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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Dec 31, 2016 - 09:08pm PT
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The whole point is that the figurative is literal. Understand that to find the power and authority of religious thought.
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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It's Sunday....time for church.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Paul,
Literal is..well, literal.
Figurative can be many things and that's exactly the beauty of it. Figurative can be metaphorical, allegorical, archetypal, magical, and mystical.
Don't degrade the figurative by limiting it to being literal.
There is magic in reality, in the literal, but that's another tangent.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Literal is..well, literal.
The wisdom found in the figurative language of the Bible is literal wisdom.
The worship of nature is the backbone of the Romantic movement from Wordsworth to Muir.
2017: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?
What literary and religious terms or concepts ought to be more widely known?
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WBraun
climber
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The wisdom found in the figurative language of the Bible is literal wisdom.
Yes, this shows good intelligence.
These anal fanatic science only people can't understand a simple thing, as their minds are way too clogged up with data and more data and even more data.
So much data they can't even see a simple whole thing anymore .....
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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How about the concept that Jesus was a mystic using mystical language to convey his experiences and understanding? It is an interesting and illuminating exercise to read only the "red print" from that perspective.
Paul, you've alluded to an argument for your position. What is your argument for your position that figurative is literal?
Is Genesis figurative or literal? What parts of the Bible are figurative and what parts are literal. What parts of the Upanishads are figurative and which parts are literal?
It seems you have mistaken valid for literal and you are arguing that the figurative nature of religious texts convey valid - or useful - knowledge. That argument may be true even though the figurative language of religious texts is not literal.
fig·ur·a·tive
adjective
1.
departing from a literal use of words; metaphorical.
"gold, in the figurative language of the people, was “the tears wept by the sun.”"
synonyms: metaphorical, nonliteral, symbolic, allegorical, representative, emblematic
"the example given was meant to be figurative"
2.
(of an artist or work of art) representing forms that are recognizably derived from life.
lit·er·al
adjective
1.
taking words in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or allegory.
"dreadful in its literal sense, full of dread"
2.
(of a translation) representing the exact words of the original text.
synonyms: word-for-word, verbatim, letter-for-letter;
val·id
adjective
(of an argument or point) having a sound basis in logic or fact; reasonable or cogent.
"a valid criticism"
synonyms: well founded, sound, reasonable, rational, logical, justifiable, defensible, viable, bona fide
legally binding due to having been executed in compliance with the law.
"a valid contract"
synonyms: legally binding, lawful, legal, legitimate, official, signed and sealed, contractual;
legally or officially acceptable.
"the visas are valid for thirty days"
synonyms: legitimate, authentic, authoritative, reliable, bona fide
"valid information"
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Paul, you've alluded to an argument for your position. What is your argument for your position that figurative is literal?
That isn't my position. The truism that it's wrong to murder is laid out in the book of Genesis in figurative language but what that language reveals, finally, is a literal statement about murder.
The figurative isn't literal but it can and does reveal an idea, that is: an idea that can then be stated in a literal sense without benefit of metaphor and is the logical conclusion drawn from that metaphor: its wisdom.
The confusion is in the notion that biblical stories are simply fairy tales or pre enlightenment nonsense, untrue as actual occurrences and therefore simply false, and what's missed then is this vast reservoir of wisdom and knowledge they contain which can be stated literally apart from the metaphor that revealed it.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Jan, Thanks for the link to Houston!
Paul, Is that a long-winded way of saying that figurative writing or storytelling can present apparently valid wisdom and/or truths about human nature and behavior?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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I beg to differ that nature is the the backbone of the Romantic movement
Not nature but the worship of nature, nature as a replacement for traditional religious thought which was discredited in the Enlightenment and is manifested in the writing of Rousseau (the virtue of natural man).
In both literature and the visual arts (including the English Garden) the beauty and sublimity of nature become a reconciliation to existence. By the 1830s and the advent of Realism of course this begins to change.
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me, here, upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while 120
May I behold in thee what I was once,
__My dear, dear Sister! And this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy:__ for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts,** that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 130
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our chearful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
Not since St. Francis had attitudes toward nature changed so dramatically as they did in the Enlightenment and the birth of Romanticism.
