My faith healing
November 26th, 2011 1:59:57 pm pst by Sterling CamdenOn a Friday evening more than thirty years ago a group of ORU students gathered in Ben Williams’ dorm room for prayer. Such gatherings were not unusual on “Fellowship,” the name we gave to the orange wing of E.M. Roberts Hall’s 7th floor. Prayer gatherings were not unusual anywhere on the Oral Roberts University campus, for that matter — but what happened to me at this particular prayer session was indeed unusual.
I was born with Amblyopia, and had only blurry vision in my right eye. My parents took me to one of the best eye surgeons available, and I underwent surgery at age 3. I still remember the nurse putting the anesthetic mask over my mouth, and the bright lights and pungent odor of ethyl alcohol in the room right before they knocked me out. After the surgery, my right eye was kept shut until it healed. An old 8MM home movie shows my sister sitting beside me on the couch trying to wink like I could.
After my eye healed, I often had to wear a patch over the left eye to force me to use the right eye, and strengthen it. I hated that patch. It wasn’t a cool, black pirate patch with a rakish strap. No, it had all the charm of a big band-aid, with the same odor and stickiness. The feeling of it sticking to my face engendered a visceral loathing for sticky things that still bothers me.
My right eye did become strong enough to see clearly. But I still suffered from a strabismus, or misalignment, which prevented me from coordinating the pictures from both eyes into a three-dimensional composite. I quickly found that I could switch pictures at will, though, so I learned to compensate by rapidly switching the two pictures to eliminate illusions of flatness. However, I never used that technique to judge distance. Rather, I would observe the geometry of my two-dimensional image — for instance, how much floor was visible between me and the chair. That doesn’t work well for baseballs and other flying objects. My inability to catch and hit became a tiresome joke.
In the dorm room that night, Ben prayed for my eye, the other guys joining him. I opened my eyes, and I was looking out of both of them at the same time, but seeing one picture.
At first, I couldn’t believe it. “Uh, guys,” I said. “I can see out of both eyes!” They looked up at me, and they could see that my eyes were aligned. I could look into their eyes with both of mine, for the first time. Our prayer session ended with much thanksgiving, and generated quite a bit of excitement in our dorm and across the campus.
The next day when I awoke, I went to the mirror. My eyes were still aligned. I felt a sense of relief that it really was true.
Living with this new visual experience proved to be more difficult than I would have imagined. I was not used to a three-dimensional image, which was far more complex and imprecise (so it seemed to me) than a flat image. Reading was particularly hampered by the noise.
Months later, I began to notice that my eye would drift out of alignment again when I wasn’t thinking about it, and I would go back to seeing out of just one eye. But I could easily bring them back into alignment and stereoscopic vision if I thought about it. I didn’t tell my friends about this. They had been so edified by the event, that I didn’t want to bring them down at all by making it anything less than a complete healing. I realize now that I thereby did them (and me) a disservice.
I’ve found that I’m generally more comfortable seeing out of only one eye at a time. But I can still bring them together, with an effort. I do sometimes, just to remind myself what that’s like.
What actually happened to me on that night? I had never been able to coordinate my eyes before. We prayed about that, and then I could. Those are facts, as far as I’m concerned. But the causes are not so easily nailed down. It could be that my inability to align my eyes before was due simply to my strongly held belief that I couldn’t. Believing in a god who heals provided a “reasonable” (and highly emotional) basis for overcoming that mental hurdle. In the words of Jesus, “your faith has healed you.” That hypothesis aligns (excuse the pun) with my subsequent observations that visual coordination required an effort — an effort I didn’t even notice until the initial excitement wore off.
I’m not dogmatic, though. I’ve been through enough changes to know that how I view things today may seem ridiculously obsolete tomorrow. I don’t completely rule out the idea of a divine agent in this story, although in my current view of things that’s more of a choice of metaphor than a substantive difference.
