I have wanted to get back to blogging for awhile now but have not done so basically due to the fact that I have not known what I wanted to blog about. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but it is to me. I don’t want to do the following:

• Spend all my time writing/thinking/reading about religious topics
• Become some sort of boring, introspective rambling naval gazer

There are plenty of other types of blogs, of course. Blogs the travels of various people, news updates, etc, etc. I don’t want to do any of those either.

So, why write?

I believe I have a reason.

Supposedly, you learn something new every day. This does appear to be true in my life. Rather than forgetting the new things I learn or letting them simply rot in my brain, my excuse to blog will be to write about what I learned every day, if I can remember.

OK, so, today… so many things…

This morning I learned a fair bit about the Buddhist conception of emptiness from a podcast lecture. The speaker was Thanissaro Bhikku and the talk was called “Emptiness Revisited”. I’d happily editorialize about it, but he has much more of interest to say about it than I do.

I actually listened to two talks on Buddhism today, the second by the name of “Letting Go of Beliefs” by Hugh MacMillan. This one was of more practical significance. I learned a new way to look at the internal dialog that happens in my head. He discusses the idea that we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves, explaining to ourselves who we are, why are are the way we are, what we want, why we have/don’t have what we want, etc. If we want to be somebody else, to change ourselves in some way, we need to stop telling ourselves these stories about who and what we are. When the stories stop, we are no longer defined by them. Very interesting psychological concept, if you ask me. I think I will suggest a podcast on the subject to Esther to complement the “Psychological Time” discussion.

From the Science Friday show I learned that the worlds largest extinction event (no, not the dinosaurs… before that) may have been caused by a new crater that has been discovered in Antarctica that is big enough to contain the state of Ohio. Damn.

On the “geek” front, I discovered a Firefox extension that embeds a blogging tool in the sidebar. I think it’s pretty swell. Only shortcoming I can see is that it requires too much horizontal screen real estate when embedded in the sidebar. Oh well, maybe in a future release.

This next item is not quite “today”, but recent and unreported, so I’ll go with it. I was listening to a discussion with the creator of the website “GodIsaJoke.com” who maintains that the Old Testament was (in large part) written by women who wanted to mock god with satire as a form of political expression. Her points were interesting, if perhaps not quite completely formed. It did get me thinking, however, about the social role that the Asherah cult played in early Israelite society. Considering that paleolithic cultures venerated mother goddesses before the documented invention of patriarchal religions, it seems quite conceivable that she could be correct where certain accounts are concerned. Still, on her site she uses a tagline drawn from Hosea 11:7 and this is where my learning takes place. The scripture, as quoted by her, appears to be saying that nobody wanted to be worshipping God. A little study into it, however, indicated a very different reading to me. First, the context in which Hosea was written (from the New Revised Standard Version intro to Hosea):

“The book consists primarily of speeches critiquing the political, social, and, above all, religious life of the Northern Kingdom, Israel, in the final days before its conquest and destruction by the Assyrians in 722 BCE.”

Hosea 11:7 says (in that same bible):

7 My people are bent on turning away from me.
To the Most High they call,
but he does not raise them up at all.

Now, let’s look at this… God is supposed to be speaking here. In the first part of the sentence he says that his people are bent on turning away from him. Then, however, it says they are calling on the Most High. What gives? Isn’t GOD the Most High? How are people who are calling on the Most High bent on turning away from him? There is apparently no obvious understanding of this scripture, judging by the number of different translations there are of this thing. I think that the key is the use of the words “Most High”. The Northern Kingdoms of Israel had worshipped a god named EL, the Southern Kingdoms worshipped YAHWEH. What if the words translated “The Most High” are actually referring to a God OTHER than YAHWEH? I suspect the actual Hebrew here is actually best understood polytheistically. If Yahweh was here complaining that his people were bent away from him and calling on another god it would make more sense, but it would corrupt the other scriptures where the title “The Most High” is applied to Yahweh. So, I learned about a new scripture that is better understood polytheistically than monotheistically. This joins Habakkuk 3:5 and Deuteronomy 32:8 in my curiousity collection of places the redactors screwed up.

I learned today that the word “respect” is basically from root that means “look again”. It’s an interesting thought that when we take the time to give a second look to something, to understand it better, we are showing it respect. I liked that thought…

Microsoft claims that Vista is the most secure operating system in the world. Uh huh. Just because it hasn’t been out long enough to be exploited yet. :-)

The day isn’t over. I’m sure I’ll learn more new stuff. I’ll to remember until my next post….

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RyanSutter has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

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