Not wanted in America

A reflection of the past

Gentle Reader,

 In my attempt to teach and educate those who have never thought about what attitudes can do, I wanted to make it clear there is no room in 2009 for discrimination or racism here in America. If you know someone who hates,  grab your wallet as that person will steal you blind. Or as they said in Ireland "they will steal your pipe and come back for the smoke".

Gone to America

Throughout the Famine years,  (1816 )nearly a million Irish arrived in the United States. Famine immigrants were the first big wave of poor refugees ever to arrive in the U.S. and Americans were simply overwhelmed. Upon arrival in America, the Irish found the going to be quite tough. With no one to help them, they immediately settled into the lowest rung of society and waged a daily battle for survival.

The roughest welcome of all would be in Boston, Massachusetts, an Anglo-Saxon city with a population of about 115,000. It was a place run by descendants of English Puritans, men who could proudly recite their lineage back to 1620 and the Mayflower ship. Now, some two hundred thirty years later, their city was undergoing nothing short of an unwanted "social revolution" as described by Ephraim Peabody, member of an old Yankee family. In 1847, the first big year of Famine emigration, the city was swamped with 37,000 Irish Catholics arriving by sea and land.

Proper Bostonians pointed and laughed at the first Irish immigrants stepping off ships wearing clothes twenty years out of fashion. They watched as the newly arrived Irishmen settled with their families into enclaves that became exclusively Irish near the Boston waterfront along Batterymarch and Broad Streets, then in the North End section and in East Boston. Irishmen took any unskilled jobs they could find such as cleaning yards and stables, unloading ships, and pushing carts.

And once again, they fell victim to unscrupulous landlords. This time it was Boston landlords who sub-divided former Yankee dwellings into cheap housing, charging Irish families up to $1.50 a week to live in a single nine-by-eleven foot room with no water, sanitation, ventilation or daylight.

In Boston, as well as other American cities in the mid-1800s, there was no enforcement of sanitary regulations and no building or fire safety codes. Landlords could do as they pleased. A single family three-story house along the waterfront that once belonged to a prosperous Yankee merchant could be divided-up room by room into housing for a hundred Irish, bringing a nice profit.

The overflow Irish would settle into the gardens, back yards and alleys surrounding the house, living in wooden shacks. Demand for housing of any quality was extraordinary. People lived in musty cellars with low ceilings that partially flooded with every tide.

Old warehouses and other buildings within the Irish enclave were hastily converted into rooming houses using flimsy wooden partitions that provided no privacy.

A Boston Committee of Internal Health studying the situation described the resulting Irish slum as "a perfect hive of human beings, without comforts and mostly without common necessaries; in many cases huddled together like brutes, without regard to age or sex or sense of decency. Under such circumstances self-respect, forethought, all the high and noble virtues soon die out, and sullen indifference and despair or disorder, intemperance and utter degradation reign supreme."

The unsanitary conditions were breeding grounds for disease, particularly cholera. Sixty percent of the Irish children born in Boston during this period didn't live to see their sixth birthday. Adult Irish lived on average just six years after stepping off the boat onto American soil.

Those who were not ill were driven to despair. Rowdy behavior fueled by alcohol and boredom spilled out into the streets of Boston and the city witnessed a staggering increase in crime, up to 400 percent for such crimes as aggravated assault. Men and boys cooped up in tiny rooms and without employment or schooling got into serious trouble. An estimated 1500 children roamed the streets every day begging and making mischief.

There were only a limited number of unskilled jobs available. Intense rivalry quickly developed between the Irish and working class Bostonians over these jobs. In Ireland, a working man might earn eight cents a day. In America, he could earn up to a dollar a day, a tremendous improvement. Bostonians feared being undercut by hungry Irish willing to work for less than the going rate. Their resentment, combined with growing anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment among all classes in Boston led to 'No Irish Need Apply' signs being posted in shop windows, factory gates and workshop doors throughout the city.

Irish in New York

New York, three times the size of Boston, was better able to absorb its incoming Irish. Throughout the Famine years, 75 percent of the Irish coming to America landed in New York. In 1847, about 52,000 Irish arrived in the city which had a total population of 372,000. The Irish were not the only big group of immigrants arriving. A substantial German population totaling over 53,000 also arrived in 1847.

In New York, the Irish did not face the degree of prejudice found in Boston. Instead, they were confronted by shifty characters and con artists. Confused Irish, fresh off the farm and suffering from culture shock, were taken advantage of the moment they set foot on shore.

Immediately upon arrival in New York harbor, they were met by Irishmen known as 'runners' speaking in Gaelic and promising to 'help' their fellow countrymen. Many of the new arrivals, quite frightened at the mere prospect of America, gladly accepted. Those who hesitated were usually bullied into submission. The runner's first con was to suggest a good place to stay in New York; a boarding house operated by a friend, supposedly with good meals and comfortable rooms at very affordable rates, including free storage of any luggage.

The boarding houses were actually filthy hell-holes in lower Manhattan. Instead of comfortable rooms, the confused arrivals were shoved into vermin-infested hovels with eight or ten other unfortunate souls, at prices three or four times higher than what they had been told. They remained as 'boarders' until their money ran out at which time their luggage was confiscated for back-rent and they were tossed out into the streets, homeless and penniless.

During the entire Famine period, about 650,000 Irish arrived in New York harbor. All incoming passenger ships to New York had to stop for medical inspection. Anyone with fever was removed to the quarantine station on Staten Island and the ship itself was quarantined for 30 days. But Staten Island was just five miles from Manhattan. Runners were so aggressive in pursuit of the Irish that they even rowed out to quarantined ships and sneaked into the hospitals on Staten Island despite the risk of contracting typhus.

Another way to take advantage of the Irish was to sell them phony railroad and boat tickets. Runners working with 'forwarding agents' sold bogus tickets that had pictures of trains or boats the illiterate immigrants wished to board to leave Manhattan for other U.S. cities. The tickets were either worthless, or if they were valid, had been sold at double the actual price or higher. On the boats, the immigrant were shoved into jam-packed steerage sections, although they thought they had paid for better accommodations. Sometimes, halfway to their destination, they were told to pay more or risk being thrown overboard.

The penniless Irish who remained in Manhattan stayed crowded together close to the docks where they sought work as unskilled dock workers. They found cheap housing wherever they could, with many families living in musty cellars. Abandoned houses near the waterfront that once belonged to wealthy merchants were converted into crowded tenements. Shoddy wooded tenements also sprang up overnight in yards and back alleys to be rented out room by room at high prices. Similar to Boston, New York experienced a high rate of infant mortality and a dramatic rise in crime as men and boys cooped-up in squalid shanties let off steam by drinking and getting in fights.

Anti-Irish Sentiment

U.S. immigration records indicate that by 1850, the Irish made up 43 percent of the foreign-born population. Up to ninety percent of the Irish arriving in America remained in cities. New York now had more Irish-born citizens than Dublin. Those who did not stay in New York or Boston traveled to places such as Albany, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and out west to Butte, Montana, and San Francisco. Upon arrival, the Irishman and his family would usually go straight to the 'Irish quarter,' locate people from County Mayo, County Cork, or wherever they had come from, and settle in among them.

Unlike other nationalities that came to America seeking wide open spaces, the Irish chose to huddle in the cities partly because they were the poorest of all the immigrants arriving and partly out of a desire to recreate the close-knit communities they had cherished back in Ireland. Above all, the Irish loved each other's company, enjoying a daily dose of gossip, conversation, poetry and story telling, music and singing, and the ever-present jokes and puns.

But the daily pressures of living in America at the bottom rung of society also brought out the worst in them. Back home, the Irish were known for their honesty, law-abiding manners, and chastity. In America, old social norms disintegrated and many of the Irish, both men and women, behaved wildly. In the hopeless slums of New York, prostitution flourished and drunkenness occurred even among children.

Wherever they settled, the Irish kept to themselves to the exclusion of everyone else, and thus were slow to assimilate. Americans were thus slow to accept the Irish as equals, preferring instead to judge them by the cartoon stereotypes of drunken, brawling Irishmen published in newspapers of the day. Irish immigrants were also derided in the press as 'aliens' who were mindlessly loyal to their Catholic leaders in place of any allegiance to America.

The sheer numbers of Irish pouring into the U.S. meant that Catholicism was on the verge of becoming the single largest Christian denomination in America. Many American Protestants held the simplistic view that if the numbers of Roman Catholics were increasing then the power and influence of the Papacy in America was also increasing, threatening America's political independence. Fear of the Papacy thus became fear of the Irish and resulted in outright violence.

In Boston, a mob of Protestant workmen burned down a Catholic convent. Protestant mobs in Philadelphia rioted against Irish Catholics in 1844. The Irish in Philadelphia promptly gathered into mobs of their own and fought back, with the violence lasting over three days. Two Catholic churches were burned down along with hundreds of Irish homes and a dozen immigrants killed. In New York, Archbishop John Hughes, on hearing of the Philadelphia attacks, deployed armed Irishmen to protect his own churches. Then he paid a visit to New York's mayor and warned him that if just one Catholic church was touched, the Irish would burn all of Manhattan to the ground. Other cities that experienced anti-Catholic violence included; Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans and Louisville, Kentucky.