At the time of this event, I called myself a Charismatic Christian. I believed that the Bible was the Word of God, and I studied it assiduously. I read up to thirty chapters a day in multiple translations. I majored in Biblical Literature, and studied Hebrew and Greek in order to be able to get at what the text “really” said. That’s how I found out several things. There is no “true” text. The Bible is highly fallible. Its writers didn’t think the way we do, and certainly not the way modern Christians do. The Bible is a human document that describes a human journey through an evolving mixture of religious beliefs. If there is truth behind it, it isn’t in the words themselves, despite the Hebrew penchant for confusing the two.
Thus, I now call myself a radical agnostic. Agnostic, to me, is different than Atheist in important ways. I’m not just a non-committal atheist. I don’t say “there is no god.” I think that question probably ends up being about definitions, which are after all metaphors (no matter how technically precise). Rather, I say, “I don’t know.” I prefix “radical” to that, because I don’t view this agnosis as a disability. Rather, I think it’s a key facility for remaining open to whatever knowledge and experience may come my way. It’s also a humble recognition that the three-pound meat computer in my head may not even be capable of the accurate representation of trivial things, let alone questions on the order of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
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I had a similar experience (including the same “cool off” effect starting about a month afterwards) with a different issue. Oddly enough, at that point in time, I had extraordinarily little faith or belief in God at all, in fact, it was the first time in my life that I ever prayed with honesty and from the heart, as opposed to doing it as a social nicety (like grace as family functions) or as a “I’ll never do this again if only you get me out of this jam” kind of deal. Just one of those things. For me, it was a critical moment in my life, because while I wasn’t looking for any signs, I did receive a confirmation of the possibility of something that fit the definition of a “god” of some sort.
J.Ja
Interesting, Justin. Sometimes I think prayer may be effective simply by putting the supplicant (or the person being prayed for) into a frame of mind that allows good things to happen. Sometimes, it may just be coincidence. Or perhaps there’s something else going on that we don’t yet understand. Of course, scientific studies on the efficacy of prayer have all failed to show any statistically significant benefit — but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any benefit, just that it hasn’t been observed.
Something that has helped me to understand why the science is very much so of the “failing to prove” category (impossible to prove, I think, that prayer is useless, though), is actually reading the Bible. As you know, while there *are* instances of large, externally verifiable miracles in it (things that others could actually observe, like the Flood, or the plague of frogs), the bulk of the miracles seem to be of the matter that you and I are discussing, things that can only be observed by the affected person. For example, in Exodus, God hardens the Pharaoh’s heart, the only people who knows what happened there is the Pharaoh himself, and even then he may well not be able to distinguish between his capricious free will and God’s influence. Likewise, neither you nor I can honestly or adequately distinguish between a genuine instance of faith healing and simply a rare trick of psychology and physiology, even when it happens to us personally. For example, I can tell you that when I experienced my… um… event… I had been running on 4 hours of sleep at best for about 5 months straight, was in a fairly deep depression, and was eating $3 worth of Wendy’s food a day. It’s easy for me to dismiss whatever happened as a mere trick of my body and mind just shutting down. But it still doesn’t explain the month that followed where I was immediately getting great sleep, felt better, ate properly, etc.
An EXCELLENT book, that I cannot recommend enough on this topic is V.A.L.I.S. by Phillip K. Dick.
J.Ja
The Wikipedia article on VALIS has some weird stuff that went on while he was writing it!
I just checked out the Wikipedia article. It’s actually rather inaccurate. While Horselover Fat is indeed PKD, it goes deeper than a literary device, PKD suffered a complete schizophrenic break during that period of time and actually saw himself as two distinct personalities, and it didn’t help that it was overlaid with some funky ancestral memory of someone from around 60 AD. Also, many of the events (such as PKD having something warn him about his son’s health, leading to the saving of the child’s life) are documented facts. The book is truly autobiographically based.
