Weird things

I missed my post for last week. Stress has kind of beaten me down.

It is a paradox of blogging that the periods of highest activity in a writer's life are precisely the times when he or she has the least time to write. It seems like I always have the most interesting anecdotes from my mundane life when I don't have any time to record them. Anyway, here is probably the most interesting thing I've been thinking about lately...

Right now I'm taking a course on Tillich's systematic theology. Paul Tillich was a good Lutheran boy who grew into a renowned theologian, preacher, and author. People would come from hundreds of miles in all directions to hear him speak at a church. Needless to say, all of his theology is in Christian terms. I, though this statement is belied by my surroundings, was not raised with Christian terms. I learned what a sutra was before I learned what a parable was. Buddha took a place in my childhood long before I knew why people called Jesus the Christ. Still, I have found common ground with Mr. Tillich. I have found that with the truly great Christian philosophers, I am able to find common ideas that bridge the gap between their Christianity and my lack thereof.

In Kierkegaard, I connected to his existentialism and found an interesting connection between his idea of God as the Abyss and the notion of Infinite Shiva from Kashmir Shaivism. In Tillich's books, I keep making marginal notes that reference Brahman or stories from Hindu culture. Some of the ideas simply span the gap. These really captivate me.

This rather circuitously relates to the cyberliteracy class. Some ideas have translated intact from the world or analog communication to the world of digital communication. The ideas of noise and signal were easy translations because they are holdovers from the early days of telephones. However, ideas like data and avatars, concepts many of us relate very closely to internet use, predate the web. The idea of breaking information down into basic components is as old as Plato and Socrates. (For you philosophy buffs, consider Socratic epistemology and the sorting of sensory data by the perceiving mind.) Avatars, of course, were the incarnations of Vishnu in ancient Hindu culture. They served to represent God on earth, as physical manifestations. Avatars today serve as digital manifestations, representing mundane users on bulletin boards and other internet destinations.


okay, rock n' roll