Secular Life, Millennial Life, Heavenly Life

I have found myself saying "this life", to refer to the life that each of us lives between physical birth and death. What follows "this life" is to wait for resurrection. Then, to be resurrected in the Resurrection which can also be called the Millennium. I like being able to say "millennial" about what goes on in the Millennium. But "this-lifely" is awkward.

Another term for "this life" could be "secular life", the time that is lived in this world. An atheist, Muslim, Christian, and even a Buddhist or Hindu would agree that there is a thing that we live in on some level, agree on that same thing, in which people are born (and registered as having been born if they live in a time and place where birth certificates are kept), and we can all interact politically and modern medicine staves off problems that we all recognize as problems. In this world, where perhaps we only expect to live 60 or 80 years, time flows linearly.

The Millennium, I assume, and this would be the natural assumption from natural theology, I think, flows linearly as well. Some people talk about non-linear time (kairos), versus linear time (chronos). Maybe kairos runs parallel to both secular and Millennial time, which are forms of chronos.

(My understanding of kairos in this post is that it is "gathered time" (every Christmas is linked to every Christmas you ever experienced). If the past currently exists, we can be close to all the Christmases at once at each Christmastime (kairos), even if otherwise things proceed according to chronos (where we are closest to the moment that just entered the past).)

Hell, ultimately, becomes non-existent and thus I guess timeless. Heaven, according to MSL, if I recall correctly, has a chronos component (repeated outworkings of life that proceed linearly), but perhaps also a kairos component. Certainly restful time lends itself to contact with kairos or the timeless, and heaven is a time of rest.

I don't know what to say about times before creation (the beginning of secular time).

News: 25 June 2023

I made a print version of Waiting for Margot.

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Thinking about things I could do with the blog, I decided one thing would be to write posts that make sense of MSLN or anything else important on the blog. This might help me to know how to explain my writing to other people.

Long Links #1

On my subreddit I put up links to individual videos, websites, or blog posts, etc. Any of these things can be "consumed" (paid attention to) in one sitting (generally speaking). Those are "short links". But "long links" take more than one sitting and to me seem to not belong in the same context as short links.

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I read Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë. It's a depiction of being a governess. The protagonist finds herself with higher moral standards than the people around her, unable to voice her real views. She is alone in the household of her employer, is an alien who has only distant connection to the people who have the same tastes as her.

I think this book could be helpful to people who find themselves stumbling on new moral truths, but unable to be with the people who also believe in those truths. Or for anyone who is in the situation of being a missionary, whether sent officially or not.

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I watched some videos from Andy Edwards' YouTube channel. He is a drummer, teacher, and prog and jazz fan who does music criticism and music history. I watched his videos on what's wrong with jazz and on "the English aesthetic", among others.

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Another book I read: A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed is a memoir of her young life in Egypt around the middle of the 20th century and her transition to Western academia.

It has interesting discussion of "men's Islam" vs. "women's Islam". "Men's" being text-based, scholarship-based, while "women's" being formed by the recited Quran (the emphasis of the text as remembered from hearing it recited) and by moral life. ("Women's" is more or less the perspective of the non-elite, according to Ahmed.)

Like Agnes Grey, the book has discussion of people isolated in foreign cultures (a European nanny in Ahmed's childhood household in Cairo, Ahmed when she was in graduate school at Cambridge).

Additionally, discussion of race, nationalism, the constructed identity of "Arabness", imperialism. Also reminiscences of Muslim female spaces and Ahmed's feminism.

News: 1 June 2023

I recently finished releasing Waiting for Margot and Reality, as you may know.

I am now offering the older books I've written for sale as print books for $15 each. I like print books and sometimes pay $15 (or more) for new books, so I feel like someone else might feel the same for mine. My books sell better than I expected at the brick-and-mortar store (Verbatim) in San Diego where I sell them. I hope to have a print version of Waiting for Margot available soon.

Today I released some "wordless prayers" on YouTube and archive.org. (MIDI instrumentals.) Like Reality, I see them as expressing ideas and feelings that follow from my writing.

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I deleted my Twitter account finally. (I mostly stopped posting in November.)

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I've cleared out all the unreleased material I had intended to release. Now what? One possibility is to work on music. I am ambivalent about music. Writing is something I clearly want to do, but music feels strange to me. I can see how music has its advantages, and I have some talent at music (but with skill deficits). It's certainly a useful side project, to fill in the "right-brained" side of what I'm trying to say. But I don't completely want to do it.

Another possibility is to continue the background work for engaging with non-Christian religions (read about other religions, learn Indonesian). It can seem like I'm impossibly far from being competent in those areas (but I am not expecting to be anytime soon).

A third possibility is to start reviewing this blog (look at every post and make comments and/or corrections). I had been putting this off because I thought it would get me into doing philosophy, which I have decided to avoid until October 2024. I think I can go ahead with it if I simply note when I have a question about my philosophy or see how it should be better, and then not resolve that until later.

One thing I'm more sure I will do with this blog is make posts of links to things that are too long for my subreddit.