WLC: "You can't prove the negative"

[emjay]

I may be wrong, but from what I've gleaned from what you've said about this, both here and in the past (including what you've said in the past about treating the Bible as largely allegorical, far more that I ever did when I was a Christian)... it seems to me that you perhaps have a sort of 'fragmentary' approach to reading the Bible? Ie treating it more like a compendium of literature than a linear historical record... along with Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell (whatever exactly that is... I couldn't tell from a cursory read of the Swedenborg wiki, which looks very complicated, but guessing it's perhaps a work of literature like Dante's Divine Comedy?). I read Dante's Divine Comedy a long time ago and though I found it very interesting, provocative, and entralling, it was at the end of the day just very imaginative literature to me (I don't know if within Catholicism (which seems similar to your views, on account of Aquinas etc) it's meant to be taken as revelation, but it certainly wasn't within my Protestant upbringing). If that is your approach... ie more grounded in ideas and literature, than line by line analysis? Then I could at least understand where you're coming from a bit more, but at the same time could pretty much categorically say that that could never be me, and never was me when I was a Christian in the past (ie I grew up a literalist and a creationist), because, differences in beliefs aside, my mind just doesn't work like that; I am [over]analytical and reductionistic by nature, so I could never approach any of this based on vague ideas and impressions even if I wanted to.

Never say never, so I am told. Cultivating an appreciation for the arts in general and of oil painting in particular...that aquired sensibility and understanding gained from craftsmanship has taught me that not all truths can be represented with premises and propositions. They do not proceded step by step to a conclusion: but rather  tease and beguile with occational visions of transcendent clarity.

So no, I do not approach scripture like a science text book or pure historical records. If anything, those to me are modern heresies...born of severely limited  abilities to recognize truth in its many presentations.

Fair enough, thanks for sharing your perspective. Don't get me wrong, in many ways I admire your sort of perspective and wish I shared it more often... it seems for instance, far more raw and in the moment with regard to general experience as well as art, than what I usually achieve, despite my interest in Buddhism for instance, which has that sort of mindfulness as a key aspect. For instance if you were to be looking at a beautiful sunset, the second you say 'that's a beautiful sunset', that subtle act of detaching into a kind of analytical mode, to talk about or analyse it, means you're no longer truly in the moment with the underlying experience, and is a trap that many Buddhist monks have fell into, in one way or another, in their various anecdotes, and usually entails them getting a bollocking from the master basically amounting to them saying 'stfu and pay attention'... or perhaps more accurately 'stfu and let it be'

Likewise, I appreciate your (and Bel's) perspective on the value and experience of art and literature, transcendental or otherwise. Though by no means a connoisseur of art, and indeed pretty much a Philistine, I still still view art similar to you, at least in principle. Ie I think of it as hugely powerful and important in its ability to capture, combine, manipulate, and convey complex feelings, emotions, and perceptions, and something that with, as you say, craftsmanship, can become somewhat 'transcendental' in many different ways, such as multiple meanings such as with a pun, or multiple layers, such as how we/I have been describing reading Plato... like layers of an onion. And to that extent I agree with you that it at least represents information in new and emergent ways, that probably could not be captured any other way. Like they say, a picture paints a thousand words, but you might also arguably be able to say, with a well crafted poem, that a word creates a thousand... well many... pictures, so that's what I see as the general essence of art/poetry/literature; its ability, when carefully crafted, to trigger and manipulate our emotions and perceptions in different, and inventive, ways.

So back again to my own experience, like I said, I'm generally not as in-the-moment as I could be, defaulting more to that analytical mode that finds just as much, if not more joy, in questioning and addressing the hows more than the whats. So for instance to the limited extent that I sometimes want to create my own art/poetry, it generally comes from this experimental point of view, wanting to try and create these sorts of effects that I've talked about, generally very minimalist in nature, like for instance trying to figure out what's the bare minimum, or essence of an idea I want to try and capture. Or, I don't know about you but very occasionally I've managed to seemingly hold an emotion/state of mind still for a few seconds... a kind of timeless feeling... very elusive... and have often wondered if it might be possible to capture that sort of feeling/state in art or poetry somehow. It's similar to feelings I've felt in lucid dreams (which unfortunately I haven't had for a long time) where the level of 'will' to apply, to direct the dream, seems a very delicate balance; too much and the whole thing can dissipate very quickly, so in my experience, lucid dreaming is/was more about gentle nudging than forceful acts of will, and balancing that state of will felt kind of protracted/timeless. So basically, my interest when it comes to creating art, limited and sporadic as it is, is just as much as much in the what I want to achieve, as in the analysis or how to achieve it (ie experimentally mainly).