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Today is the National Day of Reason, so I'm celebrating by sharing these logic cookies that I made last night. They include a variety of symbols from the fields of symbolic logic, set theory, boolean algebra, algebraic logic, and other fields. (and I had to throw in Gottfried Leibniz's integral symbol and Leonhard Euler's summation Sigma!)
Thanksgiving went rather well... I took care of the food and got a little bit of rest before venturing out at 3:30 for a knife block set and 3-pack of 4gb SD cards. I will say I felt sick much of the day yesterday, but at least everyone said the menu turned out well--better than the photos I tried to take.
Instead, I am uploading a photo in honor of those who have finals coming up. My brother was stuck at the kitchen table with his energy drinks and pencils in preparation for his logic exam. Ah, I remember those days.
Today is the National Day of Reason, so I'm celebrating by sharing these logic cookies that I made last night. They include a variety of symbols from the fields of symbolic logic, set theory, boolean algebra, algebraic logic, and other fields. (and I had to throw in Gottfried Leibniz's integral symbol and Leonhard Euler's summation Sigma!)
Studio shoot with CopperClock Bellydance: mischievous fusion dancers Letty Limbach and Sarah Kate Moore.
Exoskeleton Cabaret, '57 Biscayne, Seattle, WA. December 2011.
Costumes, hair, and makeup by Letty Limbach.
Photography by Libby Bulloff.
All rights reserved.
I stepped up on the platform
The man gave me the news
He said, you must be joking son
Where did you get those shoes?
Where did you get those shoes?
Well, Ive seen em on the tv, the movie show
They say the times are changing but I just dont know
These things are gone forever
Over a long time ago, oh yeah
Steely Dan Pretzel Logic
(one of the best recordings evah!)
Window shopping in L5P with The BillyLlama
Today is the National Day of Reason, so I'm celebrating by sharing these logic cookies that I made last night. They include a variety of symbols from the fields of symbolic logic, set theory, boolean algebra, algebraic logic, and other fields. (and I had to throw in Gottfried Leibniz's integral symbol and Leonhard Euler's summation Sigma!)
I don't know how I ever lost this. From last October, it should have gone up with poor little melatonin.
Context Provocation Mythogram (Part 1 on Lost by David Shrigley) (part 2 on The Messenger - by Bill Viola)
I had seen the grey and white pigeon with black bits, on a number of occasions. It seemed to have a habit of standing in the gutter at Gorbals Cross, even in the pouring rain. Why it seemed indifferent to the wet, when everyone else in Glasgow was running for shelter, I could only wonder at. Then I saw this notice Sellotaped to a tree in a park. It had an intriguing strangeness about it, so I called the telephone number, but it was unobtainable. There was a cold wind blowing when I returned to the park, but it brought with it a faint aroma of baking bread. I moved in close to the advertisement, to try and understand its logic, but suddenly a colder gust tore the scrap of paper from the tree, and as I watched, it soared away and fluttered in a huge grey Glasgow sky.
What was the significance of the advertisement? Glasgow must have a million pigeons, all of them grey and white with black bits, so why would anyone need to advertise for one that's 'lost', and then by the same token imply that they didn't want to find it anyway? I began to suspect that there never had been a pigeon, and that something quite different was lost. But how do you find what's lost, when you don't know what you're looking for?
There does seem to be a pigeon living, so to speak, in the visual language of the notice. It's an ideal, not a physical pigeon. A kind of word pigeon, which seems to be hinted at by the addition of the letter 'd' to the word pigeon, suggesting a creature hybridised from two words:
pigeon: a bird with a heavy body and short legs, sometimes trained to carry messages.
pidgin: language, not a mother tongue, made up of elements of two or more other languages.
Is what is sought a normal sized, mangy, grey white and black, nameless bird, with short legs and a heavy body? Is it sometimes trained to carry messages in a language made up of elements of two or more of the languages? This is not so confusing, because any text carries at least two themes. Some are read in the words, and the others can be read between the lines. By doing this, and accepting that there is only language, we can try to understand the difference between this ideal pigeon and a pigeon-shaped physical thing.
Supposing, for the sake of argument, that there are such things as pigeons, (and we can't tell from the advert that there are), we could make an inventory of things we think we know about pigeons. We could then say, that this is an inventory of assumptions that are implied by, and therefore used by the advert to kindle the ideal pigeon. They lie as it were, between the lines of the advert, but they affect the language it uses, and the way it looks.
Of all we think we know about physical pigeons, one important difference is that they live and die in a city of cliffs and ledges. They don't experience the city they shit on, and fly in, as the buildings of an urban social system. We experience their behaviour as a sequence of differences, and when we think we understand these differences, we make words for their different ways of behaving. Through language, pigeons are absorbed into the structure of the city; but they aren't aware of being absorbed into a world of words. They experience the city as pure spatial difference, and they don't need their language to indicate objects.
This is where the two languages of the advert seemed to conflict. Language for us is the means by which we try to organise the world, but between the lines, we see that language for a pigeon is not that at all. We could call this conflict 'poetry', and leave it at that; but that might divert us into art, and away from the city. If we are to find and read its lost message, we should really face head on, the dangers that the advert imposes on logic.
A pigeon's life is the defence of its pigeon-hood. Everything a pigeon does, is aimed towards its survival until that situation is impossible. Even its call. We hear a pigeon making a cooing sound that differentiates it from the other things in our frame of reference, and we say that one of the reasons that this thing is a pigeon is because it is cooing. But cooing is not metaphorical language, made up from various subtly different sounds that represent things like the eggs and nest. Although there are certain modulations of cooing, these are not differentiated from each other by their need to function in a language as a sign for something. Cooing is part of the sexual posturing of a pigeon, and because of this, cooing is the profound defence of its own pigeon-hood. As far as we can determine, a pigeon is absolutely its own most cooing thing - for itself and only for itself.
