Essays and Ideas

Genesis 12 gives us no information about who Abraham is, his history and why he was chosen to enter into a relationship with God. Instead, all we have is this singular observation: “There he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord (12:8).” This act of calling on the name of the Lord, ויקרא בשם ה', evokes two earlier passages in Genesis (what I call in this post "Genesis part 1"). Firstly, establishing a name for themselves, is the central motivation behind the Tower of Babel project which ended in those people being punished for hubris: יא,ג וַיֹּאמְרוּ אִישׁ אֶל-רֵעֵהוּ, הָבָה נִלְבְּנָה לְבֵנִים, וְנִשְׂרְפָה, לִשְׂרֵפָה; וַתְּהִי לָהֶם הַלְּבֵנָה, לְאָבֶן, וְהַחֵמָר, הָיָה לָהֶם לַחֹמֶר.  יא,ד וַיֹּאמְרוּ הָבָה נִבְנֶה-לָּנוּ עִיר, וּמִגְדָּל וְרֹאשׁוֹ בַשָּׁמַיִם, וְנַעֲשֶׂה-לָּנוּ, שֵׁם:  פֶּן-נָפוּץ, עַל-פְּנֵי כָל-הָאָרֶץ 3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone,...

The book of Genesis is the first of five books in the Pentateuch, which is the first of three major volumes that comprise the Tanakh, the Jewish-Hebrew Bible also known as the old testament. The book of Genesis is 50 chapters in length and opens with a sequence of stories, many of which are well known: Chapter 1 – God creates the world in six days and rests on the seventh Chapters 2 and 3 – Adam and Eve are tempted by the serpent to eat forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden Chapter 4 – Cain kills his brother Abel and is condemned to be a wanderer Chapter 5 – mostly genealogy Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 – Noah builds an ark to save his family and pairs of animals from a deluge Chapter 10 – more genealogy Chapter 11 – Tower of Babel and Genealogy until Terach (the father of Abraham) Chapter 12 – God commands Abraham to go to Caanan Chapter 12 is a critical turning point in the Genesis narrative. Here the focus and style of the Biblical narrative complete changes. Until this point,...

In subsequent posts, I hope to explore a very simple hypothesis: the Bible can and should be read as great literature. This Bible as literature hypothesis has opponents within religious and non-religious circles. Many religious people, who are serious about the inerrancy and divine authorship of the Bible, don't feel comfortable equating the Bible to literature as though Moses were just a really good Charles Dickens. Other intellectual communities on the other hand, don't believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and instead assume the documentary hypothesis which sees the Bible as a collection of disjointed manuscripts compiled long after the events they describe. So, I recognize that my hypothesis will meet strong opposition from both these groups. My ultimate goal of course, is to use this hypothesis to facilitate a dialog between religious and non-religious people where the question of divine authorship and whether or not Bible stories need be taken literally isn't relev...

Hundreds of years before the double slit experiment, thinkers and scientists argued about the nature of light. In the 17th century, French scientist and astronomer Pierre Gassendi and Sir Isaac Newton argued that light propagates through space as a steady stream of particles. In the early 1760s Leonhard Euler maintained that light was a wave propagating through aether. Euler argued that if the sun were constantly emitting particles it would be rapidly decreasing in size. The theory behind Thomas Young's experiment is straightforward. Unlike particles, waves obey the mathematical principle of superposition and also unlike particles, waves have the potential to interfere with one another. Young passed monochromatic light through two slits in an otherwise opaque partition onto a dark screen. When light was allowed to pass through only one slit at a time the light was distributed on the screen evenly. When light was allowed to pass through both slits at the same time he observed an i...

Evil is the term used to characterize insurmountable otherness and incorrigibly problematic behavior. The different ways we imagine evil affects the way we imagine other people our fears and our politics. What follows are some sketches and responses to evil drawn from pundits and literature and elsewhere. Hopefully this will be useful to anyone thinking about the different ways of thinking about evil and all its varieties. From the movie Adaptation : [At a seminar, Charlie Kaufman has asked McKee for advice on his new screenplay in which 'nothing much happens'] Robert McKee: Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother bea...

According to theories of electromagnetism and particle physics, complexity in the universe emerges from forces of interaction between positive and negative charges in nature. Similarly, Zoroastrianism's dualistic theology sees the world as a emerging from the perennial struggle between forces of good and evil. Although a relatively small religion, vibrant Zoroastrian communities can be found all over the world (and their rituals are similar to many Jewish rituals). I have yet to meet a Zoroastrian, but a dualistic view of good and evil is not uncommon in literature. The good and dark wizards in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter , like the light and dark sides of the force in George Lucas' Star Wars and other characters of fantasy literature have introduced myself, and countless others, to compelling notions of good and evil.

A fundamental tension between good and evil, the God of light and the God of darkness, is taken very seriously in Zoroastrian theology: In the Zoroastrian conception, not all things are good; some are good, some are mixtures of good and bad, and some are really bad. Among animals, some, like the dog, are ahuric and belong in the realm of the good. Indeed, to this day in Zoroastrianism the dog receives not just the leavings of human food, but the best of the food before the humans get any. On the other hand there are the daevic animals, which belong on the side of darkness, the so-called xrafstra...the more one kills of such animals, the better, for the physical world  (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 53, No. 2, Jun., 1985) . The Bundahishn , an encyclopedic collection of Zoroastrian cosmology and creation myth, describes the “bounteous creations” of Ahura Mazda (aka Ohrmazd), Zoroastrianism's deity of good. Creation in the Zoroastrian tradition happened in s...

My reflections on the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. “The thought that Liza was coming worried me continually.” The extent with which the Underground Man has removed himself from human society, and the anxiety he feels at the thought of a visit from Liza implies that he has a social phobia or anxiety disorder. In addition to and as a result of his persistent isolation, the UM has found an inner voice which is incessantly reflecting and thinking in his head and never shuts up. It is this rambling, inexorable voice that constiutes the substance of UM's narration: “Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?” Part of the problem is that UM is intelligent and has a pretty clear understanding of his plight and social inhibitions. However, UM is unable to apply this awareness in any practical way. In short, the UM ...

Most of us are familiar with the three primary of phases matter: solid, liquid and gas. If you think about it, phase transitions are a mysterious and mystifying thing. Continuously raise the temperature of liquid water and you won't see anything change until a seemingly arbitrary threshold is surpassed (100 degrees Celsius) and then everything suddenly changes - the water boils! It seems there isn't a smooth transition between the liquid and gas phase of water because there aren't any intermediate steps between them. I can raise the temperature of ice by 50 degrees and nothing will happen to the ice, but raise the temperature one degree above 0 degrees Celsius and suddenly my ice is completely transformed into water with completely different properties! Phase transitions are an example of critical phenomena – below a certain threshold one set of properties are exhibited and above a certain threshold a completely different set of properties are exhibited without any groun...