The Power of Speech Christians and Jews often use a lectionary to choose readings for worship. This Sunday, Christians can choose to read from the very beginning of the Bible, where God creates the universe with words. In the beginning, when God created the universe, the earth was formless and desolate. The raging ocean that covered everything was engulfed in total darkness, and the Spirit of God was moving over the water. Then God commanded, “Let there be light”—and light appeared. Gen 1:1-3 Good News Translation Then God speaks sky and land into existence. Words, you see, have power; creative power. We see this, also, in the Gospel of John. He…
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AI and Being Human
Modern Inventions Some modern inventions are so dangerous, we choose not to use them. Developed in the 1940s, for instance, the pesticide DDT and other persistent organic pollutants were either banned or restricted in a 1996 world treaty negotiated in Stockholm. Exemptions exist so countries can use these compounds to control mosquito populations where malaria is a problem, but otherwise we have decided their benefit is not worth their harm. Nuclear weapons haven’t been used since the United States bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. So far, although over 13,000 of these bombs remain in the world, no one has chosen to wreak such disaster upon the world again. We’ve…
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God and the Computer Simulation
Our Shadowy World They say reality is an illusion. For instance, maybe we’re dreaming. In the Zhuangzi, an ancient Taoist text, we find Zhuang Zhou’s famous butterfly dream. In it, the sage experienced himself as a happy butterfly. When he woke, he felt confused. Was he a butterfly now dreaming he was a man, or a man dreaming he’d been a butterfly? He couldn’t tell, for we can’t always trust our senses. [1] During the early twentieth century, the Baha’i teacher, Abdu’l-Baha, taught this same thing, that the world is an illusion. Reality exists only in God’s realm. What we see here “is only its shadow stretching out.” [2] Plato,…
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Love in the Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe
Myth as Sacred Story Myths, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s article on the topic, are traditional, symbolic narratives that tell stories of gods or great heroes within a particular religious framework which gives them an authority, not necessarily of fact, but of truth. [1] Magical and wondrous things happen in myths, but we need not believe their particulars to gain wisdom from them. Still, it’s not easy to define myth or mythology. Different Western scholars emphasize different aspects of myth, and distinguishing a myth from fairy tale, fable, or folklore is even harder. That’s probably why, later in the above article, the authors admit “it is difficult to generalize about…
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This Moment Is Not Preparation
This Moment Could Be Your Last In his treatise on Zen Buddhism, Shunryu Suzuki wrote, “Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.” [1] On the surface, his meaning seems simple. Make each moment count. Live not for a dream or hope of some future goal, but for what life brings you in the here and now. Life is not a series of goals. It is a journey, and mindfulness is the tool we use to fully experience that journey. This is especially important because we never know when our journey will end. We can die at any time. When I was three, I announced…
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The Great Loneliness
Ideas of the Ultimate In his book, The Masks of God, volume 1, Joseph Campbell quotes an Eskimo shaman, Igjugarjuk, who said, “The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of a man to all that is hidden to others.” [1] Igjugarjuk spoke those words in the context of a discussion about Sila. The different groups of Inuit have different notions who Sila is. Perhaps she is breath, soul, form. On the island of Nunivak, the people understand Sila to be a great spirit who speaks to them in…
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The Advent of Joy
Arising Unscathed from the Grave December is full of holidays. The first is Hanukkah, which this year starts on the 18th. It commemorates the success of the Maccabean revolt and the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days. On the Winter Solstice, there’s Yule, which welcomes the return of the sun. On December 26th, Kwanzaa begins. Started in 1966 to honor the heritage of African Americans with symbols of unity, cooperation, creativity, and faith, the holiday includes seven days of lighting candles. Throughout the month, Christians mark the Sundays of Advent with candlelight to mark the coming of Christmas, the day when they celebrate the birth of their…
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Being Prepared and Universalism
It’s All About Love As a Universalist, I read scriptures and myths to learn about being human. In the case of the Bible, I also learn something about our relationship with the holy, the mysterious, the I Am. Though a good story raises more questions than it answers, in scripture, I can discover insights that encourage my transformation into a better self. For me, the Bible is about love. God is love. Eternal love made life possible, and everything that exists reflects that love. We can pervert love into indifference and animosity, but God—or whatever we choose to call the essence of life—cannot. Thus, God’s wrath, vengeance, and chastisement must…
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Lessons from The Seven Ravens
The Stories of the Brothers Grimm The brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, collected their well-known stories from the oral tradition of the Germanic people. Their work went through many revisions before becoming the text we know today as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. When the brothers lived, their books were quite popular. Their compatriots bought almost as many of them as they did the Bible. Like the Bible, some of the stories are violent and crude, containing antisemitism and assumptions about gender roles and social stratification that we, in twenty-first-century America, may find offensive. This is true of folklore around the world. The oral history of a culture does not shrink from…
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The Stuff of Stars
The Sky Before Electricity In our light-filled world, with electric lamps illuminating our streets, backyards, and skies, few of us ever see the magnificence of a star-filled heaven. Indeed, as Paul Bogard explains in his book, The End of Night, only a few, very isolated places on Earth allow a vision of the night sky like the one our ancestors would have enjoyed, and then only after many hours of waiting for our eyes to adjust. Now that it is fall, I’m out for my walk before the sun rises, yet everywhere I go my path is lit by artificial light. Even when I turn onto the wooded path behind…