Signs of Intellect in Scripture

There are stages of progress to understanding scripture. The goal after reading Augustine’s essay is to know a method to approaching religious texts in order to eventually have complete understanding. When reading, you should be equipped with the ‘truth’ as to avoid prejudices of thought. Later on he says that it is not necessary to understand, but to read so as to commit them to memory “or at least make them not totally unfamiliar.” Augustine approaches religious text translation with an intellectual standpoint. The memorizing of the works functions as a foundation over which, with a greater intellectual capacity, the more truth is able to be uncovered.

He continues to write about translation. There is meaning to every translation, as long as a closer wording is sought. However, the comparison of translations, which have kept more closely to the words, is often not without its value in explaining a passage. Divine determination to Augustine was integral to the translation of texts, as if some parts were translated purposefully. Any scrap of evidence to insert or use to translate the word of God is useful and not without its place to be heard.

A few things that Augustine writes about are the music in the psalms are signs. Signs concern the ears, eyes, and mouth. There is a religious sense to the formation of instruments. The psalm combines multiple signs: instrument signs, such as indications of instrument lead, words of the air are signs that are spoken, and those words which are printed and read, presented to the eyes. A trumpet, a flute, and a lyre generally produce not a just a pleasant sound but one that is also significant. The forms of letters, the signs of words can signify experiences of the scripture.

Translation of the Bible with Ultraviolence

Pavlov's goD

When we were trying to figure out a metaphor for God in class, we came up with a Don because they establish rules, protect those who follow the rules, and deal judgment to those who do not follow the rules. A previous correlation to this system of action and response according to right, good, or even customary practices was a vending machine. When you enter the correct amount of money and press the corresponding buttons the predicted product is produced. What is not perceived as good does not “compute” with the God machine. Error! Yet, the followers can also sense the error. The product from the vending machine is worth the selected monetary value paid as it is worth it to follow God’s rules in order to achieve a good place in his judgment (and to avoid cherubic harm). In many ways, both of these metaphors are the same. Still, a few questions remain about why it is up to God to decide what is right or wrong and whether humans already knew, before the creation of the Ten Commandments, what would happen if they committed a wrong. Do people need God’s guidance or can they function morally on their own?

If you take a moment to imagine a time when humans exist without God, the place imagined is probably populated with people that behave more like animals. In order to answer why humans would follow rules of a God becomes established with the formation of societies made up of people following similar values. However, the way that people are made, biologically, also determines how and why they structure their society. Religiously speaking, people did not evolve from animals. The order of creation is that God rules over humans, humans rule over animals, and animals were created by God for humans. The behaviorist psychologist Ivan Pavlov presented an example of how animals correlate stimulus to predicted reward. He developed a theory of conditioned reflex where a sounded bell signaled the dog to salivate because the sound was associated to food. In religion, people have a ‘reflex’ known as the Book of Psalms that contains accounts of God’s judgments. The order of judgments is made according to certain laws that are accounted in the Psalm, but are only reactionary to the Commandments … what is laid out by God. After reading this book they made more aware of the consequences of immoral behavior.

Quotation taken from Pavov’s Conditioned Reflexes: An Investgation of the Psysiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex lecture I in 1927.

“As another example of a reflex which is very much neglected we may refer to what may be called the investigatory reflex. I call it the "What-is-it?" reflex. It is this reflex which brings about the immediate response in man and animals to the slightest changes in the world around them, so that they immediately orientate their appropriate receptor organ in accordance with the perceptible quality in the agent bringing about the change, making full investigation of it. The biological significance of this reflex is obvious. If the animal were not provided with such a reflex its life would hang at every moment by a thread. In man this reflex has been greatly developed with far-reaching results, being represented in its highest form by inquisitiveness -- the parent of that scientific method through which we may hope one day to come to a true orientation in knowledge of the world around us.”

The feelings and responses in reaction to sinning are innate. Translating Pavlov in the quotation above, people would be able to anticipate what will happen when we sin biologically by the way our brain is structured. By having this investigatory reflex there is less surprise to those who know “what’s coming to them” if they sin. The society and our innate biological reflexes may determine answers to those questions.

