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  • From: lorencrow AT earthling.net (Loren Crow)
  • To: Ken Litwak <kdlitwak AT concentric.net>
  • Cc: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: atheism and Hebrew scholarship
  • Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 11:34:26 -0600


Ken, Peter, and others,

To me, the point of being a scholar is not necessarily to agree with your
subject. What is important is entertaining the possibility that your
subject could be right and have something to teach you. That's what I mean
by "reading sympathetically": reading with the aim of discovering some
truth. I don't have to be Hindu to come to the Upanishads with this
expectation, nor do I have to be Jewish (let alone Christian!) to read the
OT with this expectation. I, a white man, can read _The Color Purple_ with
great benefit. And I can't read Thoreau or Emerson without some new
revelation dawning on me. As a Christian I believe that truth everywhere
is God's truth, and that God's truth may be found in some very surprising
places. Thank God!

Loren


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Certain philosophers, that have no filial piety towards their Mother
Psyche, reason as if they were pure spirits, and consequently miss the
secret of transitive knowledge, which is a spiritual expression of
interaction between bodies. The human spirit is the spirit of a body, the
thoughts visiting an animal soul; and consequently its fundamental
categories are transcripts of the modes of action and passion proper to an
animal living periously in a material world.
George Santayana, "The Soul at Play"






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