I first read it in college, my senior year, and it affected me greatly. At its base, it is a book about gnosticism, and it ties together a ton of different things to support the view that the creator God and the God that Jesus is a manifestation of are wholly separate beings. Many of the ideas crop up in “Snow Crash”, oddly enough. Once you read VALIS with the understanding that he actually lived through much of this, it is easy to understand why many of his books and short stories keep revolving around certain themes, never quite agreeing on the answers… they are snapshots of his journey to understand the things that he went through. The drugs didn’t help either, of course…
I just got a copy of his Exegesis, scholars spent ages piecing it together from all of these loose scraps of paper, I look forwards to reading it.
J.Ja
Fascinating. I’ll have to read more of his works. I’ve only read a few of his short stories.
What is it with prayer working that (eventually) leads us to abandon the belief the prayer was based on?
I have a very mundane version of the same story. Happened when I was 7 years old, and newly started at the Europa-school in Bruxelles, where the children of foreign civil servants went to school in their own native languages, but in the Belgian way.
I’ve always been a bit drifty, mentally speaking, and at one point I came to, finding myself completely alone in the classroom. The school yard was empty too, and the nightmarish quality of all this was a bit too much for me. So I prayed like I had never prayed before.
And lo and behold, a student had forgotten something and returned to the classroom. Turned out they all went to a different building to eat their packed lunches, a practice I’d never encountered at my old school.
So, somehow I realized that I could not come to terms with the implications. How does bad things happen, if there is an agency for ineffable change and revision of reality? Is it because the victims didn’t ask for help? Or did they ask the wrong way? Bad breath, perhaps? No.
I could not accept those possibilities, that would mean that God was a fickle bitch. I didn’t want to live at the mercy of that, and certainly didn’t want to reinforce that kind of behavior.
The other alternative was that there were limits to the power of the ”almighty”, which opened all sorts of possibilities for messed up-ness. I decided that God, as advertised, was a scam. A time of fretfulness followed, where I had issues with singing hymns and the like. Eventually I came to realize that the whole issue was moot. However it is, it is. Anything that is beyond my discovery is, well, beyond my discovery.
Eventually I read descartes’ proof of the existence and benevolence of God, and realized that it only succeeded in casting into doubt also what was within my discovery. That was the final straw. I decided to take full responsibility for my spiritual existence: the reality of the world was beyond my ken, but the decision to believe it to be true, at least, was mine. From there to agnosticism was a small step.
I simply limited my choice of belief to the things I found to best dispel my disbelief
Andreas -
When your faith is predicated on miracles, then it is really easy to need a regular stream of them to maintain faith. It’s interesting that Jesus performed miracles and asked that they be kept secret, not only to make sure that He wasn’t killed before the Crucifixion, but also for this reason. Jesus gets angry with the Jews for demanding proof in the form of miracles and signs (although, to their credit, simply being a descendant of David and preaching in a manner consistent with previous prophesies and Scripture is hardly enough reason to declare someone the “Son of God”). My *suspicion* is that the “those who have ears, let them hear, those who have eyes, let them see” (typically understood to mean that most folks won’t understand the parables) may be specific to something that would happen when Jesus preached, perhaps there’d be a change in voice or a fire in the eyes indicating the presence of the Holy Spirit, or something along those lines. I just thought of this now, but if that is indeed the proper meaning of this, it goes a long way in explaining why people were accepting Jesus as the Christ even without miracles (even though the apostles seem to struggle with it despite being around Jesus’ miracles week in a week out…).
“The other alternative was that there were limits to the power of the ”almighty”, which opened all sorts of possibilities for messed up-ness. I decided that God, as advertised, was a scam.”
This is the exact conclusion that I came to a long time ago as well. Reading through the Bible, while there are lots of obvious, big miracles, God seems to prefer to use others as agents, from angels to people. I guess it’s easier. Indeed, for the most part, “big miracles” seem to involve the direct, physical presence of God. The Jews had lots of miracles because they were carrying around the Ark of the Covenant, and later on, had it in their temple. God sent angels to supervise the whole Egypt/exodus deal. And so on. But without that direct physical presence, God seems to depend on basically whispering in people’s ears, or influencing their actions a bit. In a number of places, God seems to be either a bit oblivious to what’s going on (my favorite example is in the Garden, when He asks where Adam and Eve are, and appears to have to figure out that they ate the forbidden fruit), or He is perfectly happy to let certain things occur.