Militant anti-Catholics formed a third political party nicknamed the 'Know-Nothings' seeking to curtail Irish immigration and keep them from becoming naturalized Americans in order to prevent them from ever gaining any political power. The movement was most successful in Massachusetts which elected Know-Nothing candidates to every statewide office in 1854, including governor. Throughout America, anti-Irish sentiment was becoming fashionable. Newspaper advertisements for jobs and housing in Boston, New York and other places now routinely ended with "Positively No Irish Need Apply."

 

But American concerns over Irish immigration soon took a back seat to the tremendous issue of slavery which was about to rip the young nation apart. For Irish Americans, the turning point of their early years in the U.S. would be the American Civil War. Over 140,000 enlisted in the Union army while others in the South enrolled in the Confederate ranks. Irish units, including the all-Irish 69th New York Regiment, participated in the monumental battles at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, earning a reputation for dependability and bravery. At Fredericksburg, the 'Fighting 69th' repeatedly charged a well-entrenched Confederate position on Marye's Heights to the astonishment of all who observed.

However, during the Civil War, Irish civilians were heavily involved in the notorious New York draft riots in which African Americans were singled out for violence. Relations between Irish immigrants and African Americans in New York had never been good. From their earliest arrival in the U.S. the Irish had competed with freed slaves for the most menial jobs and cheapest housing. Decades of frustration and pent-up emotions finally erupted on the streets over three hot summer days in July 1863 resulting in numerous beatings and 18 blacks murdered. Federal troops from Gettysburg had to be called in to quell the violence. Hundreds of buildings, including a black orphanage, were destroyed along with $5 million in property damage.

Rise of the Irish

Following the Civil War, Irish laborers once again provided the backbreaking work needed for the enormous expansion of rapidly industrializing America. They ran factories, built railroads in the West, and worked in the mines of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Montana. They were carpenter's assistants, boat-builders, dock-hands, bartenders and waiters. In an era when there were virtually no governmental constraints on American capitalism, the Irish organized the first trade unions and conducted strikes when necessary for higher wages, shorter hours, and safer working conditions.

Single Irish women found work as cooks and maids in houses belonging to wealthy families on Beacon Hill in Boston and along Fifth Avenue in New York, and in most other big cities. Many lived inside the homes in the servants' quarters and enjoyed a standard of living luxurious by comparison to the life they had known in Ireland or in the tenements. These women were cheerful, kind-hearted, hard working and thrifty, always managing to save a little money out of their salary for those back in Ireland. From 1850 to 1900 an estimated $260 million poured into Ireland from America, bringing over more family members and helping out those remaining behind.

The women also donated generously to their local Catholic parishes for new parochial schools and the construction of stained-glass churches with marble statues and altars. The beautiful cathedral-like buildings became great sources of pride among the Irish, making the statement that Catholics had 'arrived' in America. Catholic parishes became the center of family life, providing free education, hospitals, sports and numerous social activities, recreating to some degree the close-knit villages the Irish had loved back home while at the same time protecting them from unfriendly Americans.

Catholics in Ireland had endured centuries of discrimination at the hands of a dominant culture ruled by English and Anglo-Irish Protestants. They arrived in America only to find they were once again facing religious discrimination by the dominant culture; this time American Protestants. Eventually the Irish discovered the path to changing things in their new home lay in the local ballot box.

The large numbers of Irishmen now eligible to vote in cities such as New York and Boston meant they could no longer be politically ignored. The sons and grandsons of Famine immigrants joined the Democratic Party in droves, organized themselves by every ward and precinct into political 'machines' then became candidates for office, first getting elected to city councils, later to the mayor's office itself.

In Boston, newly elected Mayor James Michael Curley boldly announced in 1914: "The day of the Puritan has passed; the Anglo-Saxon is a joke; a new and better America is here." Curley dominated Boston politics for nearly forty years. He freely used patronage as a way to reward loyalty and get Irish votes, filling various city departments with his supporters. The Irish delighted in taking civil service jobs with their steady paychecks and long-term security. In cities with big Irish populations, police and fire departments often became staffed by Famine descendants.

In New York, the political machine was known as Tammany Hall, a powerful but corrupt organization that traded favors and jobs for votes and money. Out of Manhattan's fourth ward emerged Al Smith, the grandson of Irish immigrants, who rose from the tenements of the Lower East Side to seek the American presidency. As governor of New York in the 1920s, Smith originated ground-breaking social reform programs that later became the model for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. But as the Democratic candidate for president in 1928, Smith was relentlessly bashed by anti-Catholic activists and was resoundingly defeated, losing to incumbent President Herbert Hoover.

The most extraordinary Famine descendant was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, great-grandson of Patrick Kennedy, a farmer from County Wexford who had left Ireland in 1849. Although other Presidents, including Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson had Irish roots, John Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic. To millions of Irish Catholic Americans, Kennedy's election in 1960 as the 35th President of the United States signaled an end to the century-long struggle for full acceptance in the U.S.

By the time of Kennedy's victory, descendants of the Famine immigrants were steadily leaving the old Irish working-class neighborhoods of Boston, New York and other cities and settling into the new suburbs sprouting across America. Irish Americans, three or four generations removed from their Famine forebears, now preferred a more generic middle-class American lifestyle complete with manicured lawns and backyard barbecues. Some of them even converted to Republicanism and wound up voting for another 'Irishman' named Ronald Reagan for president.

The Irish, the first big group of poor refugees ever to come to the United States, had born the brunt of American resentment and prevailed. They could now count on the fact that their children might be educated at Harvard University or perhaps rise to a top position in any corporation or business, based on their talent and ability. And they had paved the way for the waves of immigrants from Europe and other places that followed in their footsteps.

Hard work and sheer determination had allowed the Irish in America to overcome countless obstacles and find success and happiness. But their country of origin remained a very sad place in the decades following the Famine.

For you see Gentle Reader, its where we come from that makes better Americans, and don't you think that we don't work hard to be good citizens. How many people do you know that are trying to leave this country? (Besides, perhaps yours truly who wants to go home, where the green of the hills make you heart soar and there is a little bit of heaven there. 

A Right or ....a wrong

The sign reads "without any change, we live on the street"

"But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.' (1 Ti 5: 8 ) 

 

 

Gentle reader,

 You know me, I would much rather present you truth about spiritual things than get (as it were into the issues of what is right and wrong) but not enough  Christian ministers are standing up and screaming from the roof tops that we ought as Christians (see I'm talking to my family, not to those who claim no allegiance to any one or anything (rather like Bernie Madoff). 

 First, another word about your health care (those of you that have it) Without a public option [which congress seems determined to scrap in a attempt to compromise with the GOP, remember them? the Party of "NO") The insurance Companies will continue to increase your cost. (hint the Insurance industry is spending more that 1.5 Million a day to defeat any attempt to give people a decent health care system) if you have insurance good for you, if your like the some 40+ million working poor then you need to stand up to your elected Representative and tell them "get with it or get out of congress." Tell Congress to give up their health care that they value but don't want to provide for the American people.

We are living gentle reader, in what I call a post Christian country. a place where people go to Church, or synagogue on the Sabbath and then worship the "God of this World" money and what you can get with it. I think I told you once before that there is enough food to feed everyone in the world, (God provided that) Also there is enough wealth in the world that there is No reason to anyone to be poor (God told us about that). So whats the problem? In a word Greed!   Unless you stand up for what is right and get involved things will continue as they have for more than 2000+ years. It was one man (Jesus Christ who changed the world). What could we do as one person,  if every one person would get involved to help  each another. Many do (thank God for them) but many do not (shame on them). I for one remember an old martial arts adage "To fight with another is wrong but to lose a fight over principles you deem honorable and right is worse". I for one,  want each of you to be fighting for your neighbor here in America [that poor soul , that abused and battered women and child]and then for that neighbor on the other side of the world.    

If we don't take care of our own then who will? The Greedy, they never will? The elected? not as long as their concerned about the money it takes to get re- elected and those special interests who are concerned about the "bottom line". Not those who scream the loudest about taxes and cost, for they are still locked into their tiny minds that tell them "Your more important than that person you just stepped over"

 It's up to you and me Gentle reader to change the mind set to those who want to own you and your family.   

Love,

Denis

P.S. New York's financial data is all sunshine and rainbows these days. A $3.9 billion surplus has the City Council talking tax cuts, job growth is chugging along (62,300 new ones added in 2006), unemployment is at a slim 4.9 percent. No need to tell you where the housing market is. Great news for everyone! Except for one little thing: According the Coalition for the Homeless's annual report, released yesterday, the number of homeless New Yorkers increased by 11 percent in 2006, to 35,113. That means, the Coalition says, more New York families are homeless than at any point since the city started keeping records.

