The Three Content Marketeers

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CarMax, Intel Core, Lithium-ion battery, MacBook Air, Movado, Pepsi, StarBucks, T-Mobile

Just to see if he could ride this latest wave of inspiration to its zenith, the young writer after taking a sip of his ice cold Pepsi, began to furiously type away on his mac book air. He splurged on this one, the young sales girl in the skin tight express jeans at the mac store told him that this was the model with with the latest fourth generation Intel core processors and HD 5000 graphics, quite easily the most visually stunning display he had ever seen. Lion X is already installed he had heard one of the other young guys with the spiky apple hair say, he could write for twelve hours straight without plugging in once thanks to the lightweight high capacity lithium ion  battery. Even though he did his most inspired writing sitting in one of those perfectly worn in chairs at StarBucks, sipping on a Grande skinny vanilla soy latte, to him it didn’t matter which one because the atmosphere in all of their locations was to him superb, this particular hour, which upon looking down at his new titanium sleek TR-90 made from a mixture of composite/stainless steel Movado watch, modern ahead of its time, he discovered was three o’clock found him just outside CarMax. He’d been looking into buying a new car but really did not want to be hassled by a sales person which is why he came here. They never hassled him and they were always more than courteous and frank when answering the questions he needed answered, he liked the fact that they all wore the same matching uniforms, it gave him the impression that all their prices were the same which meant that he knew he was getting the best price. He wondered what had caused him to look down at his watch, oh yeah, the cute blond that had just passed him had commented on it, saying that she admired it as she let drop a piece of paper onto his windows 8 surface tablet with her name and number on it. He was just getting ready to upload a draft copy of his newest bestseller to his publisher when it occurred to him just how fast his T-Mobile internet service was working. For the first time his Samsung Galaxy S4 was showing 4g LTE and boy was it fast! He’s very happy that he took the associate’s advice and opted for that unlimited data plan with 8.5 gigs of tethering. It was a little more on the pricy side, well at least pricier than the basic $50 no annual contact plan. He likes not being in a contract, if he wanted to, he could have chosen to spread the cost of his cellular device over a 24 month period, however he appreciates the lower bill paying for the phone upfront affords him. Besides, he appreciates the direction that T-Mobile is going in, no shady contract business.

Doubt and Reflection, or Obedience?

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Abraham, faith in God, Old Testament Abraham, Robert Gordis

Kierkegaard’s Abraham has a penchant for eliciting criticism from his readers. It is said that Abraham is not true to form, according to the objections. Abraham objects against God’s intended actions towards the Sodomites, but no such objection is noted when God commands that he murder his son Isaac in a sacrifice to himself.

The objections counter the argument that Abraham is a righteous man because he did not refrain from sacrificing Isaac to God when God commanded that he do so. Robert Gordis expands this argument quite well in his paper “Abraham the Father, at Mount Moriah”. Gordis relates the general argument made by many Christian and Judaism faith adherents, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, exemplified his own faith in God and the nature of his own obedience towards God. However he discounts Abraham’s faith on the account that in at least two other stories taken from the Old Testament Abraham does not act so quickly in regards to a command by God. In Gordis’s version of the story, God tells Abraham about his intents towards the people of Sodom. Contrary to his reaction regarding his son Isaac and God’s command for him to sacrifice him, Abraham attempts to steer God away from this particular action. Abraham upon learning of God’s plans, attempts to convince God to refrain from acting out his intended course of action. Gordis cites Abraham’s pleas towards God in this manner as proof that Abraham is not always the paragon of obedience that many religious authors have made him out to be based on his willingness to sacrifice Isaac.  He states that this is proof that Abraham has not always been the obedient paragon of faith that traditional Christian thought has made him out to be.

Gordis was a brilliant intellectual and religious commentator. He devoted his life to social justices and the development of those around him in a way I could only hope to begin to truly understand. Not to mention his knowledge of the Jewish law out shined many of his contemporaries earning him a reputation held in high esteem among many to this day. However, I could not help but notice that it seemed that there were some missing components to this story that I feel should have some significance attached to them. Whether Gordis intentionally left out these details because they were truly unimportant and I am mistaken, I am not sure. However, in my limited vantage, they seem important enough for me at least to mention in the form of a question and hopefully, a poignant one to boot. Therefore I will leave you to determine their supposed importance.

