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.
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