You might have noticed that I am scheduling daily verses. Yes - software. I am about half-way through drafting the first 72 psalms. I hope to complete the draft in the next month, assuming I live so long. Last night I spent 6 hours in emergency with a sudden inexplicable explosive nosebleed. I am more fragile than I thought. Too much stress. But that's another story. Today I am swollen (an inflated balloon in half my soul) but still alive.
My posts are unique. Words without music are dangerous. They create a false abstraction not to be believed. There is only one place in the world where the music can be generated from the Hebrew Unicode text verse by verse - that's on my computer. I line up the verse on my translation form and press the music button. Then I open the XML with Musescore - and presto a verse of music, isomorphic to the Scripture -- nothing added -- and more importantly, nothing taken away. So the computer has to last until the draft is completed.
Also there is only one place where the four quadrant Hebrew, English, SimHebrew, and automated parsing can be produced. The same computer - still going strong with a new solid-state drive (thanks to science). This table is produced ad hoc by an Oracle routine I wrote a year or two ago. It's not perfect, but it doesn't destroy information -- following the commandment in a few psalms: Do not destroy. I may make the odd comment too and point to the odd performance -- all on my blog already if you look for them.
It's not quite a religious thing with me to do daily study or daily verses. I have resisted this practice.
But I have been meditating on science, culture, and faith for several weeks recently. I follow a number of things on Twitter, that app with the most lame rebranding I have ever noted. But it is still a source of confused, contradictory, and interesting tweets.
Religion is too often used to justify the status quo, to hearken back to a false narrative on the truth, and to support propaganda for war. The last is evident with the imperial Russian story and now also with the lunatic fringe of Pope Francis praising violence - how disappointing. The middle -- hearkening back to earlier stages of ambiguity -- is a common refuge for a certain class of scholarship and also for the fearful, searching for certainty. And the first - justifying the status quo - is all too common in power structures. "It shall not be so with you." I think we have not learned this well.
The psalms tell the truth about the poet. Poetry -- admittedly with metaphor -- but how else do we speak of anything.
Science was to some also a search for certainty but in another direction. Certainty turned out to be a false narrative. Science, (fully supported by the honesty of the Scriptures and their invitation to question, is as uncertain as the religious framework). Faith is best termed faithfulness, i.e. rendering the adherent trustworthy. (Not 'faith' as if it were believing a lie.) With such exploratory faithfulness, science yields true delight in the intricacy of its patterns. The most religious experience I had as a teen was my fourth year class on special relativity. Learning time dilation was more revelatory to me of God's work than some of the learning of Scripture that I fell into fearfully shortly thereafter. Now I think that the uncertainty principle supports the doctrine of co-creation and theosis, but I don't want to give either the Anglicans or the Orthodox any reasons to boast. And I'm not about to explain my hunch.
Culture is yet another question. Science and religion both are part of it. The New Testament has the phrase - in the world but not of the world, and that phrase has had several busses drive through it and cause immeasurable damage. Damage is not what religion should be about. Doesn't God love the world, and the created order, and the cultures that develop as the people learn to govern and to care?
What if the Gospel, like a good sourdough, ate up the world, flour and milk cup by cup, and taught the world to care? It is like the yeast that works in the lump, leavening everything. And now that living and working culture, like its sourdough starter analogue, is trying to teach the churches what caring means because the churches in the rigid application of their own history, jurisprudence, and prejudice have forgotten what their purpose is. In the same way that the fifth book of Torah rewrites earlier laws and statutes for a later time, so the churches must research just how it has its tendencies to stray.
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| Lost sheep they are. Forgot their knowledge. |
תָּעִ֗יתִי כְּשֶׂ֣ה אֹ֭בֵד בַּקֵּ֣שׁ עַבְדֶּ֑ךָ
כִּ֥י מִ֝צְוֺתֶ֗יךָ לֹ֣א שָׁכָֽחְתִּי |
| 176 Time and again I wander like a newborn lamb that is perishing. Seek your servant,
for your commandments I do not forget. |
qyv tyiti cwh aobd bqw ybdç
ci mxvotiç la wckti |
12
9
|
ty\iti c/wh abd bqw ybd\c
ci m/xv\tic la wck\ti |
