Jeff Swann on Nostr: There are lots of people who have devoted their lives to acting out Shakespeare's ...

There are lots of people who have devoted their lives to acting out Shakespeare's plays & they are just as clueless when it comes to 16th century agrarian puns & humor as everyone else.

The meanings of words shift over time. Things are lost bit by bit. And there are natural forces from the top down & bottom up that want the meanings distorted. Kings don't want average people to challenge them, & average people don't want the responsibility of having to challenge kings. The death of a language alone would be more than enough to lose a great deal of any message. The clues to uncovering things are there, but none of it is straight forward as far as I can tell.

For example, the word for the Christian study of sin is hamartiology, which points toward the real meaning of sin being "to miss the mark," which would explain why we are born "in the land of sin" because aim is not innate, it is something we have to develop. But most people attach all sorts of shame & guilt to the concept of sin & they act as though people must ask to be forgiven just for being alive.

I think the Bible actually explains in multiple places that everything will be misinterpreted. One of those places IMO is the story of the valley of dried bones. Ezkiel goes into the valley, talks to the bones, & God breathes life back into them.

There is a modern story about an experiment done on a bunch of monkeys. They were all placed in a room with a bunch of bananas on top of a ladder. Whenever one monkey tries to climb up to the bananas all monkeys get sprayed with cold water. They quickly decide that climbing the ladder is off limits. Monkeys get rotated out of the room one at a time & the new monkey gets beat up by the others when he tries to climb for the bananas. Eventually none of the monkeys has ever been sprayed, but they all still beat anyone up if they try to climb. This is the socially perpetuated bones of a behavior that once made sense but is now disconnected from reality.

I think there are a lot of things in churches that are very much like this. People repeat phrases & sayings without any real ability to convey what they actually mean. They pretend to have passion because they know they are supposed to have it, but when covid comes around few if any actually stand up for their right to hold church. All that "passion" seems to be completely empty IMO. The treatment of sex has become a wildly unhealthy anorexic sort of denial of any desire being natural at all.

I think, whatever the spiritual nature of God (which I think is basically impossible to determine with any certainty), the world around us, REALITY itself, is God's body. In the same way that a map can never contain all the information in a landscape –& only the landscape itself can contain info about every changing grain of sand– for God to be all knowing God must be reality itself. So disconnection from reality is disconnection from God. Delusion is what traps people in hell. Satan is the most deluded or most separated because he believed he was God. It seems that people like Gates or Soros or Scwab suffer from similar delusions & similarly spread hell in their wake.