Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"All the people I used to know They're an illusion to me now Some are mathematcians Some are carpenters' wives Don't know how it all got started Don't know what they do with their lives" -- Bob Dylan, "Tangled Up in Blue" I find always trying to simultaneously understand spiritual matters from a Buddhist and a Christian perspective gives me the clearest view of what is really going on, since I to do so I have to avoid getting caught up in a particular verbal formulation of some spiritual reality. So I think it is very useful to look at the Christian idea of "sin" through the lens of "samsara," or illusion. (And I don't think I am distorting things by doing so: St. Paul, for instance, used the Greek word sarx for sin, which I understand to be close to the meaning of samsara .) The illusion in question is that we are fundamentally isolated beings, with "interests" that are fundamentally in opposition to t...

As I have mentioned previously, to mistake a myth for a theory is a terrible error. Genesis I is not a scientific theory of how the world was created, nor is it an historical account. It is a myth about creation: it expresses a mystery that we can't capture in scientific theories or historical accounts, but that we can hint at through poetry such as, "Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." I was prompted to think about this again tonight when one of my online friends was circulating an inspirational poster telling the reader, "There is nothing wrong with you accept what other people tell you is wrong with you." Of course there is something wrong, and fundamentally wrong, with each of us! That something is expressed again and again in myths: in the Biblical story of the Fall, or Plato's myth of the originally perfect beings that split in two, in the tale of P...