Where meaning making happens

 

I discovered a new author that I hope to study further in the near future. He crosses many of the disciplines I am interested in and applies them to the issues I care about, like polarization of views and how it affects us daily, and the changing face of religion. There are some time stamps for the parts I cover here.

This interview begins with many terms. As it progresses, they get sorted out. About halfway through they apply the ideas to the polarization happening today. It’s a battle of nostalgia vs utopia. Each is a vision of perfection. One looks back at how far we’ve fallen and the other is claiming some wondrous world is just around the corner.

28:00 The question is posed, how do we square this human desire for perfection, our need for transcendence, with all the side effects that come with it. The answer, which he then elaborates on, is that we need to reconfigure transcendence. People will continue to have visions of something larger than us, either hallucinated or extrapolated. And we will want to bring them into reality. This is the well-studied idea of “peak experiences”. People can have them at church, or a Grateful Dead concert.

29:32 We need to stop thinking of these as perfection, as something to complete. Instead, see them as a process of optimization. In our normal existence, we are doing this already, striving to fit ourselves into whatever reality is throwing at us. We might see that in a context of maximizing some value, but we don’t always reach those goals.

The idea that we can move beyond who we are is how transcendence has been traditionally viewed, but in the last couple of centuries we have begun to understand how we came to be what we are. The Theory of Evolution has provided a framework for seeing ourselves as part of a long process. This differs from transcendence in that it is not a story of a quest for a final form. It’s an impersonal story of natural processes, not something that has desires or goals. It is continual change.

The sacred connection to the universe is continual change. Reality in-exhaustively changes, and life evolves to fit it. Vervaeke quotes Ursula Goodenough (citation needed), You’re constantly trying to transcend into reality as it constantly discloses unexpected and unpredicted possibilities. When we connect to that complexity, we have perpetual self-transcendence.

32:00 How does this relate to today, and our problems with democracy in America? There is no final answer to the “best” political system. Democracy should enable us to adapt. The next proposal, the next President, the next removal by an ethics committee will not solve our problems. We have a Right that emphasizes a call to personal responsibility and a Left that emphasizes how we’re subject to fate. What we need is an understanding that the two need each other.

We are bound to our finitude and capable of transcendence. If we only pursue transcendence, we get hubris and inflation. If we only see finitude, we get servitude, despair, and tragedy. We can acknowledge both and focus on one while allowing those who see the world differently to remind us of the other perspective. This is where meaning making develops.

We’ve lost shared meaning and even the idea that those who see the world differently than us can even have shared meaning. With that, we lost the ability to hear each other. We try to replace it with proposals for resolving the tension between the worldviews. There is no resolution in the reality of constant change. The tension is where meaning is created.

I’m still researching “Opponent Processing Theory”. I think it started in biology but is finding applications in other systems. https://www.simplypsychology.org/opponent-process-theory.html

Here, it's applied to addiction. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258900422100095X

 

I coulda been a millionaire

Mike Lindell offered five million dollars to anyone that could prove that the data he had was not from the 2020 election. He went on to say, the data proved China had helped to steal the election from Donald Trump. This is conspiracy theory slight of hand. It takes a little bit of specialized knowledge to figure out what he did, but someone did and he is in the process of getting the courts to award him the money. Just to make it interesting, the data security specialist that did it is a conservative. 

Above is from the rules of the challenge. This was obtained by the Washington Post. 

I'll pull some quotes from the Post article, but if you can get to it, here's the story

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/04/20/mike-lindell-prove-wrong-contest/

It really didn't take that much special knowledge. First, you had to go to the conference that Lindell put on to get the "kit" that he challenged anyone to review. Then, you need to understand what was in it. 

The data he planned to reveal, he said, were “packet captures” that would demonstrate Chinese government interference. Packet captures, or “pcaps,” are a specific file format that is an industry standard for archiving internet traffic.

I know what those are, but I would have needed a little more knowledge to take the next step. When I first heard about someone winning this challenge, I wondered why it took as long as it did. The reason for that is probably the wording of the challenge. Most people who were there and understood it, probably noticed the slight of hand, and didn't even look at the data. Only one person went through the arbitration process.

All Lindell needed to do was put any random data from the 2020 election in there. Then it would be true that he had that data. No one could win the challenge, and he could have gone on to use that as proof that he is right about China's involvement. 

