jesus’ assertion about “blessed are they that have not seen” applied at that moment not merely to persons who had never seen the resurrected Jesus personally, but to persons who had not yet been exposed to the “evidences” of the Resurrection.  They had not been given—perhaps would never be given—the tedious recitations from the faithful about this or that appearance, or “Why would so-and-so lie about an appearance?” or “Isn’t it revealing that five hundred saw Jesus at once?”  (Would “five thousand” not be more convincing?  Or “fifty thousand”?  At what point would the size of the crowd be less rather than more impressive as “evidence”?)

The story of Jesus is a story of his qualities.  It is a story of people having to decide what to do with those qualities.  It is a story of people being confronted by a person of Jesus’ qualities, and necessarily being confronted simultaneously by the latent question of whether those qualities constitute ultimate reality.  The preceding sentence could have been written differently in so many ways, but I will confess to being unable to imagine a worthy aspiration of humans that is divorced from the idea of reality.  If reality is the matter at hand, then so is truthfulness—the proper relating of reality.

Much might be said about the pursuit of truth—it is perhaps the noblest of aspirations.  It must always be remembered, however, that truth can never be more than its progressively more perfect iterations.  Truthfulness, on the other hand, might at any moment or any place—in any person, God willing—be the greatest it has ever been, or greater than it ever will be.  Truthfulness might—in any time or place—be so great that only the reality of the Ultimate abuts it.

Intellectualizing the Machine

Next, in my description of the operation of the Machine:

The tool-making creature concomitantly develops the faculties of intelligence.  I should probably try to make something clear.  I have chosen the rather clumsy notion of the Machine to describe the system of our experiences that we must faithfully analyze.  Conceptually, I might choose the Body or the Organism as labels for the system that surrounds us, but I believe such notions would carry untenable connotations of amity or communal purpose.  (And the System would carry still more connotations of purpose.)  The Machine, however, can (I hope) be understandable as an unforgiving collective that can manifest simultaneously in cohesion or non-cohesion.  The parts often grind together.

So I have thrown together clumsily the rather disparate notions of the individual creature’s “body and available materials” and the animate and inanimate elements inherent in “the tool-making creature.”  This disparity, however, must pale next to the necessity that confronts us yet: incorporating into the concept of the Machine the crucial role of the disembodied apprehension of thought.  At least we believe that thoughts are disembodied or incorporeal.  In fact, the very notion that we “believe” something presumes that our apprehension of a concept can stand apart from the reality that the belief posits, and that the test of any belief is its persistence even as the basis for its ostensible validity is removed or remote.

When dealing with matters of religion, it is often held to be incumbent upon the religious to answer the contention that religious belief serves purposes—psychological support, group cohesion, power structures, and many others—each pregnant with potential to subsume truth-seeking (the hallowed goal of intellect) into the service of less-elevated ends.  The straightforward application of intelligence militates toward this end—it is a fatuous sentiment to say, as some of the religious will, that belief can proceed in frictionless harmony with knowledge.

In Mark 9 there is the timeless plea, “I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”  There is no pretense in the gospels that belief glides in harmony with thought.  Belief is part of the machine.  Indeed, belief is itself a machine—fueled by desire, producing comfort, and boxed in by our own limitations and by the fact that the larger Machine impinges upon us constantly, demanding incessantly that we decide (or ride upon filed-away decisions about) what we will tend toward, and what we will tend away from.

Intellect can be claimed to be more basic (and less psychologically “base”) than belief.  It is no slight to religion to admit this.  What is of real concern, however, is the pitfall of considering intellect itself as something standing outside the parameters of the Machine.  Intellect itself serves purposes—surely there is no slight in saying this—and intellect itself is a machine.  Religious belief (with its analogs in “non-religious” worldviews) is only by degree more describable than intellect by “what we will tend toward, and what we will tend away from.”

Indeed, the machine-quality of intellect is found not in what it embraces, but in what it learns to shun.  Fundamentally, intellect posits an existence defined by dimensions.  As I wrote in the previous post, we are harried constantly, in our individual and collective thought lives, with “the unfortunate tendency to concoct an ‘existence’ of our neatly-defined finitude imagined as it might exist in a lattice of (imagined) infinities.”  This is what I have tried to address with “roused, readied, reaped”—we exist in a temporal and spatial milieu that curls in upon itself, that finds its references in itself, and that finds the validation of its concepts in the persistence of phenomena across time and space.  The experiences of our lives factored by quantities of time or space—our reachings-out across time and space to the experiences of our fellow creatures—are essentially our experiences factored by one—by identity.  There is no time and no space but as mechanisms of the greater Machine.

To say (as I imagine some might), that my description of reality does not make sense, is beside the point.  The existence of reality does not make sense.  There is available to us—virtually by definition—no reason why anything should exist.  Fortunately, there is however available to us the capacity to employ thought in manners that we have come to treat as counter-intuitive.  My contentions about the teachings of Jesus rely on such approaches, and for what it is worth my contentions seem hardly more likely to satisfy the religious than the non-religious.

The whole idea of what Jesus was trying to teach in the gospels (or perhaps more importantly, what Jesus was trying to do by teaching in the gospels) is addressed constantly by proponents and by critics of the gospels.  Jesus went around teaching for three or so years, and what he presented as a belief “system" has been kicked around ever since.  The denominations have massaged Jesus’ teachings into what many have called—perhaps quite revealingly—“salvation economies.”  Critics have set about dismantling those economies (or “systems,” or whatever.)  It has even become a trend for believers to expect that a stage of their religious lives might be characterized by their “deconstructing” (and usually reconstructing) their belief systems.