Take a second to process this bit of info. City shelters began their record-keeping in 1979. This means there are more homeless people today than just a few years after the financial crisis. ("Ford to City" was in 1975.) This means there are more homeless people now than during the crack-ridden, stock-screwed Dinkins era. This might even mean that when the average price of a Manhattan home hovers over $1 million, maybe some people have a harder time affording homes. Who knew?

Time out... for health and care

Time out!

Gentle Reader,

I am taking a wee time out from our study on time (Pun intended) to speak briefly about other things. I have no ax to grind but a lot of interest in what happens to this country (USA) As we have lived here for a few years.

What I see and hear are those dead set (insert pun here) against universal health care (whatever you call it ) have health insurance, first of all, they also have for the most part good secure jobs in which they are comfortably able to look down their nose at those who through no fault of their own have lost their insurance and jobs due to not their own inactivity but to the fortunes of war (another pun insert here) for this might have never occurred if we had not embraced a war for oil (thanks to the past administration, who advocated oil is a good reason to forget about the being attacked , forget about security, and wage a war for more oil), now who made out like a bandit.

If our Senators and Representatives choose to go slow on this issue then surprise, surprise another 40 years will pass  we'll be dead and no help in sight!!! And you dear gentle reader will have no safety,"net" perhaps no job and will have seen your loved ones wither into just a memory.

We need compassion on all of our citizens, regardless of race, color or creed. We need to take care of those least able to help themselves. When the greedy have bled you dry and claim that they love this country they are lying, for this country is made up of "people" . Like you and me gentle reader. People like Marti, my wife bed fast for years thanks to an uncaring medical profession who disallowed her heath care benefits, denied us treatment that could have save her!

Taxes are what you pay for services you receive. I haven’t received many benefits, have you? Taxes perhaps will help Marti to walk again. In the meantime. We  spent more than $250, 000.00 dollars in health care and lost our home, our pets, forced to jump through hoops here in Indiana , ignored by our Senators and Representatives,  President Bush (yes, Gentle Reader, I wrote him also) Our two time elected Governor has refused to help or even respond!!! (his wife got a letter from me also)

So the next time you see a homeless person  say this to your self "That could be me" Next time you see people standing in line for a job that pays a wage causing that person to live in poverty say out loud "Go get a job you lazy bum!" And think to yourself "Those people don’t deserve to live an the richest country in the world, why don’t they help themselves to do better" Then think about your new President, trying to help those millions of Americans who don’t want a hand out just a help up.

Do I need to say more. Well just one other thing That’s what Jesus (remember Him?- died on a cross ,son of God, saying with his last breath "Father forgive them for they know not what they do"!) that what he wanted all men to understand We are our "brothers keeper!

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.  Gen 4:9-10)

Where do you stand gentle reader, with the greedy who claim to care or with those trying to help?

Your choice...

I’m done,

Love, Denis

But ye say, Whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; (Mat 15:5)

And honour not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition. Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying, This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. And he called the multitude, and said unto them, Hear, and understand Mat 15:6-10)

　

　 Note: "it is a gift"

Rev., given to God. The picture is that of a churlish son evading the duty of assisting his needy parents by uttering the formula, Corban, it is a gift to God. "Whatever that may be by which you might be helped by me, is not mine to give. It is vowed to God." The man, however, was not bound in that case to give his gift to the temple-treasury, while he was bound not to help his parent; because the phrase did not necessarily dedicate the gift to the temple. By a quibble it was regarded as something like Corban, as if it were laid on the altar and put entirely out of reach. It was expressly stated that such a vow was binding, even if what was vowed involved a breach of the law.

If I could turn back time (Part 10)

Gentle reader,

This is a long journey and we need to go slow.  Why? Because there are some among us who have no concept of what is involved. (hint we will be looking in the future once we get this issue of time settled at "death" and "resurection")

 Now then looking at the next figure, we see the pattern of two lines thus crossing, one representing the horizontal passage of TIME and the other the vertical NOW-ness of ETERNITY, allows us to carry the figure one step further in the service of setting forth the truth. The horizontal line moving through history continues to flow by us until, according to Scripture, it will one day come to an end. Time will then have entirely passed by, and the vertical line of ETERNITY will no longer intercept it. There will be no more time because this heaven and earth will pass away (Mattew 24:35).(11) At the beginning — the beginning of time, that is to say — the line started its journey by intersecting the vertical ETERNITY line.
Thus we have this kind of analogy. Fig. 2 shows TIME a moment after "the creation" when only a short segment of it has elapsed.

11. "[Jesus said] Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." Matthew 24:35.

When this present universe comes to an end, the line of TIME will have completely moved across the vertical line and passed by it. Fig. 3 represents analogously that moment when TIME has only just run out.

Thus this vertical line of ETERNITY which stretches upward and downwards will be the only line remaining. It has no width, but its depth and height reach to infinity. The horizontal line representing the passage of TIME will have ceased to exist. Intensity of experience will replace extensity.

And so it appears that the only relation we can establish between time and eternity is at the point of intersection; and when time has passed by and is no more, we shall not be able to represent it in any way — except, perhaps, in our memory or by observing its effect upon the Lord's body in the marks of the nails and the wound in his side. Everything else relating to time as we now experience it will have passed away.

The eternal as "now-ness"

It is necessary to say a further word about the sense of now-ness. We carry this with us as long as we have consciousness. It always has to do with conscious being, not with having been in the past or with hoping to be in the future. It amounts to this almost, that eternity is a kind of now-consciousness, an awareness of something which has no passing, but travels with us. So long as we experience time, it is like a single point that moves with us along the horizontal line of our time-frame. When that time-frame comes to an end and the horizontal line no longer intersects the vertical line to mark the point we experience as now, now-ness will cease to be a single point. We shall then experience it along the whole vertical line of eternity in a way that has nothing to do with time but has everything to do with depth and intensity.

This is where God is always 'present.' We shall in this experience presumably share something of his eternality. Our new kind of consciousness will of course be contingent upon his sustaining us, since it will always be true that "in Him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28 ) . It is He alone who is the great "I am," the One who lives in the present, He who "inhabits eternity" (Isaiah 57:15)(12). The statement is an important one. We dwell in space and therefore in time, and both impose limitations upon us. God inhabits eternity, which involves neither time nor space as we experience them in the present world.

The essential quality of eternal life is depth (not length). The idea of permanence and enduringness is essential to it but it is not the prime quality which the New Testament emphasizes. What the Lord Himself emphasized was depth in the present rather than extension into the future: quality not quantity.

12. "For thus says the high and lofty One that inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and holy place." Isaiah 57:15a

The Old Testament saint was promised "long life" (Exodus 20:12);(13) the New Testament saint is promised "life more abundant" (John 10:10).(14)
To think of length as the essence of eternal life is to suppose that the reality of it is to be measured by how long it lasts. But a little thought soon demonstrates that we are pursuing the wrong road to understanding when we follow this path. Physicists have recently discovered a particle that has independent existence of about one-fifteen billionths of a second!(15) Is this long enough to say that this particle, called an antiomega-minus baryon particle, is a reality? How long must a thing last to have real existence? Surely the reality of existence in eternity is not measured by "how long"?

The question is inappropriate because if the same question were asked of some creature that lived for only a fraction of a second (and there is no reason why such a creature may not exist somewhere), that creature would presumably view the even shorter-lived particle in the same light as we view something which has lived for a few hours or a tiny fraction of our life span. It is all a matter of viewpoint. It is tantamount to saying that reality depends upon timed existence; that is to say, existence over some minimum period. But then we have to ask, Did God not exist until He had created time in which to exist?

And what of angels? Angels do not have material bodies, although it seems they can sometimes assume them when fulfilling divinely appointed tasks such as the rescue of Lot and his wife from Sodom — "taking them by the hand" to hurry them out of the city (Genesis 19:16).(16) But if they do not have material bodies as normal to their existence, they do not normally occupy space either and therefore do not live in time as we do.
Moreover, they existed before the creation of the universe, since they were already present at its inception and rejoiced to see it (Job 38:4-7).(17) Did they therefore exist before time and thus outside of it? They were, however, created beings and therefore not "inhabitants of eternity" as God is.(18 ) What then was the nature of the framework of their existence if there was no time until the creation of the physical universe which came "later"? Can we speak of a before and an after in eternity while as yet there was no physical world in existence to constitute time in which to set events 'before' and 'after'? Is there a sense in which eternity does witness sequences of events that supply the ground for the terms before and after even though there is no actual passage of time involved? Is this the sense in which the Son of God said, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:5 (19), re-asserting the NOW of his eternity by the words "I am," in spite of his use of the word "before"? Is there some kind of proto-time or pseudo-time in which the angels lived while awaiting the creation of the universe? Or are we to restate Augustine's insight by saying that time began with the creation, and read this to mean "with the creation of the spirit world" — this, then, being the first stage in the creation of the physical world?

To state this as simply as possible: Did time strictly begin with an act of creation per se — that is, the creation of the spirit world, this being only one kind of time? Was a second kind of time then initiated with the creation of the physical world? When this physical world comes to an end, will this second kind of time also terminate? But as to the first kind of time, appropriate to a created order that is spiritual, will it continue as long as created beings continue to give it meaning? It may indeed be beyond our comprehension — but it still bears thinking about. . . . 

