Burning Questions

On the Existential Focus of the Tanach

   
    The talking bush told Moses "I AM THAT I AM". Here is the central epistemological tenant of the religions of the book. The divine is an existentialist. "I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam", says Popeye the sailor man. "Yah cant's define me cause I gets to do that." "I am a verb", said Bucky Fuller. I'd expand that to I am a vector (directional change of mental coordinates with respect to time). A tensor even.

    Are we to conclude that God (an nebulous term at best) is a burning bush? Any burning bush in general or a specific burning bush? Yes we are.

    I was recently reminded of an old joke:
DEFINITION OF A PHILOSOPHER: a blind person who is looking for a black cat in a dark room.
DEFINITION OF A THEOLOGIST: a person who claims to have found it.

    The problem with ordinary language in coming to terms with the divine is that it is self-referential. In this scriptural passage god (and I'm not going to capitalize the term anymore as I'm not referring to any specific subset of the conceptual universe) himself is self referential . The Tao that can be told is not the tao. What did god have to make the physical universe from? As THE apriori, he had himself. All substance is necessarily first spiritual or at least divine. As I state in my essay on the 1st Commandment, any attempt to reference the divine ("God") is only a hand wave in the general direction of, rather than a specific pointer to, the nebulous referent.

    So, is god actually giving Moses any information at all here? Yes. I think two very important principles that defined Judahic theology and inform Christian and Muslim theology are given here:
1) the universe is self referential and therefore fractal.
2) the creative free will of the divine is embedded in us and therefore the correct approach to purpose must necessarily be existential

    The meaning of principle 1) is that however we categorize our thought the closer we look at the borders of those categories, the less clear they become. There is no "us and them."
    The meaning of principle 2) is that we get to define meaning in our lives. To truly identify with the Creator ["A foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds" - Emerson]. we take part in the creative process. We get to choose! His Endlessness has made us junior partners. How wonderful!