Waking Up to Attention

Interesting List Found on an Amazon.com Discussion Page

1. God is satisfied with his works
Gen 1:31
God is dissatisfied with his works.
Gen 6:6
2. God dwells in chosen temples
2 Chron 7:12,16
God dwells not in temples
Acts 7:48
3. God dwells in light
Tim 6:16
God dwells in darkness
1 Kings 8:12/ Ps 18:11/ Ps 97:2
4. God is seen and heard
Ex 33:23/ Ex 33:11/ Gen 3:9,10/ Gen 32:30/ Is 6:1/
Ex 24:9-11
God is invisible and cannot be heard
John 1:18/ John 5:37/ Ex 33:20/ 1 Tim 6:16
5. God is tired and rests
Ex 31:17
God is never tired and never rests
Is 40:28
6. God is everywhere present, sees and knows all things
Prov 15:3/ Ps 139:7-10/ Job 34:22,21
God is not everywhere present, neither sees nor knows all
things
Gen 11:5/ Gen 18:20,21/ Gen 3:8
7. God knows the hearts of men
Acts 1:24/ Ps 139:2,3
God tries men to find out what is in their heart
Deut 13:3/ Deut 8:2/ Gen 22:12
8. God is all powerful
Jer 32:27/ Matt 19:26
God is not all powerful
Judg 1:19
9. God is unchangeable
James 1:17/ Mal 3:6/ Ezek 24:14/ Num 23:19
God is changeable
Gen 6:6/ Jonah 3:10/ 1 Sam 2:30,31/ 2 Kings 20:1,4,5,6/
Ex 33:1,3,17,14
10. God is just and impartial
Ps 92:15/ Gen 18:25/ Deut 32:4/ Rom 2:11/ Ezek 18:25
God is unjust and partial
Gen 9:25/ Ex 20:5/ Rom 9:11-13/ Matt 13:12
11. God is the author of evil
Lam 3:38/ Jer 18:11/ Is 45:7/ Amos 3:6/ Ezek 20:25
God is not the author of evil
1 Cor 14:33/ Deut 32:4/ James 1:13
12. God gives freely to those who ask
James 1:5/ Luke 11:10
God withholds his blessings and prevents men from receiving
them
John 12:40/ Josh 11:20/ Is 63:17
13. God is to be found by those who seek him
Matt 7:8/ Prov 8:17
God is not to be found by those who seek him
Prov 1:28
14. God is warlike
Ex 15:3/ Is 51:15
God is peaceful
Rom 15:33/ 1 Cor 14:33
15. God is cruel, unmerciful, destructive, and ferocious
Jer 13:14/ Deut 7:16/ 1 Sam 15:2,3/ 1 Sam 6:19
God is kind, merciful, and good
James 5:11/ Lam 3:33/ 1 Chron 16:34/ Ezek 18:32/ Ps 145:9/
1 Tim 2:4/ 1 John 4:16/ Ps 25:8
16. God's anger is fierce and endures long
Num 32:13/ Num 25:4/ Jer 17:4
God's anger is slow and endures but for a minute
Ps 103:8/ Ps 30:5
17. God commands, approves of, and delights in burnt offerings,
sacrifices ,and holy days
Ex 29:36/ Lev 23:27/ Ex 29:18/ Lev 1:9
God disapproves of and has no pleasure in burnt offerings,
sacrifices, and holy days.
Jer 7:22/ Jer 6:20/ Ps 50:13,4/ Is 1:13,11,12
18. God accepts human sacrifices
2 Sam 21:8,9,14/ Gen 22:2/ Judg 11:30-32,34,38,39
God forbids human sacrifice
Deut 12:30,31
19. God tempts men
Gen 22:1/ 2 Sam 24:1/ Jer 20:7/ Matt 6:13
God tempts no man
James 1:13
20. God cannot lie
Heb 6:18
God lies by proxy; he sends forth lying spirits to deceive
2 Thes 2:11/ 1 Kings 22:23/ Ezek 14:9
21. Because of man's wickedness God destroys him
Gen 6:5,7
Because of man's wickedness God will not destroy him
Gen 8:21
22. God's attributes are revealed in his works.
Rom 1:20
God's attributes cannot be discovered
Job 11:7/ Is 40:28
23. There is but one God
Deut 6:4
There is a plurality of gods
Gen 1:26/ Gen 3:22/ Gen 18:1-3/ 1 John 5:7

Designed Experiences

Interesting post on how designed our experiences with products are.