When I ask folks about this, the answer is invariably of a hand wavey, “God works in mysterious ways” variety, even from people who should know better. My conclusions are that 1) God is NOT “as advertised”, and that He does indeed have limitations and 2) God is playing by a set of rules that we have not been told, for reasons that are not hinted at, and possibly as part of a game far bigger than Him. For example, reading through the Old Testament, it is quite clear that blood contains some sort of magic properties that are quite powerful. The blood of mere animals is enough to bind God to the Israelites quite closely. The blood of Jesus is able to create a permanent covenant between God and anyone who chooses to accept it. What makes blood so powerful? Similarly, if God wants us to be with Him so badly, why does He make us so able to not be? Why does God want us to be with Him in the first place? God doesn’t seem to deny the existence of other gods, just demands primacy. If God created the world, how did people even come to know about those other gods? Why is that? Who are these other gods? What is their relationship with God? I kind of get the impression that there is some sort of war going on amongst these various gods, and that perhaps they require support from people, or souls, or something to provide the with power in this battle.
Something I came to understand a while ago, is that bad things do indeed happen to good people, and vice versa, and an awful lot of the time, human agency is involved. Does God make people abuse their children or start wars or ignore the hungry? While tragedy and calamity strike people every day… disease, natural disasters, and more… how much are those are God’s fault? If a boat that Jesus is in almost gets wrecked by a bad storm, then it certainly seems that natural disasters can occur without God’s direct intervention or knowledge. If that’s the case, why should I attribute the other “acts of nature” like disease to God? So yes, I definitely think, that if one were to take the position of a believe int he Judeo-Christian God, that thinking that His power is limited by design (He refuses to interfere for whatever reason) or not (He just can’t do it) is definitely justified.
Something I learned, which helped me a lot, is that just because “Christians” believe it doesn’t mean it’s in the Bible, and often, it’s directly CONTRARY to the Bible… compare Matthew 6 to most churches to see what I mean. There’s a lot of great reasons why pastors prefer to preach from Paul and not from the Gospels, it’s because they know in their heart of hearts that their churches are an abomination and a reinvention of the very things that Jesus condemned the Pharises for.
J.Ja
Wow, Justin, you touched on a lot of different things there. Here’s one key for me: the Bible doesn’t agree with itself. In fact, the religious ideas in the Bible evolved over an immense period of history (many of them go back to well before any of it was written down). The religion of the Hebrews seems to have emerged from Canaanite and/or Arabic traditions in which a god was the patron of a tribe or a city, and had various relations with the gods of others. In that context, Yahweh was a bad-ass anti-social control freak. His subsequent development into the universal god of justice, mercy, and love goes through many conflicting phases along the way. The Bible is the record of those phases. As I stated in my senior paper on this subject, though, the evolution of religion does not necessarily mean that God (if one actually exists) evolved, merely that our understanding has evolved. Thus, the Bible cannot be taken as the infallible description of God, but rather as the description of human experiences in that realm.
I over-simplified a bit. The “bad-ass anti-social control freak” version of Yahweh probably emerged with the prophetic movement to resist Canaanite influence — perhaps in the period of the Judges. It seems that before that time, Yahweh got along just fine with other Canaanite deities, especially Asherah. Break-up’s a bitch.
Half of them He slaughtered, but the other half, those He became – to death.
