The minor prophets

This is a bit of rambling, stream of consciousness stuff that all seemed to crash together in the last few days.

Pigweed and I have been playing trivia recently, and our team isn’t that bad. Some of the other teams are wicked smart. Except when it comes to the Bible.

“Name the five books attributed to the major prophets in the Protestant Bible” should be an easy one, but … nobody else got it.

It seems that when people know a lot about something, either (1) they assume other people know it too, or (2) they think people are stupid if they don’t also know it. The first is ridiculous, and the second is unfair. There are simply too many things to know about in the world.

Anyway, I had a strong feeling that we should study the Maryland counties before trivia on Monday, and — what do you know — there was a question about Maryland counties.

That sort of thing has happened to me a lot in my life, and it’s not all self-reported. When I played Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager, my friends said I had an uncanny ability to guess what was coming. I know perfectly well that this is all some combination of confirmation bias and/or accidentally picking up clues I wasn’t consciously aware of. But it’s easy to see how somebody with similar experiences could be misled into believing they were very lucky, or had a gift.

With all this in mind, a professional colleague discovered that I’d written some books, and for some odd reason was drawn to Awkward Ollie and the Stolen Banana, which touches on similar themes.

Again, confirmation bias.

We experience so many things in a day, we can’t pay attention to all of them. But one thing draws your attention, for whatever reason, and then your mind is primed to watch for similar occurrences. What a surprise, you see the similar occurrence, and if you’re the superstitious sort, you believe it’s a sign.

A symbolic interpretation of Genesis by Jonathan Pageau

Jordan Peterson’s podcast recently included a lecture Jonathan Pageau gave to some group of Jungian psychologists. It’s pretty interesting stuff.

After presenting his general thoughts, he goes through Genesis 1 and explains how a symbolic view of the text makes sense of the structure. It’s a matter of God progressively separating actuality from potentiality, or … something like that. I get confused when people use words like that, but the basic idea is you have the intellectual side of things being separated from the physical side of things.

I’m sure he’d say I got that wrong, but that’s how I took it. It’s almost like a Russian doll — progressive layers of the same sort of separation, nested inside one another.

The separation goes like this.

  • God from the creation.
  • Heavens from the earth.
  • Spirit of God (order) hovering over the waters (chaos).
  • Light from dark.
  • Then there’s the creation of another kind of heaven, separated from the waters.
  • The dry land is separated from the waters.

Etc. etc. You know the general story, but he casts it as the separation of meaning / logos from chaotic stuff, creating a progressively more ordered world.

I’ve heard other people explain Genesis like this. The world was “without form and void,” or literally (they say) “without form and without filling,” so the basic structure was to create the forms in the first 3 days and to fill them in the next 3 days. E.g., form = light and dark (Day 1), filling = sun, moon and stars (Day 4). form = upper and lower expanses (Day 2), filling = birds and fish (Day 5).

Both structures seem to have some merit, and if you have a long drive ahead of you, it’s worth a listen to Pageau’s explanation.

But all these explanations don’t answer an important question. Did people in the past interpret the text as an explanation of how things happened?

Sometimes people seem to think that as long as you can show that the text is organized according to a pattern which has a greater (more symbolic, more archetypal, …) meaning, that means you’re not supposed to see the text as explaining what actually happened.

I don’t think that follows, because the two thoughts are not incompatible. A person can believe God actually created things that way, and yes, they also show this cool order / structure / symbolism. He is God after all, so you don’t expect Him to create willy nilly.

IOW, coming up with a really cool symbolic way to understand Genesis 1 is really valuable, but it doesn’t seem to address the modern person’s concern that the Bible portrays the creation of the world in a way that a modern person isn’t going to accept.

Have they tried persuasion?

I don’t follow the news in Germany, so I don’t know the background on this, but this step seems rather dramatic.

Germany Announces National Lockdown for Unvaccinated

My concern is not necessarily over the policy.

My concern is that governments seem to be relying more and more on authority and demands. They’re not treating people like adults and trying to persuade them. That’s certainly true in the U.S., and it seems to be true in other places as well.

I know some people will respond along the lines of, “but they’re not acting like adults!” Etc. If you feel that way, you need to take a big step back and take some deep breaths. Like “learning to meditate” deep breaths while you ponder your belly button and so on.

The information coming out of government sources has been confusing and unreliable, and they have not addressed legitimate concerns. There has been a conspiracy (intentional or not, organized or not) between the government, big tech and parts of the media to stifle debate. The attitude sounds very much like “shut up and do as you’re told, peasants. We’ll decide what you should know and what’s best for you.”

I want people to get the vaccine (unless they and their doctor have agreed they have a legit reason not to). And I want this pandemic to end. But not at the cost of creeping totalitarianism.

Authoritarian government is a much bigger threat than Covid, and it’s sad that more people don’t see that.