Re: bad poetry?

"You're hanging on to that silly little word entirely too
tenaciously when there are far better ones available."

You brought up the "generality" as your attack strategy, so you're stuck with it, dude. It's the idea of the "generality" I'm hanging on to, and Ideas... ah, well, superlative horses if I might return to the text again.

Anyway, if you do not acknowledge the Universal Self as a generality, the concept of the unity of god and the world as a generality, Revelations's demand that the faithful unconditionally believe in union with God at the End for it to be true as a generality, and the distinction between automatic union with God on earth and union only after death as a discrimination to be made between competing philosophies, then I concede.

The "generality" appeals, for its attempt to capture some element of truth - an attempt that is, yes, a desperate one. But would you say that you've found such a truth? As one desperate being to another, let's be courteous and kind to each other over this e-mail list (if I may borrow some eloquence from JDS).
 
luke

-------Original Message-------
From: Jim Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu>
Sent: 07/05/03 09:20 PM
To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
Subject: Re: bad poetry?

>
> There's a difference, again, between a "summary" and a "generality,"
Luke :). You're hanging on to that silly little word entirely too
tenaciously when there are far better ones available.

The Blake quotation I keep making reference to isn't a generality but a
specific judgment upon what the author considered a sloppy habit of
mind.

I'm not sure what you mean by "pronouncements" -- I think you mean mere
assertions without providing support? It wouldn't be hard to support
these pronouncments, Luke. Hebrews 13 is a nice summary of the
different kinds of lives the saints of the Hebrew Scriptures lived.
Reading the list, some of them suffered incredibly -- one of them was
even "sawn in two." I think tradition teaches that Jeremiah died this
way. If he's really the referent, he's hardly an example of a person
who lived a happy life, yet he was praised for his faith.

There is some support in the Torah for the idea of happiness following
from obedience to God, but that's because the covenant between God and
Israel was for the land they possessed, and obedience led to God's
blessing upon the land, peace with or victory over their enemies,
abundant crops and children, other material benefits, etc. All the
things most people associate with happiness. The NT backs away from
most of that, emphasizing the necessity of suffering. It extols joy in
the midst of suffering, but not happiness.

Your idea is really closer to Aristotle than either the Bible or the
Upanishads, a very common, though erroneous, gloss put on them by those
with predispositions to making generalities...

Jim

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Received on Sat Jul 5 22:30:18 2003