All of this presumes to know what Jesus was doing.  Jesus was apparently not convinced that anyone knew what he was doing.  The Gospel of John illustrates this quite starkly.  The gospel as a story essentially begins with Jesus laughing (good naturedly, it would seem) at Nathanael, “Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou?”  The same gospel draws toward its close with Jesus saying to his disciples, “Do ye now believe?  Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone . . . .”  Jesus does not seem to be very convinced.  (Nor does Jesus refrain here from his habit of toying with the dimensions of time and space.)

Of course, the gospels tell the story of the Resurrection (though in Mark the story is arguably incomplete.)  In Matthew especially, the Resurrection is foretold, apparently quite definitively: “From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.”  Yet in John—which stints not to describe the disciples’ continual befuddlement—we have the disciples described on the morning of the Resurrection: “For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.”

Even to view the gospels charitably, we must conclude that Jesus’ teachings were incredibly slow to penetrate the minds of his disciples.  It is therefore somewhat painful to have it contended today that the teachings of Jesus—delivered by him over three years to dedicated disciples in a religion-soaked environment, delivered to disciples behaving as though their eternal souls hung in the balance, disciples hand-picked by Jesus—are teachings that could not be comprehended by Jesus’ own students, yet those teachings are such as can be successfully—and salvifically—passed from one stranger to another over ten minutes in a train station.

Indeed, a train would be a fitting metaphor for the machine-like quality of the thought processes that enable us to survive the continual intellectual assaults the world directs at us.  We think of time and space because we resolve to think of time and space, and yet it is only a convention that our thoughts need to be directed so and—most importantly, whether we are religious or not—that we ought to train ourselves that way.  Jesus sought to train his disciples another way.

It has been the source of perennial controversy that Jesus said that the end of all things would be seen by the generation of his day.  Some have said that the gospel use of (Greek) “generation” was really meant to indicate “race,” but to entertain such contentions requires a latitude of translation that might infect innumerable corners of the gospels (to say nothing of the fact that—since Jesus was an Aramaic-speaker—we are arguing about translations of translations.)  Some have said that he was looking ahead to a future generation.  Some have said that Jesus was describing how his contemporaries—or at least some of them—would witness a type of the end in the coming Roman onslaught.

Time and space set aside—not really a very wild notion where religion is concerned—it appears that to Jesus there is only one generation: the generation of Adam, if you will.  Time and space, as I have said, meant little or nothing to Jesus.  Who was the high priest during some episode; who, of either David or the Messiah, had to be the ancestor; who was Jesus’ mother or sisters or brothers; who—Abraham or the devil--was the father of a crowd of Jews; who of the Patriarchs, once living, could ever be considered dead; who could claim to be a child of the ancients and not escape blood-guilt as though participating real-time in the very deeds?  We could even throw in John the Baptist, proclaiming that God might raise up from the stones children for Abraham.  Or that the Baptist was Elijah.

The Machine of existence devours all that we can conceptualize, and encompasses potentially infinitudes of infinities that we might never conceptualize.  If we are truly to consider the existence of God and the existence of God’s salvation, then—as I contend Jesus teaches—God does not merely save us from predicaments that we can imagine, or even from postulations of predicaments that we extrapolate from every dimension that we can imagine.  As I will try to develop later, dimensions and dimension-oriented thinking lead inevitably to impiety.  Too much of our religious life has been built on, “If God exists, then this” or “If God exists, then that.”  It should really be, “If God exists, then everything.”

Interacting with the Machine

Next, in my description of the operation of the Machine:

The beast employs both body and available materials as a machine.  We interact with the world that surrounds us, and the world interacts with us.  The “we” can be ourselves identified with our bodies, or the “we” can be our consciousness apprehending our bodies.  Moreover, we can define the “us” in the preceding sentence as the “us” of the individual sense, or the “us” of collective humanity or its parts.  This interaction is immensely complex, but in the analysis of religion there is usually the opportunity to distill such matters into There Are Things to Be Done and There Are Things Not to Be Done.

Admittedly, There Are Things to Be Done and There Are Things Not to Be Done straddles the divide (good luck in elucidating it) between the practical and social norms of sentient beings and the ostensibly more refined conceptualizations of proper behavior that we associate with human or humanly-understandable morality.  What is most important in this discussion of the Machine is the difficult-to-elucidate-though-inescapable reality that neither human thought nor divine decree can be truly understood to confer absolute ratification or condemnation of any of the aspects of our world.

Of course, I will bolster this contention with the approach used by Jesus.  Jesus expects us to view matters of morality with a discerning eye—a task that is incompatible with blanket assertions that this or that moral actor or observable phenomenon is intrinsically good or intrinsically evil.  To describe humanity or the world as utterly wicked is merely to forfeit the role of moral contemplation.  There is work to be done in the service of morality, and the work is not to be done by sanctimoniously declaring ourselves to be utterly depraved without divine intervention.  As I said in the previous post, “Like all scenarios contrived by God, the larger context of our temptations—fueled most formidably by our urges—is to an extent understandable, and to an extent manageable.”

Management of moral scenarios is a living process that is connected to the Machine of the universe.  We can do some things more-or-less independently of the larger Machine, and in other scenarios we would be lying to ourselves to pretend we had such latitude.  Jesus was asked why in certain settings his disciples did not fast as expected, and Jesus’ answer merely described the essential impossibility of people acting consistently in any manner contrary to their natural inclinations.  When the bridegroom is present, the wedding celebration commences.  This is about human tendencies—it is as simple as that.

