Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"Nevertheless, as early as the consciousness of autonomy becomes tangible at all there is also to be found the awareness of a crucial split in the psyche between spirit and power. As witnesses to this awareness I mention... finally the Christian climax in the Augustinian concepts of amor Dei and amor sui . However multifarious the desires may be, and however many of them may be distinguished by psychological description, they are overshadowed by the sense of a basic dualism in the psyche: autonomous man can order himself in society either by orienting himself toward transcendence or by emancipating himself as a world-immanent existence." -- Eric Voegelin, "What Is History?" The Collected Works , Vol. 28, p. 32. Some people dropped basketballs off of a dam (weren't they littering?) and got to witness the " magnus effect " in a dramatic fashion. What caught my eye was the web site describing this as "a true act of science," as if somehow s...

If I say "The weather is bad tonight" and you say "Il tempo è brutto stasera" we have "expressed the same thought" in two different languages. But what is this thought? (Not just another expression of it, but the thought itself.) Where is it? When one first begins to understand a foreign language without translating it internally, one has the experience of sentences in that language becoming "transparent": one sees right through them to something luminous behind them. The various ways of expressing a thought exist: they have a place in space and time. But the thought itself? No, I think it is correct to say it does not exist: it is a nonexistent reality. And so it is with the divine: we may see a burning bush, but the reality behind it cannot be pinned down within existence.