http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/15-how-google-is-making-us-smarter/

“Objective reality” — this is getting closer to where some of my thinking is: Is there such a thing?

I’m reading some David F. Strauss right now, BTW.

Quite true, and of course there is a good deal of room for doubt about what it is that Jesus actually taught. There is not, and as far as we know, never was a “Gospel of Jesus,” written by Jesus. The poor fellow and his teachings have been at the mercy of his followers ever since he died.

If you could go back in time and tell Jesus that you regarded him as “an expression of the Jewish Sophia/Wisdom as it meets the Greek Logos,” I wonder if he would have had any idea what you were talking about. Maybe you could get him to understand it eventually. Whether he would have agreed with that assessment once he understood it is, as you say, “another thing entirely.” Of course you’d probably have to talk to him in Aramaic, or you would not be able to talk to him at all.

I do wonder why “feelings” and emotions get such a bad rap, since they are as much a part of the human experience as rationality and logic. But mostly, I wonder why imagination is so held in disdain.

I can imagine all sorts of things about Jesus and the “Jesus movement.” If I told you some of the things I have imagined, you might regard them with disdain. I do not, however, confuse the things I have imagined with reality, since they amount only to plausibilities, backed by little or no actual evidence. I will say this, though — in their favor is the fact that they take much less effort at suspension of disbelief than some of the all-too-imaginative alternatives that have been peddled as “fact” for, in many cases, almost 2000 years.

BigHouse: It’s not all *that* loose, just looser than traditional, orthodox in-the-pew Christianity, and a hell of a lot looser than fundamentalist Christianity. “Believe” — I hope, and I trust, which requires a lot less intellectual assent to a list of factual propositions than the “I-know” sense of the word. As I’ve said before, there’s a crowd around Jesus, and I’m in it, sometimres up close, sometimes hanging back in the dust.

I do wonder why “feelings” and emotions get such a bad rap, since they are as much a part of the human experience as rationality and logic. But mostly, I wonder why imagination is so held in disdain. My mom died two year ago; she lives on in my imagination, and when my brother and sisters get together, she lives on among us, in our imagination — which I mean much more than sappy memories, but, obviously, much less than she sat at the table and had a cup of coffee with us. .. There was an article along these lines in Discover not long ago; I’ll see if I can find it after awhile, after church.

I wonder if “the Word” knew enough Greek to know the meaning of the word “Logos.”