mwotw

The Mandelbrot Set may offer us a true and terrifying glimpse of “divine intelligence”. It may be a Rosetta of Creation. There is a place just beyond philosophy and outside of mathematics, where only the poet can go. His capacity for awe and sensitivity to beauty cast a light where others find only darkness. Emerson had those eyes. Perhaps you have them too. Can you conceive of the mind for which infinity itself is not a difficult abstraction but a territory of touristic familiarity? The Mandelbrot Set places in our hands a view of the universe which our own science can neither refute nor confirm, for we cannot see the edges of its truth. It suggests that all of the recurring patterns in nature we have so far discerned (the tree, the spiral, radial symmetry, the orbit, etc.) are the consciously duplicated themes of an intelligent and systematic Creation. God’s own fingerprints, if you will. Are these recurring themes merely signs of the Maker’s creative style, or are they the perfect designs which only a perfect designer could have achieved? Faith can accommodate both interpretations. The Mandelbrot Set is quite simply a “little universe”, which humans can inspect from the transcendent perspective of an omniscient god. As we can perceive and marvel over Mandelbrot, so must God see all he has made. And in the same way that there are no insignificant replicas among Mandelbrot’s infinite replications, we are as sovereign in all of existence as we have so often dared to believe. (more…)

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which “opposing” Things are held in balance, as in the question of “”Religion vs. Science”", and also about the ways the lines between “separate” Things can sometimes get blurry, or even erased, as in “The Essence of Judaism: Spirit or Blood”.

Tonight I want to discuss a balance of “separate AND opposing” forces that I think we will all recognize in our own lives, but that I would guess seldom figures among our conscious and deliberate thoughts.

Fortunately, we DO have the works of a few great writers, who came upon this very question themselves, and have dramatized and dimensionalized it for us in literature.

One such is Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost.

Though there are sooo many ways to talk about Paradise Lost, for purposes of this discussion, I want to focus on the question:

Who is the Hero of the Story?

Without having to read PL, all that you need to know about Satan, Adam and the question of their respective claims to “Heroism” in PL you already know from Popular Culture/Religious Dogma:

1. Satan said “Fuck you, God — ban me to Hell, I’ll make it a place in my own Image”

2. Adam, seemingly the product of a God made smarter for his prior scuffle with Lucipher, was given but 1/1000th the power of the Dark Lord, has to live ALWAYS with the question: “Does God exist?” (and therefore always falling in and out of FAITH), and, most cripplingly, is FULLY subject to the will of God (though in the odd guise of free will).

Though God had enough power over Satan to ban him to Hell, he could NOT control his actions THERE, or stem his INFLUENCE over a world full of Adams.

The Lazarus Problem

If I have bid you “Rise, and make all human haste!” I really must apologize (for such a human waste), then turn a Father’s cheek. I was surprised to find at such accomplished heights (however bright and vanishing) the headway of my Earthly Tribe. It seems but yesterday that I first gave you leave to fly beyond the Garden’s harboring Green. What can it mean when all my favored progeny, and all the very best I’ve sent (to look and seek among the stars), return to me but cindered things? Of course, I wish alive again the very, very best of me, that I might prove a deity deserving of such offerings. But I prefer to re-invent, and make of cinders promises: Another band of reckless men, of singularly cunning sight, must rise and come and try again to find Me in the Night. 09 February, 2003 (For Columbia’s Seven)