Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

-----

Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Exploring Evolution Series - Tool Making and the Human Brain's Ongoing Evolution (Neuro-Genetics and Development of the Human Mind)



 The Brain Science Behind Our Obsession With Tools
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/nueroscience/the-brain-science-behind-our-obsession-with-tools-15549633

By Kiona Smith-Strickland
June 3, 2013

According to researchers at Princeton, your obsession with tools
may be the product of millions of years of evolution.

Animals as diverse as crows and chimpanzees create and use simple tools, but it's humans who take tool use to an unprecedented level. Only humans invest significant amounts of time in designing and creating complex tools, and only humans turn them into permanent, valued possessions. According to researchers at Princeton University led by neuroscientist Sabine Kastner, human brains are actually hardwired to love hardware.

Kastner's team compared human brains with monkey brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which produces an image of changing amounts of blood flow in different areas of the brain. When neurons activate in a given area, blood flow to that area also increases. Viewing images of these changes shows researchers how the brain responds to certain stimuli, such as pictures or words.

The brain handles information about objects mostly in the parietal cortex, found in the back of the brain. There a neural pathway called the ventral system identifies objects and sorts them into categories. This pathway is what lets us recognize that a table is a table, whether we're viewing it from across the room or from directly underneath, and it works the same way in humans and in primates.


Nearby, another neural pathway called the dorsal system deals primarily with information about where objects are and how to reach them. In the brains of the rhesus monkeys used in the Princeton study, that information is very basic, and "its only use is to guide reaching and grasping information," Kastner says. In human brains, however, that pathway carries much more detailed information about objects, and we use that information to interact with things in more complicated ways, such as making and using tools.

In fact, the Princeton study even found new areas in the human parietal cortex that show more activity in response to images of tools than to images of other kinds of objects. "There's no part in the monkey parietal cortex that compares," Kastner says.

Commenting on Kastner's findings, her colleague Melvyn A. Goodale of University of Western Ontario tells PopMech: "What's interesting was that there was more activity for tools than there was for simply graspable objects, so simply showing people a stick wouldn't produce as much activation as showing them a hammer." Goodale says that this may be because we immediately associate hammers with a particular action, but we don't associate such specific uses to nontool objects like sticks.

According to Kastner, even people who can't name tools usually have an immediate grasp of their use. "If you give them a hammer, they know what to do with it," she says. Of course, people's brains develop their responses to tools based on their experiences, and those experiences vary widely. "Obviously, a carpenter will have very different representations from mine," Kastner says.

Despite those differences, the human ability to recognize tools and their purposes is, to some extent, as universal as it is unique. "You see that in 2-year-old children—a ball rolls under a couch, and the child will get some kind of long stick to get that ball back. A tool gets invented. Humans can do that, as strange as it sounds, and most other primates in the world just cannot do that. How we reached that kind of flexibility, that is really something that we know nothing about," Kastner says.

She believes that these uniquely human aspects of the brain have evolved along with human tool use over the past 3.4 million years or so.

Which came first: the use of tools, or these changes in the brain? Researchers may never be certain, as the relationship is essentially a cycle. The constant use of tools, from stone hammers to minicomputers, has shaped human brains in ways that enable even more use of even more sophisticated tools.


Goodale says that natural selection probably drove the development of the dorsal system in ancestral primates, whose brains needed to make rapid calculations to grab moving insects or other prey quickly and accurately.

"Having got that in place, then having all kinds of other, more cognitive parts of the brain evolving in protohumans, then the fact that there was that dorsal system there that could be exploited by tool-using creatures led, I think, to even more specialization of the dorsal system for the use of tools," he says.

Kastner's discovery may be one of the first scientific insights into the evolutionary origins of tool use. "There are very few people that have ever studied tools," Kastner says, "and it's not easy to do."