At another point Jesus describes as hypocritical some of the Jewish leaders who condemn certain infractions of the Law.  Jesus asks who will not lift a domestic animal out of a pit on the Sabbath.  His scenario encompasses even the possibility that the “lifter” might be responding reflexively or—better yet for our analysis—that “reflexively” and “deliberately” in any context might be melded fluidly and imperceptibly.  That is how moral scenarios really work.

And, as I have described above, moral scenarios occur in the contest of the Machine of existence—so described by me to avoid the unfortunate tendency to concoct an “existence” of our neatly-defined finitude imagined as it might exist in a lattice of (imagined) infinities.  Simultaneously, we must refrain from attributing infinite or effectively-infinite qualities to the elements of moral scenarios.  This is one of the problems with attributing essential depravity to humans in the course of our analyses (as distinct from the ultimately-unknowable status of any moral actor before God.)  If we call ourselves depraved in how we interact with the world, we unavoidably confer an undeserved moral quality to the world.  As we struggle to do the things we must—or think we must—we do so against onslaughts from the world that are incompatible with any notion that we are constantly victimizing everything around us, and we are not giving ourselves credit for what we do in the face of such onslaughts.

Jesus beseeches us to understand the tender parental care of God toward us.  He asks us to understand this in reflection upon on our care for our own children.  Jesus’ teaching in this regard would be meaningless if our interactions with our children were devoid of moral content.  Even Jesus’ condemnations of certain people’s behavior is often understandable only as a matter of relative proportion.  It is no credit to the believer to do no more than the “heathen” do, yet those self-same tendencies of the “heathen” toward family and social order are the template against which Jesus expects us to understand the care extended by our Heavenly Father.

It is not merely in the abstract that we must act upon the fact that, as I said above, “If we call ourselves depraved in how we interact with the world, we unavoidably confer an undeserved moral quality to the world.”  We are confronted daily by a version of ostensible morality that has preyed upon precisely that phenomenon, to the detriment of America and the world.  I am referring to the anti-government animus that infuses the current pseudo-populist right-wing movement here and abroad.

In America, this phenomenon is traceable in large part to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and it is particularly regrettable in that the Reagan-worldview contentions of today do not faithfully mirror the beliefs of their founder.  Reagan believed in an essentially good and wholesome America.  His modern-day “followers” believe that anything essentially good and wholesome about America has become the secluded province of a contingent of “real Americans” who must “take the country back.”

The genesis of this tragic scenario—at least as far as Reagan is concerned—is found in the type of unbalanced moral scenario that fixates on one or a few essential infinities (in this case, essential “absolutes”) that can neither be ultimately defended nor—most importantly—prevented from infecting one’s appreciation of the other parts of the Machine.  Reagan’s simplistic worldview is unfortunate not merely in his contention that “government is the problem” (when he had lived through and participated in the United States’ government’s twentieth-century accomplishments that inspired much of the globe), but also in that he considered that the essential goodness of American society—a result in large measure of the people’s long history of fruitful participation in and interaction with their government—was an essential goodness that maintained some ethereal foundation of its own.

The horrid irony is in the fact that the most revered (though paradoxically effectively unchurched) president in the eyes of right-wing Christianity had a worldview that was essentially pagan (in the sense of worshipping elements of the world.)  This is an outgrowth of what I have described.  Reagan concluded that humanity’s interactions with government were essentially depraved (leading to his followers’ demonization of governmental agencies and employees, and a religiose fixation on their abolishment) and he therefore—in what operations of his mind we can only guess—was led to imbue American society with an essential goodness that might only be found in convenient imaginings.

Reagan’s world—to give just one example—was a world in which police officers might be trusted to do their duty responsibly without bureaucratic oversight (and in fact could do their duty better) because bureaucratic oversight is a phenomenon of government (which inevitably corrupts its participants.)  The government official responsible for overseeing some activity of the police (though that official might live in a modest house with some kids and a dog) is a functionary of the evil, devouring state, while the police officer striding through the community with a deadly weapon at his or her side and the presumption of legitimacy is perceived as some sort of social rather than governmental fixture.  After all, he or she has a modest house with some kids and a dog.

In Reagan’s view, the notion of the depravity of humanity applied with awesome force in the context of describing governmental overreach, and the contingent necessity of describing how society could continue to function while government was dismembered was found in Reagan’s romanticization of American society (particularly private-sector society.)  In short—as we would anticipate about any scenario we might assess dispassionately—depravity assigned conceptually to some realm has to be balanced by virtue assigned to another.  That is one of the outgrowths of the notion of the essential depravity of persons—it leads inevitably to the assignment of undeserved moral elevation to the accursed world.

Introduced by the Machine

Next, in my description of the operation of the Machine:

The creature goes about self-actualization as a beast.  In many venues use of a concept like “self-actualization of the beast” (to say nothing of people possibly taking it to mean “self-actualization of The Beast”) would be thought ridiculous.  While many schools of thought emphasize essential differences between human and animals, this distinction is rarely made more forcefully than by Bible-believing Christians who emphasize Man Made in the Image of God.

One need merely observe the male gorilla beating his chest in a dominance display, however, to observe as well the truth that animals go about squaring themselves with significant internalized drives bent on asserting the effectual fulfillment of the individual—self-actualization, at least of a sort.  The Genesis to which Jesus subscribes is scarcely as fastidious about the exceptional status of humans as many humans are.

Animals in Genesis are formed from the same soil as humans, and quickened by the same breath of life.  Both animals and humans are initially commanded to refrain from eating animals, and though both animal and human are later—in the Noahide covenant—permitted to eat animals, all such creatures are liable to be punished for homicide.  The very passage in Genesis 6, so often quoted: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man” is embedded in a passage that recognizes blood-guilt even upon beasts.  Beasts—including humanity in an abiding sense—are liable to culpability incurred in the process of living out their—our—urges.