If we limit the existence of time to the creation of the physical world we find ourselves called upon to explain how the creation of the angels, the bringing of something into being that was not there before, could occur when there was no time to accommodate this before. We therefore seem to be forced to conclude that the beginning of time was marked by creative activity per se, not merely with the creation of the material world as Augustine saw it. This makes the angels an essential part of the created universe in a way that we do not customarily think of them, but it does seem to be in accordance with Colossians 1:16 ff.(20) Here the creation of principalities and powers is linked with the creation of the material universe that constitutes the heavens and the earth, as though in a sense they all belong together. The creation of the spirit however, created beings and therefore not "inhabitants of eternity" as God is.(18 ) What then was the nature of the framework of their existence if there was no time until the creation of the physical universe which came "later"? Can we speak of a before and an after in eternity while as yet there was no physical world in existence to constitute time in which to set events 'before' and 'after'? Is there a sense in which eternity does witness sequences of events that supply the ground for the terms before and after even though there is no actual passage of time involved? Is this the sense in which the Son of God said, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8: 58 ) (19), re-asserting the NOW of his eternity by the words "I am," in spite of his use of the word "before"? Is there some kind of proto-time or pseudo-time in which the angels lived while awaiting the creation of the universe? Or are we to restate Augustine's insight by saying that time began with the creation, and read this to mean "with the creation of the spirit world" — this, then, being the first stage in the creation of the physical world?

To be continued....

 Love,

Denis

Footnotes for those who care about such things 

13. "Honour your father and your mother that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God gives you." Exodus 20:16.
14. "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." John 10:10b.
15. On the discovery of these particles and on the problem of describing them, see Cyril Henshelwood, "Science and Scientists", Nature, Supplement, Sept. 4, 1965, p.1060; and also Allen Emerson, "A Disorienting View of God's Creation", Christianity Today, vol. 29, no. 2, Feb. 1, 1985, p.24.
16. "And while he [Lot] lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two daughters; the Lord being merciful unto him, and they brought him forth, and set him without the city." Genesis 19:16.
17. "Where were you when I [God] laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if you have understanding. Who has laid the measures thereof, if you know? Or who has stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Job 38, 4-7.

18. "For thus says the high and lofty One that inhabits eternity, whose name is holy; I dwell in the high and lofty place." Isaiah 57:15a.
19. "Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, 'Before Abraham was, I am.'" John 8:58.

20. "For by him [Jesus] were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist." Colossians 1:16 & 17.

　

　

　

　

Speed bumps in time

Part 9 Watch out for speed bumps

Gentle reader ,

Are we are running out of "time" to do the things that are important to us all "world peace", the "perfect" cup of coffee, the great Irish (American, or whatever country you are reading this from) Cosmologists of the Western world today are on the horns of a dilemma. Although it is very generally agreed that the universe is running down, scientists find it difficult to accept the idea that it will really come to an end. What can come to an end must have had a beginning; and this raises the question of who began it. So they speak about a heat death of the universe which is not a physical "end of the world" but only an end of it in its present configuration, as though its corpse would return to dust but the dust would remain. Yet one still has to ask, Who made the dust? A true beginning is as inconceivable in terms of physical laws as a true ending would be. L. Susan Stebbing reported Eddington, one of the most notable of Britain's astronomer-physicists, as having said ( 5)

"Philosophically the notion of an abrupt beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me, as I think it must be to most; and even those who would welcome a proof of the intervention of a Creator would probably consider that a single winding-up at some remote epoch is not really the kind of relation between God and his world that brings satisfaction to the mind. But I can see no escape from our dilemma".

It is a problem, isn't it? Some years ago when the concept of an expanding universe first became a topic of popular discussion, the same Sir Arthur Eddington wrote ( 6)

"The difficulty of an infinite past is appalling. It is inconceivable that we are the heirs of an infinite time of preparation; it is no less inconceivable that there was once a moment with no moment preceding it.This dilemma of the beginning of time would worry us more were it not eclipsed by another overwhelming difficulty lying between us and the infinite past. We have been studying the running-down of the universe; if our views are right, somewhere between the beginning of time and the present day we must place the winding-up of the universe".

Travelling backwards into the past we find a world with more and more organization. If there is no barrier to stop us earlier, we reach a moment when the energy of the world was wholly organized with none of the random element in it. The organization we are concerned with is exactly definable, and there is a point at which it becomes perfect.

There is no doubt that the scheme of physics as it has stood for the last three-quarters of a century postulates a date at which either the entities of the universe were created in a state of high organization or pre-existing entities were endowed with that organization which they have been squandering ever since. Moreover, this organization is admittedly the antithesis of chance. It is something which could not occur fortuitously. This has long been used as an argument against a too aggressive materialism. It has been quoted as scientific proof of the intervention of the Creator at a time not infinitely remote from today. . . .It is one of those conclusions from which we can see no logical escape — only it suffers from the drawback that it is incredible. So there it is: the incredible has to be the only account that is left to us. No other explanation of reality seems possible.

Sir Theodore Fox, in the Harverian Oration for 1965 before the Royal College of Physicians in London under the title, "Purposes of Medicine," had this to say (7)

"To contemplate the Universe is to stand even more abashed. For somehow at some time, all that we see and touch and hear must have emerged from NOTHING. To us this transformation of nothing into something is contrary to reason; and the creation of the Universe is a mystery that Man may never be able to understand. Yet the Universe seems to exist: and we must beware of making excessive claims for any system of thought [i.e., scientific materialism] that finds its origin impossible."

Years ago Lord Kelvin in a popular lecture entitled, "The Wave Theory of Light," reflected upon what would be one's reactions if the universe is limited in its size. He asked his audience: "What would you think of a Universe in which were to go millions and millions of miles, the idea of coming to an end is incomprehensible."( 8 ) What Lord Kelvin said of coming to an end of space, now has to be asked of coming to an end of time.

We have every reason in the light of present knowledge to suppose that time and space are integral parts of a single reality, so that the creation of things occupying space means the simultaneous creation of time when things began to happen. Neither time nor space existed before creation. Augustine asked a pertinent question relating to this. He argued thus: If we should wonder how God occupied Himself before He created the universe, we have to realize how meaningless such a question really is. The question springs out of our consciousness of the passage of time. Before the universe there was no time and therefore it is inappropriate to ask what God was doing then, "for there was no 'then' when there was no time."(9)

Time and eternity: two different realities

　

Thus we find ourselves face-to-face with some profound philosophical problems. If we see time as a kind of linear property of events stretching out on either side of us, part of it already spent and the rest of it yet to pass by, we cannot conceive of such a tape as endless. But neither can we think of it as having two ends without at once wondering what was before it and what will be after it! Either way, our powers of conception fail us. Yet time is not eternity; for eternity is not merely an endless chain of fragments of time, since these fragments of time already past must then necessarily have shortened eternity, and eternity is thereby being exhausted little by little. Eternity would simply run out of time!
If it should be asked whether time is "within" eternity, I think the answer must still be, No. For this would make time merely a fragment of eternity which then becomes simply an extension of time at either end of the line. Time and eternity are not such that there can be this kind of overlap because the two realities are not in the same category of experience. The only "overlap" is that point of crossover at which the line representing time (which is horizontal) crosses the line representing eternity (which is vertical). Since neither line has any width, the place of intersection is not an area but merely a point, a point that can only be described as NOW. We can diagram this as shown in Fig. 1.

The Beginning of time            The End of Time

Gen 1:1                                    Rev. 10:6

---

---

    Time Passed           "Now"            Time to Come       

       

Since this figure when completed may look a little frightening, let us "build" it in two stages. In Fig. 1a we have a horizontal line which represents the passage of TIME. The movement of TIME passes from right to left with respect to each of us personally. We stand at the point marked "NOW." The beginning of TIME has already gone by and moved off to our left. What yet remains to run by is to the right; and since it is limited, it will continue only until, one day, it comes to an end. Thus the short vertical line marking its terminus has yet to move past us. When it finally does, TIME will be no more (Revelation 10:6).(10)

We then add a vertical line through the NOW-point to indicate that wherever our NOW happens to be, at that point ETERNITY impinges upon our consciousness.

Confused Gentle Reader?

Hang in there and all will be clear when you go to bed tonight!

In the meantime consider that you stand in Eternity (where you are in the "NOW"  so don’t be a speed bump in the road of life. Or as the great Yoga Berra once said "when you come to a fork in the road , take it"

Love, Denis

Footnotes for those who care about such things:

5. Stebbing, L. Susan, Philosophy and the Physicists, London, Constable, 1959, p.258.
6. Eddington, Sir Arthur, The Nature of the Physical World, Cambridge University Press, 1930, p.83 f., 85

7. Fox, Theodore, "Purposes of Medicine," Lancet, 23 Oct. 1965, p.804.
8. Kelvin, W. T., "The Wave Theory of Light", Lecture delivered under the auspices of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, U.S.A., Sept. 29, 1884, in Popular Lectures and Addresses, London, Macmillan, vol. 1, 1981, p.322.