The evolutionary processes that gave us our affinity for cordless drills is still happening, and at a faster pace than ever now that new gadgets and tools come along at such a fast pace. "I think that we will probably see that the brain can change much faster than we think. I think that in a hundred years from now, people will have different parietal lobes," she says.


related references -





* * * * * * * * * *


More Examples - this time of Software Enabled
"Programming or Soft-Tool Agents"












Why I Prefer a Gospel of "Solidarity" over that of "Penal Substitution"

Give Tony Jones his due. If for nothing else he does speak his mind and usually hits the mark right on its head.... He is passionate and passionately speaks his mind.... Today's discussion focuses on the deficiencies of the Christian doctrine of "penal substitution". Not a discussion that we haven't spoken of here before, but because of its continued popularity among evangelical churches needs to be reflected upon from time-to-time.
 
Mine own prejudices against PRIMARILY conceiving the atoning work of Christ around this ancient idea provided to us through the Scriptures (and then turned around by the doctrine of Calvinism) is that it has created an attribute out of God's wrath rather than from God's loving mercy. But this cannot be.... Wrath is simply the result of loving mercy's judgment upon the wickedness sin causes and perpetuates. It is not an attribute of God but an action of God. To judge sin is reflective upon God's character of divine holiness and righteousness. Hence, God is a wrathful God when sin's injustice - and sin's crimes of hate - are repeatedly committed and perpetuated. God judges sin because His judgment derives from His intense love for mankind: as beheld in His love for mercy and forgiveness. A repeated theme found in the messages of the OT prophets and again through Jesus and the messages of the early church in NT.
 
Another problem with PRIMARILY conceiving the atoning work of Christ around the idea of penal substitution is that it creates a Gospel message that is intensely individualistic and not collective (me-and-God as versus us-and-God... my pain as versus our collective pain) which is yet another sociological marker of Western civilization's exhibit of Modernity over the countering, global, posture of Post-Modernal, communal responsibility. We become over-focused upon ourselves -  and not on that of others - and thereby speak of Jesus' atonement in personal terms of ourselves to the exclusion of its communal applicability to all men. But when we see Jesus' atonement in terms of all men, then we are better able to see the harm we have done to one another because of our sin. Surely we are forgiven by God's grace, but just as surely we have committed great wrong and undoing in society which must also be undone by our own hands.
 
Tony Jones goes on to observe, that this idea of Christ's sacrifice makes the Son more attractive to us than it does the Father because of Jesus' willingness to takes His Father's wrath upon Himself in place of our condemnation. The "Bully on the Block" seems to be an unappeased, and very angry, God - not the circumspect God of broken heart as willing Lamb who seeks man's salvation by His own personal sacrifice. Too often we confuse Jesus' lifework-and-divine-being apart from His Father's nature and divine attributes. However, we would do better to understand Jesus and His Father as one - and even more so, to see the Father through Jesus, and not through our ideas of what we think we know of God through Scripture ("Ye have seen the Father through me," says Jesus - John 14.7). Hence, we ultimately know God through Jesus, who perfectly pictures the Creator God through His atoning redemption for man's sin. If we do not understand God than turn to Jesus to understand God better.
 
Lastly, Tony importantly notes that God is too-often seen to be held captive to His own divine laws of righteousness, honor, wrath, and expiation (a legal term for sin's absolvement). And yet, God cannot be held captive to any part of His being - nor can His laws be so understood as to be misapplied about His own being. God judges sin not because of His laws but because of its wickedness. The Law simply points out to us its wrongness. To expect harm and folly, grief and strife, pain and pride and prejudice, if sin is given in to. These God would help lead us away from... and not towards. To use our willful freedom responsibly in loving actions toward one another... and not towards self-seeking greed and evil. Sin, in its ultimate definition, is the unloving use of free will. It is not a metaphysical entity but a description of us doing unloving things. Its the misuse and abuse of the freedom that God has placed within mankind's soul. A freedom which learns to love from the God of love as seen by His life of love on this earth in Jesus.
 