Paul, Is that a long-winded way of saying that figurative writing or storytelling can present apparently valid wisdom and/or truths about human nature and behavior?
No. It's demonstrating that the meaning behind figurative writing can be described, explicated in a literal sense and should be read and understood with that in mind.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Can you provide an example?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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2017: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?
From Jerry Coyne: Determinism.
"A concept that everyone should understand and appreciate is the idea of physical determinism: that all matter and energy in the universe, including what’s in our brain, obey the laws of physics. The most important implication is that is we have no “free will”: At a given moment, all living creatures, including ourselves, are constrained by their genes and environment to behave in only one way—and could not have behaved differently. We feel like we make choices, but we don’t. In that sense, “dualistic” free will is an illusion."
The armed robber had no choice about whether to get a gun and pull the trigger.
oh jerry!
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27067
....
And if we didn't have L. Krauss we'd have to invent him...
"In science, we don’t "believe" in things..."
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27085
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Not since St. Francis had attitudes toward nature changed so dramatically as they did in the Enlightenment and the birth of Romanticism.
I'll have to agree with the Sycorax on this one. I've never been convinced that the so-called nature worship championed by the leading figures of Romanticism were very sincere, or convincingly ingenuous; certainly not Rousseau, who used his "natural man" mythos as a central feature of his con game directed at the various parlor societies who inexplicably hovered on his every word. The same for Byron and most of the rest. Shelley and Rousseau were both abominable characters who routinely abused and carelessly exploited the hapless unfortunates within their haloed orbits -- and, like Marx and others, such as Tolstoy ,must also be judged on that biographical data over and above their gratuitous philosophical blandishments and flowery phrases.
This is not to say that western societies at the time of the Enlightenment had not organically arrived at a stage of new inquiry and discovery of nature. This is a tide that started its rise during the Renaissance, having had its origins in Greece and Rome. Once the Medieval chains had been struck from the European mind they were tentatively free to jump the reservation. Nature was the only thing around which seemed to beg for discovery and clarification. Early science began its quest anew and philosophy followed in its trail. In the most general way the real champions of this new attitude towards nature were da Vinci, Galileo , Newton, and later Einstein.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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I'll have to agree with the Sycorax on this one.
Be my guest…But:
Romanticism as a movement manifests itself in a variety of ways. Chief among them is an unbridled affection for nature as demonstrated in in the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, the painting of Constable and Turner the Barbizon School in France, the work of Friederich in Germany, the whole of the Hudson River School in America… eventually producing artists like Keith and Inness (Swedenborgians both) and what was a kind of purely religious painting disguised as landscape.
By contrast the Renaissance, much like classical antiquity, was enamored with nature only to the degree one could impose their will on it. The authority of nature was always subordinated to the ordered idealism of Neo-Platonic thought, as when the classicism of the Renaissance produces the French and Italian garden in which the human imposition of order demonstrated the absolute authority of the mind over nature as a direct reflection of God’s order. In fact, what produces the best art in both the tradition of High Classical Greece as well as the High Renaissance is the tension between naturalism and the conceptual ideal.
By contrast the Romantic English garden, “a path without a plan,” gives nature the appearance of itself as an authority in and of itself. The authority of nature in Romantic thought is ubiquitous both in the sense of the bucolic and the sublime.
Leonardo (and, yes, he was from Vinci) was an anomaly in his approach, and his rocky landscapes were, to say the least, unusual in Italian Renaissance painting as were his “scientific interests” demonstrated in the sketch books.
The secularism that emanates from the enlightenment discredits religion in the late 18th c. especially in England, and the terrible vacuum created is filled with a new found admiration of nature as a source of reconciliation to being.
In a secular nature, a nature without the traditional God, humanity found a powerful, mysterious, hidden divinity. Of course the notion of the Romantic sensibility still lingers today. When one wanders into the mountain wilderness we wander into our own personal church and perhaps the messiah of that church is Darwin and the sacrament is recycling. But I have little doubt that that Romantic sensibility follows us.
The Romantic period saw nature not so much as something to be explored as it did something to be pondered as beautiful, sublime and finally, and most importantly, as a source of reconciliation.
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