Early at the morning of the light of this day I say: ‘Good Morning!’ We now have made a beginning with October, the month in which some tree’s leaves leave their abode for the year, but others stick it our with their green needles! That switch over is happening early this year, while last year it was late. So, we can say that the variation of the seasons vary. Naturally!

John and I have been exchanging a few emails while he is in Berlin, which is kind of neat to me as I know the ‘Mitte’ a bit, which is where he is staying with family. The weather there has been better than ours here, but is not all that different overall.

Palliser was on my schedule this weekend as usual and within a few weeks we’ll also be meeting on Wednesday evenings again. This time Quimby’s thoughts and ideas will be front and center for five consecutive evenings.

Reading Armstrong’s words was like reading my own, as I have recorded those in my Daily Entries, my notes and my studies relating to my talks.

Last night I read the Epilogue in Karin Armstrong’s ‘The Bible’, in which the author makes a case for mutual study of the various major religions. This with the aim to come to a better appreciation of each others convictions. Reading Armstrong’s words was like reading my own, as I have recorded those in my Daily Entries, my notes and my studies relating to my talks. This is the case in particular for the preparations for my upcoming talk ‘Humanity’s Threshold’ and I’ll continue with additional observations under Writings today.

Armstrong suggests the deployment of hermeneutics - applied in interpreting holy texts originally - to address the present day problems of text and scripture interpretations. This made me look up my various philosophy books and two of these stand out.

First is the Sesam “Atlas of Philosophy” in Dutch, a direct translation of the original German and the other is my old second hand text book “Introducing Philosophy” by R.C. Solomon. It was my philosophy course text back in 1996 at then MRC. From my initial scans and reads, I conclude that I have been practicing hermeneutic techniques all along with my ‘TPPC’ - Time, Place, People, Circumstance - guide.

We bandy about all kinds of opinions about each others religions, yet know very little about them. Armstrong emphasising the necessity of dealing with this problem is attune with my own conviction and insights in this regard. So far I had not thought explicitly of using hermeneutics, but I intent to explore that now formally, as I already made my own informal beginning.

It is assuring to find a kindred spirit so unexpectedly. I read Armstrong’s ‘The History of God’ already in around 1990 and other books of her as well, but always kind of dismissed this ’Bible Biography’ as a bit tendentious. At it happened, Juliet asked me to return her copy to the library and I said to myself: ‘Maybe you should have a look at the style of writing.’

This I did, which led to my discovery in the Epilogue, where I encountered my own insights and conviction. This in turn will result in a trip to the book store to get my own copy. I like to interact with important books by underlining passages that resonate with me and that is a ‘no-no’ for library books.

I explain this in so much detail, because it is for me an example of some thing coming my way - returning the book - and then intuiting that maybe this something has something to ‘say’ to me.

I explain this in so much detail, because it is for me an example of some thing coming my way - returning Juliet’s library book - and then intuiting that maybe this something - the book - has something to ‘say’ to me. This then followed by my acting on my intuition, even after a few dismissals!

I can point to other such ‘happenings’ in my life, which at first are just stand alone actions and occurrences, but later turn out to be pieces fitting in my puzzle and search, for which I gave thanks, gratefully.
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The ‘Atlas of Philosophy’ is a very unusual books as it has the left page containing coloured illustrations of the text on the accompanying right hand page, a bit like a graphic novel. In the case ’hermeneutics’ the illustration has five graphic components on page 148 are titled as follows.

The left top has ‘objective’, top right ‘comparative’, bottom right ‘divinatory’, bottom left ‘subjective’ with ‘understanding’ centered among the four corners.

The illustrations show the following, for objective is shown two books titled: grammar, wordbook - dictionary - and notes titled ’discerning the spirit’; for comparative is shown a scroll, many reference works and an open book; for divinatory is shown an open book with an arrow pointing to the reader’s forehead; for subjective is shown a human annotating a poster and for understanding at the center, an open book!

And there you have it, a graphic description of ‘hermeneutics’ in five pictures each worth a thousand words!

And there you have it, a graphic description of ‘hermeneutics’ in five pictures each worth a thousand words! The accompanying text on page 149 to the right quotes the older German philosophers Schleiermacher and Dilthey.

However, my Solomon text references Heidegger, his student Gadamer and Rorty (US) who are modern. These more modern views apply hermeneutics to history and human behaviour, having moved away from the holy writ per se.

It is this modern application of hermeneutics that is well suited to tackling the problems of conflicting scripture based convictions. These plague our global social discourse, as noted by Armstrong in the epilogue to her ‘Bible Biography’ and by myself in my call for the teaching of tolerance across religious traditions as our main aim today.
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