Our introduction as created beings into the realm of moral challenge and of sin is little other than a process of our creaturely selves being fed into a machine, a machine constructed of survival contexts and fuel by the urges with which we are born.  It is a beastly business, but it does not play out in an arena of wild happenstance.  God said to Cain, “if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.  And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.”  This situation has been contrived by God for all of us.  Like all scenarios contrived by God, the larger context of our temptations—fueled most formidably by our urges—is to an extent understandable, and to an extent manageable.

We are in such manner introduced to the world by the Machine.

Presented by the Machine

In my preceding post about the Machine, I ventured just “to take a stab at a description.”  I will try to enlarge on each point.

The emerging creature (newly-born or newly-evolved) responds to urges.  This would describe Adam in his first apprehension of the company of God, and it describes as well the experience of the newborn.  Jesus says that we must become as little children, and he says that we must be born a second time (or born “from above”) in a manner analogous to the genesis of the (incomprehensible) wind.  That is to say, we are to cultivate the bursting and un-cursed urges of the newborn, experiencing the wonder of existence before understanding (or, rather, attempting to understand) that existence.  God provides the means of our earthly arrival—the Machine of Creation—which renders superfluous (and perhaps detrimental) all notions of parentage or extraction.  We are the non-contributing products of the machine, and we can no more understand the process of our derivation than we can understand why anything should exist in the first place.

This first element—the instant of the primal urge—cannot be overemphasized.  Creation was pronounced “good.”  Creation was subsequently cursed.  There is no logical warrant to distinguish between competing conceptualizations of the curse.  Either humanity is evil from conception (and the “conception” that matters is the conception of the person in the mind of God) or humanity is evil from the moment the self-centered yet all-accepting urge to actualization of the newborn is replaced by that which is outright selfish.

This is not a small question.  A certain neatness and apparent humility reside in the notion that all humanity is cursed from conception, yet that mode of analysis is rightfully revolting to the conscience.  We might wonder if that is how God might act, and that is not all.  God pronounced Creation “good.”  The notion that such a pronouncement could be entirely obliterated through the finite though horrid behaviors of persons seems untenable.

The competing notion is the contention that persons embrace evil as they embrace all other things that tend toward the actualization (or attempted actualization) of themselves.  This is the notion that Jesus ratifies.  We must become like little children, and we must remember that God is a loving father if only by our recalling that we (rightly called “evil”) cannot exist without benign tendencies of our own.

We are in such manner presented to the world by the Machine.

The Machine of Existence

In the last post I wrote about the Machine.  I suppose I’ll continue to use the term “Machine” because of its widespread application in our culture to any idea of a formidable contrivance.  It is not meant in my usage to be a precise term, and it will be particularly challenging when I am describing—as I am just recently beginning to—a spectrum of contrivances that constitutes the relationship between created and Creator.

The importance of “roused, readied, reaped” lies in the conceptualization of our existence as part of a larger and ineffable existence.  I understand “roused, readied, reaped” to be in contradistinction to all views of existence as being framed by infinitely-extending dimensions.  While we might conceptualize ourselves as poor, finite creatures in a universe of receding absolutes, we are nonetheless granting ourselves a “God’s-eye” view of our existence.

We cannot really claim to conceptualize ourselves as infinitely-small phenomena on this or that infinitely-proportioned scale.  We just pretend that we can.  If there are expanses of dimensions that exceed our vision, then there exists the potentiality that there are infinitely more dimensions than we can ever hope to conceptualize.  To call ourselves small on this or that scale or amalgamation of scales is really for us to draw ourselves up in our imaginations into an ethereal observer’s chair.

Our only honest understandings of our relationship to the universe must include the admission that all our conceptualizations are self-referential.  Our projections of ourselves outward into the realms of the potential will always—if we are honest about it—circle back upon ourselves.  One can scarcely consider this as other than a morally-neutral phenomenon.  This is simply how things are.

When we consider how things are, however, and when we understand that all of our conceptualizations are self-referential, then we must conclude that our ideas about phenomena are inextricably related to the contexts that we experience.  We cannot experience anything in isolation, and any true idea about existence must persist throughout all contexts (or rather, through all spectrums of context.)  This is what I will really intend by references to such as the Machine.

The Machine is a collection of contrivances, and I attempted to describe in the preceding post how God contrived a world in which cities might be built, and Cain contrived to build one.  The Cain who was to be a restless wanderer on the earth embraced a functionality of the Machine.  We might wonder if Cain to any extent escaped the punishment meted out to him, or if he merely made things more difficult for himself in the long run.  Moral theology might want to try to figure that out (along with figuring out the character of a God who would apparently allow himself to be defied by an effectual convict) but it would be a blasphemy and an impiety to entertain such incorporeal considerations and then state that one’s conclusions are justified by “that is how the world works.”  Moral conclusions are not be to found on the surface of an earth that God waters for the righteous and the unrighteous.

What God did do, however, is place us in the wheelhouse of the Machine—if the Machine is to be viewed in an expansive sense.  Just to take a stab at a description:  The emerging creature (newly-born or newly-evolved) responds to urges; the creature goes about self-actualization as a beast; the beast employs both body and available materials as a machine; the tool-making creature concomitantly develops the faculties of intelligence; the intelligent creature projects immediacy of time and surroundings into a horizon of aspirations; the refinement of aspirations beyond instrumentalities and language leads to what (for purposes of my describing cycles of ultimate self-reference) I will call urges.  Perhaps these are more elevated urges, but that would presume that there are more elevated urges than the infant’s non-judgmental squirming toward the comfort that is her due, and is the indescribable joy of the parent.

