FredP

Well, it's your basic Einsteinian concept of "warping" spacetime by generating a massive gravitational field around the ship. This is what the warp nacelles do. It's mainly based on the pioneering work of Zefram Cochrane in the late twenty-first century. 2063, I believe. Ugh. What a geek I am.

It doesn't hurt that half of them are trained theater actors. Who would have believed a Shakespearean actor as a starship captain! And yet, he was Da Man, as they say. That was a pretty good analysis of the Trek phenomenon too, Beach. I, alas, know far more about TNG "history" than any normal person should. Like what year Picard, Riker, and Geordi graduated from Starfleet Academy. I also have the Enterprise D technical specs. I remember at one time actually having a pretty good grasp of warp field geometry. You don't think I'm serious. Sadly, or maybe not, I've forgotten most of what I knew.

Dean Stockwell. Another great series. While we're on favorites, how about the two parter where he first enters himself as a high school student, and then a comrade of his brother's in Vietnam?

Bad example, don't you think? C. S. Lewis was arguably the most important defender of orthodox Christianity in the 20th century.

Since my brain is in a bit of a Zen way at the moment, it makes me say, hmm... Maybe the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD because the earth IS the knowledge of the LORD. But that would be reading too much into it. Or would it?

Well, the Orthodox position isn't that Jesus is half human and half divine, where humanity and divinity are quantifiable ingredients one mixes together in equal proportions. It's that Jesus is completely and utterly human in every essential sense of the word, and that precisely as such he participates fully in the nature of God. No tomatoes, please, I'm just stating what the Orthodox view is.

Sorry, didn't mean to get anyone's hopes up. I've wanted to do a chalk outline of an integral systematic theology for awhile, and I might actually have found a piece of chalk to use.

Anybody remember "Cause and Effect" -- the one where the Enterprise is caught in the "temporal causality loop" and the crew keep experiencing the same sequence of events over and over again, with the ship being destroyed at the end of each loop? Are we officially off-topic now?

In Zen, just about every question is based on false assumptions. For example, that there is an actual entity called "you" asking another actual entity called "me" a question...

Wow, des, how do we like exactly the same episodes?! Or maybe my bringing them up caused you to remember them. That was such a great melody. Damn, I need to see that episode again! Oh yeah, I love that one! "Darmok." (Don't worry October, I looked that one up.)

DCJ doesn't really post that often.

It strikes me you'd find yourself at home philosophically in Unitarian Universalism, but most UU churches aren't going to share your political views. It's always something, isn't it? What you probably are is a traditional, rather than modern, Unitarian -- an 18th century liberal, rather than a 20th century one. Anyway, based on the 8 Points, and the writers that TCPC tends to draw on, you will find a lot of theological resonance in Progressive Christianity.

Or is it both? Is it, like Jung said, the rhizome and the flower? Yes, it's both; just like a pebble on the beach is Spirit. But are we talking about Spirit itself, or the pebble on the beach that is Spirit? Conceptually they're still two different things, even if ultimately they're not. Sorry, I'm in a paradoxical mood this week, so I can only imagine how unnerving it is to have a dialogue with me. If it's any consolation, the outline of my new book is coming along nicely, thanks in large part to these feats of mental gymnastics.

As much as I did enjoy the book for many reasons, and am looking forward to the movie, I do understand that some people are concerned about the way it completely revises the past. Sure, it's fiction, but it dovetails with so much bad historical scholarship going on in "Early Christian Studies" right now, that a spiritually immature and historically naive population is eating it up, and not thinking too much about the fiction/history boundary too much. God knows I don't have any naive belief in the "official" traditional history of Christianity; but people need to know that the "alternative" history presented in The DaVinci Code is no less mythological and symbolic than the "official" one. As for protecting children against anti-Catholic propaganda, hey, I grew up Fundamentalist -- the ultimate anti-Catholic propaganda machine! Nobody protected me!

I was just thinking more about this today. You're correctly describing something, but I'm not sure consciousness is what it is. What is not found in body or mind and cannot be objectified is called, variously, the One, the Absolute, the Ground of Being, Ultimate Reality, and so on. Consciousness, of course, participates in this reality, and therefore can awaken to its nondual identity with Absolute Being, but is still -- at least as the term is ordinarily used -- part of the field of manifestation, and subject to development and dissolution. It's probably worth clarifying what we mean when we use this highly loaded word, to avoid more confusion than we'll invariably already have. When we say "consciousness," are we referring to The Witness -- to Absolute Being -- which transcends both subjectivity and objectivity, and includes them in nondual union? Or are we merely referring to a center of subjective experience in the world? Anyway, welcome, and thanks for your thoughtful post.