This is how conspiracy theories work; Get someone to argue against you, claim something minor that is true, get them to say the minor claim is true, go back to saying your bigger claim is true and keep talking really fast, throwing in new claims and bad logic until everyone gives up even trying to argue with you. Anyone witnessing that who wants to believe your theory but doesn't want to do the work of thinking about it, is now on board. 

That's when they'll tell you to "do your own research" even though they have not. The 4 hour video of Mike Lindell does not count as research, BTW. Or, they'll tell you not to listen to the experts, like the news or the courts or the government, while also claiming to be experts on the issue. 

The contest winner, Robert Zeidman, calls himself a "moderate conservative" and voted for Trump twice. At the arbitration hearing where he was awarded the prize, he said, 

Zeidman testified that he wanted the money and wanted to push back against stolen-election claims. “Mr. Lindell has a lot of followers,” Zeidman said. “He’s making a lot of statements to people that I know, people that are good friends of mine, people that are influential. And they are claiming that he has the data that shows that this election was stolen.”

What was in the data Lindell provided? A flowchart of how elections work, a list of IP addresses, and some other files that appeared to be random data. No packets, Chinese or otherwise. I can only imagine the series of conversations that led to this blunder. I imagine Lindell was advised on how to setup the challenge so he could not lose, but somewhere along the line, the advice was bad, or it was horribly executed. Having worked on a few computer projects in my life, I've seen what happens when managers think they know better than their technicians. 

Lindell's response is in the record now, and it's the next step of the conspiracy theorist. He says he actually has the data, but he can't show it to you. It would put him in danger if he did. This is exactly what those who want to believe him want to hear, that he is the real victim, that there are forces out there that are trying take away our rights, and silence our voices, and even to kill us. And Mike knows who they are. But it's too dangerous for him to show you. 

Lindell testified at arbitration that he did not share what he had described as his key data to support the foreign intrusion claim during the conference. He held off, he said, after a man seeking a selfie poked him in the side as the symposium was nearing an end — an act that Lindell called an assault and said he took as a signal the government might tamper with his central information if he made it public.

Lindell told the panel that, after the incident, his “red team” advisers warned him against making that information public. “They said it could be a poison pill put in the data and we really shouldn’t release the China stuff,” he said.

Regardless of his lose in this fight, Lindell will no doubt carry on as if he won. What will come next are claims that no one is addressing the China vote tampering, even when offered $5 million. Explaining how no one was ever offered that kind of money to address it, takes a few minutes. Time that most people don't take in this busy world of ten second video clips. 

 

Testing a milepost100 entry

 

Link to the texts for this week.

This week begins the lectionary year A. That cycle begins with Advent, the 4 weeks before Christmas, the anticipation of the coming of Christ. This year, we will view that from the gospel of Matthew. Most of the TV specials and Christmas pageants you are likely to see will draw from Luke as well as Matthew, combining parts of each to build the narrative. It makes for a better and more familiar story. But try reading either Luke or Matthew's first few chapters all the way through and see what you recognize or what you notice is missing.

Matthew 24:36-44

We're not at the birth story yet in the lectionary. This gospel passage looks a lot like the end of the last lectionary year, giving us Matthew's view of the second coming, including the famous statement of a thief in the night that I recently contrasted to Thessalonians. We'll get to the baby Jesus, but they want us to look here first. I like that they start here. It is likely that the birth narratives were not conceived until after the stories of his life and death. So little is known of his life, it seems unlikely that details would be known of his birth and then chroniclers just ignored him for 29 years.

As Dominic Crossan puts it, Jesus had his short ministry, then died suddenly and violently. The next thing the community would have done would be to go looking in their traditions to explain this, and lo and behold, they found prophecies of a messiah. Richard Carrier and other historians have different theories; that Paul and others were already drawing on those traditions, those prophecies, and creating spiritual versions of a messiah, then those stories were changed into stories of actual people. That's the very short version of multiple books and speeches.

Frontline did an excellent introduction to these ideas in a four part series, From Jesus to Christ.

What of the words for this week themselves? Is this a more peaceful apocalypse? One that includes everyone and forgives the sinners, as we see in many gospel stories? I don't see it. I see it invoking Noah, a story that ended with the promise of the rainbow that symbolized God never doing that again. It divides the ones who will be taken from the ones who will be left. The "keep awake" line would be a horrible verse to teach a child. I find no comfort in these words.