Like with the Flood-bringer versus the Ark-inspirer conflict we talked about earlier
Yes, it’s interesting to observe which parts of Canaanite religion became acceptable aspects of Yahweh, and which ones didn’t. Ba`al-Hadad riding on the clouds of thunder is pretty much quoted for Yahweh in Psalm 29 (in fact, it could be argued that “Ba`al” would fit the meter of that poem better than “Yahweh”, so perhaps it was originally a hymn to Ba’al). However the sexual aspects of the deity, which feature so prominently in Canaanite religion, have all been excised from the “official” (post-Deuteronomic) version of Yahweh.
Overturned tripod… at some point I remember thinking that someone has overturned the tripod: Before there was a Father and a Mother, producing a son. Afterwards there was a Father, producing a Son and a Daughter.
And hey, place the one motif on top of the other, and you get the seal of solomon – coincidence?
Who knows? We have little information about where that symbol came from, and nothing earlier than the Middle Ages.
I’ve seen that same evolution. Again, VALIS talks about this greatly. In it, there are two gods, a Yin and Yang of the same whole. One was sickly and diseased, that is the God of the Old Testament, who creates an imperfect world. The other God represents love and peace, and sent Jesus to the world to try to heal the world of the mess that the other God creates. When I first read this, it opened up a lot of avenues of thought for me.
I too view the Bible as exactly what you said. I think of it as a history book. “This is what God said…”, “this is what Moses did…” etc. Much of the Bible, we’d label as “hearsay” in a court of law. The Four Gospels, for example… the author was clearly not in the room, how does he know what was said to whom? Oral tradition? Best guess? The pat answer is, of course, “divine inspiration”. I just have never been able to swallow that all the way, because the human representatives of God are so obviously flawed… from the highest priests to the lowest layman… that I just can’t accept that there is a Bible-shaped infallibility sphere in human affairs. If God is able to guide the Catholic Church so perfectly that they selected the right manuscripts for inclusion in the Bible, why can’t He guide the Catholic Church to do the right thing with regards to priests molesting children? Why is He constantly going back and forth with the Israelites and Judeans regarding their faithlessness?
Mainstream Christian thought is FILLED with these kinds of baffling things. Evolution… do they honestly expect me to believe that science works well enough to cure polio and get a man to the moon, but the same science we’ve proven to be accurate with geological history with events we can verify is suddenly bogus when it comes to evolution? Is God or Satan really so sneaky that they construct this elaborate ruse known as “Science” just to test our faith?
And is Satan even “evil”? In the Old Testament, God and Satan collaborate. In Job, we see this quite clearly. Satan can’t even lift a finger against Job without God’s permission and grant of power. As such, can we truly view temptations as “evil”? I don’t. I see them for what they are, temptations, it’s on me to resist them. Even if the assumption is that God’s grace lets me resist them, then it is on me to be open to God’s grace. So why blame Satan on our shortcomings?
If the Bible is indeed the direct word of God, then it’s also part of God’s plan for it to be so vague. The whole thing binds me in knots, intellectually. Spiritually, it is my earnest belief that all you need to do is pray for guidance and direction, with an open mind and an open heart. If God is out there, cares, and can help you, then He should lead you to the right path.
Also, you may both want to check out Bah’ai. The more I learn about it, the more I like it. It (seems to… haven’t read the source materials yet) resolves these questions very nicely, by saying that God periodically sends manifestations to Earth who craft their message in an appropriate historical and cultural context. This explains why Jesus’ teachings are hard to understand, because the target audience is a Jew circa 0 CE living in the Israel area ruled by Romans, not a modern American. It also handles things like evolution quite nicely.
J.Ja
That scene in Job is pretty interesting. It reflects the Canaanite notion of the court of the gods, presided over by the chief god (El in the Canaanite, Yahweh here). The “satan” is literally “adversary” — so really just a lesser god who has something against Job. This whole book seems to come from Edomite tradition, and there’s a good case to be made for the worship of Yahweh having originated in Edom/Midian.
I have a lot of respect for the Baha’i. If someone wants a “spiritual” approach that accepts and encourages rationality, it would be hard to do better.