A pigeon is essentially an 'am cooing' thing, not a self-conscious 'I am cooing'. Cooing is pigeon; but that 'is', as an implication of presence, is only as far as we can say it with words, because pigeons aren't inside something called presence. And because pigeons have no need to represent themselves to themselves, they have not evolved a language that can elevate the self, that a pigeon could be conscious of, to the status of the genetically infinite.
Our consciousness of time as a linear unfolding of 'nows', centred on the present, supports a common language structure that is also linear. We talk in time, and we hear ourselves speaking at this present moment. Our language is made of words that are repeatable ideal values, derived from ideas and from things like pigeons. We hold these things ready for use, and at any time, we can represent them, so to speak, almost as if they are physically here. But to be able to communicate in this way, we need to suppress in a quite unethical way, that physicality of things, the unity of which is the very idea of pure spatiality, that profound exterior difference between any one present moment and the next, that would compromise and confuse the linear logic of language. We must suppress the physicality of things, or we wouldn't be able to speak, for living in the pure breadth of unlimited relativity. But the physical nature of pigeon shit is never experienced through discourse. The sanctity of our consciousness of pigeons is seldom contaminated by the abject orifice.
This necessary degree of colloquial insulation from the physical is reflected in our practical behaviour. We have a manual dexterity that enables us to arrange materials, and experience them as such. This is because our internal time consciousness predisposes these skills and materials to being for the sake of some future arrangement, and for some progress towards a better situation. We call this technical expertise, technē, which was for the Greeks, crucially, a practical experience gained from encountering the differences of the physical world, which they were part of.
This view from within the physical world was manifest in their art and architecture, and the Greek body and mind was no doubt fused to the planet. But this plural and diverse way of thinking was already being suppressed through the linearity of a language that had to be made to account for the capitalism and control of material wealth. Derrida's reference to Leroi-Gourhan's text, describes this:
"The development of the first cities corresponds not only to the appearance of the technician of fire, but... writing is born at the same time as metallurgy. Here again, this is not a coincidence... it is at the moment when agrarian capitalism began to establish itself, that the means of stabilising it in written balance accounts appears, and it is also at the moment when social hierarchization is affirmed that writing constructs its first genealogists... the appearance of writing is not fortuitous; after millennia of maturation in the systems of mythographic representation, there emerges, along with metal and slavery, the linear notation of thought. Its content is not fortuitous."
Through the centuries, this linear notation assumed an ascendancy that changed the way European people thought, and the type of questions they asked. Technical specialism and linear notation gradually came to repress what Leroi-Gourhan calls the "Mythogram" - a writing that spells its symbols pluri-dimensionally. Gradually, people asked less the question, why is this the way it is, and more they began to ask, what is it in its own structure? This change of purpose may be evidence that a 'culture' had begun to see itself as self-sufficient; but it was also the opening of technology, that paved the way for an unlimited globalized commodification.
Today, the technical operations of our production lines dovetail smoothly and imperceptibly with linear language. These two modes of structural or systemic defence become synonymous in the word technology, which is the practical management of something called nature, within the voice of consciousness. This ideal world enables us to avoid grappling with pure awkward difference.
Pigeons are not technological. A nest isn't built from twiggy and feathery materials. As a pigeon grapples with the pure awkwardness of physical things, it's not aware of them as materials for progress. What we call materials for nestbuilding, are for a pigeon that exterior part of its own physicality, that must be arranged as a defence of its pigeon-hood. A pigeon is that properly constructed nest, the truth of which is only verifiable in terms of eggs and chicks. Pigeons are their own profound physical relationship with the planet, they are that very spatial exteriority of difference between them and the things they deal with, that one day just stops.
By calling on lost feral pigeon, the notice implies something of this. What is so disconcerting, or indeed dangerous about it, is that it plugs straight into that unnameable spacing, that was already there between one present moment and the next, before the very idea of representation. In other words the advertisement cannot be a representation derived from anything; the advertisement is a purely physical, and visual thing. You might say that its words were never voiced, or that its speech, which would always have been the easiest and most powerful way to represent and dominate things in the breath of its spirit, is immediately silenced by a pigeon that could never be present. Or even lost.
By implying that neither nests nor twigs exist as such - by making us think the one as a trace of the other - the advert is quietly and persistently subverting all urban technologies. By drawing on that very unremarkable ubiquitous thing, which is the absolute opposite to what is required for any marketable item, the notice introduces a lethal virus into the world of advertising. By calling with words, to a pigeon that could never be lost, the notice does violence to the logical structure of language. In fact, by the invocation of something that could never be present, the advert erases its own words as representations. Pigeons do not exist. This advertisement is essentially and profoundly untrue. The answer to the question 'what is lost?' is indeed 'what is lost?', or at least that voracious mode of questioning, and with it goes the assumption that texts relate to objects. Because it has used the ideal pigeon, as pidgeon, to silence its own voice, it hangs there abjectly, but quietly optimistic.
To write these things is to think towards deconstruction, and to be suspicious of the power assumptions inherent in a language of representation. The central currency of this language is the image. Which is why so much of traditional art practice has, in recent years, been called into question, by artists whose thoughts tend towards deconstruction. This may have something to do with what Joseph Kosuth was thinking about when he said in 1969:
"Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it. That's because the word art is general and the word painting is specific. Painting as a kind of art. If you make paintings, you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art. One is then accepting the nature of art to be the European tradition of a painting - sculpture dichotomy".
Well maybe. It all depends on the context and the intention of the image. David Shrigley's advertisement for a lost pidgeon, as an advertisement in a world of advertising, is a static image that successfully interrogates itself to death, and by doing this, performs deconstructive surgery on its greater technological structure.
