Religion, Theology, and all that good stuff

[Rit]

i don't believe that to be the case at all. i think allegory is literary, and an expression of imagination, nothing more, nothing less. it is the product of our rationalist brains fighting a mortal psychic struggle with our wholistic brains. a continual replaying of that original mental split.

but the point is, we have allegory in our lives. we see it everywhere. anything can be allegorical, given enough thought and application behind it. it adds to life. poetry creates allegory.

but taking those allegories literally is something else indeed. i firmly believe that allegories describe one thing, and one thing only. Which is humanity's inner lives.

Yes, the Bible does contain a huge repository of allegorical world-making. the flight out of Oppressive Egypt, and the building of the holy city of Jerusalem, being a metaphor for spiritual upbraiding, for example....

But indications of actual phsyical realities behind them? i doubt that.

[Thorngrub]

So, here's my creation mythos, for your perusal, very roughly, and in a nutshell:




In the beginning there was not.

The Makers then fashioned the nexus of our existence.

Suddenly a pocket was fashioned within the Notness.

From this pocket more pockets formed, a great, spiralling chain of pockets. The Makers injected the basic building blocks into these pockets.

Zooming in to one such pocket for a clearer look reveals a solar system containing a number of planets circling about a sun.

The solar system is held within a great Sphere of space: the pocket.

This great Sphere's borders were to be named "The Oort Cloud" by the denizen's of one of its planets. This planet was to be the third from the sun.

In order for the Makers to properly "inject" their basic building blocks of life into this pocket -- what the denizens of that third rock from the sun would come to label "DNA" -- it became necessary for them to fashion what men would later refer to as "comets".

These comets contained in their icy cores the basic building blocks of all Life as we have come to know it. All the Makers had to do was sit back and allow their creation to grow.

Eventually, one of the myriad comets packed with the DNA of all life would be caught by the gravitational force of one of the planets contained within the pocket. In fact, this event was bound to be far more common than men would someday come to suspect. All of the planets were indeed bombarded by such DNA -containing comets. As the comets struck the planets, some released the DNA programming although most did not. Only one out of millions of comets would succeed in breaking open and releasing the programming contained within.

One such succesful "impregnation" occured on what was later to become planet "Earth". This comet released its DNA -encoded building blocks and began issuing the molecular components necessary to first establish H2O, which formed the planet's oceans. Next came a primitive form of plankton, or came our planet's atmosphere. The order in which these stages occurred is anybody's guess. These processes took immeasurably epochal periods of time in which to become established.

Eventually, as the program continued to be executed upon the surface of this newly deemed paradise, more complex forms of life emerged. The first masters of the Earth were the dinosaurs.

The mystery of whence came homo sapiens has yet to be solved by us. We could have been a part of that original program, but we also could be the results of another comet which pierced through our atmosphere during the reign of the dinosaurs - Earth's first Kings.

The design of comets themselves are such that were they to target an already established atmosphere on a planet, the icy core containing the essential "spermatazoa/DNA" would survive re-entry and be deposited on the surface. There it would begin the enormously epochal periods of its download. Eventually mankind grew to walk out of that process.

[Rit]

ehh... i like that, but i've seen really affecting creation stories. written by Ovid, Milton, and Blake, to name a few. Creation storytelling is a genre unto itself, i think. (and if it's not, it should be).

It's ample opportunity to express the character of a person, how truly enriched his or her soul is, indicated by the figuration, motifs, metaphors, and tropes that they decide to use in their version of the creation myth.

[Thorngrub]

Of course that was just knocked off the top of my head, I haven't had the opportunity to fine-tune it, I just wanted to put it out there as a rough example of my thinking about just where in the heck do we all come from. That is as close to a rough explanation as I can come up with.


And yes - - it does excise the need for a "master race". Multiple races could easily emerge on multiple planets within multiple systems (pockets) simultaneously and all be fashioned out of the same basic building blocks that we were fashioned from.


It is why I do not believe in aliens, strictly. What I believe in is the brotherhood of ALL life, regardless of which planet or solar system it might be found upon.