Abraham learned of God’s plans to destroy Sodom from three men who visited Abraham at one of his temporary homesteads. The biblical text is unclear on who these men were, but we know that through some type of relation with them, Abraham had communion with God. The text says that God appeared to Abraham while he sat “at the entrance of his tent”. We are then told that Abraham looked up and saw three men standing near him. When Abraham addresses these men, he calls one of them lord, but it is not capitalized which means that the man whom he spoke to was not God. However, as Abraham is attending to these men, one of them says to him that he will return, and that Abraham’s wife will have a son. At this Sarah laughs to herself at which point the Lord, this time with a capital L takes notice. At this point, the men begin to leave when the Lord, again capital L, asks the other men whether or not he should inform Abraham of his intended actions. His purpose in potentially telling Abraham appears to have to do with Abraham’s future significance. God intends to make Abraham into somewhat of a significant character and therefore he debates whether or not he should include Abraham in on these particular plans. I think that it is important to note that so far, at least in regards to Sodom, there has not been any command uttered. Ultimately, God develops his case to Abraham, but here, it is important to note that God has not specified any course of action yet. He merely tells Abraham that he has concerns for various sins the population of Sodom is committing. He never once tells Abraham that he will destroy the city. The only hint that we get that something might take place concerning Sodom is what God says to the other men. He asks, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do…..?” It is very easy to confuse our knowledge of the events about to take place in Sodom and Abraham’s knowledge. We know what is getting ready to happen in Sodom, but at the time that Abraham makes his plea to God, I personally do not think that Abraham knows. In fact, I am not altogether sure that God himself is committed to any particular course of action. In verse 21, God determines that he must “go and see” whether the situation on the ground is what he thinks it to be.

Another way that we could, I believe, interpret Abraham’s pleas toward God, is in a manner that supposes that Abraham is naively asking God what will happen to the city of Sodom if their sin turns out to be a great as God thinks it might be. It is more plausible that instead of Abraham knowing explicitly what God intends to do to Sodom, he knows what God probably would do if the city’s situation is a bad as it appears to be. Abraham is asking God that if the city turns out to be not as bad as it sounds, what would be God’s next move. In this interpretation, Abraham is asking God to clarify his criteria of what would constitute which actions.

Gordis attempted to show that even Abraham has questioned God’s intentions and that therefore Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac has nothing to do with commandments from God, but rather there must be some other explanation to this story. It would seem to me, that there might be a belief out there that says “if I can call Abraham’s faith into question, then there is much greater justification for doubting my own faith”. This is a good first step into what one might call legitimate doubt regarding belief in God. However what I believe that I have shown here is that this particular question asked by Gordis can be interpreted in another light.

I acknowledge that my version of the story is difficult to not find some objection to it. In the west, we never fail to ascribe to God the trait of omnipotence and so a God that travels about the earth in an attempt to clarify rumors and gather evidence or information is difficult to swallow. I am not attempting to change this perception of God in any way. I honestly do not know how to interpret this portion of the text. I do not know precisely what it means by stating that God is out traveling with two or three other men and that their next stop is going to be to confirm or deny rumors they heard about a particular area. At the same time however, I do know that it is a bit presumptuous to call into question Abraham’s character based on Gordis’s version of this story, making Abraham out to be this rebellious fellow who questions God’s intended actions.

 

 

Doubt and Reflection, or Obedience?

In “The Call to Discipleship”, Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes the statement ‘doubt and reflection take the place of spontaneous obedience’. Instead of living in obedience to God’s will, we will sometimes super-impose moral consternations over these difficulties, obscuring the original commandment all in an effort to avoid living in obedience to the will of God. Bonhoeffer successfully discerns the true intent behind many seemingly innocuous questions of morality, showing that many of these concerns are exaggerated. This is done he believes because the questioner never had any intention in following the commandment that he or she is supposedly questioning.

For the next couple of weeks, I will be exploring the topic of doubt and reflection versus obedience. I will make many references to Soren Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, in an effort to contrast Kierkegaard’s Knight with the person who purposefully equivocates God’s commandments. The distinction between intentional equivocation of the will of God and a true misunderstanding of God’s commandment is a difficult one to discern. My hope is that by the end of this mini-series, one would be able to see that true obedience lies in taking the first step, whether or not he or she knows what the next step will be. By writing this, I am taking the first step, to where I have not the slightest clue, but it is not the end result that obedience is concerned with.

The Sky is Falling but in more important news…

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case, ethics, florida, Genealogy of Morality, George, George Zimmerman, Iain McGilchrist, Jury, Lateralization of brain function, Levinas, Martin, master and his emissary, murder, Nietzsche, philosophy, Sociology of race and ethnic relations, Trayvon, trayvon martin shooting, United States, Western world, Zimmerman

After 10 hours of deliberating, the jury assigned to the George Zimmerman murder trial finds George Zimmerman not guilty. Watching the trial closely, I see how this could have happened because in all honesty I still hold some doubt as to Zimmerman being guilty. I think that the defense did a fine job in presenting its case while the prosecution did a poor job presenting its case. I question the decision to not bring GZ to the witness stand among other questions I have as to how the case was handled. Granted, a part of me feels that this was deliberate and the whole purpose of the trial in itself was because of public outcry, a shame trial if you will, which to me in itself presents a glimpse into a larger problem in our society. However I admit, I am no legal expert.