Contrivance Types

The elements of existence as we know them can only be considered by us to be infinitely elastic.  That is, when the divine is in view, everything else that we know is rendered void of any intrinsic proportion.

The “world” that we know can be as much as a virtual pantheistic God-expression, or as little as a speck of insignificance in the mind of God.  This is not intended to be flippant or impious, but rests rather on the substance of the scriptures.  Jesus in the preface to John is interlaced inscrutably with Creation—for if Creation is his, then it is beyond us to opine what facets of Creation are irretrievably beyond the divine—and yet Jesus in the temptations treats the glories of Creation as nothing when seen against the worship of God.

The importance of the “elasticity” consideration cannot be overstated.  When Jesus is crucified, he prays, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”—yet, when the question of the individual person's salvation is at hand, it is precisely the opportunity to consider the selfless sufferings of Jesus that ought to be most likely of all things to convict lost souls.  The confession of the Good Thief hinges precisely on this consideration (as does his reproof of his comrade).  The churches have had to settle for the entirely presumptuous notion that “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” was meant by Jesus to apply only to the soldiers of the execution detail.

This presumption is ridiculous.  Across the gospels, Jesus is at one moment lamenting the lost and unfortunate lot of the masses, and at the next castigating the entirety of humanity for unrighteousness.  In one sense—in the crucial sense, if the salvation of humanity is in mind—every man or woman who has ever lived has crucified Jesus, and has borne the guilt of knowing and willful and damnable transgression.  Jesus being lord of all, it ought to be no surprise that he might speak of humanity either as his pitiable children, or as the spawn of the devil.  It is to the glory of God, not to any intrinsic proportion of culpability among God’s children, that the prayer “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” is most likely addressed.

The volatility of proportion ought always to be kept in mind.  Jesus tells Pilate that Pilate’s power comes from above, and then Jesus tells Pilate that the one who turned him over to Pilate is guilty of the greater sin.  Our minds might turn directly to the High Priest, but we cannot forget that the power of the High Priest came likewise from on high.  We run the risk of turning Jesus’ searing words to Pilate into a weaselly argument on Jesus’ part—Jesus seeking to curry the favor of the gentile official who might release him from his fate.

No—while the power that Pilate wields comes ultimately from on high, the “one” who turned Jesus over to Pilate is—ultimately—all of us (including Pilate).  We all—in our dim searching of the reality of the situation—must reckon that we contribute to the power structures that nonetheless exist in our world originally through the design of God.  Worldly power is a contrivance of God, and we turn it into innumerable contrivances of our own.  God makes for us a world of interlocking and interplaying powers, and we turn that world—through our conceits and contrivances—into a battery of machines (a grand, more-or-less cohesive Machine, really) that we put into the service of our wills.

God branded the malefactor Cain to be a restless wanderer on the earth, and Genesis has Cain straightaway proceeding to construct a contrivance: a city.  Cain will not be a restless wanderer on the earth, for God so contrived to create a world that would allow permanent settlements.  It is left to us to consider whether Cain might have been ultimately successful in quashing his restless wandering, or whether his punishment would have persisted nonetheless to haunt his thoughts and dreams.  Undoubtedly the latter scenario would have served him better in the long run.  Cain could not expect to find true refuge in the Machine of the city, and yet he could build it, and it could operate.

Noah, esteemed though he was of God, had not the knowledge or the control of the Machine of his body to handle the chemical that his vintage produced.  Shem and Japheth had not the control of their individual selves, or of the two-man work crew they comprised, or of the family of which they—during Noah’s incapacitation through inebriation—were the heads, to handle the awkward situation properly.  In short, Noah need never have known that he had lain naked, or that anyone but himself had covered his nakedness.

Instead, Noah is confronted upon awakening by what has happened, and he seizes upon a vengeance almost diabolical.  He constructs a Machine.  By instituting a curse of slavery on a son of Ham, he turns the interplay of a family into the interactions of a contrivance—a hideous, merciless contrivance.  No “the Law provided protection and dignity for slaves” argument will suffice—Canaan is to be “the lowest of slaves.”  It is quite logical to ask at this point what other kinds of “slaves” there were.  Was Japheth a tent-dwelling “slave” of Shem?  And why was Canaan singled out, rather than his father, and presumably singled out among other sons of his father?  Was Ham still needed to perform the functions of a patriarch?  Was the “Canaan strain” of Ham’s blood enough to provide all the “lowest of slaves” types that were needed?  Inescapably, one must use the logic of the machine.

And down on through the Dred Scott decision (and for generations after) the logic of the machine was used.  The African was a device.  The Noah and the Curse of Ham Story was a device.  Scripture itself (as so often through history) was turned into a machine, used to serve the possessors and arbiters of power.  If Scripture is not a machine—a source of power magnifying the status of the possessors of power—then why do the churches not ask for more Scripture?  Forget arguments about how new Scripture would be validated (remembering that nothing is impossible for God).  The churches do not want more Scripture.  Scripture as it stands has been relegated to the status of the Machine—a “salvation machine” at best (if such is really possible), and a power machine at all times.

Only when the Machine of Scripture is stressed beyond its tolerances—when this or that element (or the totality) of existence is viewed as everything or nothing (such as Jesus rejecting the Law or requiring absolute adherence to the Law)—only then can we have any hope of seeing the organic reality of God’s creation (and of his creative power) rather than the real or conceptual machines of our own contrivance.

The Life Death Dimension

In Matthew and Mark, Jesus in Gethsemane falls to the ground and presents himself to do his Father’s will.  The story has something to do with the possibility that Jesus might shrink from his task, or the story is hollow.

