Joshua’s Love Is Hard As Hell
Recently, I shared an article with a dear friend: “Whitehead and Evolution” by John B. Cobb, Jr.
Below are his thoughtful and well-considered comments, which are much appreciated.
Thanks for the article. Open Horizons looks like a great website, and the particular article you sent is quite interesting. I pretty much agree with all of it except the point made at the outset that “If one supposes that the Bible is inerrant, then we must affirm the biblical account quite literally, difficult as that is.” I disagree. Why, if I suppose the Bible is inerrant, must I also take it literally? The Bible is often highly allegorical (i.e., NOT to be taken literally) but still “inerrant” in the lessons it teaches us. This is just a misstatement by the author of the article, Cobb, not Whitehead. But I’ve seen this before in other articles. It’s true that many fundamentalist Christians take (or try to take) the Bible literally, but in my experience, most Christians understand that it’s packed with symbolism. There are all sorts of Christians, as there are scientists. One size does not fit all.
Our shared understanding of the symbolism in religious texts is truly profound. Language, like the Bible, is symbolic, and mathematics is a form of symbolism.
In mathematics, a symbolic language is a language that uses characters or symbols to represent concepts, such as mathematical operations, expressions, and statements, and the entities or operands on which the operations are performed.
Christians interpret the Bible literally because it is, at its core, literature. This shared understanding unites us, even as we acknowledge the diversity of interpretations among Christians. We are extraordinary creatures, and our shared exploration of these texts is a testament to our shared curiosity and understanding.
We may never know what it’s like to be a whale or a crow.
“Godly” below is used in the Christian sense stemming from Western Civilization. My comments are limited to “White Empire” belief systems that were coopted and converted to Christianity AD. Joshua was not a Christian, and Buddha was not a Buddhist.
Why would Christians take the Bible literally when they know people created the stories? How could a creature/person know anything about what God thinks, wills, or is? I take the lessons as accounts of the Godliness of people’s sentiments. People are not Gods; we are complex, conscious animals that evolved on Earth, and we may have a “soul” (whatever that means to someone). There may be a heaven, but how would you know? It’s easy to believe in heaven; why wouldn’t it be? We don’t want to die, and we don’t want to be separated from our loved ones.
Homo hubris has an epistemic problem, a puzzle filled with belief. My mystic musings are perfectly natural to me and my species. I am Homo true believer.
Science is a suite of tools and activities we use to understand how Nature works (imperfect and inadequate as it is). Theology is a suite of tools that explain religious dogma. Religion doesn’t tell us a darn thing about God (a Human construct). But we all fuck around, and we all will find out eventually what it means to “know” God.
The curtain will fall.
When a man tells you he knows what God thinks, he is a con man, not a Godly man. When a man loves like Joshua, he maintains patterns of behavior that we feel are profoundly Godly (not the Punisher God, but the Fatherly, Motherly Loving God). Learning to Love is hard, knowing Love can be even harder, and living Lovingly is sadly not as prevalent as we want. So we keep trying, and the brutes keep shooting the messenger, but Nature is the most consistent Marksman and always hits its target. Nature is one thing none of us can avoid. We are part and parcel of Nature and one with God whether we believe it or not. We are the storytellers. We are creators.
Joshua was an antidote for Civilization, a social disease that may eventually drive our species to extinction. I’m not sure that if, after the collapse, with five thousand people left and nothing but time to get LOVE right, we wouldn’t make all the same mistakes again despite the many talents of Homo storyteller.
Belief releases all the comfy endorphins. But LOVE, my friend, can be hard as hell.
Originally published on the globehackers blog at www.cospolon.eu