Context Provocation Mythogram Part 2 - on The Messenger by Bill Viola
A critical essay by Stan Bonnar
link to still from the video: www.flickr.com/photos/stan_bonnars_artworks/9640685983
In 1996, the church of England's chaplaincy to the arts and recreation in north-east England, commissioned the American artist Bill Viola to make a work in response to Durham Cathedral. The building of this great cathedral was begun in 1093, and it is considered to be one of the finest examples of a Romanesque-Norman architecture in Europe. Viola's artwork is a video entitled 'The Messenger', and this is how he describes the piece:
"A large image is projected onto a screen mounted to the great West door in Durham Cathedral. The image sequence begins with a small, central, luminous, abstract form, shimmering and undulating against a deep blue-black void. Gradually the luminous shape begins to get larger and less distorted, and it soon becomes apparent that we are seeing a human form, illuminated, rising towards us from under the surface of a body of water. The water becomes more still and transparent and the figure more clear on its journey upwards towards us. We identify the figure as a man, pale blue, on his back rising up slowly. After some time, the figure breaks the surface, an act at once startling, relieving and desperate. His pale form emerges into the warm hues of a bright light, the water glistening on his body. His eyes immediately open and he releases a long held breath from the depths, shattering the silence of the image as this forceful primal sound of life that resonates momentarily in the space. After a few moments, he inhales deeply, and, with his eyes shut and his mouth closed, he sinks into the depths of the blue-black void, to become a shimmering moving point of light once more. The image then returns to its original state and the cycle begins anew."
The scandal which ensued the installation was eagerly grasped by the national press. This response from John MacEwan in the Sunday Telegraph:
"On press day, journalists arrived to find to the Dean and Chapter in a flap. They had been legally advised to protect themselves against indecency charges by getting police clearance. Screens were being hastily arranged to hide the film from the general view, because the police had warned that the sight of 'appendages' might upset the public. As the Dean explained: A child who had been sexually abused might come into the cathedral and be disturbed by a large image of a nude male.
"The Dean praised the film: I only saw it this morning, but I think it is a great work of art. Canon Bill Hall, who commissioned the work, added to general approval that it was regrettable it could not be seen as conceived, in full view at the west end of the nave.
"Such verbal support cannot conceal the fact that by admitting the film can cause offence, the Dean and Chapter immediately put themselves in the wrong. To add humiliation to lack of judgement, they have also bowed to the secular authority of the police on a matter they claim to be spiritual. The ensuing mess is no more than they deserve. By turning a blue movie into a Blue Movie, there does indeed seem very good reason for an outraged member of the public to take them to court. The heavy breathing of the soundtrack is now far more scandalous than the screened-off nudity."
Viola's intention had been to make The Messenger: "...have this resonance with, hopefully have a dance with - on the positive side, - on the negative side maybe a conflict with this incredibly powerful place." But although he hopes that the work will have a perceptible interaction with the place, somewhere between dance and conflict, the result was off the scale. In Durham the messenger will inevitably be remembered as screened and censored, so it is worth trying to understand what happened.
It should be noted at this point that The Messenger was also seen in art spaces around the country. I saw the work in the South London Gallery, and although the space was quite dark, being illuminated only by the video projection, there was little resonance with the building itself. I approached the work from this location. Under normal circumstances, the time that the cycle takes, would have involved the terminal expulsion of breath while underwater. This technological stretching of time could be viewed as a subversive commentary on the breath, the voice, and the spiritual dominion of man - a deconstruction of representational purity, glimpsed through an image of the very invincibility of man in fortress 'metaphor'. The authenticity of this view would be signalled by abject desperation, the symbol of a search for the means of linguistic suicide. But although the man is said to be desperate, there is nothing in his body language to suggest despair. That Viola's man is not distressed by any technological dislocation from the meaning of his image, might suggest a utilisation, rather than a critique of metaphorical language.
If this is true, it suggests that the messenger does not address the problem of time and language to the extent that's possible in video artworks. It may be that the water is a metaphor for the subconscious in unity with its physical surroundings, and that this is evidence of pluralistic thinking; but the apparent ease with which he uses metaphor, means that the image as an ideal narrative object, cannot be wrested away from a dominating subject. Because metaphor is essentially derivative and linguistic, its viability as a tool for use towards a greater understanding is in doubt, immediately understanding attempts to dig its way out of representational language. Viola stops The Messenger from drowning through the use of metaphor.
Although Viola reintroduces the human body into the Christian spiritual equation after its exile for centuries, he fails to convince the Sunday telegraph art critic, that The Messenger is nothing more than "... yet another example of body art, its concentration on the physical the reverse of spirituality." Yet surely, as one so involved in the mystical aspects of religious thought, it could be expected that an exploration of mind as body would be central to his project, and that the messenger's body would not be isolated from its own abject but nevertheless potentially ethical reality, by an envelope of spiritual consciousness. Nevertheless although bathing in a linear model of time, The Messenger is the catalyst that causes the very foundations of Durham Cathedral to shake.
It could be argued that what was being censored was not the nudity of the messenger, but the idea of ecstatic love as a way to God. Bill Viola writes that his work is based in unknowing, in doubt, in being lost, in questions and not answers, and he relates to the role of the mystic because of this. He is fascinated by the ancient Christian teaching called the via negativa, the basic tenet of which is an unknowability of God, who can only be approached in love - through the body as much as through the mind of the individual. By love, the soul enters into union with God, a union not infrequently described through the metaphor of ecstatic sex. The via negativa was eventually dominated by the more familiar via positiva of today, a method of affirmation that describes positive, human attributes such as Good and All-Knowing to the image of a transcendent God. But there is also an other aspect to ecstasy.
In his book Being and Time, Martin Heidegger disclosed ecstatic temporalising as primordial to the commonsense sequence of 'nows' we recognize as everyday time: "Temporality is the primordial 'out-side-of-itself' in and for itself. We therefore call the phenomena of the future, the character of having been, and the Present, the 'ecstases' of temporality."
He also disclosed temporality as the ontological meaning of care, and care as Being-towards-death, from which one might assume that ecstasy, both ontological and colloquial, encounters death in a way that would be threatening to the infinite linearity of English ecclesiastical time. In other words it could be argued that it would be necessary for the clergy to censor this aspect of ecstasy, even more so than the sexual aspect of the image.
