Forgotten roots

"I am officially Jewish, but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant."

- AJ Jacobs

The other day when I was putting away books in the library I ran across a copy of "The Book of Mormon Movie." Having heard the reports on the quality of the movie I thought it'd be worth checking out simply because it sounded like one of those movies that was so bad it's funny (ie - Twilight).

As it turns out I was wrong. Entirely. It was so bad it wasn't funny.
It felt like a ward play that one is forced to go to that's written by a college age business major and all of the parts are played by people who have never acted before.

Ouch.

The worst part, however, was the apparent lack of consideration that the characters in the movie were supposed to be Jewish. Whoops? That's quite the mistake. The background looked nothing like Jerusalem. The dialog was painful. Nothing Jewish.

Within the last week I also was able to see a PBS series on Early Christianity. It was excellent although it didn't include all of the things I wanted in it. The series included a lot indirectly related to my qualm above. Namely: Christianity comes from Judaism, but Judaism is lost in the shuffle.

What a bizarre concept. The Jewish history is varied: angry, calm, murderous, barbaric, beautiful, odd, etc. But most importantly for Christianity: the Jews left a scholarly work. What is it called? The Hebrew Bible or, in Christian terms the Old Testament.

This leads me to a question that I really wonder about. That is: Why, if everything about Christianity is supposed to be started with the Jews, don't Christians study about Judaism?

Learning about the scholars putting together the bible in Seminary would've been far more important, useful, and interesting than the typical instances of the pushing of all the stories being literal, and wonderful tales of people being totally moral. Which they aren't.

I might've actually liked the Bible during that year if the class had been about Jewish traditions and the why, when, and how of it. If it had shown how the Jewish culture was changing, how the ideologies were becoming ones that would allow for many people to claim to be Jewish Messiahs (according to history a lot of men made the claim just before and after Jesus).

It seems that over time Christianity has forgotten it's roots. No one mentions the reasons for the Jewish authors of the gospels writing what they did. The influences of the Jewish systems and current events are left out of much of the modern version of Christianity and replaced with a saccharine combination of the gospels that don't really fit together (despite the stickiness of saccharine.)

It's rather odd. I can only see the traces of Judaism through scholarship in one modern religion. That is Catholicism. Catholics are ok with admitting that they were wrong. They can say that the pope merely interprets the bible and can be wrong about social issues. They've apologized for the crusades, etc.

As times have gone on, however, this essential piece of Christianity: the need to understand the history and culture behind the Bible. Has been lost. With each new religion since the early Christians we have lost much of what it really means to be a branch off of Judaism and have replaced Christian heritage with assumptions that Jews today are nothing like those in the past; the ones in the past were just like us. Until we reach today. The day where I sit it takes a TV documentary to remind me of a lost and important part of Christianity: Jewish history.

And then, I realized I was talking to myself

*Before I begin I would like to point out how very aware I am that this is probably close to a Universal complaint. I realize the lack of originality in the post, but I wrote it anyway.*

Sometimes I like to pretend that two people could entirely relate to each other.

Maybe I read too much. You can read whatever you want into books. They always say what you want them to say.
Maybe it's the music. Paul always seems to say things that are relevant to me.

Whatever it is I find myself thinking that someone relates so well to me and I to them. And my mind goes off creating an entirely new life for them. And then the fantasy is shattered when I get to know them.

Ulysses has a commentary on the inability of men to really know each other. Pages upon pages of two men thinking throughout the book of all of the things of their lives the one wanting to get to know the other only to have them run into each other at the end, have a shallow conversation, and go their separate ways.

Perhaps I've been corrupted by what I consider one of the most beautiful lines from one of the most beautiful scenes in literature (which is a slight spoiler for Crime and Punishment by the way and is much better in context, read the book):

"I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity,"

Maybe I just want someone to love that scene and all things like it and relate to them in the same way I do.

That'd probably be enough. But probably not.

Jabbering my way to a biography

So.. I have this unhealthy obsession with getting rid of things. From sentimental junk (for almost all things sentimental are) to to personal notes almost everything in my life gets edited and taken out fairly regularly. (I even edited out a lot of journal entries at one point.)

