Thy game be won?

February 27th, 2013 by Charles Cameron

Who’s to say a God, ground of being, Great Mystery Power, or simple unaided universe can’t “purposefully” do Big Bangs and enormous time lags while gasses and galaxies and solar systems are formed and dissolve, flashes of lightning, inspiration and insemination, reproductions sexual and asexual, lives long and short, painting by El Greco and Vermeer, horrible puns and ugly Oscar ceremonies, mu mesons and mitochondria, prayers answered, hung up on in disgust, or unheard on account of it’s the Lord’s Day of Rest — grasses, feedlots, cows, milk, beef, methane…?

Depending, of course, on your definition of “purposefully” — since the purpose may be no more and no less than the unfolding of what is.

Whatever it is (or isn’t) that encompasses all this, it’s in little things as surely as big ones — and thumb wrestling, too. So there you have it: my theology of little things.

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Posted in art, Buddhism, Charles Cameron, christianity, Islam, Religion, science, space, Specs, sports, Theology, ubiwar, Uncategorized, war | 2 comments

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  1. Charles Cameron:

    February 28th, 2013 at 1:33 am

    Someone on FB pointed out in response to this post that the Tebow business is a tiny bit old by now. That’s correct, but in responding to his comment I found myself explaining that the post above is not really about sports, it’s about war.

    .

    I wrote:

    the post’s foot in the present day is the Dalai Lama quote, from this week’s Shambhala SunSpace, the Tebow references are earlier, from 2012, and the Hizbollah piece is earlier yet, dating back to 2008. The question of whether God takes sides in wars, which is what the various sports are standing in for, and the bit I’m really — but with British reticence — interested in here goes back at least to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural…

    Talking about games, in other words, is a sandbox in which certain questions that also relate to war can be discussed, without “militarist vs pacifist” issues arising.  

    .

    Besides which, the games / war analogy is a fascinating one, dating back at least to the time of Plotinus…

  2. carl:

    March 2nd, 2013 at 5:01 pm

    The dominant liberal establishment mass media (thank you Mike Rosen) hates Tim Tebow.  They hate him of course because he is demonstrably religious, he plainly states what he believes, he doesn’t much care what the writers and talking heads think and he won’t be influenced by what they say.  There aren’t many people, especially younger people, who are like that.  They can’t get at him, and boy they don’t like that.
     
    So they try to get at his fans, which is what that whole Huffington Post was about.  It was one of the “Aha!” progressive pieces of thinking that purports to expose the dark side of the Americans by showing the malign in the most innocent of behaviors.  From the dominant liberal establishment mass media’s viewpoint, it has two big advantages.  First, it furthers the belief that the Americans are evil.  They love that one.  Second, it establishes them as being morally superior for recognizing the evil.  They love that one even more.