Adam is formed from the ground and given the breath of life.  He is presented with the prospect of a divinely-willed eternity of fellowship with his Father.  The text has God acting on the realization that Adam will shrink from the prospect.  The larger context of the Genesis approach to its narrative makes plain either that the story of Adam is the story of humankind, or that the story is hollow.

One thing is plain from Jesus’ teachings and from the stories (such as in Genesis) to which he subscribes.  To do the will of God is life, and to shrink from doing the will of God is death.  Those are the definitions of life and death.  To do the will of God is life, and to shrink from doing the will of God is death.  Surely life is biological, we will say.  Our forebears might have rather said that life is “natural,” or some such, and while the particular terminologies and connotations might differ with time and place, the import is the same.  In human understanding (or in what humans have decided to understand) “life” and “death” happen to the body, and all other applications of the terms are metaphorical.

It is sadly the case that human assertions of biological life and biological death as baseline applications of the terms “life” and “death” have been accepted by Christianity.  In any wholesome approach to the teachings of Jesus, on the other hand, it would be folly to speak of the “life of the soul” or of the “eternal death” of damnation (conceptually just a much a type of “eternal life”) or any other type of life/death metaphor employed by the churches.

Jesus said to some of the Jews, who protested that they would not persecute the prophets as their forebears did, that the mere recognition of a line of forebears made the speakers equally guilty.  There is no room in Jesus’ analysis for postulation—for putting forward some conceptualization of, say, one’s forebears as flawed and resolving to copy their virtues and shuck off their vices.  In Jesus’ analysis, there is only the moment and there is only the question of adhering to God’s will or not.  One’s forebears might as well be one’s contemporaries, and indeed to Jesus there has only ever been one “generation” (which will see all and experience all.)

Life as a function of time, or place, or parentage (he disparages parentage especially) means nothing to Jesus.  Life versus waking; death versus sleeping; the fullness of a life that one must give up; the death of the dead burying their own dead—all of these notions put forth by Jesus presume a life/death paradigm that controls all, and it is not the biological one.

Adam was given life.  Adam grasped for death.  We all would have done the same, for the “life” to which we aspire—though it might burst with all the natural virtues and joys—is the invitation to death, for it is the denial of life in its pure original—life in fellowship with God.  Moreover, the most biting aspect of original death is not that it is the opposite of life, but that life continuing after the original death is the very means of perpetuating the pain of original death.

Life and death are not opposites.  The dimension of life and the dimension of death serve to structure the experiences of the created being in a manner analogous to the scientist’s dimensions, but in the most perplexing manner.  Not like depth versus breadth do the dimensions of life and death bedevil us, but in the more tortuous manner of any of the physical dimensions versus the fourth dimension of time.

We are hoisted and spread-eagled by innumerable aspects of life and innumerable aspects of death assailing us at every moment.  Our only refuge is God, our only standard is truth, and the only true religion is to cast ourselves to the earth to which we are kin and pray for the chance—and the will—to do the bidding of our Father.  That is the lesson of Adam.  That is the lesson of Jesus.

A Franchise if You Can Keep It

Outside of religion, in the sphere of human relations, there is definitely a place for binaries.  We understand our relationships in such terms.  We lie, or we tell the truth; we do what we say we will, or we don’t; we hold to a covenant, or we don’t.  Most importantly—though instances be challenging or difficult to prove—we decide if we will hold purposefully to ideals that we have espoused.

In questions of politics or of governance, the existence of ideals is essential.  Reckoning on our tendency to fall away from our duties, we must always see our actions in relation to ideals.  Moreover, we must always expect the worst when we fall short—hoping that things will turn out for the best is unacceptable, and countenancing risk (occasioned by distortions or shortcuts in our proceedings) is equally unacceptable.

The preceding is the logic that is manifest in the structure of the United States government, and in the governments of “the several states.”  Our constitutions presume the vigorous interplay of many interests, relying on the collision of those interests to produce, first, workable approaches to the problems of governance and, second (and ultimately more important), preservation of the intrinsic elements of the political process.  The essential elements of our republics cannot be treated as consumables, as expendables to be fed into the maw of purported necessity.

A present situation illustrates this.  The store of trust and allegiance built up over two centuries of American law-making is at risk of being squandered on a logically untenable scheme.  I refer to the Independent State Legislature Theory, whereby it is to be reckoned that state legislatures (narrowly defined) are the only state entities that have a voice in the handling of state functions as regards the election of national representatives, senators, and presidential electors.

None of this should be viewed other than as the Revolutionary generations saw such matters.  It does not matter if this theory were to be put into practice in a minority of states, or practiced only sparingly, or indeed used at all—what matters is whether the theory gains legal purchase.  As we ought to be endlessly reminded by James Madison, “it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.”

The illegitimacy of the Independent State Legislature Theory can be established simply by appealing to those elements that give any legislature legitimacy in a democracy.  Those three elements are:

First, that the electorate should fairly represent the population of the polity;

Second, that the basic presumption of decision-making is majority vote; and

Third, that the majority ought not to be permitted to disenfranchise the minority (leading, in the most tragi-comical outcome, to a second and third, etc., whittling down of the electorate.)

This third point, if it is not fastidiously borne out, can lead to the degrading of the other two.  A constriction of the franchise will lead obviously, first, to an un-representative electorate and, second, to a tendency to minority rule.  That is why we need constitutions, with their establishments of undergirding logic for any legislature.

It is true that long-standing practice has allowed for the expulsion of members of legislative bodies, but   the common American experience has been to expect ostensibly aggrieved members to appeal for judicial review or to hope for countervailing action by the executive.  The Independent State Legislature Theory, by contrast, would allow for a simple majority of a state’s legislature to effectively dictate the state’s national representation, both in Congress and in the Electoral College.  Conceivably (and therefore possibly) gerrymandered legislatures in collections of states (perhaps representing a clear minority of the country’s population) could control the federal government in perpetuity.

