“just trust me bro” – Moses and Joseph Smith, assuredly
The Sikhs have fine fashion sense. Their men dress their heads ceremonially, and those who are able let their manly beardness flourish. A man’s gotta express the secondary sexual characteristics that mark him as a man! All the more better to be a man, man, man, manly, man, man, man, in order that man1 may make great benefit in accord with why there man in the first place.2 A beard more marks than makes a man a man, it makes him more markedly such and yet at the end of the day it is he himself who gotta be him. A beard is a beautiful natural concordance to manhood, a heritable hirsute privilege. And of course it’s not just Sikhs that are big on them, you’ve also got the whole Israel ben Eliezer contingent, not to mention the Exoamsterdamian Dutch.
I speak first of the men, but I’m sure the women are no slouches in their own right, and speaking of the subcontinental et plus ethnic taxas’ X-Ray X-Ray contingent, there are some fine lasses of brunette complexion in that region, although I cannot say for myself, having no reading in it, if this is necessarily stated explicitly in the Sikh’s corpus, but maybe you could find it somewhere in the Buddha’s, or maybe That One Sutra Everyone Knows About. One other fun fact is that the Sikhs consider that one of their big-time is-ness revealers is now literally the text3 he left behind.
By contrary analogy, as far as I know, Jesus himself didn’t write or even dictate4 the Gospels – in fact, they weren’t even in his own tongue. Of course they’re explicitly acknowledged as being according to so-and-so, traditionally starting with Matthew, and there’s no Jesus at least in authorship terms until you get to at least John, but don’t quote me on that. The Christ Project, that is, anointing Jesus as the Saviour and Messiah, was that of Hellenistic5 Jews, and the Gospels were written in Greek, although not necessarily the kind spoken in an Athenian taxi dispatch. You could almost say Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, though it itself eventually didn’t require people to keep to the law exactly like The Original Big M ostensibly wrote it, unless you count Seventh-Day Adventists, those Day of Saturn fellow travelers who are more meaningfully than technically Jews for Jesus.
Many truths about human nature find their expression in religious contexts [sic]¸. The job of the clerical class is making humans work together, whether you’re talking about ecclesiasts or jurists. An eighth-grade dropout in the Pacific Northwest called politics the modern replacement for religion and even as a Maritimer I’m inclined to give him that one.
Obviously empirical findings out of science suggest new truthiness without necessarily having in-built reverence for ecclesiastical sensibility or lexical material. It’s not a geologist’s problem if the rocks don’t support a six-twenty-four-hour-day story, at least to their own mind. Actually, it would be a problem pragmatically in some contexts, where to have anything that contradicts Scripture, the foundation of clerical legitimacy, is dogs and cats living together. But Jesus (of Nazareth6) couldn’t have known about the San Andreas from all the way over in Ye Olde Levant7 and he did not have access to radiological dating (informed by physics!). Nor did Moses. Perhaps both were knowledgeable figures by the standards of their times, but those times are pretty long in the rearview at this point, if not also behind hills and/or over oceans.
The typical interdisciplinary compatibility of science is proof of its truthiness. You wouldn’t get that for free (where you do get it) were it not for being warm on the truth. It’s kind of like a bigger version of not having to remember what you told people.8
Christianity’s legitimacy has Jewish scaffolding. Islam has retained elements of both – it has its own tellings of Moses and Jesus and others, and ostensibly points to the same monotheistic monad. It’s worth knowing that Arabic has a common term for God whether it’s a Christian or a fan of the Mohammedan Canonical Revelation of [insert YHWH’s name in fancy Arabic script starting from the final “e” in here9] who is speaking.
If you take the science with which I hope she / her did not literally terminate your sight with as being explanatory, God could only be an explanation for when you run out of explanations. God – or whatever you want to call a Create-All Monad Thingamajig – is the biggest just-so story of all time. But God still doesn’t answer the question of why there is anything – even if all that there is is owing to God, to what does God owe God? Doesn’t God just have the same problems that we have, just one level up? I mean, the existential ones anyway, not necessarily specific day-to-day ones, such as deciding whether the kids get another snow day either directly or consequentially.
I don’t think science taken together has anything near a complete world-view, at least not by the standards of the generations to come, I should hope. And the practitioners do have humility about this: for instance, in astrophysics and cosmology they don’t really know what most of the cosmos is made of, which in some contexts might also justify a “so to speak” addendum. It’s like we’re on a road where we think we can see the lines but have only vague ideas about the pavement. Of course, in some parts of this region thinking you can see the lines is actually the best you can hope for, but that’s orthogonal.