Nevertheless, the attempt to censor many intimate moments of divergent thought, backfired, causing what might have been a gradual evolution of understanding, to become one of a least intended, catastrophic change, that plunged the people, the clergy and the shaman into an abyss of controversy.
To remember an important dream, is to begin to make sense of its symbols. Although these are events in time, what is important in a dream, is the way in which its images are patterned by the brain. This gives a symbolic picture of the subconscious state, and introduces a potential energy for change. To tell about the dream, is to make word signs that represent its symbols. In Durham, The Messenger may have inadvertently threatened the temporal power base of the Church, and provoked an abject dislocation in its language structure; nevertheless, because this is a shared experience, the first thing to change in light of this dream, might be the very language used to tell it.
The Messenger works because Bill Viola is immersed in the same linguistic structure as the church. He is able to open up this meaningful dialogue in a common language, that results in the spontaneous transformation of the situation. This is the only criterion for success. Most important though, is the need to recognize that it's not an artwork entitled The Messenger that people are standing around questioning, but it's their own ideas of what happened, that they are standing among as part of.
When Canon Bill Hall says that The Messenger is great art, he is defining great art within its context. This is close to what Donald Judd meant when he said, "if someone calls it art, it's art." Within that frame of reference, art becomes a word to use, to contextualise an act, to locate it in a social structure of the same name. Here there is a problematic difference of perspectives on art, from two structures that lay claim to ownership of the messenger. When the Dean refers to this as great art, he sees the entire situation at the cathedral as something that's going to profoundly affect his life. He no doubt is very sensitized to the abjectness of the whole situation. On the other hand, when The Messenger is viewed in the isolation of art, a sense of the abject that might signal an intention to bring death into the linguistic equation is missing.
Viola is happy for the work to be shown in art galleries around the country, because he also belongs to an art world structure. But here the problem centres on the definition of something as art. As long as this uni-dimensional conceptual pattern of a specialized social system called art, persists, it will place a barrier between an intention to deconstruct, and any functioning social system which that deconstruction intends to be part of. In this case it forestalls the necessity for art critique to delve into the contextual background of the work, which would reveal the situation as being truly subversive for its context, the Church. This seems to raise the question as to whether it would in fact be counterproductive to place artists-in-residence in such institutions.
To paraphrase Joseph Kosuth's earlier statement, an artist, being a thinker now, means to question the nature of functioning social structures. If one is questioning the nature of art, one cannot be questioning the nature of other functioning social structures. If a thinker accepts art, they are accepting the tradition that goes with it. That's because the word society is general and the word art is specific. The art world is a kind of functioning social structure. If you make art, you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of society. One is then accepting that the human image can only really be reflected by art, and disseminated as such to society.
Nevertheless, art exists, and a defining factor of deconstruction is that it operates on the periphery of its own linguistic structure. It could be argued that if something is art, then by definition it can only deconstruct the languages of art. To be sure it filters through eventually to a broader church, as minimalist style, but to whose benefit? Although much of contemporary deconstructive art is difficult to commodify, it still submits to an art objectification, which capitalism would no doubt see as its last line of defence. If it is this linear, linguistic, capitalization of physical things that threatens to be erased by deconstruction, then capitalist thinking would need to maintain the Object, in order for its languages to be able to predict an infinity of its own presence. This objectification is a technological distance that corporate interest must proliferate to survive; but it means that people forget what proximity is for.
These political processes through which art appropriates, commodifies, and neutralizes the ethical impulse of deconstruction, thwart even the most determined attempts at linguistic suicide. To be art, it must have at some stage controlled unpredictability for its own pre-diction as art; it must at some stage in its own future, be able and willing to look back on proximity, as something that happened before it became art. And yet it is that very unpredictability of proximity that allows fluid discourse to find its own democratic level. Deconstruction seeks democracy in the silence of the artists voice, but this is inevitably only a demonstration of how to deconstruct. If art is to transcend its own objectification, a new art tendency must be conceptualised from which the whole of art can be deconstructed. If the whole of art could be viewed by the whole of the population, from the multitude of tiny intimate moments in time that would motivate such a tendency, then the silence would be intense.
To begin to recognize what factors might characterise this tendency toward democracy in art, we might refer to Simon Critchley's book, The Ethics of Deconstruction, Derrida & Levinas. In this work, Critchley draws on Emmanuel Levinas' thinking on ethics.
"...Levinas is preoccupied with the possibility of an ethical form of language, the Saying, which would be irreducible to the ontological language of the Said, in which all entities are disclosed and comprehended in the light of Being... the Saying is my exposure - corporeal, sensible - to the Other, my inability to refuse the Other's approach. It is the performative stating, proposing, or expressive position of myself facing the Other. It is a verbal or non-verbal ethical performance, whose essence cannot be caught in constative propositions. It is a performative doing that cannot be reduced to a constative description."
A tendency towards democracy in art might germinate in this spatial relation to the other. Language opens up the issue of HOW being in relation to the human other is articulated, ethical or not, but prior to language is the Saying, as the "...sheer radicality of human speaking... as the very enactment of the ethical movement from the Same to the Other", as the very unnameability of the trace. Art might raise the issue of its own transcendence in this space, as a performance in the unpredictable proximity before the Other.
At issue here is a tendency within the ontological language of art, to say 'Yes' to the unpredictable Otherness of the Other. If as Levinas states, the Saying is my corporeal and sensible inability to refuse the Other's approach, then it makes sense to perform art in a space of maximum unpredictability. This does seem to suggest that the whole of art might best be deconstructed in public spaces that are unrestricted, and in which the Other is not a predictable object in the artistic field of vision.
Unrestricted public space is full of people, who come close in an unpredictable way, but who are nevertheless capable of forming the 'we' who can in this present moment, demanded justice, or take a political decision for the justification of any issue. Art is such an issue, but deconstructive art, as a signification that raises the question of signification, could be a means to rediscover the sheer proximity necessary to democracy.