Once instituted, this control would enjoy near-total freedom of action as against federal intervention, and this control would allow virtually any conceivable restriction of the franchise among a state’s population.  The majority of the country would have its fate decided by a rigged minority, making voting as citizens an empty exercise.  Most of the country would have, among other things, taxation without representation.

The Only Binary

“Roused, readied, reaped” is uncomplicated.  I at first attributed a good deal of gravity to the notion of mankind awaking from slumber in one religious sense or another (and I might still pursue the matter) but the most important aspect of “roused, readied, reaped” is quite simple.  It is one half of a binary question that attends all religious matters.  That is, do we see existence in a comprehensive (though “mystery-shrouded”) sense (the wrong answer), or do we see existence in a viewpoint-grounded sense (the right answer)?

We are born, live, and die surrounded and limited by our circumstances.  That much ought to be plain, but one of the horrid aspects of the religions we practice is an effectual denial of those limitations.  Religion is usually understood as informing the believer of his or her place in the universe.  This is folly.  The more we challenge our presuppositions about God, the more we ought to have impressed upon us the conceptually ever-expanding gulf between our natures and that of God.  The only “place” we occupy is the smallness of ourselves, and the only destination for which we ought to yearn is the disappearing of ourselves into the un-encompassed expanse of God’s will.

Once we properly address the binary question “do we see existence in a comprehensive (though “mystery-shrouded”) sense (the wrong answer), or do we see existence in a viewpoint-grounded sense (the right answer)?”, then we can reckon rightly with the implications of our viewpoint limitations.  Honestly addressed, our comprehension (such as it is) of existence in necessarily understood in terms of vantage-point and proportion.  We look at everything from some perspective, and we weigh everything we look at.  To pretend otherwise (for example, that religion results in altered states of unmeasured awe) is to lie.

In short, we need to address the binary question of our comprehension or incomprehension of existence (settled in favor of the latter) and then we need to reckon that we must measure our experiences.  After our acceptance of the binary option (or, rather, our return to the infant’s reflexive grasping at a universe of what is graspable), then we need to address a ceaseless progression of analyzing and measuring the experiences and insights that confront us.  We are binary creatures trapped in a web of analog responsibilities.  If Adam had grasped at nothing more than fellowship with God, we wouldn’t be in this predicament.\

“Roused, readied, reaped” leads not only to religious implications, but to social implications as well.  Wrongly answering the original binary question (that is, purporting to understand existence even while prating constantly about “mysteries”) leads to an inescapable ramification of that wrong answer: conventional religion never wants to stop pretending to comprehend scenarios framed as binary.  The “sanctity of life” (framed as against a “culture of death”) is but one example.  Man is made in the image of God, that is true, but Jesus tells us only that we are worth more than many sparrows.  Much of religion, however, wants to present itself as the unique voice to the effect that each human life is of inestimable value.

So far, so good.  Many people who want to stay alive are only too glad to have it said that human life is of inestimable value.  It is worth considering, however, how much good having denominations cling to their binary-framed valuation of “the sanctity of life” has done for the security of life.  Untold horrors have been committed against the lives (or anything that makes a life truly a life) of powerless millions in two thousand short years of Christianity.  “Untold” is not a hyperbole meant to escape having to present evidence—such things are becoming more and more “told” and less “untold” all the time.  Straightforwardly attested and publicly-released admissions from the major denominations of our era often exceed the most lurid fever-dreams of anti-Christian or anti-denominational polemics of a century ago.

This is all bound up with the religious obsession with binary questions.  A person who thinks human life is valuable will try to preserve it.  A person who thinks that the sanctity of human life can only be preserved by the anointed denomination will oppress, torture, and kill in the service of that ostensibly invaluable denomination.  (Binaries, arbitrary in themselves, are—unsurprisingly—invoked even when they conflict.)  A person who thinks the divine command to tend to Creation ought to be taken seriously will try to preserve Creation.  A person who thinks that his or her religion is the only one to properly address the yes/no framing of who is and who is not a true steward of Creation is also a person who will countenance the wholesale despoiling of Creation if such is framed as necessary to preserve the ascendency of the true “stewards.”

The only enduring yes/no question is the question of whether we exist or not.  We can only answer that question in the process of being born, living, and dying.  We can spend our lives grasping into the murk and mire that surrounds us, like the infant that cries for the parent in the darkness, throwing our hopes upon the prospect of having the Father recognize us.  Or we can spend our lives contemplating the universe of our imaginings, grading ourselves against innumerable binary theology-derived standards, placing ourselves perilously at every moment in the positions of the wretched souls who will cry, “We drove out demons in your name.”

The only enduring yes/no question is the question of whether we exist or not.  The only matter of ultimate importance is whether or not the Savior will say, “I never knew you.”

Worlds and Infinities

"Roused, readied, reaped" applies not just to the notions of infinity.  That is, "roused, readied, reaped" does not merely address the folly of us thinking ourselves justified in extrapolating our notions of dimensions into infinity.  We exist in parts of time and parts of space.  We know nothing of what might or might not bound space, or time, or space-time, and this lack of knowledge is not incremental--it is total.  By definition, our creaturely existence precludes knowledge of the limits (or not) of any dimension that defines that existence.

