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| Credit: Qrdz |
Good grief! Christians can´t even agree on when to commemorate / celebrate Easter. Here are links to two Wikipedia entries on the Memorial and Quatrodecimanism.
Friday, April 10, 2026
Thursday, April 9, 2026
Metaphors decoded
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| Welcome to the Shimmer, earthling! |
So I watched "Annihilation" from 2018. Or most of it. A Swedish TV/movie site claimed that it´s the most scary horror story ever made, et cetera. Naaah. Not by a long shot. In fact, I´m almost tempted to call it false marketing.
A mysterious alien presence takes over a territory in the United States. Patrols sent out to scout the area disappear after first going mad. Four women volunteer for a new mission to this scariest location on planet Earth. So what do four women, one of them a former US army soldier, talk about on an extremely dangerous expedition to the potentially deadliest place this side of the Andromeda Galaxy?
Why, their family relationships and former boyfriends, of course!
Something tells me "Annihilation" couldn´t pass the Bechdel-Wallace test...
The women are weak, too weak for a realistic mission of this kind. In film like this, the actors should be manly macho men. Or female Israeli commando soldiers (hint hint). Maybe I´m missing some clever psychological metaphor. And oh, the mutant bear looked like the next cousin of the monster from "Prophecy" (a half-forgotten film from 1979).
But sure, there are some interesting angles here and there. The alien presence is called the Shimmer. It´s not clear what it wants, or even want something at all. The Shimmer has turned a wildlife refuge in Florida into a surrealist landscape that looks like a Salvador Dali painting. It´s actually quite beautiful, but also dangerous. People who enter the Shimmer get disoriented, suffer memory loss, or die under strange circumstances. The Shimmer expands (albeit slowly) and could potentially annihilate all life on the planet. During the dramatic finale, we realize that the alien quasi-intelligence can "download" our genetic signatures and memories, creating crude body doubles of real people.
And maybe *that´s* the key metaphor of "Annihilation". The Shimmer is really a symbol of the Internet, AI and robots. It´s superficially beautiful (like AI-generated art), yet illusory and mechanical. Everything feels "wrong". The alligators are white while the plants form impossible hybrids. Some even look humanoid. The Shimmer turns us into robotic copies of ourselves, incapable of real relationships. And just like the Internet, the alien entity is quasi-intelligent but lacks a real purpose. It spreads like a computer virus in automatic fashion. Indeed, that´s how the main character Lena eventually manages to destroy the Shimmer: by making it mimicking an explosion, something the mindless system does until it self-destructs.
Or maybe not...
Three stars for this production. But no more.
TACO Tuesday
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| Credit: Michael Tracey |
I just realized that many Americans interpreted Trump´s pre-deadline tweet as a threat to use nuclear weapons against Iran. I´m referring to this (now notorious) sentence: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will."
I took it to be hyperbolic. Interestingly, the Iranian regime probably didn´t take it seriously. Otherwise they wouldn´t have made maximalist demands and closed that fucking strait again. As far as I understand, the holy market didn´t believe it either, since there was apparently very little turbulence at the stock exchanges as the deadline approached.
Is this the first time "the madman strategy" works better on your own population than on the enemy? If so, that´s an original record, to be sure!
Welcome back, I suppose
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| Credit: The Fourth Way |
Overheard on the interwebs: "What you are is God´s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God".
The good old days
From the X account The Fourth Way, the self-ironic memes of which are often hilarious!
Avignon
Did the Trump administration threaten to declare war on the Vatican and overthrow Pope Leo? This is getting more and more absurd. Although I suspect these reckless statements were similar in character to Trump´s grandiose verbal attacks on Canada or Denmark. Who are still at large as of this moment. So I don´t think Leo needs to fear an Anti-Pope on the Potomac. Or in Avignon, for that matter.
Fitting in (Gemini version)
The Gemini version.
How could monotheist religions such as Christianity be fitted into a pluralist religious paradigm? That is, pluralism as in "all religions lead to the Divine". Especially exclusivist forms of monotheism (our way is the only way to salvation) seem different to fit in, but if pluralism is true, then even these traditions must in *some* way express the truth of the (pluriform) Divine.