For all the good the Christian communities were doing in the 1st and 2nd centuries, this to me is the reason for their failure. I'm sure not all of them accepted this idea of an apocalypse, but enough of them did. For enough of them, the motivation was wrong. Their reason for being good was not sustainable. This left the door open for a return to the gods of retributive justice of the past and gave each generation a god that was easy to dismiss because their rath never materialized. In the 4th century, the power structures that were built on giving aid to neighbors were co-opted by a theology with strict rules and was combined with a military to enforce them. Councils followed, texts were redacted, until we have the Christianity we have.

If you want more about that history, I recommend Charles Freeman's "A.D. 381".

Romans 13:11-14

The Book of Romans has some great stuff. Sometimes it sounds like Ecclesiates or Sirach. Other times it sounds like Deutoronomy. I think the overall message of Romans is one of love, despite these occasional turns into rules. The 3 verses preceding these are ones I often turn to as important verses showing the shift in theology going on at this time. They end with, "Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law."

But this lection is about salvation, and how to get it. We get a few words about just what is righteous, then we're told to "put on the Lord". I'm sure that means "be like Jesus", as the Easy To Read Bible says. Of course, which Jesus, we can't be sure, and if He is also the OT God, that really complicates things.

The Book of Romans contains an oft used verse about homosexuals in the first chapter, then in chapter 14, we hear the words Pope Francis used when asked about gays, "Who are you to judge someone else's servant?"I don't know for sure if it is my personal bias or not, but I hear a stronger message of forgiveness and caring in these chapters than I do for specific things that you shouldn't do. The examples given are there to support the general sense, and to guide you in learning to think for yourself.

I'm not bringing up these seeming contradictions just to pile on with the thousands of other places you could find that list contradictions. In this case, the problem may be translation. The last half of the first chapter of Romans, where those verses on homosexuality can be found, may be a rhetorical device, an argument against gentiles presented in a third person voice ("they"), and then responded to with "you" in chapter 2, "you who pass judgment... are condeming yourself". You can research scholars such as Calvin Porter, James Miller, Mark D. Smith or Roy Bowen Ward if you are really into that.

These and other scholars note the similarity of the language to that of Jewish missionary literature of that time. Something that Paul refuted. So here, he presents it first, so we know just who he is speaking to for the rest of the book. If you lived in that time, you would have recognized that. Living today, and only reading the Bible does not provide that context. In any time, you can look to a speaker's concluding remarks as a restatement of a theme. In Chapter 14, verse 13, Paul says, "Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister."

So, I'm going with that. We should at least agree that there is a lack of clarity here on what is being said about people's choices.

Isaiah 2:1-5

The end of the Book of Isaiah appeared at the end of the last lectionary year, just a couple weeks ago. Now we are back at the beginning. As I alluded to then, it was probably different authors at those two points in the one book. The Book of Isaiah spans a few hundred years, so that isn’t a stretch of the textual scholarship. At the beginning, it could be the Isaiah, son of Amoz, that is claimed in the text. No question, it was and is an important book. One that was familiar to Jews and early Christians. It is also a shift into this idea of “salvation”.

God is no longer a local war god, or one who provides justice through punishment, instead it emphasizes holiness. These shifts can take a lot of time, and the old ways can return or branch off into sects. Sorting that out is beyond my scope, but we can see the theme in this week’s lection. What we see is visions of buildings on hills and swords into plowshares. I think about churches all across Europe and America. The big ones usually are in prominent locations, occupying good real estate. But that is supposed to be a symbol. If you have the high ground physically, you have a responsibility to demonstrate the metaphoric moral high ground. Sometimes I see that, but more often I wonder which is more important, the beautiful building, or what it is supposed to represent.

Wisdom Through the Ages

 I started this for a friend of mine. It still needs some work, probably some review by a better historian than me. It's been a hobby for a while, but it's turning out to be more applicable to the world's political problems. We have always fought over resources, and pondering our existence needs some time of peaceful reflection. To have that, someone else needed to be protecting borders and working to create that stability. 

The same forces that create civilization often are the ones that destroy other civilizations. Centuries of this have led to scientific exploration into how the mind works and where we came from. The questions that appeared on cave walls. What we're finding is, feelings and intuitions are more central consciousness than we thought.