That’s about where I am as well. I have little complaint with the Bible itself, but I believe that there are gaping holes in it, and that traditional, mainstream Christianity tries to fill these holes with pure nonsense. I like that Baha’i fills these holes sensibly, and in a way that creates a message that I can get behind, one of universal tolerance. Also, the Baha’is that I have met have an obvious peace with themselves and the world that even when I find it in members of other religions (other than Buddhists), it usually feels forced or even outright faked. Back to, “if it works for you…”, it seems to be working for them extraordinarily well. I’ve been holding off on visiting them to read the source material, but honestly, I’m not sure why I’m being so cautious… probably because some part of me feels that it is some sort of betrayal to the Bible to check out other things. That’s something that Christians have successfully taken from the Bible, sadly, this oppression against daring to think differently. Of course, it’s all from Pauline epistles; Jesus has the whole “fig tree” analogy which is fine, but it’s the Pauline epistles that make you feel dirty just for seeing a Koran on a bookshelf…
J.Ja
Even Paul isn’t consistent on that score. The whole business of admitting Gentiles was pretty radical in his day, and he really sought to expand Christianity to embrace all the ideas that he considered true from other religions — he just did so incompletely. And then his writings got canonized.
James, about postmiracular hangovers, I think you’re on to something.
Somewhere Jesus says something like “As it was in the beginning, so shall it no longer be”, I take that to be a clause to preclude further miracles (and further prophets, perhaps, but the next supposed Christian prophet came along under a hundred years later, with Revelations). It also handily divorces the “new yahweh” from the old, there being no trace of the latter in the postmythological times that follow.
Sorry, I mean Justin.
Brainfart. Must be something I read
LOL, that actually happens to me all the time.
J.Ja
I’m not recalling the passage to which you allude. Perhaps something like Matthew 12:38-40?
You know… I have no idea. I was completely certain there was a statement like that, but I can’t seem to find any references to it.
As I recall it, it went pretty much like I wrote it, except in Danish.
Maybe I’ve dreamt it? Hey! Divine inspiration! Time to start a new religion :p
Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it? I’m having major deja vu about this whole interchange.
Indeed, Andreas. If there is a God, he must have a sick sense of humor.
Thanks for relating your experience. I wonder how many people have had similar experiences, but kept it to themselves and quietly went along with the forms of religion.
Either that, or it is like in the gnostic cathar beliefs, that the God of this world, of miracles, of creation, of favor and of condemnation, is an imperfect thing, a childish demiurge. And that the God that is not of this world, of love, of hope, of compassion and of salvation, is also anathema to power, and cannot act upon the matter of this world – at all – but can only reach out to the parts of us that are like it… like antennae of love, letting us grow more attuned to that which is not of this world, and less attuned to the hubbub of the demonic Creator… but that’s heretical of course, like Cathar has grown to be synonymous with in many languages.
The problem with limited deities is that they become mere amplifications of humanity. The problem with omnipotent, omniscient deity is that it must be cleansed of all anthropomorphism. Or at least, the anthropic elements must be limited to their proper insignificance.
From a practical perspective, I lean more towards Taoism than any other religion/philosophy — precisely because it eschews definitions. I’m not even certain that Tao is true — it could also be merely a human abstraction, even though we define it as beyond human definition. By that, it seems to hover between being and not being. Nevertheless, I find the concept useful.
The Tao you know to be true, is not the True Tao
True. D’oh!
“I’m not even certain that Tao is true — it could also be merely a human abstraction, even though we define it as beyond human definition. By that, it seems to hover between being and not being. Nevertheless, I find the concept useful.”