Fitting an exclusivist, monotheistic faith like Christianity into a pluralist framework—the idea that many paths lead to the same Divine Reality—is one of the greatest challenges in the philosophy of religion. At first glance, the statement "No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6) seems to slam the door on pluralism.
However, theologians and philosophers have developed several "bridges" to harmonize these concepts. If pluralism is true, even an "only way" claim must be interpreted as a specific, culturally conditioned expression of a universal truth.
1. The "Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant"
This is the foundational logic of pluralism. Each religion touches a different part of the "Elephant" (the Ultimate Reality/God).
The Fit: Christianity touches the "heart" of the elephant—emphasizing Divine Love and Incarnation. Its claim to be the "only way" is viewed by pluralists as "the language of a lover." Just as a person might say to their spouse, "You are the only one for me," the exclusivist claim is seen as a statement of deep devotional commitment rather than a literal, objective exclusion of everyone else.
2. John Hick’s "The Real" and its Personae
The philosopher John Hick was the pioneer of modern religious pluralism. He argued that there is an ultimate, transcendent "The Real" that is beyond human description.
The Fit: Human cultures filter "The Real" into different "Personae" (Personal Gods like Yahweh, Allah, or Krishna) or "Impersonae" (Brahman, The Tao).
The Christianity Angle: Within this model, Jesus is the definitive lens through which Christians experience "The Real." The "exclusivism" is a necessary psychological boundary for the community to maintain its transformative power, but it is not a boundary that limits God’s reach.
3. Karl Rahner’s "Anonymous Christians"
This is a more moderate, "inclusivist" bridge often used in Catholic theology.
The Fit: It suggests that the Grace of God, as manifested in Christ, is so powerful that it can reach people who have never heard of Jesus. If a person of another faith lives a life of selfless love and follows their conscience, they are effectively "following Christ" without knowing his name.
The Logic: This allows the religion to keep its central figure (Jesus) as the source of salvation while accepting that other paths are effectively "undercover" versions of the same truth.
4. The "Radiating Centers" Model (The Many and the One)
Instead of religions being parallel paths that never meet, imagine them as spokes on a wheel.
Pluriform Divine: This model suggests that the Divine is intrinsically pluriform. Just as white light contains all colors of the spectrum, the Divine possesses infinite "facets."
Exclusivism as Focus: An exclusivist tradition is like a laser beam—it focuses intensely on one single "color" (facet) of the Divine. Its claim that "this is the only light" is true from its specific perspective, but from the perspective of the prism (the Divine itself), it is just one necessary part of the whole.
5. Esoteric Perennialism (Frithjof Schuon)
Perennialists distinguish between the Exoteric (the outer shell/rituals/dogma) and the Esoteric (the inner mystical truth).
The Fit: At the exoteric level, religions must be exclusivist to keep their structure and protect the faithful. A Christian must believe in the Trinity; a Muslim must believe in the Oneness of Allah.
The Transcendent Unity: At the esoteric (mystical) level, the "exclusivist" walls disappear. A Christian mystic and a Sufi mystic are often describing the same state of union with the Divine. The "only way" is a fence for the sheep, but the shepherd (the Divine) knows the whole mountain.
Summary Table: How Exclusivism fits Pluralism
| Concept | The Pluralist Interpretation |
| "The Only Way" | A "love language" expressing total commitment to a specific path. |
| The Incarnation | A specific, perfect "window" into the Infinite, tailored for a specific culture. |
| Salvation | A universal process of "human transformation" that takes different names (Heaven, Nirvana, Moksha). |
| Mission/Evangelism | Sharing a beautiful "map" that has worked for you, rather than "conquering" others. |
The Direct Answer: To fit an exclusivist monotheism into pluralism, you must move from a literal reading of dogma to a symbolic or phenomenological reading. You treat the "exclusivism" as a necessary part of that religion's "spiritual grammar"—it's how that specific path makes sense of the Infinite, even if the Infinite is larger than that path.
Does this help reconcile the "only way" claim with a broader view of the Divine, or does it feel like it dilutes the core identity of the religion?
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