Persons, Animals, Machines

During seduction, there is a moment of transition from the flirtation into a more animal movement, however delicate, when the persons descend into a world which is concealed from the marketplace and other venues.

It is interesting that this descent is more frequent and the transition nearly instant these days, the inter-personal flirtation being done away with in many cases, especially at clubs and other venues.

What gives rise to this accentuated animal life, this affirmation of animality which risks destroying the personal?

I suspect that it is the pervasive mechanical template, which structures the movements of our days and the metrics driving our valuations, the architecture of our corporatation's organization and its place within an industrial society of consumers. In our context, to descend into the animal is really an affirmation, and more than an affirmation, an ascent - an ascent from the mechanical to the animal.

Hopefully we Orthodox Christians can become pillars bridging earth and heaven, and bearing to others a truly personal life, inclusive of animality, and not perverting our animality to use it as a shield against the darts of mechanization and industrialization, in a world understood as composed merely of particles and forces, and nothing more, where free persons are strangers.

Serbian Chant

I found this, and I'd like to look at it later - it may be just what I've been looking for!

Vision, Experience, Account, Style, Tradition

My parish will begin reading through the book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ on Thursday of next week after Vespers - immediately after this book was chosen as the content of our resumed class, it was
on my reading list, and I read at least half of it two nights ago.

Two or three days before that, I had read through the first six chapters of the Revelation. I've been reading quite a lot of secondary literature dealing with Apocalypticism as a literary and religious phenomenon in late 2nd Temple Israel prior to this read, which made the whole thing much, much more intelligible, but it also raised some questions, which questions had begun to surface earlier as I was reading through the prophetic literature alongside the epistles, and noting how apocalyptic in general was both an articulation of religious mystical (and almost certainly liturgical) ascent experiences ("I was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day..."), and a tradition of literary expression with certain forms of expression shared across the genre, which themselves likely shaped the primary experience and were the language in which the experience was articulated. So too with the book of the Revelation - it may be a whole literary work, complete in itself,
or it may be a collection of several shorter letters of prophetic character, sent as an angelic voice (so to speak) to several communities. At any rate, in form, the book of the Revelation is a single work, which conforms, in many ways, to characteristic forms of expression for the genre. Pagan Hellenistic works often begin with an invocation of one of the muses - even when this expression has no connection in the experience of the poet as the culture undergoes secularization, it is still included to continue the form.

So too with the Gospels. So we have Papias, a 1st Century Christian, saying (as recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius)

    Mark became Peter's interpreter and wrote accurately all that he remembered, not, indeed, in order,     of the things said or done by the Lord. For [Mark] had not heard the Lord, nor had followed him, but     later on, as I said, followed Peter, who used to give teaching as necessity demanded, but not making,     as it were, an arrangement of the Lord's oracles, so that Mark did nothing wrong in thus writing down     single points as he remembered them.

This is related by Papias about Mark, and about Matthew this was said:

    Matthew collected the oracles in the Hebrew language and each interpreted them as best they could.

So we have a similar phenomenon going on in the Gospels, though in the Gospels, the character and message of Jesus Christ, the God-Man, are arranged to articulate the tradition of transmission vis-a-vis an audience/community which is either apostatizing from that tradition, or else one that is other than the community that has received the tradition of the Lord, and which opposes the Church. None of this is terribly troubling to us, in a sense - most of us would be unconcerned that we do not have direct access, or that the Gospels and apocalyptic and prophetic literatures are not attempting a kind of positivistic "faithfulness" to history and memory (which would really amount to an impoverished interpretation of the meaning of a thing, it would amount to an inexcusable blindness when it comes to the Person of Jesus Christ), but we do want to not remain outside, and to remain faithful to the deposit as it has come to us. How do we faithfully enter into the Life of the Lord? How can we not be displaced from the experience of God in Christ that these works come from by fixation upon the form of the texts which articulate it? This is not merely the difference between the letter and the spirit of a work, though that touches upon what I'm getting at.

