Diary

The Absolute is That Which Has No Relation: Thoughts on Religious and Ontological Pluralism

“[Universalism]…is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue. For more than a generation we have followed scholars and sages down the rabbit hole into a fantasy world in which all gods are one. This wishful thinking is motivated in part by an understandable rejection of the exclusivist missionary view that only you…

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The Paradox of The Poison Chalice

I listened to a great podcast with Peter Cave recently that dealt with philosophical paradoxes. A paradox, for those who don’t know, is a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd, but in reality expresses a possible truth. One example that they used in the cast caught my attention. It is called the Paradox…

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Trans-unification – Toward Multiplicity

“When the “One” becomes invisible again, this is really not about the loss of monism, but of dualism. The disappearance of dualism is really a condition for the liberation of multitude. Gilles Deleuze has the formula that as soon as dualism vanishes “monism is pluralism.” The same strategy, I think, appears in Loomer’s theopoetic language…

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Abolishing the Distinction Between Bosses and Employees

“The fact that the state regulates private capitalist enterprises and operates state capitalist enterprises does not reduce the capitalist structure of an economy. So long as employers, private or state, hire laborers to produce commodities and generate profits that the employers “exclusively” receive, the economy has a capitalist structure. So long as it is exclusively…

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Disgust, Bodily Fluids, and Theology

“Tertullian, an early Christian theologian, summed up what he regarded as the putrid nature of women’s bodies when he described women as a “temple built over a sewer.” Tertullian was thoroughly familiar with Greek philosophy, though he mostly rejected their views on metaphysics. But in regard to women, the Aristotelian strain of misogyny seeps through….

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The Torah calls us an ‘Am’

“We don’t really fit the categories of the West, and I’m ok with that. The Torah calls us an ‘Am,’ which loosely translates ‘a people,’ but it’s a Hebrew term, it has its own valence. So, Judaism is a nexus of history, religion, peoplehood, culture, shared destiny…I think in some ways, ethnicity rose  again in…

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Christmas Reflection: There Is No Paradox

God did not cram Godself into a human body the way Ralphie crammed himself into that pink bunny suit. Christmas is not my favorite holiday. As a kid it certainly used to be, obviously, because presents…but as I’ve aged, getting gifts has become less of thing to look forward to (mainly because the only things…

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