CADRE Comments

While people who meet me may not immediately recognize it, I am an an introvert. Fortunately, I am not the type of introvert who seeks to avoid any type of interaction with people. But at the same time, I don't particularly welcome it. When offered the opportunity to choose between going to a party and staying home with a good book or a movie, unless I am good friends with the people at the party I will always opt to stay home.  But, of course, that's not the way it works. Being married to a wonderful woman who is much more of an extrovert than I am, I am often forced to go to social gatherings of various types where there are people with whom I am not particularly comfortable. In the past, I would hang around with my wife, but that almost always made me feel like some unwanted bystander to her conversations. So, inevitably, I would move off to a corner where I would happily smile and talk to people who took the time to approach me, but I rarely made any real effort to ini...

[Note: the contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, continuing Chapter 45, can be found here. ] [This entry concludes Chapter 45, "A History of the Fall".] The first sinners might want to put their corrupted synthetic shape back to its uncorrupted state, and that would be a good thing, as far as it goes. Indeed, love and justice on God's part would suggest that He will institute ways for them to know they have made a serious mistake that should be fixed. It might be purely self-serving for Adam and Eve to want this; but the problem to be fixed is the result of their intentions to be self-serving. This cannot be fixed by being merely self-serving again. To truly want to fix it, must involve at least a partial negation of that intention. It is the first step, or one of the first, on the road of repentance. But can they do it? Basically the question is: once they have hampered their connection to the source of their knowledge and power, can th...

Introductory note from Jason Pratt: I am here appending in several parts some excerpts from an unpublished book of mine (not CoJ incidentally), originally composed late 99/early 2000, wherein I work out a progressive synthetic metaphysic. The topic of this Section of chapters [beware!--long summary paragraph approaching! {g}] is ethical grounding; and in the first several entries I analyzed crippling problems along the three general lines of ethical explanation, including general theism. After this though, I returned to the argument I had already been developing for several hundred (currently unpublished) pages, and used those developed positions to begin solving the philosophical dilemmas I had covered in previous entries. Along the way, I ran into a potential problem last seen back in my (unpublished) Section Three; but slotting that problem into my developing argument allowed me to discover that I should believe that a 3rd Person of God exists. Having covered some introductory inf...

Introductory note from Jason Pratt: see here for the previous entry; and see here for the first entry of the series. (It explains what I'm doing, and how, and contains the Johannine prologue.) The Body and the Blood (the night before the end...) When the hour had come (to celebrate the seder service, tell the Disciple and Scholar and Follower), He reclined (at the table to eat--this is after the 'normal' feast of the night), and the apostles with Him (except for Judas, who has already left). And He said to them: "I have truly, deeply desired to eat this Passover with you--before I suffer. "For I am telling you: I never shall eat it again, till this is fulfilled in the kingdom of God!" And when He had taken bread (bitter and unleavened by sin yet striped by sin, some of which will be hidden to be recovered later), having blessed and given thanks, He broke and gave to them, saying (in a new response to the traditional question "What is this bread?"...

Introductory note from Jason Pratt: see here for the previous entry; and see here for the first entry of the series. (It explains what I'm doing, and how, and contains the Johannine prologue.) Be aware, this is an especially long entry. Lawyers and Second Comings (8 and 7 days until the end...) Now it happened that when Jesus finished these declarations (says the Disciple, seconded by the Follower, meaning the teaching on forgiveness seven times and seventy-times-and-seven, while back in Capernaum before the final mission-tour to Jerusalem had begun), He got up and went from Galilee; (eventually) coming into the region of Judea beyond the Jordan (past Jericho, east of Jerusalem 20 miles or more). Now the Passover of the Jews was near (the Evangelist says, taking his turn of the story for a moment), and many went up out of the countryside into Jerusalem before the Passover, in order to purify themselves (in the week before the Night itself). So they sought Jesus, and they said as ...