[Thorngrub]

Now a different galaxy - - THAT may very well be "across the line" which seperates OUR galaxy's fundamentally similar DNA from theirs; indicating that THERE is where we might actually be introduced to the 'alien', i.e, a different set of DNA...

But then again . . . ALL GALAXIES IN THE UNIVERSE could also be merely greater "pockets", that is, the First Pockets from whence all subsequent pockets were also formed. In THIS case, simply ALL LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE could be a "brotherhood". That is actually more believable to me. . . it feels right.

[Rit]

you utopianist, you. that's cool though. Do you believe that one individual's will to change things can have a real effect on the world? in measurable ways?

[sisyphus]

who stands witness for the witness? heh heh

[sisyphus]

ritalinpants said:

the possibility that a master race created us is not in dispute. but why call that god? god would necessarily have to be the First Principle, as Aquinas said. a master race just sounds like a further link in a chain.

my sentiments exactly. i'm far more interested in said First Principle than in the chain,

however, i do think that the "god concept" is often nothing more than a stand-in for unexplained phenomena, and that it can be of benefit to us to study the evolution of our psychic alterations and interpretations of this stuff... the patterns may be able to tell us something about our deeper origins. dunno.

[Thorngrub]

^ yes sisy, that is what I tink

[Thorngrub]

sisyphus said:

who stands witness for the witness? heh heh

Who watches the Watchmen ?

[Thorngrub]

ritalinpants said:

you utopianist, you. that's cool though. Do you believe that one individual's will to change things can have a real effect on the world? in measurable ways?

Yes, of course I do, and I can prove it. (Unless I misunderstood the intention behind your question, in which case, you may rephrase it) :

I see a rock. I pick it up. I put it down somewhere else.

i.e, My will just had a real effect on the world in a measurable way.

[Thorngrub]

. . . measurable to us and our sense of perception, that is.

To "God" (note quotation marks) not only would one rock placed elsewhere quite possibly NOT constitute a "measurable" change, but you could take that concept further and state that the entire history of the human race, with all its grandiose love and death, building of cities and their downfalls, not be "measurable" at all by "God's" standards. I.e, in a relative fashion our processes may be seen from the "outside" as merely part and parcel of the whole; i.e, no actual change from the superstructure it was meant to be in the first place. i.e, all the "changes" in our relativistic corner of the universe may in fact only be measurable by us, as they may only relativistically affect us and our world.

Its another way of observing that all this "detail" which springs up before us may only be of significance to our processes. To a "Greater Eye" or consciousness removed from our universe, our processes may in fact appear homogeneous.

[Thorngrub]

homogeneous
One entry found for homogeneous.


Main Entry: ho·mo·ge·neous
Pronunciation: -'jE-nE-&s, -ny&s
Function: adjective
Etymology: Medieval Latin homogeneus, homogenus, from Greek homogenEs, from hom- + genos kind -- more at KIN
1 : of the same or a similar kind or nature
2 : of uniform structure or composition throughout <a culturally homogeneous neighborhood>
3 : having the property that if each variable is replaced by a constant times that variable the constant can be factored out : having each term of the same degree if all variables are considered <a homogeneous equation>
- ho·mo·ge·neous·ly adverb
- ho·mo·ge·neous·ness noun

[Rit]

there's a little distinction i want to make here.. you envisioned a point of view in relation to an eternal being or eternal history (eternity).

but all we can ever know is human centred. Our wildest, most extreme out-there idea is still "only human" in the end, because if we could really conceptualise dimensions or concepts that are truly higher than us, we'd cease to be human.

God has a human face. the metaphysics of life is human-bound. the edges of the universe are human-measured. (which may in fact be way off from what really is there)

The only real "outer space" available to us is inner space (as Sisy was referring to, and which i totally subscribe to -- psychic differences between minds and the ways we percieve).

You seem to have a very physical connection to ideas.. they manifest in a physical dimension for you, and you then project them out of yourself onto the world as you see it.

[sisyphus]

hey rit, check out the stuff i posted over on your visual arts board at sedaka....it relates to this stuff.