reply to post by adjensen
Now, I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound much like Christianity.
No, but it does sound like some of the pagan religions Christianity stole its traditions from. Many of them taught self-empowerment, and said that you
are practically your own god - if you learn the right practices. Just as with walking, if you don't practice, you will forget it. Or if you never
practice walking at all, you'll never learn it. Your muscles will be underdeveloped...just like the areas of the brain commonly attributed to
spirituality.
That was their view, anyway. And even then, as per the nature of mankind, spirituality was divide into those who practiced it for control, some who
practiced it for understanding, and some who practiced it for the peace of mind. Lately, we're seeing more of the first type, those who want control
and those who want to be controlled. I have a theory that spirituality didn't work out at first, whether it had been planted by Jesus or not. And so
we focused on material mastery, in order to deeper understand our physical reality.
There's a thread I have been participating in regularly, titled "The Vanity of Enlightenment". In that thread, the subject of talking about an idea
in contradictory terms inspired me to express something I have felt for a while now. When we communicate (and this is important, as it has profound
implications for every holy text in existence) we use physical mediums that require a box to be built around the ideas we are attempting to
communicate. Sound, sight...all of these things require an anchor, a line that is drawn around the idea to distinguish its dimensions. And when this
happens, it freezes. It's a fossil. It is the taxidermied corpse of an idea that was contained in order to be understood. As a result, that idea
cannot grow with our understanding of the world. We advance 50 years, and those words gain a couple new shades of meaning. That's it. We don't bear
a full comprehension of how every word can be used, of how every idea can grow, of the intentions and the possibilities for every word we speak. And
because of that, when we share an idea through talking or text, that beautiful "impression" that you don't hear or think, you
feel, it has
to be translated into a more basic and rough representation. A Porsche looks beautiful, but tear off a rim and that little piece just doesn't
compare. It's like translating a Michelangelo painting into 1's and 0's. All of that emotion, that inspiration, all of those meanings and emotions
evoked by a painted canvas...all reduced to series of numbers. A bar code.
All explicit knowledge requires explicit translation, and all translation is imperfect.
So here's where I'm going with this: just like artwork is converted into 1's and 0's, so we convert our ideas into words and sentences. And like
our ideas, material mastery was another way of educating us in spirituality. The world around us, the physical world, is a physical representation of
our spiritual condition. It is a translation. And since we weren't getting the subtleties of spirituality, maybe we had to switch to a more blunt
medium, one that would be more suitable for our vessels.
But just like that artwork, a lot of that loses meaning in the translation. Sometimes we improve vocabulary so as to better express what we think. But
sometimes...we just stop stretching our mind. And when we stop stretching our mind, that's when we stop learning how to translate. But how are we
supposed to know if we're doing it right?
I eagerly await the day science answers that question for us.
