MISCELLANY

Culture, Education, and Change

We live in an era of constant, widespread changes...and they’ve been intensifying. Old paradigms are being questioned, outgrown; old truisms, old cultural and social default positions, are being flanked or abandoned, crumbling or dissolving.

Leading to fear. “No place to hide! Make it stop! Make it stop!” Thus the growth of irrationality. And desperation. Thus terrorism. Thus political, and military, and religious fascism.

Culture provides structure, coherence and meaning to human life, and can be rigid or flexible to varying degrees. To the extent a society accommodates cultural differences, it deals with change less destructively. Societies and cultures less hostile to new ideas and attitudes adjust more successfully, evolving new formats.

Thus anything that adds flexibility — for example open-ended, non-autocratic education — helps cultures and societies deal successfully with new conditions.

Language and Mathematics

While language is a system of metaphor, it exists in variants that differ in grammar, vocabulary, and referents. The language of mathematics draws on very different potentials, potentials that like all metaphor are limited. For though mathematics provides marvelous reach, with marvelous precision — it is rife with constraints on application. And its precision can be tricky, for precision is one thing, and accuracy quite another. And if the constraints of the math are not met, its precision can be bullshit. (Speaking of metaphor!)

A peripheral plus: like all language, the use of mathematics literally programs the brain to accommodate the tools mathematics provides. Enabling the creative aspects of mind to enlarge upon that language, and on the overall vision of the ensouled lifeform.

Born Again...and Again

Speaking of metaphor, those familiar with the bible may remember, or can turn to, the apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13, verse 12. Where we find: “For now [referring to this human life] we see in a riddle [or ‘in a mirror dimly’], but then [after death] we will see [the world and God] face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully....”

“Fully” is not entirely true, but it’s a very large stride toward knowing. Spiritual “post grad studies” consist of learning more and more fully, and deeply, the nature of the Tao.

Or so it seems to me.

Those who swear by the literal accuracy of biblical scriptures are delusional —— and inconsistent! Ask a Christian strict constructionist if he believes in reincarnation, and he’ll tell you “no.” Then ask him how he reconciles that “no” with Jesus’s statement that “you must be born again.” He’ll either be angry, or he’ll explain “what Jesus really meant by that.”

In either case he’ll tell you much more about himself than about Jesus son of Joseph.

A good, church-going Lutheran friend commented that “I don’t know what your religion is, John.” I answered that it didn’t have a name (at that time), but it included reincarnation.

“Really? You know, reincarnation has always seemed reasonable to me.”

I wonder how many other Christians might answer that way.