Except, of late, I haven't been editing my e-mails.

And so I suddenly realized that the only ways that anyone could know much of anything about me is through a progression of e-mail conversations and a couple of blog posts.

Not that posterity will care... but, you know.. it's interesting that I've nearly edited myself out of history.

Maybe I'll get rid of those e-mails.

What time do you think you have?

Time. Consciousness. Existence. Nothing. Perfection. Knowledge. Truth.

Seven of the oddest concepts that I have ever run into.

Time wasn't ever odd to me until I ran into a book titled: "The Calendar" which seems to suggest (I haven't actually read it) that time is entirely a human invention.

What is time?
The only purpose and defining feature of time seems to be that it is a measurement between a past and current event.

So five ideas that have been driving me crazy:

1. Can one reach a point at which time can no longer be divided into smaller units? If so then it would seem as though time does not exist at each one of those moments because there would be nothing to compare it to.

2. If it were entirely possible for something to not change for say, one second, would a measurement of time necessarily skip that one second?

3. Seeing as one is always living in the present moment, never in the past, and never in the future, can we conclude that there are truly such things as the past and the future? Are the past and the future the present?

4. If, as many religions suggest, time will not exist after death doesn't this mean that there can be only the options of a sort of Buddhist-nothingness after death, or an existence for persons which is stuck in one mode so that if one had a body that body could never move, eat, talk, etc. because doing so would allow time back into the game board as a measurement between when the person did and did not act?

5. If time is cylical would the circle of time taken as a whole, meaning the greatest time unit that could be reached, be the measurement at which time does not exist because one time around the circle would be the same as the next time around the circle and so on and would, thus, indicate not a measurement of change, but instead a pattern?

I just had to laugh my brains out

The other day I suddenly realized that I had discussed insanity caused by cannibalistic practices of eating the brain quite a few times but for the life of me I could not remember the exact details of what happened or where I read about it.

I finally found it and I have found where I read it.

It's called Kuru.
It was located in a tribe in New Guinea. (Not Europe as I have claimed.)
And I read about it in a book Titled: Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Goodness. I was starting to think that I'd made it up. (Although, I was quite wrong on quite a few of my memories of it.)

Here is an official site discussing the disease and here is Wikipedia's article on it if you would like to read about it.

Just thought I'd confirm at least part of what I told probably all of you at one point or another. The rest my brain must have added in.

"A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible. . ."

Throughout the course of the day I was able to check out three different translations of the Bible bringing me to have five different copies of the Bible in my room (Cambridge, Cotemporary English, KJV, Complete JST, and Oxford). It was an adventure.

It's shocking how little I know about the Bible. I'm finding out through "GOD: A Biography" all of the things that I have missed in the past.

I embarrassed to admit that up until a couple of months ago I thought that Franklin's ever-so-famous line: "God helps those who help themselves." was in the Bible. Until tonight I thought the title of this post was in the Bible. And until tonight I thought that Tydale's remark: "I will cause the boy that drives the plow to know more of the scriptures than you!" was in the Bible.

I don't know what I'm talking about. It's time for some serious review of Bible-related books and, of course, the Bible.

I'm just glad no one has tried to Bible bash me. I'm doomed if they do.

Oh! Two Bible related fun facts while I am on the subject:

When Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God he stated that he did not believe, he knew. This makes me wonder if this is the place where the shift took place in English religious discussion because you rarely hear someone say that they "believe" in God, today people tend to use the word "know" instead. It was, apparently, shocking that he would've said such a thing then, but fairly common to say now.



One can call himself or herself a gnostic! I had known that the term "agnostic" was coined by the ever-so-attractive man above T.H. Huxley (Aldous' grandfather), but for some reason it had never occured to me until the other day that Huxley was using the two roots of "a" and "gnostic". I'm really tempted to tell the next person I talk to about religion that I'm a gnostic just to be able to see the reaction I get.

"Agnostic?"
"No, you know, a gnostic."

"It's the end of the World as we know it . . . and I feel fine."

Chandler Scott showed me this website a while back.
It's called: Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the Earth? dot com.
Hope you like it.