I have reconsidered my position and have concluded that my previous post is based on my limited initial skimming through of an article about Heschel in Wikipedia. Though Wikipedia is a good resource, my skimming through the article led me to form an inaccurate picture of the man’s teachings which I wish to revise. Having read the article more closely, I wish to change my opinion.

Given my limited knowledge of Heschel, my characterizing of him as a mere self-interested purveyor of a yet another self-serving religious “party line” is an unfair ad homonym attack of the sort that I do not like making without having a basis for doing so. I do not like making hasty critical judgments about anything or anyone without all the facts, and am not proud of having done so in this case. Furthermore, I understand from a re-reading of the article (and from reading a couple of other brief biographies), that Heschel has done considerable good in the world, having stood for social justice in our age when too few others stand in the breech for the oppressed. Heschel is NOT among those I still refer to when I speak of the self-serving “Party Line” pushers of narrow religious doctrines.

Sometimes I let my passion against injustice create injustice—even the very form of injustice I am passionate against. Then again, we are all trapped from time to time in our own worlds—we bounce off the walls of the castles of misunderstandings that we have built for ourselves. This is no excuse—but the fact that it happened will serve to make me more cautious about jumping to conclusions in the future.

Posted by Bill Churchill (20101008, 13:10)

Sorry I haven’t been back in a while.

Though I’ve been in and out of many religions, (prior to the last 20 years or so), I’ve been a spiritual fence sitter for the last 20 years or so with regard to religious commitment. I can’t even decide to be an atheist, agnostic or some form of “transcendentalist.” I believe in God, but I can’t claim to know much more than that. The connected-to-God thing is always there in my emotional back-story. I think the subtle God experience I feel from time to time is to my spirit like what music is to my heart: the ever present sense of the sound and warmth of my early psychic impression of my mother’s heartbeat—an archetype that never leaves the inner nature of sensitive persons—which is why a robot can never really appreciate music and a cool rationalist can never admit of any existence of love and God.

The problem with AJ Heschel, and other brand loyalists is that they are brand loyalists. They have a shtick—a profession to uphold. They can never publically acknowledge that they just don’t know all they are “supposed to” know. They have to tow a “party line” in order to keep their flocks and the income those flocks provide. They must sell “truth” in order to peak the interest of their flocks. They will never leave their walled kingdoms to experience God for themselves and allow other to do the same. They can’t–it’s their little red wagon.

No one really knows God in the sense that things “known” can be known. This is because knowledge implies communicability of said “knowledge.” To communicate your God to someone is like communicating your early babyhood experience of your mother’s closeness—Its ludicrous to think that you could communicate such a thing. Conceptually, such notions can be loosely referred to—but not known in the fullest sense of the idea of “knowledge.” “Communicating” it would be like trying to explain romantic love or the wonder of an autumn day—just can’t be done. Poets have tried for ages and will never get it right–though they come closer than other scientists in explaining it.

I am quite comfortable sitting on the fence of spiritual indecision. After all, it’s all really just a question of being able to admit that no one can ever truly settle on where the line on the horizon of paradox actually is. No one can cleave ultimate reality. I have no trouble with such ambiguity—After all, God can fight his/her/its own battles. If God is so subtle and patient, what else can I do? I am not equivocating—I just plain don’t know enough to say “I know the way.”

Posted by Bill Churchill (20101006, 16:50)

On wonder, if you haven’t read Abraham Joshua Heschel, you owe it to yourself to at least google a deeply kindred perspective to your own. His core concept is “radical amazement.” “We may doubt anything,” he wrote in Man Is Not Alone, “except that we are struck with amazement. When in doubt, we raise questions; when in wonder, we do not even know how to ask a question. Doubts may be resolved, radical amazement can never be erased. There is no answer in the world to man’s radical wonder. Under the running sea of our theories and scientific explanations lies the aboriginal abyss of radical amazement.

Feel free to write me at arlene@arlenegoldbard.com if you’d like to be pointed to some more on that, or schmooze about Taleb, or whatever.

The thing about Taleb is that he is killing a sacred epistemological cow—namely, the “limit” of what we think is “possible.” An understanding of the fact of Randomness, (true randomness qua randomness), crushes the “Ludic Fallacy,” (the idea that life conforms to a “game theory” that can be fully vetted in some final manner). It renders the “bell curves” of “possibility” a little less final and ugly than we have led ourselves to believe.

We need to expand our minds beyond where they are at in the present time—to see beyond the contours of our present boxes. Randomness itself reveals the underlying order of the universe.

Posted by Bill Churchill (2010720, 10:53)

What is interesting for me in his writings is that he is a great killer of sacred cattle, from the newspeak babble geeks, to the babble generated by our own self-satisfied minds. As to the latter, Taleb seems to ascribe our will-to-meaning to our need to mnemonically condense information. What troubles me though, is that there is often a telling meaning in our mental constructions. Take geometry for instance. It is safe to say that the sum of the squares of a right triangle equals that of the hypotenuse. This fact alone evinces the presence of an order in the universe that, while Taleb does not refute the fact, (in fact he affirms an overarching, though mentally unfathomable universal order). He nevertheless does, (at least within the emotional apparatus of my mind) seem to downplay the importance of this order.

I tend to straddle the fence on the issue of order vs disorder in the universe. I see no conflict between the idea of God and that of a Darwinian evolution—and, I do not need to embrace the ideas of Lamarck, and his ilk, in order to hold such an opinion. The thing is, I am old alchemist by spiritual nature. One thing I know to be true is that we are all sitting on an epistemological fence, and what is refreshing about Taleb’s work is that he is helping us to admit it. None of us has the final answers, and none of us ever will.

What blindsides financial markets is the fact that too many people come to the table with more of a need for confirmation than understanding.

Posted by Bill Churchill (20100716, 14:32)