perspective of the rose.....

[wil]

a contemplation...(spurred from the biblidolatry thread)

Anyone ever seen 'Being There'?

It was Peter Sellers last film. Peter Sellers was one of our kings of comedy in my mind, an expert at physical and verbal slapstick. Being There was one of his best films, a culmination of a lifetime of experience where he expertly performed, 'mental slapstick'.

He played Chauncy Gardner, and looked at life as a garden. His character was an adult with a learning disability, the question in the show was, did he or do we?

A little change of topic.

Now I've been having issues for a while with this Old Testament G!d vs. the New Testament G!d. That the OT G!d was vengeful, evil, and bipolar, while the NT G!d is loving, forgiving, and compassionate.

The issue I have is that I believe it is all good and G!d is good, but I was having problems seeing that in the Old Testament but in my heart I knew it to be true and the Jews I knew knew it to be true, as they didn't have reference to our 'good news' but were comfortable in their beliefs. Now I resonated with the metaphysical interpretations. Whenever I couldn't replace the word G!d with the word love...I looked for an interpretation other than the literal...I looked at the metaphor or the metaphysical for solace. But I still had issues with the cultural and literal perspectives, and this bothered me. Now I've always said to myself...in situations where I couldn't see the good, that the fact was I didn't know the whole picture, that I couldn't see it from the right perspective, that if I knew the outcome, I'd be more comfortable with the now. And that does take the burden off, does allow me to experience the now without such trepidation.

But still reading the scripture, despite the metaphysic, slaughtering a nation, including the women and old, including the children and taking the virgins for yourself...just doesn't seem to be an order that G!d would give.

Suddenly I wondered whether I was looking from the perspective of the rose. In a rose garden if one plant got some black spot, or some root disease, or just didn't fit in the garden. The gardener would not shirk or even have issues with pruning for the sake of the plant or removing a plant or two for the sake of the garden.

So could be as simple as that? That as a human, I have a human concern for humanity, and not the perspective of the whole. That I've been looking at things from the perspective of the rose, rather than the perspective of the gardener, or what was best for the garden?

 

[shawn]

That was a good movie.

The references in the scripture to the word God can be confusing as the word we read as generic "God" could be any one of about a dozen different varieties of the name.
Fairly certain that it is not accidental.
So using a symbolic/metaphysical set of reading glasses is pretty much required.
If we read it literally we will get confused.

By looking at things from the perspective of the bush as contrasted with that of the gardener we are then in a state of incompletion as we are looking at only one point of view.
We are to be holy as He is holy, meaning complete.
So there is one of the challenges laid before us.

 

[wil]

... "God" could be any one of about a dozen different varieties of the name.

Elohem, Yahweh, Adonai....yes different folks had different ideas of G!d.

I've always thought there was a lot of blaming...re: Geralidine (flip), "The devil made me do it." It is nice to blame stuff on an entity that doesn't respond (or does it?).

But this concept fits into my paradigm...that my thoughts aren't encompassing the whole, that I don't have the big picture. Whether the analogy is a gardner, or a chef...we look at a western omelette for a different perspective than the chicken, the pig, the onion, or the green pepper would.

In scripture we read the horrors of slaughter from a human perspective, and that is why it creates issues.


Its funny, I have been doing a meditation for years that is designed to realize the true scope of what I perceive as my troubles and it works wonders...yet I never applied it to scripture...

 

[Dream]

Hi Wil. Looking again at your posts. I don't know what you'll hear when I say this, but what if our understanding of God (which is partly what you're discussing) -- what if our understanding of God or the name of God grew over time. I think you are familiar with the notion of Fractiles and fractal geometry, the way they can branch out with repeated patterns of branching to make a complex shape -- like a rose. Now suppose our understanding of God grew and changed into a comprehensible shape. Then I will use Complexity Theory as an analogue to why it may be difficult to understand names of God in the past. Complexity is a Mathematical theory that shows that there are algorithms in nature where starting from a point you can predict in general what will happen, however you cannot backtrack! Assume today we see that whatever God is is something that cannot change and does not grow; but our understanding does. So then in analogy I say our understanding is made up of a growing pattern, and it may be impossible to always know what understanding or belief lead to what without actually knowing the people that lived before. That means understanding of God today may not reveal how God was understood before, and it may actually be impossible. The way that ties in with your discussion about killing vs not killing etc. is that then our understanding was different. Also, what we understand today may not allow us to backtrack to what was thought then. That does not completely answer our mutual question, however it does allow me to partly defend my opinion that God did not change from 2000BC to today. Instead, using what I know today I am unable to deduce what those in the past thought. I will not impute a destructive nature to the concept of God.

 

[wil]

I think we agree?

Sort of like slavery? Hard to fathom today that people were thought of as chattel. Hard to get today's mind wrapped around that being normal and acceptable?