The end of meaning

This is the kind of story that initially sounds funny to me:

480-Pound Woman Dies After Six Years On Couch
STUART, Fla. -- A 480-pound Martin County woman has died after emergency workers tried to remove her from the couch where she had remained for about six years.

Gayle Laverne Grinds, 40, died Wednesday, after a failed six-hour effort to dislodge her from the couch in her home. Workers say the home was filthy, and Grinds was too large to get up from the couch to even use the bathroom....

Emergency workers had to remove some sliding glass doors and lift the couch, with Grinds still on it, to a trailer behind a pickup truck. Removing her from the couch would be too painful, since her body was grafted to the fabric. After years of staying put, her skin had literally become one with the sofa and had to be surgically removed....

But let's think about this story. How many years ago did this woman give up on life? When did any significance and meaning become banal and uninteresting? In many ways she died years before her physical body quit. Did she find any meaning in anything as she lay on the couch day after day after day? Did she find small pockets of meaning in television?

And what causes a person to give up? To completely check out........Was she a defragmented soul? Did she feel lost? Angry? Pain? Or just apathetic? Perhaps she had no feelings at all......

Do we need a male Oprah?

I was listening to my sports talk radio guy, Colin Cowherd, who took it upon himself to be the male Oprah - to give several pointers to young guys who need help. His essential definition of a young guy who needs help is a dude in his twenties with a neck tatoo. So, he dished out various bits of hillarious advice for young guys, all of which were right on....well, except one suggestion: Leave the jersey at home. He was talking about the sports jerseys that guys wear around. This was the only point on which he was way off because I'm tellin' ya' I know how to rock the sports jerseys - when I wear the jerseys of my favorite sports teams and players the women flock, they can't get enough of it!.....but I digress....

Here's the question for all of you women out there (and I guess guys can answer too): Do the young men in American society and culture need a male Oprah?

$tarbucks

Interesting post by Doug on coffee, culture, and Starbucks:
http://theconstructivecurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2007/03/quiet-passing-of-kurios-coffee.html

Podcasting the Stoic

Here is a short and fun podcast on the Stoic philosopher Seneca. It is narrated by Brian Johnson. He makes some interesting commentary. The comments he makes kind of reminds me of Tony Reali from the ESPN show, Around the Horn. Here's the link if you are interested:
http://www.learnoutloud.com/podcasts/Seneca.mp3

Final Four Piks

Going into this weekend's Great Eight round of games I am pleased to announce that all of my final four picks are still alive and well:

Georgetown
Memphis
Kansas
Florida

I really, really, really want to see Florida lose. So if they go down tomorrow and don't make it to the Final Four I will be happy. If they go to the Final Four and lose to Kansas then that would be, well, that would be fantastic.

Marriage Proposals Gone Wild

I ran across a hillarious blog on marriage proposals gone wrong at Kruse Kronicle:
http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/2007/03/sports_highligh.html

It seems as though there is a website dedicated to the subject:
http://proposalsgonewrong.com/

Some of these are brutal....I copied and pasted one that is particularly painful! The guy gets turned down even after writing her a song! Ouch!!

Did God plan evil?

What did God do sans time?

Why do we say "sans" time? Because to say "before" time implies that there was time before time. So, we say "sans" time to try to be a bit more accurate, although it is difficult for our minds not to think in terms of a linear time frame.

What did God sit around thinking about? What went through his mind? What was God kicking around in his thoughts? Did things actually "go through" God's mind? Probably not, since when we think we think one thought after the other after the other after the other, etc. So, we think in time and through time. We require moments to build arguments. But, of course, if God is existing "sans" time, then he wasn't really "kicking" anything around....But we'll go with it just for sake of an interesting discussion...

We know that God was planning what he was going to do with all of creation. He was getting ready to create something. According to Scripture the plan of salvation was a part of this creation. Of course, this gets sticky because if God is planning to save then he must have also planned for a failure from which to save us from. We know from a few thousand or so years of history that this failure has to do with the moral condition: Evil exists in the world. So, the reasonable conclusion is that God was planning evil sans time.

Did God have to plan evil? Or is evil a necessary aspect of a finite creation?

One solution to this is to say that God didn't "create" evil, rather he granted human kind free will. Humanity used their free will for evil and consequently we've got bad things to deal with.

Fair enough. I respect that position, but I don't agree with it. I'll spare you the reasons.

Let's take another route to answering our question. What if good and evil are not really two separate entities? For some us this might sound absurd at first thought. In western philosophy and thinking we draw sharp dichotomies and make distinctions. Good is the opposite of evil. Evil is the opposite of good. Something is either good or it is evil. It cannot be both. Classical western logic systems usually have some basic and fundamental laws: the Law of Non-Contradiction, Law of the Excluded Middle, etc. Something cannot be both A and non-A. We generally apply the same reasoning rule of thumb to morality: Either good or evil.