What I’m getting at is that there are just whole realms of stuff that escape our notice let alone our understanding. (And perhaps there are even specific microcosmic instantiational variations in keeping with the theme of take-up or rather its dearth, but we don’t need to get into nominative designation about it.)
Let’s talk about ecclesiastics. Their whole thing is setting the truth-table. They maintain a self-justifying memetic superstructure. But at the end of the day, it is a memetic superstructure. It is not isness in and of itself. In being a fixed expression, it has a fundemental severance between itself and the continuity of isness. Even if the referentiality to isness as it then was was perfect, how can an already-taken snapshot continue to reflect what is? Heck, in Islam and Communism, innovation and revision are actual sins, things formally10 forbidden!
Islam is resting on the idea that a sixth/seventh-century Arabian Joseph Smith got a Special Conclusive One-on-One with Super Zeus. Needless to say, much of the rest of the world has at least hitherto resisted that occupying its memetic centrality, and even some people in nations that take the centrality formally, but you still see a bit of it cropping up here and there even outside of Arabia. (Yet it’s still Indonesia, not Arabnesia, as everyone well knows.) Was Joseph Smith smart enough to say he was the last Prophet there would ever be? Is Bingham Young kind of like Ali? I can’t answer every religious question in this short blog post.
Communism as has been practiced isn’t formally religious, notwithstanding its ultimate offspring of large bronze statues to which one demonstrates fealty. Indeed, religions compete with its self-asserted turf of being the thing that dictates values.
I’d like to think Marx wanted freedom and material prosperity for people in the end, but both Lenin and Mao hit a lot of roadbumps, not to mention the Kims and the Pol Pots. As an aside, Stalin’s legitimacy depended on his being seen to be a good pupil of Lenin, so you don’t get Stalin without Lenin first.
If your philosophy paints intellectuals as enemies, you’re dooming yourselves to perpetual intellectual retardation.
Islam didn’t grant a corporeal divinity to Jesus of Nazareth, but acknowledged him as a capital-P Prophet, and they consider him to be already taken to Heaven. So that means Islam and Christianity basically agree about where the old Juliet Hotel Charlie resides, and that’s an encouraging memetic concordance in fraught times.
- Man manly man, oooh oooh oooh… ↩︎
- That’s a truth that necessitates establishing idomatic expression for memorable effect. At least all the things I carry around in my own brainbox are catchy to me, you know? ↩︎
- Not literally a single SMS. Even if it had been in the medium of mobile missives, there would have been more than one, and probably no exaggeration to say at least several. ↩︎
- Here in Modern World we take writing pretty seriously. It is the referential form of expression. Ink is far more morphologically stable than speech, so it’s a powerful psychotechnology. And yet there’s nothing like hearing words. Words themselves are fundamentally things spoken (and speech came long, long before writing, and as a further complication writing has both phonetic-approximative and logographic approaches to it, sometimes both in the same language like with Japanese), it’s just that they can be also be found on pages sometimes. It’s important to remember that writing also does not face a lot of the pragmatic (often social) constraints that speech does, for writing may be done in private and even non-linearly, while speech in the absence of technological developments must occur linearly, and in real time, with a concurrency and immediacy in giving and receiving voice. Now people did of course cultivate memories for good words in a good order – it wasn’t as though streams of words had no fixation whatsoever. Take songs, for example. To be(come) a bard in Gaelic culture, you had to learn a whole bunch of pieces by heart and perform them on demand. ↩︎
- That is, sociolinguistically on the Greek spectrum. They didn’t necessarily have Zorba on Betamax. ↩︎
- But by golly he was gonna be birthed in Bethlehem one way or another, by retconning if necessary. This gave him Skywalker-level legitimacy points, or at least Waterwalker-league. ↩︎
- Certainly there was no El-Al flight from TLV to SFO at that time. ↩︎
- I have nice words about maintaining a metaphorical room temperature for your India Quebec, and having a chaleur épistémique in your own right, but they’re not really pillars of support for the paragraph’s argument. “Smart people being able to work together – locally or generally – can get good results sometimes” might be the moral of the story of science, I dunno. ↩︎
- This shouldn’t be too difficult to translate because just like Hebrew .direction this write also they ↩︎
- And to a great extent also seriously, although sometimes in some localities the most central, pure, rigourous expression is best experienced in the breach. ↩︎