Some of you are probably expecting me to say that this problem that we face is race and its negative relation between the members of our larger American community, but no, this is not the larger issue that I see. Actually I see negative race relations as only being a small symptom of this growing threat that I perceive and the threat is actually that of a complete and willful disregard for human life. This disregard I believe actually stems from a burgeoning contemporary tendency of Western society not being able to see things, objects or instruments as anything other than “that which helps me get what I want or is a barrier to me getting what I want”. Handy objects, whether people, relationships, ideals and constructs are not nuisances such as everything else is which cannot be used to my benefit. This is especially dangerous because essentially, that which cannot be “seen” to have any use is than discarded and it fails to be seen how this thing might actually have had use after all. Now at this point Nietzsche would probably be warning me that I am in danger or purporting what he would call “slave morality”. Essentially trying to save the hides of those that are not seen to have any visible power or influence by suggesting that they do indeed have both but that it remains to be seen. In his book “On the Genealogy of Morality”, Nietzsche was referring to the Jews who he said engendered a great disservice to humanity when they orchestrated the Great “Slave Revolt”! Claiming so says Nietzsche, that all that the Jews do they claim is the good, and what should be is what we ourselves do, meek! That’s us! and this is good! Poor! That’s us and this is good! Downtrodden! This is us and this is good! Rejected! That’s us and this is the good! Namely saying, maybe you can’t see our value now, but it is there because our value lies within itself which is so embedded within the framework of our makeup this makes it difficult to ascertain. “So take my word for it Nietzsche hears from my lips”, the essence of goodness is the essence of my being; slave morality.

But I truly mean this, just not in the way Nietzsche would hear it for what I am proposing is that value is not always apparent and this is why it is important to value life and the unknown. Disregarding something because the value of which is not immediately visualizable is akin to shunning the unknown and abstract, which I feel is a real danger to which our community is headed towards. This particular argument is not my original argument and it is something that I was only able to know because of a particular book written by Psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist called “The Master and His Emissary”. The book details how current studies are reporting findings of how the mind perceives the world around us, which is by way of two contradictory and competing points of view afforded by way of the two hemispheres of our brains. The right, says McGilchrist, has always been the hemisphere that was most responsible for shaping the way we see things, “it is concerned with finer discriminations between things, whether living or non-living” (p.52). The right hemisphere in other words is capable and responsible to see the “whole” of things, making them what they are as individual things, big picture essentially. “In keeping with this, despite the well-known right-hemisphere advantage in dealing with the visuospatial, the left hemisphere is superior at identifying simple shapes and figures, which are easily categorized, whereas complex figures, being less typical, more individual, are better processed by the right hemisphere” (52). According to McGilchrist, Western society is graduating toward a more left-hemisphere approach to how we view the world, categorization and objectification are the words of the day, therefore those items that cannot be categorized or conceptualized are then disregarded, vilified even. He warns that there would be a rise in intolerance and inflexibility (432) since reason would be replaced by the rational. This is to say that that which works to my advantage whether an ideal that is completely non-sensical or action that is downright deplorable will engender the action because it is the most rational, reason has no part in my decision making. The left-hemisphere also prefers the impersonal to the personal (431), the personal requires regarding things, objects and people as individuals. It would require us to see the thing for what it is, not how it can be used. “Exploitation rather than co-operation would be, explicitly or not, the default relationship between human individuals, and between humanity and the rest of the world” (431).

This is the drama that I believe is being played out in regards to the George Zimmerman trial. The media sees the death of Martin as a media blitz, a story, a headline. The rest of see it as further justification for us to hold onto our various points of view and the result will be a society where the above video becomes a common story, a fragmented and disjointed society where all of us, view all others, regardless of race nationality or creed no more as separate and individual entities but as conceptions as merely useful or non useful. While society is arguing about race and what’s being done to “me” or “them”, death, along with vice is becoming a non-issue. Murder and hate is not about ethnic group versus ethnic group or race versus race but is about a devaluing of the infinite which is the human person, the infinity of the Other (concept derived from Levinas – Ethics and the Face). As the above video shows, violence is a real possibility anywhere and anytime people, animals and things lose their individual value, when the unknown is discarded for the thing that is assumed to have been perceived. Race? Race is the non-sequitur.