What if there is a closer connection between the two? That good cannot exist without evil or that evil cannot exist without good. That they are co-dependent in some sense.

How does good take on meaning without evil? And how does evil take on meaning without good. They feed off of each other. Those who feel most strongly about fighting evil are usually those who feel most strongly about the good. If you experience evil in a profound way you will typically have a more profound appreciation for the good. In this sense they certainly compliment each other, while simultaneously oppossing each other.

So, if God is to plan good he also simultaneously plans evil. To instantiate a world with morality necessitates the potential for both good and evil as it will occur in space-time.

This is not really an apologetic....well, maybe it is to some extent...but primarily I am interested in exploring the nature of good and evil and whether there is a closer connection than previously thought.

Bad Boys of Philosophy

This is a humorous look at the weird and quirky ways of a few famous philosophers:
http://www.neatorama.com/2007/03/16/9-bad-boys-of-philosophy/

You've got to feel bad for Peter Abelard, don't you??? Especially if you're a guy - ouch....

Are you sick?

It's kind of that time of year where people get sick.

My roommate was moping around the house this weekend, wasting his life away sleeping and wallowing in self-pity because he had somekind of a virus. Meanwhile, I'm up and running - getting stuff done, enjoying the basketball games, getting out and enjoying life, yada, yada....And all of this while I'm running on two nights last week of only a couple hours of sleep. I mean, there were two nights I just couldn't sleep and I got maybe 2 or 3 hours each night.

So, here I am working overtime on the weekend and moving through life, while my pitiful roommate is laying around fighting off a virus.

Yesterday evening he comes home with bags full of fruits. He never eats healthy fruits. But all of a sudden a grocery bag full of good fruits??? Yea, he's trying to be like me. I eat like a health nut: Fruits for breakfast and greens for lunch - almost everyday without fail. Any surprise why I don't get sick and I can run on less sleep? Not at all. But I take flack for it all the time! I even take flack from my pitiful roommate (when he isn't laying around fighting off viruses!). Everybody loves to take shots at the "health nuts" until they get sick and their health nut buddies are running around making it happen....sheeeeezzzzz.......give me a break!!!

Qohelet and Deconstruction

I am excited for this Friday's Evangelical Theological Society Midwest Regional Meeting. Unfortunately, for the second consecutive year in a row your's truly submitted a paper that was turned down for a reading.....Yes, I hear the violin music playing...and, yes, I will take cheese with my whine....In any case, I thought I would take a break from wallowing in self-pity (see my previous post on narcissism!) and post this year's failed submission for your thoughtful consideration.

http://erdman31.googlepages.com/Qohelet-Hebel-Decontruction.pdf

This paper is only the beginning of my research on Qohelet (the book of Ecclesiastes). I am fascinated by it because I see many themes which contemporary philosophy is exploring, or should explore as far as I am concerned. One of these themes is deconstruction. In this paper I make an attempt to show that Qohelet is deconstructing the human experience. I do that by exegesis of the key word hebel (the "b" is pronounced more like a "v" in Hebrew, and if you really want to sound Semitic you will might sound the "h" with a gutteral!) and showing that at bottom hebel is functioning as a destabilizing device.

There is by no means a consensus on the study of hebel, or even on anything related to Qohelet for that matter. So, in this current paper I take a look at Douglas Miller's recent work and pit it against Michael Fox's highly respected studies. The result is a tension on interpreting hebel. Hebel, as I mentioned, is the key word in Qohelet's thought and is sometimes translated as "meaningless" or "vanity", etc. It occurs nearly forty times and has produced varying interpretations. Fox, on the one hand, wants us to preserve a common meaning to hebel, while Miller leans more towards seeing diversity to the term (but also wants us to see hebel as a unifying symbol). This is an important and key philosophical contrast: Is there one thing that is true of all experiences in this world, or is Qohelet leveling different critiques as he examines different aspects of the human condition.

I believe I have an interesting solution to this tension, and I find it by interpreting hebel as a destabilizing device that is used in a deconstruction of the human experience.

Enjoy and don't forget to leave a comment.

Blink

How ironic. If we look at the vast spectrum of human history we are nothing. If we look at the vast spectrum of eternity we are even less.

And at each moment we are merely one amongst 6 billion or so.

What is man that you are mindful of him?

Yet each moment contains within it such an incredible amount of potential. We are influencing eternity with each blink of the eye.

How ironic. Each moment so full of meaning and potential. And yet each moment is at the same time so meaningless. To be a person of perpective forces us to bounce back and forth between these two poles.

Selection Sunday

March Madness, baby!

Here is a link to the brackets:
http://cbs.sportsline.com/collegebasketball/mayhem/brackets/viewable_men

I have a Yahoo group that I have been running for a few years where you can go head to head with me and a few others. If you want to fill out some brackets and be a part of my elite bracket group just drop me an email (erdman31@gmail.com) and I will send an invite to your email address. (No money involved - so it is safe for you if you are a compulsive gambler, like my friend Danny.)