I want to refer back to the mythogram, but now as a clearing for the writing of stories whose symbols spell themselves pluri-dimensionally, and as a deconstructive continuum for ethico-political decisions. A tendency to open democratic space.
website - stanbonnar.net/
Steely Dan / Pretzel Logic
Side one:
- "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" - 4:32
- "Night by Night" - 3:40
- "Any Major Dude Will Tell You" - 3:05
- "Barrytown" - 3:17
- "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" (Duke Ellington, Bubber Miley) - 2:45
Side two:
- "Parker's Band"- 2:36
- "Through with Buzz" - 1:30
- "Pretzel Logic" - 4:32
- "With a Gun" - 2:15
- "Charlie Freak" - 2:41
- "Monkey in Your Soul" - 2:31
(All songs written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, except where noted.)
Donald Fagen – keyboards, saxophone, lead vocals, background vocals
Walter Becker – bass, guitar, background vocals
Jeff Baxter – lead guitar, pedal steel guitar
Denny Dias – guitar
Jim Hodder – backing vocals
Recorded: October 1973 to January 1974 at The Village Recorder Studio in West Los Angeles
sleeve design: The cover photo featuring a New York pretzel vendor was taken by Raeanne Rubenstein, a photographer of musicians and Hollywood celebrities. She shot the photo on the west side of Fifth Avenue and 79th Street, just above the 79th Street Transverse (the road through Central Park), at the park entrance called "Miners' Gate"
Label: ABC Records /
ex Vinyl-Collection MTP
2/6 of my interpretation of the LEGO House zones, testing out my new indoor lighting rig (I still prefer sunlight but this was cool to try).
Which Religion is the ONLY true one?
Because there are so many different religions all with conflicting beliefs, many people find it confusing and difficult to decide which one they should follow.
Would a God really want to make it difficult for us to find the truth? Surely the truth has to be available for all humankind - - - for the simple and humble, as well as the clever, the intellectual and the theologian? So, it makes perfect sense to conclude that it must be possible to discern the truth through simple logic.
Firstly, it is easy to see that God has made his existence clear, through reason and logic to those who are open-minded and genuinely desire to seek the truth. [The evidence for the existence of a single creator God, is overwhelming. i.e. an intelligent, single, first cause, itself uncaused, and not subject to the laws of nature (Supernatural), can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of any truly, open-minded person through simple logic and science… for example, the laws of: Cause and Effect, Biogenesis, Thermodynamics and Information Theory, Intelligent Design etc.]
Thus monotheism - - belief in one supernatural, eternal, creator God is easy to deduce by those who are open-minded and really wish to seek the truth.
See: (Atheism revealed as false - why God MUST exist:
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/24321857975
AND
The real theory of everything...
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/34295660211
Once we have used reason and logic to establish that the Creator God can only be: one, supernatural and eternal, we know that all non-monotheistic religions are automatically ruled out as intrinsically untrue.
Of course, polytheistic or pagan religions may have some teachings which appear good, but it is obvious that they are all based on a false premise.
The true religion has to profess belief in only one, supernatural God and Creator.
We are left with only three major world religions that are strictly monotheistic.
They are: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
So the true religion has to be one of these three.
It is a fact that these three religions have many important doctrines which conflict with each other, for example; Christians and Jews believe in monogamous marriage, while Muslims believe in polygamy.
Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, while Judaism rejects Jesus and teaches that the messiah is still to come.
Likewise, although Muslims believe that Jesus was a prophet and a messiah, they reject many of His teachings, including His teachings on marriage, Heaven, drinking wine, love of enemies etc. and, even more importantly, His Divinity and his Crucifixion.
Muslims believe that Muhammad was an authentic prophet while both Jews and Christians reject that belief.
God is truth, so as these three religions disagree fundamentally with each other - - - - it is obvious that it only possible for one of them to be completely true in all its doctrines. So how can we decide conclusively which of these three religions is the only true one?
By asking the following question - - - we know that the Creator of the universe (the first cause of everything) must be infinite (unlimited). So everything about God must be perfect, his love is perfect and without limit (all love existing in the world originated from God), so too is his justice (his justice cannot be cheated).
Therefore if God infinitely and perfectly just, and we have all offended his infinite majesty by sin, how can anyone hope to be saved?
Only because God is also infinitely merciful and loving.
But here we have an apparent contradiction, perfect justice demands that the full price is paid for every sin, whereas perfect mercy and love demand extreme leniency. - - -
HERE IS THE QUESTION: - - -
How can God overcome the apparent contradiction between His perfect justice and perfect mercy?
To clarify ... How can God (who cannot deceive, nor be deceived) satisfy his infinite justice, which demands a price equal to the *offence, yet at the same time enable us to be saved through his infinite, unfathomable, mercy and love?
*[the seriousness of an offence can be judged to be commensurate with the status of the person offended against. In the army, if a private were to insult a fellow private it would not be considered very serious, but if a private were to insult or disobey an officer this would be much more serious and the seriousness would increase the higher the rank of the officer. A sin against a perfect and infinite God (our Creator) is of the ultimate seriousness. Therefore perfect justice demands infinite reparation for an offence against God].
Christianity is absolutely unique. It is the only religion that has a proper answer to this question. The question that is most crucial to our salvation. Put this question to the followers of any other religion and they will not be able to give you a satisfactory answer.
THE AMAZING ANSWER - - - Jesus Christ said “I am the way the truth and the life” and “no one can come to the Father except through Me.” Jesus backed up His claim by suffering an agonising death on the Cross for the salvation of all humanity.
Jesus, although completely innocent of all sin Himself, suffered for the sins of all humankind.
He was crucified, as a sacrifice, for the redemption of His enemies, as well as His friends. We are all sinners and have all offended the infinite goodness of god. No one deserves heaven entirely on their own merit.