Pre-History

Before written language, we can see from archaeological evidence that people were influencing each other in non-violent ways, implying some reflection on who they are and what type of future they desire

https://www.science.org/content/article/early-humans-domesticated-themselves-new-genetic-evidence-suggests

Axial Age 8^th to 3^rd centuries BC

3000 BC

The early books by Homer and the Epic of Gilgamesh show us how they were thinking about the meaning of life, how to organize society, and what it is to be good.

To develop a robust philosophy that could challenge empires, civilization first needed to develop. One of those empires fell, but left behind a middle class, and was isolated enough to stay intact and for them to organize themselves and trade with neighbors. The advancement of a language that was easier to learn and could be used across disciplines, helped put the authority of words above gods and kings.

The Origins of Greek Philosophy » Internet Infidels

500 BC

The Pre-Socratics then Socrates, Plato, Aristotle are well documented, so I won’t regurgitate that here.

Hindu Buddhist had a tradition of emptiness, as in ‘empty the mind’ that led to the use of “0” in linguistics. Silent beats also occurred in music, eventually inspiring Brahmagupta to create zero and negative numbers. I mention this as an example of how ideas precede inventions and innovations that become part of our worldview.

Zero to Infinity | NOVA | PBS

As we’ll see in a bit, it takes more some literature and good ideas to develop philosophy that can support democracy and increase cooperation on a world scale. The East didn’t have the ideas the Greeks had, and the Roman Empire was collapsing. Philosophy was preserved but didn’t advance for a thousand years.

Indigenous people might have had a better sense of intuition and a better relationship with the natural world, but without written language and widespread travel, those ideas didn’t spread. They remained tied up with their mythology and were almost lost when Western philosophy promoted colonization in the name of progress. This is not just an aside, it is significant. It’s only in the last 100 years of advancements in neuroscience that we are beginning to see the errors of viewing ourselves as creatures separate from our environment, and worse, ones with dominion over it.

700

The Islamic world had a Golden Age around 750-950AD with improvements in agriculture, poetry, arts, synthesis of crafts across the Asian and European continents and even the beginnings of Calculus. But they continued to be driven by the desire to conquer. They held Greek writings but very few people could read the language anymore. Averroes was tasked with squaring the secular logic of that philosophy and the Islamic scripture. Internal threats of despotic Caliphs and Clerics like Al-Ghazali and external threats like the Mongols eventually brought down the empire.

1100

Judaism had been pushed out of the East by Islam, but they were allowed to live and work within that empire. Sects ranged from strict adherence of Jewish laws to the more philosophical. Maimonides attempted to apply ancient ideas to the emerging modern thinking.

As that was happening, Europe was just starting to crawl out of the mud and mount a challenge to the long domination of the Catholic Church. Early humanist Christians interpreted the Bible with more compassionate themes. Thomas Aquinas continued the work that Judaism and Islam had been doing and found himself in trouble with the Condemnations of 1277. Fifty years after he died, in 1323, he was canonized as a saint. Some view this period as a time of horrible oppression of scientific advancement by the Church. Others say it was moment when the Church agreed to let that knowledge continue to grow, as long as they didn’t get their noses into the miracles of God and Jesus.

This is a good time to take a break from history and go over just where philosophy fits in the spectrum of human thought and knowledge. People who are working on discovering the wonders of creation are still called “natural philosophers” at this time, but where is the line between philosophy and science?

Is Philosophy Stupid? (richardcarrier.info)

1500

With more riches coming into Europe, a class of people who could do nothing but think about life started coming up with new ways of viewing the human condition. Descartes famous “I think therefore I am” stands out. This left many unanswered questions. Descartes attempt at answering them included thinking up a “perfect being” that must exist. It was an advancement in that we began to look at ourselves as thinking beings, instead of purely driven by the whims of gods or magic, but it has also come to be known as the “Cartesian error”.

With the challenges to the three major religions and the empires they were tied to, and the growing merchant class, and world travel, the stage is finally set for science. So many changes happened within a few centuries, that it’s hard to pin down just what they were and how to label them. Richard Carrier does a pretty good job of that.

What Exactly Was the Scientific Revolution? • Richard Carrier

1650

I couldn’t talk about philosophy without mentioning Spinoza. Although he maintained his loyalty to the Judaism to his dying day, he has been called a pantheist. His logical proofs have supported many philosophies of “God is everything”.