God in the Weather

Psalm 18 is a dramatization of a near-death experience. There seems to be evidence of God intervening in battle in verse 11. David (the supposed narrator) is saved by a fiery God that comes down and fights by his side, “He mounted a cherub and flew, and he soared on the wings of the wind.” In the following verse the previous statement is obscured, “He set darkness His hiding-place round him.” David does not actually see God, but believes that God is present in the powerful signs of weather: thunder, strong wind, and dark clouds. God becomes represented by power. If David thought that the thunder was a sign that God was there, then there was no need to fear the storm … the enemies of David were enemies of God and would be the only ones in fear. Another way to describe the scene is David giving a raspberry and taunting his enemies with a “nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah.”

The psalm is sectioned into three parts. The first part is a scene where God is personified through weather, second is a thanksgiving prayer away from the battlefield, and third is a scene where God is “in” David while fighting (verses 33 onward), imbuing him with a strength not seen. With the exception of verses 21-32, the psalm metaphorically describes God and his works. The underlying message is that God is a source of support to those who believe in his power and that he deserves thanksgiving, “my God, my rock where I shelter, my shield and the horn of my rescue.” The horn is a call to arms, but also a call to faith. The mystery brings trust. He created the world and can take you out just as easily. Better to be on his side.

Hebrew Pilgrims

There isn’t much difference between the two translations of the original Hebrew. Reading closely, reveals not much besides a few differences in word usage and division of verse lines. In a broad context, there is much that is lost in translation between languages, some which are not indicated in the written word. But, the conversion has a minor significance, dictating how followers worshiped and their historical and social motivations. However, nobody worships in the same way, even those of the same religion or those who read from the same book printing of the same era.

Since the Bay Psalm Book was written merely twenty years after colonization in North America after separation from England, Psalm II had personal significance as being compared to (as noted in verse 3) a representation of independence and rebellion. A change in the second line of verse 3 has a different tense than that of Alter’s Psalm translation. It is that the “cords bee from us thrown” rather than “let us fling away their bonds.” The pilgrims have successfully been freed of England’s bonds. The personal hint has been improvised and imbues a victorious aire to the translation. Perhaps the pilgrims thought that they were living their own Old Testament while establishing a new life on a new land. Perhaps they thought of themselves as the new ‘Hebrew’ people being messaged across a ocean by the help of the LORD – referencing back to Moses and the separation of the Red Sea to the Land of Israel.

Spiritual Memory

Inspired and hardly altered from Jesef Albers' Interaction of Color, chapter I, Color recollection -- visual memory

If one says "God" (the name of an deity)
and there are 50 people listening,
it can be expected that there will be 50 Gods in their minds.
And one can be sure that all these Gods will be very different.

Even when a certain religion is specified which all listeners have seen
innumerable times -- such as the God of the Christianity signs which is
the same God all over the country -- they will still think of
many different Gods.

Even if all the listeners have hundreds of Gods in front of them
from which to choose the Christianity God, they will again select
quite different Gods. And no one can be sure that he has found
the precise God image.

And even
if that powerful God Christianity sign with the perfect image
is actually shown so that everyone focuses on the same God,
each will receive the same projection on his retina,
but no one can be sure whether each has the same perception.

When we consider further the associations and reactions
which are experienced in connection with the entity and the name,
probably everyone will diverge again in many different directions.

What does this show?

First, it is hard, if not impossible, to remember distinct entities.
This underscores the important fact that the visual memory is very poor
in comparison with our spiritual memory. Often the latter is able
to repeat a vision seen only once or twice.

Second, the nomenclature of entity is most inadequate.
Though there are innumerable entities -- shades and tones --
in daily vocabulary, there are only about 30 entity names.

Plastic Jesus

Hollywood Jesus

When I went to China last summer I bought a metal Buddha figurine to put on my desk. There are others like it, but this one is mine. Religion in today’s modern society is becoming more of a commodity. The smiling Buddha is a symbol of Buddhism, but when I look at his copper grin I feel no more inclined to become Buddhist than any other religious sect. I am sure that this mentality is vastly different than years during the Lower or Upper Mississippian where the societies had very limited contacts with other cultures, therefore being influenced by less ideologies. Just walking down a street in Shanghai there were more ideas thrown at me than the Ho-Chunk ever experienced … perhaps … until colonists settled America and pressed westward.

