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Properly understood, apocalyptic rhetoric is not the language of despair, but the language of hope. In theological terms, the apocalyptic is not so much the end of the world as the beginning of the breaking through of truth and justice into the world we live in. To say that “we are living in the end of the world” — whether because of economic exploitation, environmental collapse, or devastating consumerism — is not to say that everything is dying but that everything must change. To employ apocalyptic rhetoric is not to say that the world is doomed but that another world is possible.
Again, in religious terms: The apocalyptic task has always been the work of the prophets, not the priests. The priests say that if the current system ended, everything would be over; the prophets say that if the current system ended, the new one could at last begin. Perhaps the prophets are “unrealistic”; perhaps they are “naïve”. That’s what was said of MLK, of Gandhi, of Milk — but these men and others like them, though dismissed as ignorant and idealistic and unworthy of being taken seriously, are the very prophets who have given us hope and brought us change. It takes an act of daring and dreaming to listen to their visions; but when we do, we see suddenly not the end of the world, but the true beginning.
[science & religion]
I have to admit, I like xkcd. A lot. I think it’s one of the more humorous features of the interweb.
Last week, comic #435 was published (click on it below for larger view):
I like this comic. It describes something I’ve thought a lot about myself – that science (most of it anyway) is ultimately reducible to mathematics.
This being a blog about more than science, however, I will attempt to apply this cartoon to another subject: religion. Specifically, if one were to construct a similar diagram of ‘Fields arranged by Purity’, but one that included religion, what would it look like?
I suppose some would place religion in the diagram above in some way connected to sociology or psychology. But that, to me, would be unsatisfactory. I would prefer to place it not within the schema above, but rather to construct a parallel organization. For example, I might begin with:
religion < applied metaphysics
But of course it could not end there. Other relations must follow. One might arrive at a schema like this:
ritual < applied doctrine < applied metaphysics < applied language
If that makes any sense. Of course, this is drastically incomplete, and I’m not sure I even agree with it. But I do think it’s an interesting analogy to the point made by the cartoon.
I’m not sure of [ metaphysics < applied language ]. The basis for this claim is that metaphysical systems are constructed in language (of course) and in many ways deal with linguistic problems (or at least cognitive problems, intimately connected to language); but I lack the experience in philosophy to really make a claim like that. If I’m right, though, the implications are interesting: language is symbol-manipulation, and so is mathematics. Symbols then, in the technical sense of the linguistic and mathematical symbol, form the basis of both physics and metaphysics.
None of this is, of course, original. But I did arrive at it myself, mostly.
What do you think? Is my conception of the symbolic system as at the heart of everything accurate? How would you work politics into all this?
Science Daily reported today that the language one speaks can affect the way colors are percieved. Apparently, when common colors (that is, colors with specific names in a given language) are presented to a test subject, areas of the brain associated with word searching are activated much more than when the subject is presented with colors that are harder to name.
This is no surprise. Language is one of the most profound aspects of what it means to be human, and it only makes sense that differences in language should cause differences in perception.
One fascination of this study arises if its results are hypothetically extended to other areas of human experience. Consider, for example, time. Time has long been a mysterious subject of the inquiries of philosophers and scientists alike. But the concept of time is one that is central to language, in large part because of verbs.
I could go on for several paragraphs and describe different types of verb tenses. Be relieved – I’l spare you. Suffice to say that time is inextricably linked to language, and to grammatical tense. But if the results of the color study are extended (hypothetically) to time, it would mean that experience of time is not universal, but rather varies from language to language.
The really interesting implications arise through constructed languages. If I were to invent a language that handled time in a totally different way, then that could significantly change my experience of time. The philosophical implications could be enormous, especially if you subscribe to one of those schools of philosophy that links perception with reality.
Time travel anyone?