This is something that I find extraordinarily important. It doesn’t matter if you believe what I believe. What matters is that *it works for you*. And by that, I don’t mean it in this wishy-washy, New Age, “craft your own spirituality” or “I’m spiritual, not religious” sense of, “I heard something that sounds vaguely neat and I agree with it”, but in a, “I’m putting honest effort in, trying to learn and grow and mature, and what I believe now is merely a snapshot in time of my continued spiritual evolution” way. It has GOT to work for you, to be a better person. I could not care less if someone leads youth groups and goes to church every Sunday if they have a torrid gambling problem *and refuse to try to change it*. All spiritual systems that I’ve seen have the same fundamental moral teachings, based on respect and love for each other and ourselves. C.S. Lewis talks about this, and calls it the “Tao” which makes sense to me. Some have legalisms in them (like Judaism) that people can use to justify restricting their love and respect to members of their own faith. If someone’s beliefs and actions do not lead them to try their best to practice these universally good and right principles, then clearly they are being failed either by themselves or by what they are doing.
J.Ja
It seems to me that C. S. Lewis is reappropriating the term “Tao” when applying it to any specific moral principle. That’s OK for his purposes, but should not be confused with its usage in Tao Te Ching.
I agree with you that pragmatism is about all we can rely upon. Even the fundamentalist’s decision to believe the Bible literally is in theory a pragmatic one: s/he believes that such a belief will be the best thing they can do for themselves.
Pragmatism, of course, presumes that I am able to reasonably assess the benefit of each of my options. That may not be the case, yet I trust myself better than anyone else.
I actually thing Lewis uses it correctly, having read the Tao Te Ching, but not the original Lewis material (just excerpts). My guess (it’s been a while since I read the Lewis stuff or the Tao Te Ching), is that Lewis feels that certain right living that is prescribed across the board by all belief systems is part of maintaining the Tao, or perhaps that the Tao itself, the harmony, leads to that kind of right living. It’s an interesting idea.
J.Ja
The way I read Tao Te Ching, the Tao can’t be nailed down to any prescription. So perhaps following the Tao might lead to these behavioral outcomes, but their consistency across cultures (and situations) would be coincidental.
The way I see the Tao Te Ching, using the Road image inherent in the word Tao, the one “following the road” is really standing in the trackless wilderness, trying to find the road. Except that “trying” and “find” are both red herrings. Actually it’s being there in the trackless, but walking on a road that is actually nowhere.
It’s a bit like Borges’ Aleph; it’s there, and it’s not there.
I had not read Borges before, but I found a translation here: http://www.phinnweb.org/links/literature/borges/aleph.html
Thanks for that.
It’s a funny potpourri, isn’t it? Banal and sublime, all mixed up.
Also in the literal translation, a pot of rot, considering the south american fascination with decay it exudes.
The image of the aleph is very powerful, it successfully boggles the mind, in ways that seem pregnant with revelation.
Trying to see it in the minds eye is futile, but imagining having seen it is not. A bit like imagining having heard a trace of the Tao, it can inspire towards a state of mind that is less far from the road – not wanting to use the word “closer”.
Hi. I am the former ORU student who prayed with Chip Camden the night his eyes came into alignment in my dorm room. What an incredible thing that was! I was not aware of the responses you all were making on this site in response to Chip’s original post about his “Faith Healing.” I found it just recently. I admit that I have not read every word you all have entered, but I have skimmed parts.
This recent interaction with Chip and this discussion about his “healing” have gotten me more interested in what people who do not believe the Bible do believe. I am a pastor, United Methodist, so I have been speaking about the coming of Jesus into the world because it is the Christmas season.
Planning to speak on what has been said about Jesus from various sources this coming Sunday, which will be Christmas Day, I ran across an interesting quote attributed to H. G. Wells.
“I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.” Whether or not Wells said that, it is arguably true.
The folks who put no faith in the reliability of the New Testament say that the early church made it up. They don’t know that Jesus even existed, and if He did, He surely did not say and do all those wonderful things attributed to Him.
Interesting. A cadre of uneducated, poor, nameless people in Judea made up a personality, and they did such a smashing great job with it, that their made up personality has affected human history more than any actual human being throughout human history. If that is what happened, then we might want to reconsider the possibility of miracles, because that would have been one.
Just thought I would add that thought into the mix. God bless and Merry Christmas!