Binary pairs:
black/white
up/down
left/right
east/west
us/them
self/other
Human beings observe the chaos that surrounds us and try to make sense of it by organzing things into binary pairs or opposites. We observe these things through our senses and then we make sense of the world in our minds by constructing reality. Human beings create our reality through our constructs, or ideas, about the observable world based on our own perceptions of it.
heaven/hell
I am bothered by that one. We can observe black/white or even us/them. We cannot observe heaven/hell. The "afterlife" is beyond our perceptions. So is God and all things "godly".
heaven/hell
is too simplistic for me. It sounds man-made, and yet it is beyond our observable reality. It seems to me that we, rather clumsily, assigned God and all things "godly" a label, just like we do to other things. But God is beyond our immediate perception. We can observe God's creation, but not God directly. We imagine so much on faith.
What is the reality of God?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
You have to consider, maybe we're not capable of even understanding God in our feeble human minds. If we could assign God a formula, he wouldn't really be God.
Perhaps things only seem so simplistic at first glance...
"When a man kneels to pray...God is the thing to which he is praying- the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on- the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal...That man is being caught up into the higher kinds of life...He is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself."
"If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about."
--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Forgive me if I have posted too much, but I'm currently reading this book and find it very thought provoking and would recommend it to all. :)
Here's the problem with binarism: it leads, without fail, back to itself and only to itself. So, if we imagine the universe as binary, and we want to examine the concept of darkness, that examination will lead us, without fail, to the concept of lightness.
But can we imagine a multiform universe?
I think we can.
Ask yourself: what is the opposite of a circle?
No, it's not a square.
Ask yourself: does it have an opposite? Must it have an opposite?
Post a Comment