Where Are the Time Travelers?

Time is perceived to be a dimension of our existence, like height, width, and depth. It seems likely to me that we would eventually learn how to move through time in either direction. This implies that we should have visitors from the future……unless those enlightened folks see nothing interesting about road rage and reality TV.  Perhaps there is reason to avoid us?  Maybe we contaminate attitudes? Yet, I think natural human curiosity would impel them to visit us.

So, where are they?  I don’t buy the notion that they’d all be hidden. People are screw-ups. Even though they would have protocols to safeguard contaminating our time with knowledge of them, someone would slip up. That’s just human.  But they haven’t, so they aren’t here. 

How can that be? The most likely answer seems to me to be that the world will end before mankind advances enough to travel through time. The lack of time travelers here implies the end of the world. 

Is Hillary Going to the Crowbar Hotel?

I notice at https://thehornnews.com/shocker-hillary-clinton-jailed/ a report on further developments in the Clinton scandal. It discusses a December 27 ruling by an appeals court in the USA that John Kerry was derelict in his duty to refer the Hillary case to the Attorney General for prosecution when she did not comply with the request for her emails but bleached the data instead. It also discusses Trump’s nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama as the new Attorney General, and the rigid opposition of Democrats to the nomination on account of their apprehension that the nominee will pursue Hillary all the way to jail.

Of particular interest are the 100+ comments posted at the foot of the article. Those folks really are bitter towards the former first lady and her husband. In another time and place she would have been burned as a witch or beheaded as a traitor. I wonder how much of that ire stems from personal frustrations that have nothing to do with the Clinton shenanigans. I am not trying to mitigate Mrs. Clinton’s guilt, or overlook the ridiculous number of Clinton contacts that seem to have dropped dead in the Clinton wake over the last 40 years, but I am curious about the social psychology of this situation. Of course, reductionists try to attribute psychology to elementary physics: every thought and feeling is a function of the interaction of physical forces and materials. I don’t buy that, and maybe will write about it separately.

The Art of Loving

I started rambling about love, and the pain that keeps us from loving, in the post at http://gordon-feil-theology.blogspot.ca/2016/12/my-addictions.html, and added to it at http://gordonfeil.blogspot.ca/2016/12/my-pain.html. I am going to continue with that theme and will probably end up with a series of posts that seem disconnected, but I do intend to tie them together for those patient enough to keep reading over the next several weeks.

At http://gordonfeil.blogspot.ca/2016/11/love-that-never-dies.html we discussed the love that is really liking something or someone. While I want to be loved with that kind of love (in other words, I want to be liked), I really need the kind of love which the Greeks describe with agape. 

We read in I John 4:8 that "God is love". It's a statement of equivalence and it is a definition. That same word agape that is used 116 times in the Greek New Testament and is rendered in the old King James Version as charity, which back then really wasn't such a bad translation of it. Yet, agape is more than what we typically mean by charity today.

Love is not an emotion; it is an attitude. It is thing of the head more than of the heart. It is a point of view. It is, as Eric Fromm relates in his The Art of Loving, an interpersonal creative capacity that is characterized by care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. If I love you, I care about you, I take responsibility for your welfare, I respect you, and I get to know you and about you so that I CAN actually take that responsibility.

Essentially love is non-directional. If I love you I must also love the guy across the street. If love you, but not him, then the very reason that I don't love him shows that my love has conditions attached: it is a "love" that operates only if its Object fulfills certain requirements. That then renders my "love" as a business transaction. That isn't love. I either love everyone, or I love no one. Moreover, a corollary is that I love them no matter what they say, what they think or what they do. I may not love what they say, think or do, but I love them in any case. This, of course, requires separating the person from the behavior and realizing that a person is not his behavior.

The next time I write on this, I want to explore the concept of God as the personification of love.