@lukeburgis Good and evil aren’t symmetric powers. In a trust crisis—this moment—evil is less “having bad ideas” than the systematic loosening of reality-bonds. It is anti-incarnational. The wheat and tares parable presumes a real eschatonic separation as the revelation becomes unignorable.
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Hardly surprising. Eschatologically speaking, the web era initiated the arrival of an algorithmically-supercharged parsing mechanism which, ultimately, can only be understood apocalyptically, that is, from a point of view revealing a meaning different from its literal sense. Man-made history is not history's only dimension. History is not a blind alley. Beyond the mystery is meaning. And the meaning is destined to be disclosed. - Abraham Joshua Heschel This moment of seeing is what Jesus refers to in his parable of “the wheat and the tares.” (We would say weeds today, but the parable is still known to many, and certainly to me, by the King James Bible’s archaic word tares.) In this parable, he compares the kingdom of heaven to a field in which a house-holder has sown good seed, only to have an enemy come in the night and sow weeds, which grow up with the grain. The house-holder’s servants ask him whether they should try to weed the field, and he says, “No, lest in gathering the weeds, you root up the wheat along with them.” They can be separated, he says, only “at the harvest.” In everyday life, the wheat and the weeds are inextricable and, often, in-distinguishable. Only at the harvest, the moment Illich calls apocalypse, will the meaning be apparent. - Ivan Illich, An Intellectual JourneyDavid Cayley. Subtweet: History tends to the fuller and fuller revelation of the mystery of evil. History, therefore, follows an apocalyptic logic. Not apocalyptic in the sense in which the word is used colloquially to refer to catastrophes but in the word’s original sense of revelation or unveiling.
Open original document@pauljpastor "The very experience of not knowing what to trust anymore is an apocalyptic grace—judgment on our idolatry of representation. The core question isn’t “how do we patch epistemology?” but, “where does Truth actually live?” And that question, pressed hard enough, is Christological."
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18/ As for the apocalyptic irony built into the collapse itself? Precisely by becoming total, representation destroys its own authority. The more perfectly we can simulate presence, the more completely presence reveals itself as irreducible to simulation. The idol judges itself. 19/ The trust crisis, then, forces a rediscovery—at once pre-modern and post-digital: truth isn't chiefly a statement to be verified but a metabolic process requiring time, bodies, friction, and cost—a way of living together that reopens the space where truth can appear as truth. Essential reading today is you care about what's happening in spirituality work. How Deepak Chopra's AI spirituality is hijacking spiritual hunger Chopra’s AI isn’t an anomaly; it’s the evolutionary endpoint of a global spiritual economy built on mediation—a world system revealing its inner logic precisely as it maxes out its own possibility. And exactly here, the deeper question breaks in. Where, and in whom, is truth? 1/ Notable, the essential 'portability' of dominative religion - the practical shedding of indivisibility with the ground it now hovers above, and the seismic implications such exile from Wholeness effects and requires - so directly correlating with religion's empiric character. 20/ If mediated reality is reaching “peak manipulation,” the counter-movement won’t be peak counter-manipulation. It will be reality's slow revolt: people migrating back to what resists forgery—presence, cost, and covenant, borne not rendered. Not nostalgia: resurrection.
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