We have primary experiences, whose interpretation is mediated by a literary and liturgical/ascetical/mystical tradition, even by those who have these primary experiences, and then we have the articulation of these experiences so shaped along the lines of the conventions of that tradition, gathering up these conventions to serve the experience, rather than the other way around, I should hope.

It seems to me that it is essential to try and recover the experience behind these literary expressions, if possible, to try to enter into their world, but not to think that by getting at the experience that we are "liberating" something that is "suffocated" or "suppressed" by the interpretation and stylized articulation - the interpretation surely does not have this kind of a relation to the event or experience or tradition, does it?

Christ Jesus himself is the source of the traditions surrounding him and the communities which followed him before and after his resurrection, and the shape of the apostolic preaching; he is himself thus the source of the accounts which are stylized expressions of this tradition. Likewise with the experience of God or the ascent experiences which are the backdrop and content of what is articulated in the apocalypses - the experience is the source of the text, not literary conventions, but the two are interwoven in ways that I can see with some clarity, but not enough to write about it. We must say in both cases, though, that the style of articulation is chosen because of its fidelity to bear what it expresses.

David Bentley Hart on Modernity

modernity is secularization. It is, in its essence, a project of detaching moral, legal, and governmental reasoning from any authority transcendent of the state or the individual. It is the project of an ethics conformed not to divine justice but to human reason and popular consensus; of a politics authorized not by divine ordinance but by the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state; and of a model of freedom based not on the perfection of human nature but on the unconstrained liberty of individual will.

I thought that was appropriate to post. Well said!

Pascha in Seoul, Korea

St. Gregory Palamas

First, St. Gregory Palamas himself; Second, St. Gregory mixed with commentary and explanation.

I've read the first, and I hope to read the second soon.

Amazon.com Discussion

The following is a discussion on Amazon.com. I thought I'd post it just to have it archived where I'll have the freedom to look at it again in the future and critically appraise my response. I am Abba Poemon.

Product of Evolution says:

Eventually, even if it is very late in life, all people come to the realization that much of what their parents told them was untrue. Maybe it was all they knew, and maybe they just never questioned any of it. It is now time for all of us to let religion go. Our whole society needs to get on the road to freedom and wave to the old gods as they stand in the front gardens of their little houses, receding into the distance of history. Goodbye jesus. Goodby Mohammed. Goodbye Buddha.

Abba Poemon the Ubermensch says:

Product - I'm not really sure what your aim is in posting what you did. Are you inviting others toward a discussion of what you posted, and placing an interior dialogue you're having (in a summarized semi-propositional format) as catalyst for said discussion? I'm a bit confused, because it sounds like you're addressing yourself...

My parents raised me without any concentrated religious instruction (my mother alienated my father from the house, so he wasn't around to offer much instruction about theology or any "meta" questions, and my mother gave me conflicting pictures on the larger questions to suit her mood at the moment, so I had to resolve the tension of that somehow, by doing some serious digging into things - I have De Duve, Matt Ridley, Badiou, Plato, Yi-Fu Tuan, Hans Jonas, Mary Midgley, Zizioulas, Dawkins, Herder, Gadamer, Plotinus, Lyotard, Solovyov and the Philokalia on my shelf next to me, in queue), so as much as I'd like to, I can't really empathize with your unified upbringing and the sense of alienation and loss you seem to feel at "letting go" of whatever it was your parents told you was true. Further, I might suggest that your feelings, which are specific to the events of your own history and development, have been projected (in your narrative of "goodby") onto society as a whole, so that this large, dramatic, societal "letting go" of "the gods" is really an overflow of sentiments which is normal for the development process.