9. Augustine, Confessions, XI.xiii.15.

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

Time Use it or lose it (Part 8)

Gentle reader,

If you get through this study I’ll put you in for a degree in Philosophy! This is more like what we do when we sit around the table drinking copious amounts of coffee listening to the songs from home (Ireland, in case you have forgotten). And speaking of God and eternity and our place in it. No time for the petty things in life like “Did you she how she came dressed for church today... Well I never” (No and like my father use to say “They don’t build cars the way they use to . . . and they never did!” People talk about things that interest them, some talk about the failings of others, politicians and their sex life (like who really cares except gossips and those trying to raise their Television ratings) or the fact that you think you understand the news and the tax code. {Get it straight Gentle reader, unless you make MORE that $250,000 a year your not going to pay more taxes. Also your missing the bigger picture of what is happening in this country. Most claim to Christian (although I rather doubt they are willing to do this) And all that believed were together, and had all things common; (Act 2:44) or this But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.
(1Ti 5:8) So until the American public gets a hold of what it means to sacrifice they will never get to where you are Gentle Reader...

Now where were we? Oh yes in our study of Time...Lets look at the Acount of Time from the point of view of the Philosopher.

"Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away." This is the common-sense view. Time is a river that sweeps on whether we are waking or sleeping, living or dead. It is a stream within which events happen, as space is a box within which things exist. This seems so obvious as to be self-evident. Time is uniform in its current, precisely measurable by clocks set by the sun, and everywhere the same throughout the universe in its rate of passage. It starts to the right of our screen of consciousness, passes dead centre in front of us as NOW, and is wound up on the left, to be preserved for always. Thus we divide time into past, present, future; each of which has a reality that is unquestionable.
The passage of time is at a fixed rate, and it becomes our standard of reference for the speed with which events succeed one another. Even if events should seem to happen more slowly sometimes and with bewildering speed at others, nevertheless we "know" that such fluctuations are apparent only, and that clocks everywhere in the universe never vary except in so far as they may be (in our world) mechanically imperfect. There is a real speed at which events happen, fixed in the mind of God whose time-piece regulates everything else. We would set our clocks by His if only we had the means, and then we would be correct in our estimate of the time taken for everything that has happened since the world began, and indeed even for events occurring before the sun and moon were set in the heavens to regulate time on earth. We assume that time was kept even before the creation came into being. This again is the common-sense view.

It is perfectly true that we each have private inner clocks that reflect our own personal sense of time, and by and large our personal clocks agree quite accurately when compared with those of everyone else who shares our framework of reference. But what we now know is that this only happens so long as we all share the same segment of space and move through it at the same velocity. Anyone who happens to live in some other galaxy moving through space at a different speed with a different rate of acceleration in our supposedly expanding universe would experience a different rate of the passage of time. And this difference would not be the result of imagination: their clocks would actually confirm the difference. This is where a real problem arises. This is where the common-sense view breaks down.

As soon as we move we change the flow rate of our time. But because we and our private clocks move together, the change in rate is concealed from us. The first recognition of this real change in time rate was a philosophical one, but we can now verify it as a fact — only the change is so tiny that we require extraordinary devices to detect it. But there is little doubt that it is real.

The particular movement we happen to be involved in through space has the effect of modifying the rate at which time flows by us. Thus this flow rate of hours or minutes or seconds proves to be relative, relative to our speed through space — or more precisely, to our change of speed through space, our acceleration or deceleration. In terms of actual experience even our grossest movements (to the moon and back by space craft, for instance) are so tiny when compared with the distances involved in traversing the span of the universe, that we cannot detect the change in the flow of time except by using special instruments of quite fantastic sensitivity. So we are unaware of any change. The changes are far far smaller than the normal inaccuracies characteristic of man-made mechanical devices.
But certain experiments which have been performed in recent years have fully confirmed what Einstein predicted, namely, that time is relative to the rate of acceleration of the clock through space. It doesn't matter how little the change is: from the philosopher's point of view the classical and common-sense picture of time as an ever flowing stream with invariant speed of current has been shattered.

'Common sense' view of time shattered

Yet the concept itself of the relativity of time goes back a very long way, far beyond Einstein, to Augustine (354—430 A.D.) in fact — and before Augustine to Philo (c. 20 B.C.—c. 42 A.D.) and his contemporaries.(2) According to the Jewish commentators in the time of our Lord, God produced ten things on the first day of creation. He produced the heavens and the earth, Tohu and Bohu, light and darkness, wind and water, the duration of the day and the duration of the night.

The Jewish rabbis believed that the duration of the day and the duration of the night were actual creations and not merely the result of the creation of the heavens and the earth. They held specifically that "time" was created simultaneously with the world. Philo Judaeus was a Hellenized Jew who imbibed much of the spirit of Greek philosophy, and he argued strongly against an older view held by his contemporary Jewish brethren that the world had been created in time. He held that until creation, time did not exist. Time had just as much reality in its own right as the world did, though by no means independent of it. When Augustine proclaimed that God created the world with time and not in time, he may conceivably have arrived at the conclusion by the exercise of his own profound insight, but it is more probable that his wide reading had made him thoroughly acquainted with the arguments that had gone on between Philo and some of the older Jewish writers, since Philo's work, De Opificio Mundi ("Concerning the Fabrication of the World"), was quite widely known the time. Here are his actual words, as translated from the Greek of his original by F. H. Colson and G. H.Whitaker:

Then [Moses] says that "in the beginning God made the heaven and the earth," taking "the beginning" not, as some think, in a chronological sense, for time there was not before there was a world. Time began either simultaneously with the world or after it. For since time is a measured space determined by the world's movement, and since movement could not be prior to the object moving, but must of necessity arise either after it or simultaneously with it, it follows of necessity that time also is either coeval with or later born than the world. . . And since the word "beginning" is not here taken as the chronological beginning, it would seem likely that [only] the numerical order is indicated, so that "in the beginning He made" is equivalent to "He made the heaven first." [My emphasis throughout.]

The concept itself of the relativity of time goes back a very long way, far beyond Einstein, to Augustine (354—430 A.D.) in fact — and before Augustine to Philo (c. 20 B.C.—c. 42 A.D.) and his contemporaries. According to the Jewish commentators in the time of our Lord, God produced ten things on the first day of creation. He produced the heavens and the earth, Tohu and Bohu, light and darkness, wind and water, the duration of the day and the duration of the night. The Jewish rabbis believed that the duration of the day and the duration of the night were actual creations and not merely the result of the creation of the heavens and the earth. They held specifically that "time" was created simultaneously with the world. Philo Judaeus was a Hellenized Jew who imbibed much of the spirit of Greek philosophy, and he argued strongly against an older view held by his contemporary Jewish brethren that the world had been created in time. He held that until creation, time did not exist. Time had just as much reality in its own right as the world did, though by no means independent of it.

Since Einstein was himself a Jew and undoubtedly acquainted with the literature of his forebears, it is not perhaps so surprising that such a thought as the coincidence of the creation of matter and the creation of time should have been in his mind when he formulated his special theory of relativity and made time part and parcel of the physical world.

Linear time vs. endless eternity

Now Einstein wrestled with the problem of time, with the nature of time as opposed to eternity, of time as an abstract reality. The problem arises from the fact that one cannot have a span of time. It won't stay still long enough for us to measure it. Eternity is not time stretched to infinity on either side. There is a very significant difference between eternity and some immense stretch of time, for the simple reason that no matter how long this span of time is, we can always shorten it by chopping some off. Whereas eternity remains as endless as ever no matter how much we "cut off it." At least we imagine we could do this, though in actual fact we don't know how one can reduce the length of something which has no extended existence. Only NOW exists, and it exists as a point, not a dimension. It has only location. The past is gone, and the future is not yet. We are therefore left with nothing to shorten; only with something which has no length. Ten days never exist at one time, nor even ten seconds, nor even ten millionths of a second! How then could we ever speak of reducing them? Time becomes a position in eternity, nothing more.

Thus while we do seem to reduce time by having spent some of it, we cannot ever seem to shorten eternity no matter how much we have spent of it. In the very nature of the case, eternity remains unaffected by what has already passed. The categories of time and eternity are clearly not the same. What is appropriately spoken of as shortening in the one case becomes meaningless in the other. If we have a very large number and we subtract something from it, what remains is less than it was. If we have an infinite number and subtract something from it, we still have infinity remaining. When something is forever, as much remains no matter how much has already been subtracted. Thus while we may speak of time which is passed, there is no such thing as eternity which has passed. Otherwise we would have to ask the absurd question, Is God older today than He was yesterday?