R.E. Slater
June 4, 2013
 
 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 
 
 
Penal Substitution Dies on the Reservation

Photo by Sydney Foster
 
Over the Memorial Day Weekend a few of us from my congregation joined between 1,000-1,500 pilgrims from around the world at for the Taize Gathering at Red Shirt on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
 
Taize is an ecumenical monastery in Burgundy, France. Every week the brothers of Taize welcome thousands of pilgrims to participate in the rhythms of their communal life, and once a year some of the more than 100 brothers take their ‘community’ somewhere else in the world for a pilgrimage gathering.
 
This year the brothers were invited by the Lakota nation to welcome pilgrims to Red Shirt.
 
Just as pilgrims do at Taize, we spent our time at Pine Ridge in worship (sung chants, sung prayers and a whole lot of silence) 3 times a day.
 
We shared simple meals of buffalo meat straight off the rez, and we shared our faith stories in small groups.
 
We listened to each other; in fact, listening was the primary reason we’d gathered. We camped in tents in a horse pasture and went, uncomplaining, without running water. For those few days at least, we did our best to approximate the simplicity and joy of what the New Testament refers to as the oikos: the ‘economy’ or household of God.
 
Our ‘sanctuary’ was a hollow carved out by the wind in the middle of the badlands. We sat in the prairie grass under the sun and stars.
 
Sunday night’s worship concluded with Taize’s traditional Prayer around the Cross. The cross is an icon of the Crucified Christ with water rushing out from his pierced side. For the prayer around the cross, the icon is taken out of its stand and laid on top of 4 cinder blocks so that it’s about a foot off of the floor and perpendicular to it. As the gathered sing, one by one, pilgrims approach the cross on their knees. Once they make their way to the cross, they place their forehead on the cross and pray.
 
The Prayer around the Cross is powerful to experience.
 
It’s just as powerful to watch so many approach the cross with devotion and seriousness. But it’s even more powerful to notice the patience and hospitality everyone affords one another during the prayer, for it can take a good long while for that many people to crawl to the cross and then pray on it.
 
Before the Prayer around the Cross on Sunday night, Brother Alois, the prior of Taize, invited us to place our burdens upon the cross, the burdens we suffer both personally and collectively ‘because,’ Brother Alois said in his simple yet incisive way, ‘Christ didn’t just suffer in the past. Christ still suffers today with us, with anyone who suffers in the world.’
 
His words hit me with converting clarity.
 
The prairie wind I felt blow across me could very well have been the Holy Spirit.
 
Because not one of us 1K pilgrims missed the clear, straight, connect-the-dots line he’d just drawn from the Crucified Christ to the all-but-crucified Lakota Indians on whose land we prayed.
 
When Brother Alois mentioned ‘collective suffering’ an accompanying illustration or further explanation wasn’t needed.
 
Sitting all around us were Lakota Christians, young and old, whose families had been herded like cattle onto a patch of land aptly named the badlands. Promise after promise made to them and treaty after treaty made with them had been broken- because why do you need to keep your word to cattle? There on the reservation unemployment is over 80% (just think what the average suburban street would be like with unemployment that high). As a result, alcoholism and hopelessness are nearly as high, and I can’t remember the last time I read a news story or heard a politician mention an Indian issue other than the name of a f&^*%$# football team.
 
We prayed that night just a stone’s throw from Wounded Knee, the site of massacre where a mass grave of over 300 innocents slaughtered by the U.S. Army little more than a hundred years ago. Afterwards the soldiers took gleeful pictures next to heaps of bodies of children and their mothers. Wounded Knee remains a festering wound of memory for the Lakota.
 
When Brother Alois mentioned the cross and collective suffering, we all knew what he meant.
 
And in one sense, nothing he said was revelatory or profound.
 
Yet here’s what hit me about what he said and from where he said it: the ‘traditional’ evangelical understanding of the cross, what theologians call ‘penal substitution,’ not only has nothing to say to people like the Lakota, penal substitution speaks no good news to them because it simultaneously privileges people like me.
 
Penal substitution is an understanding of the atonement ideally suited for oppressors and people who benefit from oppressive systems.
 