Everyone is defiled by sin, and nothing defiled can ever enter heaven. An offence against the infinite goodness of an infinitely loving, but also an infinitely, just God, can only be redeemed by an infinitely, good sacrifice. So only a Divine sacrifice can satisfy the demands of infinite, Divine justice. only the sacrifice of the true, spiritual Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, incarnated as man (as prophesied in the Old Testament) is sufficient to save us all from the consequences of sin, to open the gates of heaven and restore eternal life to the whole human race.
Amazingly, this was even foreshadowed in the Old Testament (Book of Genesis), when God asked Abraham (as a test of his obedience) to sacrifice his only son Isaac on a pile of wood at Mount Moria. This Mount Moria is believed by some to be in the same place as Golgotha, the site of the sacrifice of God’s only Son on the wood of the Cross. Because of his obedience, Abraham became the symbolic, earthly father of all who follow God. Because of the Incarnation and sacrifice of the Son of God, Jesus, God became the spiritual Father of all who follow Him. The Cross of Jesus now represents the new tree of life, because it has restored the possibility of eternal life to the whole human race. Access to the original tree of life was removed from Adam and Eve and the rest of the human race because of original sin. The Cross of Jesus is a restoration of the tree of life. It promises eternal life to those who accept its saving message.
Only those whose garments have been ‘washed white by the Blood of the Lamb’ are fit to enter heaven. The debt of our sin has been paid by Jesus - and His saving sacrifice is offered as an unsurpassed, loving and free gift to us all. We simply have to gratefully acknowledge and accept that gift in a spirit of humility and repentance.
By His supreme sacrifice, Jesus paid the price for every sin ever committed, and thereby opened the gates of Heaven to the whole human race. Without His unique sacrifice, no one of any religion could ever enter Heaven. It matters not whether you are the most devout Muslim, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist or follower of any other faith, ultimately you will rely not on any of the rituals or customs of these various religions, but on the sacrifice of Jesus to enter heaven. All who enter heaven do so only with a passport provided by the merits of Jesus’ sacrifice. Without His sacrifice on the Cross you would never get there, whatever your religion. All other sacrifices or religious offerings, rituals etc. are as dirty rags before the Divine majesty of Almighty God, they cannot pay the price for sin that God's perfect justice demands.
This is the unavoidable truth, whether you like it or not.
Of course, we should all have free choice to follow any religion we choose, but once we know that it is only the sacrifice of Jesus that can make us fit to enter heaven and eternal life, we will surely wish to love and follow Him. It would be foolishness indeed for us to choose to follow any religion which refuses to acknowledge this, but would rather pretend that we can redeem ourselves by following its manmade doctrines and rituals.
Death entered the world through the sin of disobedience one woman and one man (Adam and Eve), but sin was pardoned and eternal life restored through the obedience of one woman (Mary) and the death of one man (Jesus).
The ancient Hebrews used the blood sacrifice of an animal as a symbolic scapegoat to bear the punishment for their sins.
Jesus, the spotless Lamb of God, became the real scapegoat who bore the punishment (by His Crucifixion) for the sins of the whole world. His death on the Cross was a perfect, holy, once and for all sacrifice, sufficient to redeem every sin ever committed. It is re-enacted in remembrance, with bread and wine, every day, by Christian priests all over the world. It is known as the Holy Eucharist which is part of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Only God Himself could pay the enormous price that God's perfect justice demands for sin, but as it is man who is responsible for sin, in true justice, it is man who should pay the price. Therefore only someone who is both God and man (God made man) would be able to pay the price for sin. So the only possibility of salvation for humankind had to be provided by God Himself, and that is exactly what He did. That is why Jesus has to be God incarnated as man. Those who deny that deny Jesus is God, or who deny the Crucifixion of Jesus, deny the only possibility of salvation.
Abraham (the representative, earthly father of all followers of God) showed he was willing, when asked by God, to sacrifice his only son Isaac to God, as reparation for sin (it didn’t happen, because God stopped it at the last moment). And God, our heavenly Father, (who cannot be outdone in love or generosity) offered His only Son (Jesus) as a sacrifice for our sin.
Prophesies from the Old Testament.
Isaiah 53 New International Version (NIV)
1. Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
2. He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3. He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
4. Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
5. But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
6. We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
7. He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
8. By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was punished.
9. He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.
10. Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
11. After he has suffered,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.
12. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.
Psalm 22 New King James Version (NKJV)
The Suffering, Praise, and Posterity of the Messiah
22 My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?
Why are You so far from helping Me,
And from the words of My groaning?
2 O My God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear;
And in the night season, and am not silent.
3 But You are holy,
Enthroned in the praises of Israel.
4 Our fathers trusted in You;
They trusted, and You delivered them.
5 They cried to You, and were delivered;
They trusted in You, and were not ashamed.
6 But I am a worm, and no man;
A reproach of men, and despised by the people.
7 All those who see Me ridicule Me;
They shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying,
8 “He trusted[b] in the Lord, let Him rescue Him;
Let Him deliver Him, since He delights in Him!”
9 But You are He who took Me out of the womb;
You made Me trust while on My mother’s breasts.
10 I was cast upon You from birth.
From My mother’s womb
You have been My God.
11 Be not far from Me,
For trouble is near;
For there is none to help.
12 Many bulls have surrounded Me;
Strong bulls of Bashan have encircled Me.
13 They gape at Me with their mouths,
Like a raging and roaring lion.
14 I am poured out like water,
And all My bones are out of joint;
My heart is like wax;
It has melted within Me.
15 My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
And My tongue clings to My jaws;
You have brought Me to the dust of death.
16 For dogs have surrounded Me;
The congregation of the wicked has enclosed Me.
They pierced[c] My hands and My feet;
17 I can count all My bones.
They look and stare at Me.
18 They divide My garments among them,
And for My clothing they cast lots.
19 But You, O Lord, do not be far from Me;
O My Strength, hasten to help Me!
20 Deliver Me from the sword,
My precious life from the power of the dog.