One of the earliest symbols for eternity was a circle. We walk around the circle through so many degrees of arc but we do not actually shorten the distance we yet have to journey to complete the circle. As much remains of it to walk around as ever. The circumference persists intact and unchanged. We can go on and on endlessly, like the marching column of caterpillars whose head has been induced to link up with the tail and so they journey on, each following the leader in front, until at last they starve themselves to exhaustion.
Eternity does not flow past us, for if it did some would already have been used up. The concept of an exhaustible resource can never be applied to the word eternity. Only if eternity was like a circle would it then escape this inevitable limitation: but circular movement imposes a no less undesirable limitation, namely, repetition. Some ancient philosophers viewed heaven as cyclical, but even then they saw it as ultimately having an end, as though the circling movement gradually slowed down and finally stopped.
It is not surprising that cultures which emphasize material things and reify (make a thing of) time, tend to view history as linear, as a long line of successive events with a firm beginning and a well defined ending. As we have already seen, cultures which attach more importance to the spiritual aspects of life have tended towards a view of history which has no beginnings or endings in the linear sense. Things just go on forever. Such is the Hindu view, mand so are all reincarnational views.

Next time Gentle Reader, we will consider

Dilemma of beginnings and endings

But for now remember, no matter what time it is in your part of the world God still loves you... You are accepted, you are valued, you are loved! By the Heavenly Father and by us.
Love,
Denis

Time Out! and all that Jazz (Part 7 study of Time)

"Take Five" is a classic jazz piece first recorded by the Dave Brubeck Quartet and released on its 1959 album Time Out.

Gentle Reader “What we have is a failure to communicate.” (A line from the great movie “Cool Hand Luke”). We don’t listen to one another , we are to busy forming our next thoughts in response to what we are not listening to you saying. No wonder we don’t have the time.

Dakota Indians on the other hand (spoken like a true Libra) have this kind of time perspective. The world in which they live is entirely a present one. They would agree with Augustine when he said,(11)

What is now plain and clear is that neither future nor past things are in existence and that it is not correct to say there are three periods of time: past, present, and future. Perhaps it would be proper to say there are three periods of time: the present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of things future.

 In short, only the present has any reality. A few years ago a full-blooded Dakota Indian girl with a Ph.D. wrote to a friend and said, "You see, we Indians live in eternity."(12) She explained that the Dakota Indian was not striving to get somewhere in this world, or the next; he was already there.

 Time, events, and space relationships

What is said of time is thought about space also. The Australian aborigines have no difficulty at certain times of the year in believing they can be in two different places at once, an idea that to us seems clearly impossible. Two branches of a family with a shared totem will ceremonially eat this totem animal once a year to re-unite themselves with their ancestral roots. Though the two branches may be hundreds of miles apart and have each captured a specimen of their totem animal and slaughtered it, they will both believe they have captured and eaten the very same animal, not simply the same species of animal, but the same particular animal. There is no contradiction to this in their mind. Both they and the animal can be in two different places at the same time. It reminds one of the statement made by the Lord (John 3:13 (13) ) in which He speaks of Himself as actually being "in heaven," though also on earth. And in keeping with this elimination of distinction between the two worlds, the same Lord could speak of Himself as existing at this very moment "before Abraham was" (John 8:5 8 ) .(14)

 It is impossible by our logic to reconcile such conceptions of space and time but this is only because we are culturally bound to a view which is only partially correct. The native sense of space is not like that of an enormous box with the top and bottom missing and the sides knocked out, within which discrete things are separately positioned apart from one another: and their sense of time is not that of a river flowing by, a river which is in existence before it reaches us and continues on after it has passed us. The native creates both his own space and his own time by his own experience. Evans-Pritchard, who for many years studied and lived with a Nilotic black people called the Nuer, had to develop a different time sense in order to enter into their way of thinking. They do not keep time with their clocks, their clocks keep time with them. As he put it ( 15) The daily tasks of the kraal are the points of reference for each day, and for longer periods than a day the points are the phases of other recurrent activity such as weeding or the seasonalmovement of men and their herds. The passage of time is the succession of activities and their relations to one another. All sorts of interesting conclusions follow. Time has not the same value at one season of the year that it has at another. Since the Nuer have, properly speaking, no abstract of time reckoning they do not think of time as something actual which passes, which can be wasted, can"be saved, and so forth; and they do not have to co-ordinate their activities with an abstract passage of time, because their point of reference is the activities themselves.Thus, in a certain month one makes the first fishing dams and forms the first cattle camps, and since one is doing these things it must be that month or thereabouts. One does not make fishing dams because it is November; it is November because one is making fishing dams. [Emphasis mine].

Intervals between events are not reckoned as short or long passages of intervening time. What intervals of time there are, are "measured" by the importance of the events that bracket the interval. And as for an event itself, if it is very important it takes up a lot of time regardless of what the clock may happen to say. Even the order in which events are remembered and reported will be the order of their importance, notnecessarily the order of their historical sequence.

Time reflected in social codes

 A culture's particular sense of time can have some remarkable repercussions on their methods of handling social problems. If the past is of no consequence for the present, a crime or a misdemeanor done long ago has no present significance from a legal standpoint. It no longer counts. Suppose in a South African gold mine a native employee is late and is docked so much "time" as a penalty. If the penalty is not imposed at once, it will strike him as a gross injustice to penalize him at the end of the week. It requires a basic re-orientation of time sense for such an employee, freshly introduced into a clock conscious world, to accept a delayed penalty as just. It is not without parallel in our own culture, as C. S. Lewis commented ( 16)

 We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speakers, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact orto the guilt of the sin. The guilt is not washed out by time but by repentance and the blood ofChrist.

How much time must elapse until an event which has moral implications becomes an event without moral implications? Can guilt be cancelled at all by the mere passage of time? Admittedly as an accommodation to the fact that we are time bound because we are space bound, it seems that the mere passage of time must be allowed to have some bearing in the matter; and so we have the Statute of Limitations as a necessary accommodation.

 Our time is limited and will run out so that, as we have less and less of it remaining to us in this life, it becomes in a sense increasingly worth more and more to us. Experience shows that to delay the penalty unduly may impose an unfair hardship because what at thetime might have been a just imposition becomes, as our time begins to run out, less and less just, simply because what time remains to us becomes increasingly more valuable. It is a kind of progressive inflation. Thus a man earning a high salary could be reasonably expected to pay a penalty that at the time represented ten percent of his current income. But if the same penalty is imposed upon him ten years later when he has retired and his current income is not a quarter of what it then was, the burden of the samepenalty becomes unbearable. It is commonly agreed as unjust to impose a penalty after many years have elapsed which change the circumstances. It is true that the same delay in some cases may place the guilty party in a much better position to pay so that the penalty is reduced in its effect. However, the prime object of the system is really intended to protect the injured party, but limitations are imposed in an effort to balance injustice to either party. As Paton and Derham have noted ( 17) "It is unsettling to allow no time limit to legal claims. . . . The small percentage of cases in which there may be injustice is outweighed by the legal interests in establishing security."

Such considerations are relevant only while we remain within the present space-time framework. In terms of the justice of God in the light of eternity in which the present does not recede into the past, such limitations surely do not apply. Here the time factor becomes irrelevant, for guilt is present not past. In so far as heaven belongs to a timeless order of things, time lapse is not going to be relevant in determining the measure of guilt or of innocence.

The Christian: two worlds — two times

When a man becomes a child of God he is placed in a position of living in two different worlds. He cannot yet escape the world of time and space, and in his horizontal man-to-man relationships he must accept the consequences of the framework within which his social life is lived. But in so far as he has been translated into the Kingdom of God's dear Son and has become a citizen of eternity, to this extent in his man-to-God vertical relationships he lives within a different framework. There is a sense in which his life becomes timeless, the new man ceases to grow old even though hopefully he may mature. There is a sense in which he lives in heaven even though he does not altogether escape the bonds of the material world. The community of the saints is a society of people who share together this dual sense of time, and it is important that we should not isolate ourselves from this new society, for membership here is everlasting: we are only passing through this world. The Lord prayed for us, not that we might be taken out of it but kept while we are in it (John 17:15). (18 ) 

 Is there only a subjective sense of time?

In summary it can be said that any culture which places a major emphasis on the accumulation of things will tend to be pre-occupied with the value of time. It will cut up time, parcel it out, reify it as quantifiable, give it a measurable existence in its own right which it probably does not in fact possess. Our culture has done this pre-eminently. Many other cultures do it scarcely at all. Thus we have to recognize that a different culture with a different ethos may have a different perception of time. We also need to recognize that as Christians our sense of time has been modified, because Christian culture is different in its ethos and thus also in its perception of time. But quite apart from "cultural" influences, we also have to recognize that it is not merely a modified sense of the passage of time (which is subjective) that has to be taken into account. It is now known that time itself does not flow past us at a constant rate even when viewed objectively. It is as though the tape that is running through the recorder from the future into the past can actually run more slowly or more quickly under certain circumstances — and perhaps even stop running altogether! This is not a subjective deceleration or acceleration, but an objective phenomenon, a phenomenon that is (as we shall see) quantitatively measurable. The implications of such a possibility are tremendous.

To be continued . . .

Love, Denis

p. s. Keep thinking and listening

 Footnotes: for those who want to check things out for themselves...

