Denial of Belief

October 15, 2025 9:46pm

What to say? The market dropped Friday, came back Monday – down again today. The steel gray sky slid west southwest as I watched from the dream chair on the barn porch.

If you deny the old beliefs, what is left? Does mankind have a spiritual life at all? With no supernatural inclination, what is left? I think there is a pull toward spiritualism but not in the usual way. We have a consciousness that demands justice, fairness, and accountability. I don’t think we have a soul in the usual sense, but we do have a consciousness that requires that we rise above our bestial origins. There is great wisdom to be found in the sacred texts of many religions. Perhaps an amalgam of the best of them is the correct path.

Language and Translations

October 27, 2026

Yesterday, I cut 13 stones to make the arch for the fireplace in the stone house. Each is about 4″ at the bottom and a little over 5″ at the top. The arch will be about 8″ high in the middle. It is laying on the ground now but it has promise and I’ll know more once I get the form built to hold it up as I apply the mortar.

Recently, I ran across the concept of teleology again and while researching it (again!), I read about Socrates’ ideas of causality. The quotidian acorn story emerged as expected. Two days later, I picked up the Dialogs of Plato to read in a waiting room and fell into the exact same story. Sometimes, you do wonder if maybe everything is indeed connected…. that there is something to this teleology stuff!

A few pages further yielded another gem. Plato used the phrase “through a glass darkly” to describe how we see reality. Everyone who has read the Bible will recognize Paul’s words from 1st Corinthians 13:12 in the King James version.

Plato predated Paul so was Paul using Plato’s ideas or were they both borrowing from some even older source?

Internet searches didn’t immediately address this particular question and I almost gave up….but then, a seminary student noted the same question and with a knowledge of Greek, determined that the translators had both used some poetic license and that the translator of the Dialogs had a Bible background and so had quite naturally used the “through a glass darkly” phrase when the original Greek of both Plato and Paul should have yielded something more along the lines of “reflections in water and mirrors” to describe our poor observations of reality.

The ancients were known to use smoked glass to safely observe eclipses, and I did the same as a child in the ’60’s.