owendlamb
God certainly had a special plan for these languages: the language of God's Law, the language of human power, and the language of human wisdom. The presence of His name in all three languages left the situation unambiguous to whoever might have been in the area to read it. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, hung on that cross. When pressed about it, Pilate would not amend those words.
In this way, though maybe unnecessary thanks to the Gift of Tongues the Holy Spirit later gave to His apostles, the sign stood as a kind of Rosetta Stone, which no one could misunderstand. It shows that history itself, along with all human matters, belong completely to Him, and at the same time it made those languages new by virtue of that single title, grounding them firmly in the Truth Himself.
Latin and Greek, themselves originally vernaculars, continue to hold a special place in their respective churches, both Catholic and Orthodox. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, continues to be used in many Eastern churches as well, again Catholic and Orthodox both. All three constitute especially venerable traditions—and to this we may add Coptic, since Jesus spent his early years in Egypt; Slavonic, for its very writing system's role in the conversion of the Slavs; and a handful of others I am more or less ignorant of. With each one, by entering into the language, you enter the mind of those first converts, who themselves entered the Mind of Christ.
In the Latin Catholic Church (that is, the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church, or however you want to name it) we call the Latin language a "sacramental"—the same sort of thing as holy water, something which conveys grace to those who use it with an openness to those graces.
Demons hate it because of its legal precision, by which, in the name of the same Christ named in Latin on the cross, they are driven out of people, things, and places, fulfilling Christ's own prediction that His followers would cast out demons.
By forming one's faith life around one of these languages, one can more clearly ask those basic human questions that Christ is the answer to, without having to deal with the centuries of semantic drift and overloading that are scattered about the minefields of our modern vernaculars. The vernacular, of course, is no impediment to personal prayer, but as more and more people are gathered in one place the confusion of Babel threatens to set in.
On the other hand, every little Latin grammatical lesson, every new piece of vocabulary learned, reveals new wonders and opens the door to the great body of literature that was composed in the single Mind of Christ.
But we had this, and in the 20th century we let it slip through our fingers, not knowing what we'd been given. The problem is not that we don't know Latin. The problem is that, in broad cultural strokes, even when we did, we didn't care.
You mean Satan, as depicted in Dante's Inferno, yes? Certainly Satan thinks himself the center of the universe!
It seems to me (from summaries that I've read) that the Divine Comedy shows the one "center of the universe" at the bottom of hell to be a false center, the real center being at the peak of heaven, outside of the physical order altogether, in the depths of the Trinity's interrelations.
From her example it's no large leap to say that other rational animals might also have been saved precisely by being prevented from falling. Still Mary would retain the special privilege of being the Mother of God. But there is plenty of room in the hierarchy of being for other unfallen men below her.
As for hive minds and such, once we identify a will in the action of any set of material, that set of material should be recognized as a single person. The field of metaphysics will no doubt help us find the right times to apply the words "rational", "animal", "man", "human", etc. to any new and strange physical configurations we discover. The key will be finding the boundary between one single will and another, whether or not that corresponds to what we would call a "stable" "physical" boundary.
Particularly I don't think referring to a "notion of the self" helps the search for these things, since the Christian view is not that any animal's "notion of self" generates its intelligence, but that God Himself infuses intelligence where He wills, and any creature's "notion of self" at one time or another is merely a result, not the cause, of its intelligence—and I even think it's possible to have either one without the other.
If you've got the time and interest, check out Dr. Paul Thigpen's book Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Catholic Faith, a fantastic overview of the debate over extraterrestrial life in the context of Christian history. The author's thesis is that the existence or nonexistence of extraterrestrial life—in any of a multitude of forms—poses no threat to the Christian, and particularly Catholic, faith.
It begins:
Algernon
You won't need these flowers
They've revoked the horrors
Your tragedy now ends happily
And I'm sure that they won't be done
Till they fenced off the ledges
And rounded the edges of all that goes wrong
For you, Algernon...
[2] On YouTube: https://youtu.be/IFR06LNqJVs
I've usually used my $3-4 alarm clock for waking me up in the morning, and then my phone timer for naps.
Now that I just took a closer look, I was able to find a way to disable automatic updates on the phone. (I had to find and tap "Software update > System Update Preferences > Smart Update" in the Settings app.) But I like the alarm clock, so I'll probably keep using it anyway. Better that my phone isn't the first thing I interact with every day.
More recently I've been reading some pre-Socratic excerpts with friends, and some Augustine—On Free Choice of the Will and De Musica—on my own. De Musica I'm working through a second time, this time in the original language. I've never been more motivated to become fluent in Latin in my life.
You know how the very consistency of the rules of the material world seem to outlive the world itself? The fact that 1 and 1 are 2 outlives the fact that a certain bottle of beer and another bottle of beer are two bottles of beer. Even if I found a single receptacle that could hold all the beer (mmm), 1 and 1 would remain 2, the fact altogether out of my reach to alter.
Similarly the pecking order in a chicken coop won't last longer than the chickens and the coop, and it can change besides—but 1 always comes before 2, and 2 before 3, and no other numbers will displace that order even if you shoved another chicken between two others near the front of the line every other second. You may destroy the line of chickens, but you'll never shake 6 off 5's tail.
The faculty by which you and I recognize these obvious truths—well, what kind of stuff is it? Do we "sense" the very number 1 in all its splendor with our mere ears or somehow conjure it up from a multiplicity of neurons? or do we merely suppose or opine, rather than know, that the numbers take a particular order? Of course not! Rather, we find out. We label the numbers arbitrarily to keep easy track of them, and then we count them: we see where they'll take us. We're along for the ride, passengers on someone else's train, one that can take you right outside the universe to the mysterious land of D'oh—a land, you might say, more real than our native one.
Now, the faculty by which we recognize that numbers are always prior to material nature—since nature plays by number's rules but never the other way round—what will we call it? I call it reason, anyway. It's notable among our faculties for comprehending eternal things like number, as naturally as anything else.
So commonly a human being will prefer pure numbers to any sloppy instantiation of them. Bees make hexagonal honeycombs out of natural habit because the shape of a hexagon works well; a human, however, contemplates the pure hexagon and tells its ratios and properties to other humans on HN because the numbers are just that cool, hang usefulness. This is one thing that divides humans from the mere animals.
From all this it seems to me more plain that the spiritual human soul (the part of the human that touches or is itself in eternity) exists than that Mumbai is a real city, or even that the earth is a geoid and not a perfect sphere (though I believe these things also). And anyway, I use mine every day. I should know.
You reminded me of that Simpsons bit about Protestant Heaven vs Catholic Heaven:
I guess it's possible for a palimpsest's erasure to be complete to the naked eye, but for its original text to still be distinguishable outside the visible spectrum.
Maybe by "twisting" the author means that the field is one of torques rather than of linear forces. I guess you can make a continuous field of torques tangent to the surface of a sphere (as long as you're speaking of the "wheel" of the torque, not its pseudovector axis, being tangent to the sphere).
In addition, you can only speak of two "ways" any particular torque in such a field can go: clockwise or counterclockwise, as viewed from, say, a point inside the sphere. That would explain the one-way-or-the-other language.
https://dirtpoorrobins.bandcamp.com/track/but-never-a-key-de...
https://open.spotify.com/track/5NXt7fGhxFGfU6h1m9x06A
The album it's on (Deadhorse, by Dirt Poor Robins) is also excellent if you like apocalyptic cinematic rock with a sci-fi radio drama vibe.