 11. Augustine, Confessions, Bk.XI.xx.26.

12. Miss Deloria to R. Clyde McCone, "Evolutionary Time: A Moral Issue" in A Symposium on Creation, Henry Morris et al., Grand Rapids, Baker, 1968, p.144.

13. "No man has yet ascended up into heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven". John 3:13.

14. "Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am." John 8:58.

15. Evans-Pritchard, E. E., Social Anthropology, London, Cohen & West, 1951, p.103.

16. Lewis, C. S., The Problem of Pain, New York, Macmillan, 1962, p.61

17. Paton, G. W. and David P. Derham, A Textbook of Jurisprudence, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972, p.502.

18. "I pray not that you should take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil. . . ." John 17:15.

Time, Eternity and J.D. (Part 6)

"Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. "

Gentle reader,

Bless you and all of the rest of our readers for having the fortitude to wade through these studies, there is a point and a end, but as well, all know (or should know) it is the goal to leave this place a wee bit better off than we received from those who went before. In my case after 1500 + church groups who are determined to hide in the dark about what they believe and refuse to acknowledge “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Act 1 Scene 5) So we try to bring to your attention truths which having a scriptural implication also will expand your mind to new horizons.


Concept of time reflected in grammar

Non-Western man's sense of time is thus apt to be very different, and it is in fact nearer to the truth perhaps.
We know now (since Einstein) that time does not have a fixed flow rate either in the personally experienced sense or even in the absolute clock-bound sense. Natives have 'known' this for years. For us it is a veryrecent re-discovery, based upon the strictest and most rational interpretation of scientific laws which are now being experimentally verified in remarkable ways. It is apparent that time does not flow as a steady current. Our clocks keep time with our time, not our time with our clocks. Native people have for centuries made time coincide with events, not events with time. The clock is set by their activities, not their activities by the clock.

Because events do not happen in time but time is determined by events, there is a real sense in which future time is simply non-existent since future events have not yet happened. Western man is very future conscious. We live in the future — for this evening, for to-morrow, for the weekend, for when we grow up, for when we get old, for the time when our children will take over from us, for when we are gone.
Non-Western man has tended to live now, in the present: indeed, so indifferent to the future is he apt to be that we characterize him as improvident. We ourselves take out all kinds of policies to cover future eventualities — sickness insurance, unemployment insurance, annuities of all kinds for old age and life insurance for after death. The future which may never happen eclipses the present, and we think this is proper and normal.

Other cultures have even refused to speak of the future unless they are so certain about what will happen that it can be spoken of as actually happening now.

The Hebrew language of the Old Testament has no future tense in its verbal system like Latin or French. In Latin "I love" is amo; "I shall love" is its future tense: amabo. French has its future tense: English managesit by using the compound form, "I will. . ." or "I shall. . ." and so on. But like the languages of many primitivepeople, the future is not specifically expressed in Hebrew. If one wishes to say "I shall kill," one uses a verbal form which really means "I am killing." The Hebrew people were quite aware of this and consciously made certain modifications in the rules when speaking of the activities of God. Man's intentions for the future are precarious and he cannot strictly speak of what he is going to do in the future, so in that sense he does not need a future tense. God, on the other hand, can speak with absolute certainty of the future — with such assurance, in fact, that the future is a fait accompli. Thus God's declared intentions for the future are oftenexpressed in Hebrew not in the present tense but in the past tense. When God speaks of what He will do in the future, man can refer to it as already done. When man speaks of what he intends in the future he has to put it the present tense, as though to say this is his present intention. Many non-Western people do just this, and it becomes highly disconcerting to theWesterner who assumes that the speaker is looking at time as he does himself. A good illustration of the confusion which such ways of thinking can create is given by Edward Mack who related the following incident:

A desert traveller went with a missionary friend to visit one of the 10,000 mud villages in theValley of the Nile. The night was not a restful one in a native home. The next morning the
traveller wished to return as soon as possible to the boat on the Nile. The missionary however,knowing the demands of courtesy, insisted that they must not go until after breakfast but expressed the hope that breakfast might be expedited. "Oh," said the host, "breakfast is just ready." One hour and a half after that time by the traveller's watch, a match was struck to kindlethe fire to cook the breakfast. And sometime later still, a cow was driven into the court of the house to be milked to provide the milk to cook the rice to make the breakfast. Was the host untruthful? Not at all; he did not reckon by time, but by events. He had no way of determining thepassage of time. When he said, "Breakfast is just ready," he meant it was the next thing in the household economy, that they would do nothing else until that thing was done, and thateverything done was to that end. That is to say, he reckoned only by events.

Views of relationship of time and event

It may be thought that this attitude towards the passage of time is evidence of a primitive mentality which we have long since outgrown. But this is not really so. The Greeks themselves never seem to have entirely abandoned the view that there are really only two ways of viewing events. An event is either finished — or in process(4). They saw all action as being either imperfect (by which they meant not yet complete but currently in effect) or perfect (that is, complete and finished). In short, there were only two tenses, though
they embroidered them in different ways. Similarly, the Hopi gardener who intends to hoe his garden sometime in the future is already hoeing it, and he will tell you he is hoeing it -- not that he will be hoeing it in the future. He does not see the future as having any strict reality. Such people do not really think of thepast as an expanse of time as though it still had a real existence like a length of tape wound on the reel to the left while the future is a similar length already having a reality which is merely waiting to be unreeled from the right. They are aware only that NOW has real existence and that even IT is only a boundary, not a segment.

Augustine shared this view. He questioned whether it is possible to talk meaningfully of a period of ahundred years, for example. He asked, "Is a hundred years a long time? It is a good question! Is it a long time? Who can ever answer it, since a hundred years never exists . . ." Thus Augustine said:

First of all, see whether there can be a hundred present years. If the first of those years is going on, it is present but ninety-nine are still in the future and so they do not exist. But if the second year is going on, one is already gone, another is present, and the rest are in the future.And this is so no matter which of the intervening years of this century we take to be the present one. For that reason there cannot be a hundred present years.
But Augustine carried his argument one step further. He said:

Now, see whether even the one year that is going on to be itself present. If the first month in it is going on the rest are future; if the second is, then the first is now past and the rest do not yet exist. Therefore, one year which is now going on is not present as a whole and, if it is not present as a whole, then the year is not present. . . .

Yet neither is the month which is now going on present, but only one day. And so he continued his argument with relentless logic down to the hour and the minute, in each of whichonly the immediate moment has any reality. "That alone is what we may call the present and this too flies over from the future into the past so quickly that it does not extend over the slightest instant. For if it has any extension, it is again divided into past and future. But the present has no length at all." It is obvious therefore that we cannot speak of past time or future time as having any reality. The tape, of which we spoke above, which we assume is unwinding through the vortex of our consciousness, is not doing anything of the kind — unless we equate time with events, or more strictly with the succession of events. It does not stand apart as a thing in which events happen, but is rather created by the events themselves so that if nothing happened there would be no time. It is important to get this concept clearly in mind.

Augustine was wise enough to observe that creation was not in time like a bleep which is written on a tape that is already unwinding, nor a single exposure on a film which is already running through the camera.

Creation was with time, or better still, time was created when the Universe was created. Time is something which does not exist in its own right. It is not one of the "givens" of reality. This was known to Augustine and to others as well in those ancient times. It is only recently that it has been re-discovered.

Einstein put it this way:

If you don't take my words too seriously, I would say this: If we assume that all matter were to disappear from the world, then, before relativity, one believed that space and time would
continue existing in an empty world. But according to the Theory of Relativity, if matter (and its motion) disappeared, there would no longer be any space or time [my emphasis].
The Hopi Indians viewed the matter in precisely the same way. They did not see how it was possible to speak of ten days! One can have ten men at one time, but never ten days at one time. And so they considered the phrase inept and didn't use it. They might say, "after the tenth day. . . ." but they would not speak of a period of ten days. The past has gone, the future is not yet: only NOW has reality. To many Indians even the past is still present, time does not flow by at all. To this extent they live in the always-now. The Hopi, like
many other cultures which have not grown up within the traditions of the Western world, were far more conscious of their oneness with nature and were far less absorbed with things or with time.

They are nearer to Luther's concept of eternity as a reality which is totum simul, a phrase which is perhaps best represented in English by the words "the whole thing at once."Eternity is a unique kind of now-ness that persists. The past is not past: the past is present still.

Think about that Gentle reader and get back with me.....
Love,
Denis

The Time of Your Life (Part 5 of Time, Eternity, and jelly donuts)

my favorite scene and line "I got's to know"

Part 5

Gentle Reader,

We are looking at "TIME" and the various aspects that make up our understanding. You might think that as a Doctor of History in Early Christianity and Linguistics that I am not qualified to discuss scientific matters. If you are one of those few that hold that science has no place in the matters of the religious "heart" than perhaps you are reading the wrong blog and need not apply for the rhetorical wedgie that is coming your way.

