Wash and Wax

I know a clean car is a sign of a sick mind.  But the work pressure and muscle pain from the last run was gone after 2 hours of labour.

Trinity

An atheist though, I am obsessed with the relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Son of God, and the meaning of Trinity.  Is the Son of God begotten or unbegotten?  How can the Son be coeternal and uncreated if his being is from the Father?  How can Jesus be equal with the Father if he specifically announced that the Father was greater than he?  What is Holy Spirit?  How does it relate to the God?  These questions were once the focus of the lively debate between Arius and Athanasius.  The Gospels seemed to be on the side of Arius.  However, since Constantine for political reasons proclaimed at Nicaea that Athanasius was right and his descendant, Theodosius, in 381CE, issued a decree which made it unlawful for everyone to question the state-preferred Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit formula, the debate was brought to an abrupt end.  Still, what does Homoousion in the Decree of Nicaea mean?  Trinity?  How can there be three be one?  If there is only one God, how could the Logos also be divine?  The questions remained.  At one point, Gregory of Nyssai felt compelled to announce that "Every concept of God is a mere simulacrum, a false likeness, an idol: it could not reveal God himself.  The true vision and the knowledge of what we seek consists precisely in not seeing, in an awareness that our goal transcends all knowledge and is everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility."  When I am almost ready to accept that the Christian God is after all completely unspeakable, unnameable and unknowable (the Fathers of Cappadocia who tried to justify the Christian faith said it, not me), an equation that appeared in a recent article in the Hong Kong Economic Journal (which has nothing to do with religions) somehow revives my interest in the matter: ∞ + ∞ + ∞ = ∞.

∞ + ∞ + ∞ = ∞.  Doesn't it explain the nature of Trinity?  The problem is, of course, if we take out an ∞ from the left side of the equation the end product will remain the same.  It also doesn't matter if we add another ∞ to the equation.  But, is God the same God if we take the Son or the Holy Spirit out of the equation?  Does God remain the same if we add say a Holy Daughter to the equation?  Why not?  After all, ∞ + ∞ + ∞ + ∞ = ∞.

"Old Idea" - Leonard Cohen

The long wait is finally over.  Leonard Cohen new album is about to hit the street.  You can listen to it online, courtesy of NPR.  The streaming is available for a limited time.  So grab a single malt, dry martini, espresso, whatever, dim the light and enjoy.

You can pre-order the album here.  You can also read the poetic lines of the first track "Going Home" In New Yorker's Poetry page.

Comments Moderation

A fellow blogger has been receiving comments from those who don't know the difference between the right to speak and the right to bully.  As I'll hate to see this little personal blog turn into a mud wrestling field, I do moderate comments.  Luckily I seldom get nasty comments from my readers and I have deleted comments from no more than 2 individuals.  The first of whom was too keen to find out who I am, comments deleted; the other had the tendency to post some nasty remarks about another reader of mine, comments deleted.  When I delete a comment, I ignore it completely.  No rebuttal; no reply.  It always works.  People disappear after being ignored a few times.  It's probably not very polite of me to completely ignore a comment but, hey, not all comments deserve a reply, do they?  And, more importantly, I consider it rude and unfair to the one whose comment gets deleted if I comment on his/her comment after exercising my right to delete it.  So, as a rule, I don't mention deleted comments.  They just silently disappear.

I love the delete key.

Angry Bird and London Philharmonic Orchestra