Most parents get upset at their children when they disobey at a very young age, because the parents interpret the behavior of their children as though their children were adults. The children do not have the presumed adult intentions behind their actions, though - the children are merely exploring limits as part of their developmental process, just as it often takes the form of teenage rebellion later on - like a goat scraping its head against others when their horns are coming in. They're doing it because something is growing and needs to come out. It's important that you not confuse the process of differentiation from your parents, necessary for building a healthy identity, with coming finally into some awareness that is superior to theirs (which may be true), or finally into truth itself (highly unlikely). Your parents path was probably different from yours, and the feeling of freedom you feel when you experiment with perspectives is a good thing, but it doesn't mean you've exhausted all possible perspectives, and it doesn't mean that your new perspective is the best. We need lots and lots of perspectives in our repertoire, because, while truth is one, it is a many-sided and many-splendored thing that resists simplistic dramas (one reason I am neither a Franko-Papist/"Roman Catholic" or a Protestant, for both want to eliminate multiple perspectives, one under the mouth of the Roman Pope, whose singular voice and interpretive perspective brokers no dissent, for he has authority to interpret the many voices of the past, which supposedly come into unity through him, and not through a common Conciliar Spirit of Love; one under the mirage of an "infallible" bible, which turns out in the end to be merely the infallibility of whoever or whatever group is doing the interpreting).

Further, this melodramatic relationship (which has no content other than a flatly-stated connection) between "freedom" and "letting go of the gods" sounds a bit simplistic and suspicious to me. If you're interested in truth, I would suggest that you try to re-write this in the form of several distinct positive propositions to avoid jargon and rhetoric, such propositions as: "freedom consists of X," "religion consists of X," and "gods are detrimental to freedom because of X." You'll see, just from this outline here, that the path to truth is longer than easy answers.

Amazon Review of "Gods Behaving Badly"

I don't write poor reviews generally, but since I selected this product to read for free, I am now committed to writing a review of this for Amazon.com, for that's the agreement.

I spend my reading time these days divided (mostly) between ancient literature (Greek, Hebrew, Canaanite, Roman), modern philosophy (Wittgenstein, Adorno, Nietzsche), and cultural criticism.

So, this book looked promising when it was offered to me through Amazon.com's Vine Program to read for free: a fun experiment, interfacing our modern culture with the culture of ancient Greece, by way of placing the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece in the modern world.

That's not at all what this book is. It is, in fact, the opposite - the stock scripts and behaviors that fill the modern social lives of middle-school children are projected onto the behaviors of the gods. The gods have no depth as a result - their actions are merely a collage of shallow pop-culture phrases, gestures, interests and activities that make soap-operas look like the pinaccle of all of Western Civilization by comparison.

I laughed at the very first line of the book: "One morning, when Artemis was out walking the dogs, she saw a tree where no tree should be. The tree was standing alone in a sheltered part of the slope. To the untrained eye, the causal passer-by, it probably just looked like a normal tree. But Artemis's eye was far from untrained..." etc. The gods, throughout, are the projected fantasies of a poorly educated low-ceilinged imagination, who has reified the tawdry and the banal, and can only assert that these characters are gods because they have "powers," which powers belong on the TV show "Charmed," or some knock-off of it. The characters themselves are simplifications of the archetypes found in the media of the Modern Pop-culture Industrial West. They say nothing that an adolescent couldn't dream-up and then put, word for word, in a comic book.

This is very frustrating for anyone who has any appreciation for the slightly secularized literary expressions of real, robust ancient Greek paganism, and who is fascinated with the religious experience of the gods that is reflected in them. I doubt that any modern Christian would recognize the Christianity that Eros has adopted, though it serves as a wonderful foil for the author to have the gods mock Jesus ("that thief of faith"). Strangely, the gods seem to think of monotheism as a heresy, which is not a category that any ancient pagan would have understood, and clearly one that the author does not, either. The gods of ancient Greece did not care what you believed, and did not care about "faith," whatever the author means by it. They want sacrifices, temples, monuments and feats in their honor.

If you've never read any classical literature and think that "Survivor" is one of the highlights of your week, and that the quarrels on Jerry Springer and Judge Judy are real, appreciable, entertaining problems, you'll enjoy this book. To top it off for you, it's got some very dull sex scenes in it, too, which most pop-TV trash could never show you.

Otherwise, read Lombardo's translation of The Iliad, which really punches, and reads a lot better (and more accessibly) than the other translations of that work, which are usually dry, and (strangely) have a British temperament. Even readers of this book ("gods behaving badly") could pick up Lombardo's translation and understand it without trouble. That will enrich you and expand you, and make you more human. This will enslave you to the dregs of modern consumer culture far below the level of "The Gossip Girls."