On the other hand if you’re a Clint Eastwood "Dirty Harry" fan who as was said in the first movie " I gots to know" than nothing is off limits to the increase in your "religious studies" For as I understand if God created everything then nothing is off limits and I believe that in learning we get step by step a wee bit closer to understanding God and what He has provided. It is only those with closed minds who never advance beyond the door of ignorance. So with that in mind who’s with me as I study "time" and its various aspects? Let’s move on and leave bread crumbs for the rest....

　

TIME: THE CULTURAL ACCOUNT

Western man is progressively putting more and more emphasis on the material things of life. This is a sad repudiation of our Christian heritage which is pre-eminently spiritual in its ethos.

We have sent missionaries to other people with the intent of converting them to a more spiritual way of life: but it often became apparent that these same people to whom we sent our missionaries actually took a more spiritual view of life than we do ourselves.

We assumed that the basis of this spiritual emphasis was in their case mere superstition, and undoubtedly this assessment has frequently been correct. Nevertheless, while we found them poor in this world's goods, they often turned out to be oddly well-to-do in the non-material aspects of their culture: and in spite of their poverty they usually found meaning in life where we seem to have lost it.

World views contrasted

Now, anthropologists have observed that many cultures of non-Western tradition do not bifurcate their world into two kingdoms: the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural, the secular and the sacred. Western man tends to make a clear distinction in which the material world is taken to be the real world and the spiritual world is taken to be a fantasy, a creation of our ignorance. Primitive cultures, and many of the high cultures of ancient times, on the whole took a very different view of things. They saw the spirit world as everywhere interpenetrating the material world and, in fact, regulating it. It was for this reason that, in the case of an accident, they customarily asked not "How did it happen?" but "Who did it?"

Events were not analyzed intellectually: they were experienced as personal confrontations. They felt themselves to be citizens of what to them was a kind of 'commonwealth' of animated beings. Many of them still feel this way. If what one reads is true, the Hopi pre-eminently view their relationship to the world as such. What we call the unanimated forces of nature (with a small n ), to them are the animated wills of Nature (with a capital N ). Such people have always been humbler in the presence of elemental forces, less brash in their attitude towards the world around them, more aware of the comparative impotence of man when his behaviour is contrasted with that of animals. The relationship between man and his world was not, or is not, a me/it relationship (as it is with us) but a me/thou relationship.

As an illustration: in Egypt where annual records of the levels of the Nile river were kept from earliest times, the Pharaoh made gifts to the Nile every year at about the time it was due to rise. When they cast their sacrifices into the river, they also threw in a document stating, in the form of a contract, the Nile's obligations. The important thing was always to be in tune with Nature rather than on top of it.

The individual felt part and parcel of the universe, in sympathy with it, able and willing to deal with it on a person-to-person basis. In this personal relatedness he had no difficulty in seeing himself as surviving beyond the grave. Nature survives the apparent death of winter by spring, why should man not survive burial by resurrection?

It was only when the animate Wills of Nature were turned into inanimate forces, and when the characters of these wills were reduced to mere characteristics of things, that man followed suit and found himself reduced to a mere thing among things. The responding soul was turned into a reacting thing, nothing but physics and chemistry.

Whereas native people animate Nature and so relate to it on a personal basis, our de-animation of nature destroyed this sense of relationship and left man feeling orphaned in a hostile universe.

This sense of alienation has led Western man to seek the recovery of relatedness by reducing himself to the same inanimate status, thereby becoming a mere cog in an impersonal machine, but at least part and parcel of it all once again.

We have, in short, robbed ourselves of any spiritual significance. We have become bundles of electrochemical reactions instead of vital, conscious, animated souls capable of active communion with God and his world. Where other cultures have maintained their sense of fraternity with their living world of trees, stones, rivers, mountains, sun and moon and stars, and mother earth, we have come to treat these things as material objects and then sought relatedness with them by reducing ourselves to the status of objects. It may be that either way is unrealistic, but man in these other cultures has probably done less harm to the dignity of his own being.

　

Time-conscious vs event-conscious

Now, these two rather different philosophies of life have produced what might be called an unexpected spin-off which has not been given sufficient thought. The more deeply embedded we become in the world of things, the more profoundly conscious we tend to become of time. One cannot have a pervasive concern with the three dimensions of space without being equally locked into the fourth dimension of time.

It is not an accident that Western man has expended so much energy perfecting clocks that parcel out time in smaller and smaller fragments upon which he places a more and more precise economic value.

We have thus come to quantify almost the whole of life. Never in human history was man so conscious of the importance of material possessions and of the necessity of preserving physical life, while paying less and less attention to its spiritual values. And never in human history was man so concerned to keep a precise record of the passing of time.

Other cultures had clocks and, like the Chinese, they gave much attention to improving their accuracy in any ingenious ways. But they were not intended to be read as marking fragments of time (seconds or minutes) for the individual but only for the co-ordination of events involving groups of people. And ninety-nine percent of the people felt no need to possess such devices nor sought to regulate their lives by them except on occasions of community effort. The ordinary man had a highly flexible sense of the flow of time, this flexibility depending entirely on the importance of the task engaged in. When there was no task that had to be done, there was no counting of time, and no sense of wasting it either. Time lost did not mean for them things lost, money lost, progress lost — in short, some of life lost as though life was parceled out and ended with death when time ran out.

There is a real bond between things and time, because things occupy space, and space and time are inextricably bound together. And those whose philosophy is materialistic are accordingly far more time conscious. This applies not merely to certain individuals within a culture, but to the whole culture itself.

When the ethos of a culture is materialistic, that culture is also likely to be strongly time-conscious. Many cultures throughout history which, unlike ourselves, have attached far less importance to things, have also attached far less importance to time.

This is true of all primitive cultures. Such cultures do not even think of themselves as living in time at all: they actually live in eternity.

People who are absorbed in the material world are absorbed in a temporal world: those who hold things lightly hold time lightly. Those who are unwilling to share their things find it difficult to share their time.

Time is money: which is another way of saying time is things.

Societies which bury all the treasures and material possessions of the dead with the deceased are in fact much closer in spirit to the child of God whose citizenship is in heaven and who lives in eternity, for such cultures are far less bound to the things of this world and do not find it difficult to relinquish them. During the early settling of the New World, many White men discovered that the graves of native people frequently contained valuables such as gold and silver, and they became chronic grave robbers. American Indians were often reluctant to move to new territories (sometimes even to better ones) because they could not bear the thought of the desecration of their burial grounds which they quickly found out was likely to happen as soon as the White man moved in.

It might be supposed that such people buried precious metals with their dead simply because they were not so "precious" in their sight. There was a reasonable abundance of gold and silver and it cost them little or nothing to collect it. But we know now that later on when such precious metals became more scarce, they still buried items which were not as accessible — for instance, perfectly good sewing machines were buried with dead women. Such items were of considerable practical importance once they formed part of their culture and they could not be easily replaced. Yet they did not hang on to them. They buried them, as they had buried precious metals. Sometimes a perfectly good hunting knife of hardened steel obtained from a White man would be buried with the dead owner, and one must conclude that the economics of such "waste" were overridden even when they were irreplaceable.

There is much evidence from studies made by anthropologists during the last century that primitive people do not hold the physical world to have the same paramount importance in their lives as we do. As a consequence they do not mark time as we do either, and perhaps even more significantly they have not treasured physical survival as we have.

Man straddles both worlds — the physical and the spiritual — even in his fallen state. The physical world is not merely a world of three dimensional space occupied by things, but a world also marked by a sense of time. The spiritual world is inevitably, from this side of the grave, a projection of our space-time world --
only we somehow conceive of its space as being qualitatively different rather than quantitatively different, and its time as being something which might appropriately be called eternal rather than merely extensive.

The Old Testament strongly reflects an awareness of the spiritual nature of this world. The Hebrew poets did this in the Psalms, calling upon all nature to worship the Creator in a spiritual way, inviting the mountains to skip like little children with sudden joy (The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs. Psalm 114:4) and the floods to clap their hands (Psalm 98:8 ) . We think of this as fantasy.

Primitive people would not. They see a constant interaction between the visible and the invisible, betweennature and supernature, between time and eternity, between the animate and the inanimate. These two worlds do not form two kingdoms but one, and the more important world in certain respects is the supernatural -- more important because it is more difficult to control and therefore less predictable, and more important because it is constant while this world is always changing.

Living, as such people do, in daily awareness of this non-material world, they normally have a different time sense. The idea of cutting up time into segments of equal length and with more and more precise and diminutive divisions seems to them pointless. To get a native to use a watch in order to keep an appointment more accurately, or to report for work on a regular time basis, seems to him unreasonable. He is not clock conscious but event conscious: and for him 'event' usually means 'community event', shared event, and therefore corporate experience. To own a watch is fine as a prestige symbol, but to be in bondage to it is a form of slavery no sensible man should allow. The idea of an alarm clock that wakes a man while his soul is still wandering abroad in his dreams is the height of folly. The rudely awakened individual will be in danger of walking around for the rest of the day without any soul until sleep overtakes him again and his soul can finally catch up. All day he is a kind of half-there person.

That’s enough for now for you to think about. See you next time.....

Love,

Denis