each individual's life "Bible"

each individual person's life is their own lived and sometimes written "Bible" (their making sense of their world)
but there are so many plagiarists.

here be no dragons...

who now in this time of mind even imagines to fear that a dragon or devil might stick his head out of a sidewalk or building wall?

second Sinai scenario

Moses ascends the mountain, but then sees no sense to descend and try to explain...

our earthly home?

walking down a street in Moscow on this lovely sunny day, an insight to our life:

the society, culture and mind of this time is not at all that mankind is some spirit come down to earth
rather that the earthly, physical life is the home and goal of man

the gnostic scientific claims of cosmogenesis

natural scientists came to reject the unbelievable Mosaic account of creation in Genesis
but their own cosmogony of the exploding singularity is little less unbelievable
and such claims, not to any supernatural, divine knowledge of origins, but to a reasonable, scientific, natural one, are also not modestly agnostic

...Nothing happened

In the beginning God created...

In the beginning Nothing happened...

when the gods disappeared...

they left music for consolation behind

rejected stark contra-visions: Strauss' and Steiner's

extreme oppositions of Christologies, theologies, anthropologies, Bible readings,...
the Skeptic Strauss (1808-1874)                                the Seer Steiner (1861-1925)

self-loving in California?

when those who profess and promote self-love as some happy solution to human dissatisfaction, can distinguish it clearly from narcissism and solipsism, they might start to do more than babble in their happy dream-ideals

conversations with the dead

spent the week with Origen, Nietzsche, Darwin,...

ideas and images of Moses, Jesus, revelation...

no one, as for years, noticed

free will?

most are not now determined by the stars...
nor fate...
nor the gods...
nor providence...

rather by social group
conventions
genes
and marketing

"all men are created equal"

all men were created equal...

but then...

theo-logy?

theologians have really written less of "God" than man

revelations of revelations

the history of the theology and idea "revelation" is very revealing about mankind

the final exam room

 

theodical theology

in fact, after another excursion through (what remains of) Origen('s system):
"theology" is itself theodicy, or at least theodical

acme

mediocris in climbing a spiritual mountain

saving God

theodicy amounts to saving God for man

reading the theologians on "God"...
one can discern they were on something

theologies of comforting doctrinal sleeps

early Christian doctrinal disputes in one aspect in retrospect seem like arguments on how best to prepare a bed

sleepings

one can sleep in churches and doctrines

one can sleep in departments and fields

do books escape human?

are the Testaments of the Bible, the Phadrus of Plato, the Enneads of Plotinus, the Confessions of Augustine, the Commedia of Dante, Luther's Theses, Newton's Principia, Goethe's Faust, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Freud's Illusion, etc, et al...in reality more true sub specie dei (or sub specie nihil?) than Cervantes' Don Quixote?

truths in the ashes

a history of the "truths" in the ashes of books worthy of burning would surely be enlightening

disbelievings: hell/Devil heaven/God

historically it seems that, to the extent that they were, Hell and the Devil were disbelieved before God and Heaven

history not for history's sake

what is truly of interest is that in history which constitutes continuing essential elements of our moving world now
not history for history's sake

horizons of mind

even few philosophers escaped, or attempted successfully to, the mental horizons of their times

studying Christianity

one major problem in studying Christianity is the Christians who have written most of the books on it

theology has been written sub specie ...?

sub specie dei

or

sub specie humanitatis

the theology of theological exegesis

most theological exegesis tends to be written as if God Was, not Is
or if He Is, He Is not here and not now, but some other where and when

lessons learned from history?

hardly those from merely the "20th century"

✞ ✝

in post-Soviet Moscow and elsewhere, the cross seems to represent answers to questions people seem not to really have

institutional necropolises of soul and spirit

universities and their departments?

time off for Moscow's "Vaishyas, Shudras"

the crowds in Moscow Metro Kurskaya

the Brahmans of the West uncertain of God...
the Kshatriyas rather busy...

what shall the modern city's "Vaishyas, Shudras, and Untouchables" do but walk around rather inwardly aimless

here be monstrations

most theologians fear -- rightly -- to attempt to climb up "Mt Sinai"

the reliquaries theologies

like pieces believed from the "true" cross in cathedrals
theologians claim to have and describe the divinely revealed Truth in their systems

is the theological less or more true than the physical?

hanging out in Starbucks sub specie mundi

those to be seen casually sitting, sipping and conversing seem unconscious to imagine there was ever a time when time was imagined to be deadly serious

they relax and chat as if time was on their side -- sub specie mundi, not sub specie aeternitatis, and certainly not sub specie mortis

theological dross

dug out a few real nuggets amid 30 pages about "theological" views in modern lit

academic obfuscations

as theology was over time claimed to tend to a, so to say, schooled obfuscation
so has the modern academic mind tended to the same
the most common factor being:
the obfuscators

RIP "AD"?

a final death certificate cannot be issued, but the historical term AD* is MIA in and of history
injured; presumed dead by disbelief

                                                                                            *anno domini

sms to an atheist: the hermeneutical self-imprisoners

reading Schleiermacher and hermeneutics. : ((
so many methodologies and theories, and theories about methodologies and methodologies about theories...
like prisoners themselves adding bars to theirs cells, rather than trying to escape!
scholarly self-imprisoneders

religious studies about religious studies about religious experience

a serious, scholarly study about "religious experience" reveals itself as a study about the study of "religious experience"...

if God is distant in the Churches or nature or cosmos...in many universities it is not religious experience or "God" that one studies in religious studies, but one studies the studies themselves

micro-consumercosm

the consumered man and woman

equality on earth as it is in...

the demand for human equality has replaced that for heavenly justice

the soporific social ideals of history

whatever whenever widely agreed on ideas have been soporific

reviewing one's own CV post-mortem?

the reader may consider his own personal ideas, believings and feelings in relation to this idea -- once widely believed, if conceived in different terms -- of one's own curriculum vitae reviewed post-mortem by one's Self