h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Another Sunday then. I went out to the garage and filled up with stodge. I appear to have slept in my chair last night. Don't remember much about it. I know I upgraded a computer that badly needed upgrading, with very good results. It's running Linux Mint Qiana now. But I need to replace one of the external hard drives because it's failing; and I don't know what data there are on it, but I think some quite old stuff because I've had the drive since about 2007 and that's a long time for one of those old drives.

It's a bit chilly out. Roll on Summer!

Watched Who which was probably the most beautiful television I've ever seen, apart from the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet I watched once years ago with Mum.

The voices are having a field day today. And most upsetting they are too.

My, but that was a beautiful, beautiful episode of Who. It has left me quite stunned.

It's Sunday today and the voices are clamouring at my head. Upsetting.

They sawed Isaiah in two; I've got it relatively easy by comparison.

The voices are deliberately and maliciously torturing me.

I sit in silence listening to the invisible voices sounding from afar, accusing, condemning, damning.

I think the average christian is too bound up with the knowledge of good and evil, to understand what God is doing half the time.

It's Monday tomorrow. Again.

It's 19 degrees outside at the Airport. Warm indoors.

My ulcer is playing up something rotten. It's in the herniated part of my stomach, too, which makes it even more uncomfortable.

Encouragement: God has not brought us this far to give up on us now.

That's true, I needed to hear that.

Still, it's 19 degrees out and bright sunshine. Not that you'd know that in here, with the windows and the curtains closed. Well it's my den isn't it.

I MUST get into the habit of going to Pick 'n' Pay and buying meat and stuff to eat. Eating out of tins is so expensive.

Watched the second half of Jarman's "Wittgenstein". A beautiful movie.

Most of what people say and do is inconsequential. That's what Solomon said. Hebel habalim, 'amar haQoheleth, hebel habalim, hakkol habel. Ecclesiastes is a remarkable book. I wrote a series of essays on it after I finished my theology degree. They weren't very good but I had one or two ideas which I managed to express.

God blessed them and said, Peru urevu.

Be fruitful and multiply.

I wonder whether I can write any more of my Bible teaching?

I started making notes for an essay about children. I think that apart from the generative aspect, analogous between God and man, I think the main function of a child is to perfect its parents, and to go on itself to be perfected by its own children in turn.

But what about the sins of the fathers being visited upon the 3rd and 4th generation? That ended some time in Ezekiel didn't it?

Children are mirrors in which their parents see themselves clearly for the first time. That is why David cried out, Absalom, Absalom, O my son, my son. Because this is what God said when David sinned. Children make us see ourselves as God sees us. That is why Hagar saw herself seen, because of Ishmael. In Isaiah 7 and 8 there are two parallel passages along the lines of "before the child knows right from wrong", that is to say, there is a time in a child's life before he suffers the inherited sin of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

And it is the work of Jesus to undo this knowledge in his people. No longer are God's children to walk as judges of good and evil. We are to walk in love, which involves an entirely different phenomenology, or way of seeing, and an entirely different epistemology, or way of knowing. We are to walk in grace and in the forgiveness of sins - that is to say, we walk in God's grace towards us and in his forgiveness of our sins, just as we walk in grace towards others and in the forgiveness of their sins against us.

In this way we are children of God, that we walk in love, not judging by the sight of our eyes, but judging righteous judgement.

We learn how to love, by being loved by our Father. We learn to how be gracious, because we are ourselves the objects of God's grace. We walk in love because we are loved. We love, because he first loved us. God is relationality and it is in the father <> son exchange of love that the Trinity subsists and in which God's children are fruitful and multiply.