21 Save Me from the lion’s mouth
And from the horns of the wild oxen!
You have answered Me.
22 I will declare Your name to My brethren;
In the midst of the assembly I will praise You.
23 You who fear the Lord, praise Him!
All you descendants of Jacob, glorify Him,
And fear Him, all you offspring of Israel!
24 For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted;
Nor has He hidden His face from Him;
But when He cried to Him, He heard.
25 My praise shall be of You in the great assembly;
I will pay My vows before those who fear Him.
26 The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
Those who seek Him will praise the Lord.
Let your heart live forever!
27 All the ends of the world
Shall remember and turn to the Lord,
And all the families of the nations
Shall worship before You.[d]
28 For the kingdom is the Lord’s,
And He rules over the nations.
29 All the prosperous of the earth
Shall eat and worship;
All those who go down to the dust
Shall bow before Him,
Even he who cannot keep himself alive.
30 A posterity shall serve Him.
It will be recounted of the Lord to the next generation,
31 They will come and declare His righteousness to a people who will be born,
That He has done this.
Babylonian Talmud: "The Messiah --what is his name?...The Rabbis say, The Leper Scholar, as it is said, `surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him a leper, smitten of God and afflicted...'" (Sanhedrin 98b)
Midrash Ruth Rabbah: "Another explanation (of Ruth ii.14): -- He is speaking of king Messiah; `Come hither,' draw near to the throne; `and eat of the bread,' that is, the bread of the kingdom; `and dip thy morsel in the vinegar,' this refers to his chastisements, as it is said, `But he was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities'"
Targum Jonathan: "Behold my servant Messiah shall prosper; he shall be high and increase and be exceedingly strong..."
Zohar: "`He was wounded for our transgressions,' etc....There is in the Garden of Eden a palace called the Palace of the Sons of Sickness; this palace the Messiah then enters, and summons every sickness, every pain, and every chastisement of Israel; they all come and rest upon him. And were it not that he had thus lightened them off Israel and taken them upon himself, there had been no man able to bear Israel's chastisements for the transgression of the law: and this is that which is written, `Surely our sicknesses he hath carried.'"
Rabbi Moses Maimonides: "What is the manner of Messiah's advent....there shall rise up one of whom none have known before, and signs and wonders which they shall see performed by him will be the proofs of his true origin; for the Almighty, where he declares to us his mind upon this matter, says, `Behold a man whose name is the Branch, and he shall branch forth out of his place' (Zech. 6:12). And Isaiah speaks similarly of the time when he shall appear, without father or mother or family being known, He came up as a sucker before him, and as a root out of dry earth, etc....in the words of Isaiah, when describing the manner in which kings will harken to him, At him kings will shut their mouth; for that which had not been told them have they seen, and that which they had not heard they have perceived." (From the Letter to the South (Yemen), quoted in The Fifty-third Chapter of Isaiah According to the Jewish Interpreters, Ktav Publishing House, 1969, Volume 2, pages 374-5)
Rabbi Mosheh Kohen Ibn Crispin: This rabbi described those who interpret Isaiah 53 as referring to Israel as those: "having forsaken the knowledge of our Teachers, and inclined after the `stubbornness of their own hearts,' and of their own opinion, I am pleased to interpret it, in accordance with the teaching of our Rabbis, of the King Messiah....This prophecy was delivered by Isaiah at the divine command for the purpose of making known to us something about the nature of the future Messiah, who is to come and deliver Israel, and his life from the day when he arrives at discretion until his advent as a redeemer, in order that if anyone should arise claiming to be himself the Messiah, we may reflect, and look to see whether we can observe in him any resemblance to the traits described here; if there is any such resemblance, then we may believe that he is the Messiah our righteousness; but if not, we cannot do so." (From his commentary on Isaiah, quoted in The Fifty-third Chapter of Isaiah According to the Jewish Interpreters, Ktav Publishing House, 1969, Volume 2, pages 99-114.)
Why the Isaiah 53 prophesy cannot refer to Israel.
Why Isaiah 53 cannot refer to the nation of Israel, or anyone else, but must be the Messiah
1. The servant of Isaiah 53 is an innocent and guiltless sufferer. Israel is never described as sinless. Isaiah 1:4 says of the nation: "Alas sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity. A brood of evildoers, children who are corrupters!" He then goes on in the same chapter to characterize Judah as Sodom, Jerusalem as a harlot, and the people as those whose hands are stained with blood (verses 10, 15, and 21). What a far cry from the innocent and guiltless sufferer of Isaiah 53 who had "done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth!"
2. The prophet said: "It pleased the LORD to bruise him." Has the awful treatment of the Jewish people (so contrary, by the way, to the teaching of Jesus to love everyone) really been God's pleasure, as is said of the suffering of the servant in Isaiah 53:10 ? If, as some rabbis contend, Isaiah 53 refers to the holocaust, can we really say of Israel's suffering during that horrible period, "It pleased the LORD to bruise him?" Yet it makes perfect sense to say that God was pleased to have Messiah suffer and die as our sin offering to provide us forgiveness and atonement.
3. The person mentioned in this passage suffers silently and willingly. Yet all people, even Israelites, complain when they suffer! Brave Jewish men and women fought in resistance movements against Hitler. Remember the Vilna Ghetto Uprising? Remember the Jewish men who fought on the side of the allies? Can we really say Jewish suffering during the holocaust and during the preceding centuries was done silently and willingly?
4. The figure described in Isaiah 53 suffers, dies, and rises again to atone for his people's sins. The Hebrew word used in Isaiah 53:10 for "sin-offering" is "asham," which is a technical term meaning "sin-offering." See how it is used in Leviticus chapters 5 and 6. Isaiah 53 describes a sinless and perfect sacrificial lamb who takes upon himself the sins of others so that they might be forgiven. Can anyone really claim that the terrible suffering of the Jewish people, however undeserved and unjust, atones for the sins of the world? Whoever Isaiah 53 speaks of, the figure described suffers and dies in order to provide a legal payment for sin so that others can be forgiven. This cannot be true of the Jewish people as a whole, or of any other mere human.