Enlightenment

Durkheim 1858-1917

Darwin, Origin of Species published 1859

Camus

The Boy Who Knew Infinity

Robert Sapolsky  Bonobo and the Atheist

Frans de Waal

EO Wilson What We Do - This View Of Life

American History of Slavery

I have read books, listened to lectures, attended college classes, and heard speeches on the topic of slavery all my life. I'm still surprised by some of the details that I find. Recent memorials and museums will hopefully help all of us better understand our own history. My great grandfather was born into a slave-owning family, in 1860. He wouldn't remember it, but his family moved west to opportunity, and I'm sure it was a difficult life. We have very little record of it. 

I try to address all of the anecdotes I have heard, as well as the major milestones that are well documented. Some, like Bacon's Rebellion, are murky, but play pivotal roles. International trade and economic forces are important but deserve a timeline of their own, so I only touch on those. 

If there is something I should add, please comment.

 

16xx	Irish Slaves and Indentured Servitude	This article contains factual errors
1641	First Law legalizing slavery	The beginning of the triangular trade
1654	First Slaveowner	This article should be fact checked
1662	Slavery is a lifelong heritable condition	Virginia law
1676	Bacon's Rebellion	A complicated chapter in American history where the limits of freedom were tested
1676	Bacon's Rebellion	This article offers three possible outcomes of Bacon's Rebellion
1676	Bacon's Rebellion	It was a turning point. Worker's demanded more rights and at the same time, the supply of Africans was increasing. Slave laws began to focus more on them.
1690	Slave Codes	increase over the next 50 years
1705	Who can be enslaved	Blacks, mulattos, natives, non-Christians
1724	Code Noir	Dominated slave treatment in the South through the Civil War
1778	3/5th Compromise	The US Constitution
1788	In Britain	Petition for aboltion had 10,000 signatures. The next year it had 100,000 and kept growing.
1800	But slavery continued	The Whitney Museum in New Orleans
1862	Black Confederate Brigade	Did slaves fight for the South?

You Are Here

You’re in My Light

A blog about my upcoming novel

One of my reasons for wanting to write this book was the story of how religious freedom has evolved in the United States over my lifetime. There are some good sociology books on this topic and plenty of polemics from one side or another as well as those who say they have found a middle way. I hope I’ve avoided any of those types of presentations. Instead, I follow two people who were born in the middle of these changes. 

I don’t ever mention the attack of 9/11 in the book. The Orions arrive on earth in 1999 and that event does not occur in my fictional timeline. Anything before alien arrival is factual, to the best of my ability. The two main characters grow into adulthood in a world where cross cultural relations are improving. The Orions focus on the more basic causes of conflict, like resources scarcity and fair distribution of technology. Cultural divides are in their distant past. Their one continent world developed sustainably and much more peacefully than ours. 

When Dave in his early thirties. His father divorced his mother because she wanted her son to go to church. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but she felt there had to be something that created the universe, and churches seemed to know what that was. He meets Suzanne, whose mother never had a relationship with her father. Her mother disdained organized religion. So she grew up in a community based shunning tradition, unless you call witchcraft and psychic phenomenon a tradition. 

The two personalities that result clash, but they gain respect for each other as they are riding across Indiana. The book begins in the middle of their journey, when they come across a conflict that is playing out with weapons and claims on territory. That conflict, of people with traditional values against a government they don’t feel represents them anymore, reflects the conflict that I see many people going through in this real today, of their values versus the world of powers and economics. Through flashbacks to how Dave and Suzanne ended up in the middle of a cornfield that is in the middle of a battle, we see how the world has ended up in the conflicts we experience now. 

We also see some of my thoughts, which are informed by better thinkers than myself, on how the world could have ended up differently. In the lore of the Orion world, in an early chapter, we find out that one of their early leaders fought to prevent the spread of the idea of land ownership. When they come to this planet, before they build their spaceport, they work with farmers who are barely able to feed themselves. When the spaceports are built, they offer an entire continent on a planet near their home planet. This essentially solves our current dilemma of not having a Planet B. 

As the heroes travel, we see the world as it has developed for 17 years of improvements to agriculture, reduction in population, and opening of borders. Non-motorized traffic is everywhere with some roads repurposed for pedal power only. Work is flexible and requires fewer hours. Families have more time for each other. Manufactured goods are being recycled into the new economy. By focusing on the poorest in the world, want has been reduced, and that has reduced conflicts and increased cooperation. And yet, not everyone is happy. 