Advertising floods our attentions and influences our thoughts in an extreme way. There are so many religions to choose: Which one would suite me? Which one is my friend a member of? Which one is ‘right?’

It is easy for individuals to become religious. We buy into religion, secure sacred places with money, and (most popularly) purchase experiences of religion. The big screen is a popular and wide-ranging medium for inducing religious conversions. Remember Passion of the Christ? The story-line is very blatantly scriptural, but with a subliminal message. Christian and Jewish beliefs are strengthened and a slight pressure for unreligious viewers to choose a religious side is promoted. The movie provides ‘evidence’ to favor one way of faithful thinking over another and to question what faith is “true.” People buy copies of Mel Gibson’s controversial film to show their friends and spread the word. You’ve probably seen it, even if you are an Atheist, to satisfy a burning curiosity and possibly to strengthen your belief that there is no God. Movies are just another way that religion is now in Hollywood and Jesus is a Star!

Chain of Being

To be considered a “system of symbols,” referenced in Geertz’s definition of religion, the effigy mounds of Wisconsin had to have establish “powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations.” The people of Ho-Chunk and surrounding regions built mounds of various types to successfully satisfy the requirement of developing a system of symbols. By representing an ‘Upperworld’ and ‘Lowerworld’ that was in turn spread and shared by communicating with different economies and cultures around effigy mound hotspots, a reoccurring set of three symbols become evident. The sky (thunderbird), earth (bear), and water (panther) establish a system of symbols that band foreign groups together and (more importantly) formulate, encapsulate, and strengthen meaning to the effigy mounds between cultures in an expanding environment.

The regional aspects of Wisconsin as ground symbols and how they change depending on the surrounding environment, brings on other religious meanings relating to symbol systems and the pervasive structure of intertwining societies. As effigy mounds travel inland from Lake Michigan, they change in order to be “harmonious” with the land. In the words of R. Clark Mallam, effigy mound ceremonialism represents ancient “ideology from the earth.” Between tribe interactions and a “chain-of-being” from the earth and sky gods to mystic men, a ‘map’ that surveys the land and cultures present in these lands is formed. I am sure that when constructing the mounds, the pure monumental size of earth moved and shaped in meaningful symbols provided importance, symbolic power, and wonder to its followers. Accompanying the largeness of an effigy mound is the long-lasting cycle of seasons that provides structure to religion coupled with the ability of the effigy mounds (being man-made) to endure lifetimes of seasonal changes. Which, at the time, seemed uniquely as a blessing and as something to idolize.

Thunderbird, Bear, and Water Spirits in Pocohontas

Into a Black Hole of Thought

When we agreed upon three elements of religion, art, literature, and (of course) religion, I came across a descriptive definition of prehistory cave art, in relation to paintings made closer to our time. Clement Greenberg, in his widely published essay "Modernist Painting" quoted in a paragraph, "The making of pictures has been governed, since pictures first began to be made, by all the norms I have mentioned. The Paleolithic painter or engraver could disregard the norm of the frame and treat the surface in both a literally and a virtually sculptural way because he made images rather than pictures, and worked on a support whose limits could be disregarded because (except in the case of small objects like a bone or horn) nature gave them to the artist in an unmanageable way. But the making of pictures, as against images in the flat, means the deliberate choice and creation of limits. This deliberateness is what Modernism harps on; that is, it spells out the fact that the limiting conditions of art has to be made altogether human limits." Religion has infinite possibilities that are as vast as the imagination. When the shaman approached art, the animals were conformed to a place on a wall, but became limitless (and perhaps immortal) when put in context of endless space of a dark underground universe.

One aspect of religion that we forgot to mention is the promise or prospect of the limitless: the ability to go beyond what other beliefs promise or allow access to, in an altered state of being (death, reincarnation, premonition). Some of the art of today tries to narrow the gap between art and religion by way of universality and connecting common innate thought. A connection between different faiths is the result of following a ritual that, in turn, benefits the community. Which brings to question the conflict between conflict between religions and importance of individual thought. If all current religions spawned from the same basic elements, why is there such diverse and controversial stances between present-day religions?

Science as a Religion