point of view

a telling social experiment is to ask different cultures "how many colors are there in the rainbow?" e.g. Japan has seven colors in their rainbow, the US has six (ROYGBV), Germany five, Russia, the answer apparently differs from one person to another.

the actual number of colors in a rainbow is much greater than the 256 colors defined by 8 binary bits, or the 65,536 colors defined by 16-bits, or even 16,777,216 colors defined by 24-bits. the colors in a rainbow are continuos - so there are an infinite number of colors in a rainbow within the visible spectrum.

yet each culture has an answer to this question that they teach their children.

which is right? which is wrong?

it's so big of us to see the absurdity of this right/wrong question when the issue is this trivial - and when we have a higher perspective. yet within each culture - this truth is real: e.g. what would be the seventh color in the american ROYGBV rainbow we could add? or which one should we remove to be compatible with Germany's five? consensus would be quite distant.

different ways to parse truth. to make finite that which is infinite.

i was traveling through Germany last week. their national color seems to be mustard yellow. concurrently, or maybe consequently - the whole rest of their color pallet is whacked to my eye. their red's are just a bit off, their blue's likewise... at least to the eye of my world-view. in taste, i think their colors are richer than the primary colors / red white and blue of my land, and i thoroughly enjoyed the differences. but i was amazed when i came across this set of houses...

to think they have the same rainbow we have!

the Death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

i caught a glimpse of Michael Berg's (father of Nick) reaction to the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi listed side by side with world leader's reaction on BBC news... and it stood apart:

Well, my reaction is I'm sorry whenever any human being dies. Zarqawi is a human being...

...As long as people use violence to combat violence, we will always have violence.

i can no longer located this on BBC's website... (baaad BBC) but CNN does have a full interview with Michael Berg - which is well worth the read (and watching the vids). I see two tones ringing throughout the interview: religious and political - and they intertwine much as all conversations do elsewhere in the world. but i'd like to pull on just one thread...

Judaism and Islam both have the concept of an "eye for an eye" - an idea which speaks to a sense of justice - and an improvement over "many eye's for an eye". While the Christian Bible does contain many "problematic" passages (lest we get haughty) when in comes to violence (assuming for a moment we don't elevate any portion of scripture over any other portion) including the aforementioned "eye for an eye" directive and even God-sanctioned genocide - it also presents a "higher way":

my thought is this: if anyone is going to break the cycle of "justice", or is it really revenge, Christianity should be our (collective) best hope for breaking the cycle. I believe Jesus presented this as "turning the other cheek". yet - this conversation, or expectation even among christians, or from christian leadership, or from a statistically christian nation - is largely absent.

i believe there is a problem here. selah

The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians...pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)