No, the fact that we are born, live, and die in the framework of our existence means not only that we cannot see the bounds of what defines our experience-realm, but also that we might exist in any number of experience-realms of which we are (in the present state that we understand as our existence) totally unaware.  In other words, the implication of "roused, readied, reaped" is not only that we cannot see the limits (or ascertain the limits) of any infinities, but also that we cannot know if an infinitude of infinities surround us.

The implications of these two considerations for God-worship are ultimately inescapable.  The first (the notion of infinities of known phenomena) can be illustrated by arguments about ultimate (that is, first) causation.  "Everything has a cause" is a statement of truth as we understand truth.  Of course, "everything has a cause" can in one sense be a tautology, if our understanding of any "thing" includes that "thing" as defined by its properties, since properties can be understood only in the context of the "thing's" interaction with its surroundings--such interaction being intrinsically space-time oriented, and therefore by definition causal.

Or "everything has a cause" can also be an unfalsifiable and unconfirmable proposition.  "Everything has a cause" is no more provable than the materialist contention that everything exists in the realm of energy-matter, a contention that might only be proved by bouncing (or observing the bouncing) of matter or energy off of everything that exists.  Unsurprisingly, science takes "everything has a cause" as a working proposition--a quite reasonable approach, and one that is usually questioned only in the contest of metaphysical debate (with the scientist understood to be saying that "everything has a materialist cause.")

It need scarcely be said that the materialist approach is often derided as "arrogance" in some religious circles.  The denial of unmaterialistic causes (or of the possibility of unmaterialistic causes) is taken as arrogance.  Simultaneously, it need scarcely be said that some religious circles contend that it is the plainest of logic to pronounce that (everything having a cause) there must have been a First Cause--that is, (by an untested warrant) God.  The materialist's denial of a divine First Cause is taken as arrogance.  Unfortunately, these two religious circles, which would by cleanest definition be mutually exclusive, are often not--a universe punctured and punctuated by un-causal phenomena ("miracles") is reckoned to be the creation by definition of an absolutely necessary First Cause.

And so, in the context of God-worship, contentions about infinities can throw varying lights on what might be considered "arrogance."  It might seem to be humility and piety to honor God as the First Cause (that is, not merely as a sentiment but as a contention), but the matter is not so simple.  A person who honors God as the Creator and forbears from analyzing the matter might well be displaying less arrogance (and more reverence) than a person who approaches the throne of God hauling along a contention about infinity about which the believer really knows nothing.

At this point (perhaps betraying the limits of my facility) I can only think to repeat my second paragraph (the one about the second phenomenon I want to address):

No, the fact that we are born, live, and die in the framework of our existence means not only that we cannot see the bounds of what defines our experience-realm, but also that we might exist in any number of experience-realms of which we are (in the present state that we understand as our existence) totally unaware.  In other words, the implication of "roused, readied, reaped" is not only that we cannot see the limits (or ascertain the limits) of any infinities, but also that we cannot know if an infinitude of infinities surround us.

If we cannot know the limits of infinities, then we cannot know that existence (writ large) does not consist of potentially numberless infinities of which we are unaware.  (Certainly one notion of the un-tiresomeness of eternal heaven is the expectation that the elucidation of the phenomena attributable to God's genius would take forever.)  Indeed, it would seem only prudent to assume that not only do we experience only the slimmest slice of time and space, but also that all the realms of phenomena we experience constitute but the slimmest slice of God's realms.

If this be so, then it would also be prudent to assume that this realm of our existence is discernable (to God's eyes) as distinct from numberless other realms.  In other words, God does not exist at the end (or at the summit) of the universe.  We might be forgiven our creaturely limitation in seeing the divine as a conceptual extension of the (imagined) bounds of our existence, but we cannot upon due reflection pretend that such limitation is not grave and troubling.  God is a God of infinities.  God is not a God tethered to the conceptualized ends of the infinities we imagine to exist.

The "Bible stories" that Jesus recalls and the stories of Jesus that the gospels recall evoke this larger approach to God-worship.  One chief (and really rather elementary) example of this is Jesus' references to Genesis creation as normative rather than as narrative.  In the straightforward normative sense, the prescriptions issued to mankind are based on mankind's maladjustment to creation (as originally a venue of simple fellowship of Adam with God).  The universe in which we live is not the universe of original creation, and our only hope of salvation lies in our identification with God's original ideals (and with the better aspects of our moral natures.)

Some of the implications of these truths are rather basic.  Jesus cursed a fig tree for having no fruit, and the tree withered.  The gospels indicate that, in the progression of the seasons, Jesus ought not to have expected any fruit.  Commentators have noticed these things.  Commentators, of course, can always come up with something to say, but if an anti-Gospel animus is in play, then the commentator who says that Jesus ill-treated the unfortunate tree is delivering a lackluster performance.  Jesus made the world, according to the Gospels, in concert with the Father, and by divine will all fig trees eventually wither.

The world of God's intent had no suffering, no death, and no lack of fruitfulness.  The state of our present world--also always subject to divine intent--is cursed.  Our present world is but a shadow of original creation and--to think that the matter could be still worse--the connection between our accursed world and the world of God's original intent is not to be found in tangible phenomena, but rather in the vaporous (to use an analogy) nature of our moral selves.  It is this divorce between the two worlds--between original creation and the creation declining before, during, and after "The Fall"--that Jesus presents to us when he exhorts us to embrace our capacity to emulate God the Father even though (as parents and otherwise) we are evil.

The denominations, unfortunately (betraying their this-worldly attachments) tend to cast aside the reality that our world is provisional and--what is most important--that it is displayed before us by our Savior as a matter for moral consideration.  Rather, the denominations will shrink from the responsibility of moral consideration and embrace either the balderdash of total depravity or the balderdash of intrinsic goodness (if not some morally bereft incantations about salvation economies.)