On the pop level, penal substitution is the understanding of the cross that says ‘Jesus died for you.’
 
For your sin.
 
Jesus died in your place. Jesus died the death you deserve to die as punishment for your sin.
 
Jesus is your substitute.
 
He suffered (suddenly I realize how the past tense is key) the wrath God bears towards you.
 
On the purely theological level, I’ve always had a problem with penal substitution. Quickly: penal substitution seems to make God’s wrath more determinative an attribute than God’s loving mercy. It easily devolves into a hyper individualistic account of the faith (me and God). God the Father comes out, at best, seeming like a petulant prick who bears little to no resemblance to the Son, and, at worse, the Father seems captive to his own ‘laws’ of righteousness, honor, wrath and expiation.
 
Forgiveness, it’s always seemed to me, shouldn’t be so hard.
 
And shouldn’t require someone to die.
 
I’ve always had my theological gripes with that way of understanding the cross, but when I heard Brother Alois introduce the Prayer around the Cross the this-world, moral deficiencies of penal substitution hit me like a slap across the face.
 
Saying Jesus Christ died for you, for your sin, for your sin to be forgiven is good news to… sinners.
 
But what about the sinned against?
 
What we flipply call ‘Amazing Grace’ is good news for wretches like Isaac Newton. For slave-traders and slave-masters. Thanks to the cross, they’re good to go. Their collective guilt and systemic sin…wiped clean by the blood of the cross.
 
Hell, we might as well continue in those sinful systems because what matters to Christ isn’t our collective guilt but our individual hearts.
 
Yet what about those whom the ‘wretches’ made life an exponentially more wretched experience? What about the millions of others whom those wretches, who’ve been found by this amazing grace, treated like chattel?
 
At the Lord’s Supper we proclaim that Christ came to set the captives free, yet we persist in an understanding of the cross that bears zero continuity with that proclamation.  We spiritualize and interiorize gospel categories like ‘suffering’ and ‘oppression’ and ‘deliverance.’
 
Because it suits us.
 
Because we are ourselves are not oppressed, have no actual desire to be delivered from our ways in the world and suffer only the affliction of the comfortable.
 
Penal substitution, I realized upon hearing Brother Alois’ words, makes the mistake of acting as though Jesus of Nazareth is the only one to ever be strung up on a cross of shame and suffering.
 
Sure, every single, last Lakota gathered with us was, on an individual level, a ‘sinner.’ Just as surely to focus so singularly misses the larger issues, for the Indians praying with us at Red Shirt have been sinned against by us actively for centuries and they are now sinned against by our cynical indifference.
 
To suggest the primary meaning of the cross is that Christ died for their oppressors’ sins is to perpetuate, in a very real way, their suffering.
 
If Jesus wept over Jerusalem, I’ll be damned if he doesn’t weep over a place like Pine Ridge. And if he called the Pharisees ‘white-washed tombs’ for turning a blind eye to Rome’s oppressive systems, I wonder what he might call us?
 
On my knees in the hollow that was our sanctuary and hearing Brother Alois’ words as they struck the ears of Indians along with mine, I realized that Christ doesn’t die for us so much as Christ dies as one of us. With us.
 
In solidarity with those who’ve suffered like him at the hands of empire and indifference.
 
Location, location, location. Real estate can make you hear the gospel with different ears — that’s what I realized at Pine Ridge.
 
The cross, I realized at Pine Ridge, is the opposite of good news unless it is today what it was for the first Christians: a symbol of protest, a demand for and a sign of an alternative to the world’s violence, a declaration that Christ not Caesar is Lord.
 
The primary message of the cross for someone like me, then, isn’t that God’s grace has saved a wretch like me though it can include that message.
 
No, the primary message of the cross is that it’s a summons to suffer, as Christ, for those whom the world makes life wretched.
 
Rather than Jesus being the answer, the solution to our selfishly construed problem, Pine Ridge has left me believing that the Cross is meant to afflict us with the right nightmares.