5. It is the prophet who is speaking in this passage. He says: "who has believed our message." The term "message" usually refers to the prophetic message, as it does in Jeremiah 49:14. Also, when we understand the Hebrew parallelism of verse 1, we see "Who has believed our message" as parallel to "to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed." The "arm of the Lord" refers to God's powerful act of salvation. So the message of the speaker is the message of a prophet declaring what God has done to save his people.
6. The prophet speaking is Isaiah himself, who says the sufferer was punished for "the transgression of my people," according to verse 8. Who are the people of Isaiah? Israel. So the sufferer of Isaiah 53 suffered for Israel. So how could he be Israel?
7. The figure of Isaiah 53 dies and is buried according to verses 8 and 9. The people of Israel have never died as a whole. They have been out of the land on two occasions and have returned, but they have never ceased to be among the living. Yet Jesus died, was buried, and rose again.
8. If Isaiah 53 cannot refer to Israel, how about Isaiah himself? But Isaiah said he was a sinful man of unclean lips (Isaiah 6:5-7). And Isaiah did not die as an atonement for our sins. Could it have been Jeremiah? Jeremiah 11:19 does echo the words of Isaiah 53. Judah rejected and despised the prophet for telling them the truth. Leaders of Judah sought to kill Jeremiah, and so the prophet describes himself in these terms. But they were not able to kill the prophet. Certainly Jeremiah did not die to atone for the sins of his people. What of Moses? Could the prophet have been speaking of him? But Moses wasn't sinless either. Moses sinned and was forbidden from entering the promised land (Numbers 20:12). Moses indeed attempted to offer himself as a sacrifice in place of the nation, but God did not allow him to do so (Exodus 32:30-35). Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah were all prophets who gave us a glimpse of what Messiah, the ultimate prophet, would be like, but none of them quite fit Isaiah 53.
So what can we conclude? Isaiah 53 cannot refer to the nation of Israel, nor to Isaiah, nor to Moses, nor another prophet. And if not to Moses, certainly not to any lesser man. Yet Messiah would be greater than Moses. As the rabbinic writing "Yalkut" said: "Who art thou, O great mountain? (Zech. iv.7) This refers to the King Messiah. And why does he call him`the great mountain?' because he is greater than the patriarchs, as it is said, `My servant shall be high, and lifted up, and lofty exceedingly' --he will be higher than Abraham...lifted up above Moses...loftier then the ministering angels..." (Quoted in The Fifty-third Chapter of Isaiah According to the Jewish Interpreters, Ktav Publishing House, 1969, Volume 2, page 9.)
Of whom does Isaiah speak? He speaks of the Messiah, as many ancient rabbis concluded. The second verse of Isaiah 53 makes it crystal clear. The figure grows up as "a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground." The shoot springing up is beyond reasonable doubt a reference to the Messiah, and, in fact, it is a common Messianic reference in Isaiah and elsewhere. The Davidic dynasty was to be cut down in judgement like a felled tree, but it was promised to Israel that a new sprout would shoot up from the stump. The Messiah was to be that sprout. Several Hebrew words were used to refer to this undeniably Messianic image. All the terms are related in meaning and connected in the Messianic texts where they were used. Isaiah 11, which virtually all rabbis agreed refers to the Messiah, used the words "shoot" (hoter) and branch (netser) to describe the Messianic King. Isaiah 11:10 called Messiah the "Root (shoresh) of Jesse," Jesse being David's father. Isaiah 53 described the suffering servant as a root (shoresh) from dry ground, using the very same metaphor and the very same word as Isaiah 11. We also see other terms used for the same concept, such as branch (tsemach) in Jeremiah 23:5, in Isaiah 4:2 and also in the startling prophecies of Zechariah 3:8 and 6:12.
Beyond doubt, Isaiah 52:13-53:12 refers to Messiah Jesus. He is the one highly exalted before whom kings shut their mouths. Messiah is the shoot who sprung up from the fallen Davidic dynasty. He became the King of Kings. He provided the ultimate atonement.
Isaiah 52:13 states that it would be the Messiah who will "sprinkle" many nations. What does that mean? What was Messiah's ministry to be toward the nations? The word translated "sprinkle" or sometimes "startle" is found several other places in the OT. The Hebrew word is found in Leviticus 4:6; 8:11; 14:7, and Numbers 8:7, 19:18-19. The references cited all pertain to priestly sprinklings of the blood of atonement, the anointing oil of consecration, and the ceremonial water used to cleanse the unclean. Is Isaiah 52:13 telling us that the Messiah will act as a priest who applies atonement, anoints to consecrate, sprinkles to make clean? (This vision of the Messiah as both priest and king is also found in Zechariah 6:12-13). But, priests were to come from the tribe of Levi and Kings from the tribe of Judah! What kind of priest is he? David told us Messiah would be a priest of the order of Melchizedek (see Psalm 110 and Hebrews chapters 7-9).
Isaiah 53 must be understood as referring to the coming Davidic King, the Messiah. King Messiah was prophesied to suffer and die to pay for our sins and then rise again. He would serve as a priest to the nations of the world and apply the blood of atonement to cleanse those who believe. There is one alone who this can refer to, Jesus, whom millions refer to as Christ, which is from the Greek word for Messiah. Those who confess him are his children, his promised offspring, the spoils of his victory. According to the testimony of the Jewish Apostles, Jesus died for our sins, rose again, ascended to the right hand of God, and he now serves as our great High Priest who cleanses us of sin and our King. Jesus rules over his people and is in the process of conquering the Gentiles. The first century Jewish disciples were willing to die rather than deny they had seen the risen Messiah. Only if one has presupposed Jesus cannot have been the Messiah can one deny that which is obvious. Israel's greatest son, Jesus, is the one Isaiah foresaw.
(c) 1997 Fred Klett