With those needs met, the questions of where we came from and why we are here are freely asked. There is no powerful organization that can claim authority by claiming to have those answers. Almost no one feels that they need to give to such organizations to help procure a place for themselves in the afterlife. There is one character who offers religious advice, and her role, her job, includes meeting their physical and medical needs. 

I don’t offer much in the way of answers in this story. I hope reading it opens questions about what you might do if you had more choices and a clearer sense of where you were in the universe.

 The Worst passage in the Bible. Another expanded sermon helper.

Easter Sunday, Year C

I link to an article titled “The Worst passage in the Bible” this week. It’s the Corinthians passage, actually scheduled for Tuesday.  It’s not one of those articles that goes on about evil Christians who want to see people burning in hell. It’s not that kind of bad. It’s bad because it is not seen as bad by perfectly kind and loving people. What’s bad about it is that it sets up a wall between Christianity and anything good that doesn’t validate or might even contradict it. It renders useless any discussion about where we come from or something like morality comes from. As it states a few times, such talk is “foolish”. 

There are other difficulties in leaving or challenging religion, like in-group loyalty, or in more insular environments there are people who will come after you if you try. If this bit of bad logic only existed in Christianity then I think we would have overcome it a few hundred years ago, if not sooner. But like many things in religions, it was not invented by just one of them, it’s something more ingrained in human nature. 

That makes the way out of this bad reasoning a lot harder than people think. Those who are not involved in organized religion think they have the right reasoning, but often they are doing the same thing from the point of view of whatever worldview they have chosen. The problem is explained in the link within the Lectionary helper but I’ll skip to the positive answer first, rather than focusing on that negative. 

Religion can and does contain helpful practices and teachings. It is becoming more popular for mainstream churches to say they “don’t own the franchise” on faith. They are willing to partner with other faiths and with secular organizations to accomplish the goals they believe are in line with their faith. They will also use logic like this passage to explain why they still think it’s important to pick one set of beliefs, one denomination, and stick to it. And this logic prevents any curiosity about where else their ethical teachings might come from or why it is that there is so much cross-over with those other faiths.

The answer to that, I believe, is natural facts. That is, when choosing to put someone’s eye out, turn the other cheek, have an abortion, or enter war with another nation, everyone always relies on facts that can be derived from observing nature. Some experimentation may be needed, and in all cases, certainty is impossible, but deriving our views from our environment is part of being a conscious social creature. We figured out how to get along over millions of years of evolution and what we learned was passed on, with many errors along the way. 

We have some sense of being good. I’m going to have to wave a hand here and acknowledge there are bad people, but it is rare to find someone who can articulate that they know they are bad and that they don’t care. I’m not talking about having too many sweets or not flossing kind of bad, that’s covered in the “many errors” part of how we have passed along these ideas of right and wrong.

I also acknowledge that we can see bad behavior rewarded. Nature itself does not enforce morality. We can’t claim that killing is moral because predator animals do it. We can observe that and see that those creatures are still leading brutal lives, lives that don’t lead to cures for diseases or vacations by the sea. 

That good person that we think we are, is constantly challenged. Our choice of grocery store includes how our food sources and packaging affect people around the world. It can’t be avoided. Even doing nothing, when there is so much need in the world, is a moral choice. We can’t save the world, and sometimes that is a source of stress. Prayer does not always make that go away. 

Even if you believe in God and love your church, you bring some reasoning to it. When challenged to question your beliefs you will start with facts. You might say something about the value of human life. At some point, you will run out of reasons why, and you will rely on some cosmic origin for those values. These are patches for those errors in our understanding of the world. A less charitable anti-theist might call them “crutches”. In any case, they are a way to bridge what we are able to discern with our rational minds with the place we’d like to be, our aspirations for what we envision. 

I see the same phenomenon in Wiccans, or pagans, of some off-the-grid self-made philosophers. Even an average person on the street of an industrialized nation will admit there is work to do. You may have heard the words that capitalism or democracy are “the worst systems, except for all the others”. We are beings that look to the future, reflecting on the past, with barely a plan. 

It’s interesting that this passage comes on Easter Sunday, a day that attempts to reconcile the world to the Old Testament, and to deal with the death of Jesus on Good Friday. After a few hundred years of Jews trying to understand these letters and gospels, the dominant theology said that death had been conquered. I think that was an interpretation of people who had lost their own history. I think Easter is about accepting death and moving forward, not about finding a way around it or conquering it.