The Dual Meaning of the Biblical Body

Definition: Study Circle-A group that forms to systematically study the Baha'i writings and apply the insights into concrete acts of service.

In our study circle, there is a lady who in many ways believes in the Baha'i Faith but is having trouble corraborating some things in the Baha'i Faith with the Bible. Baha's believe in the Bible, though we often interpret it differently than Christian's. One important such case comes from the idea that Jesus Christ, after 3 days of being crucified, left his cave, appeared numerous times to numerous followers in physical form, and then resurrected into heaven. The core meaning of this to Christian's is that Christ conquered death, and therefore by believing in him anybody could also conquer death. If reading these versus literally, it is almost impossible to contradict the Christian interpretation. This is especially given the fact that all four gospels speak about the disciples finding an empty tomb, and Christ appearing among his apostles and saying, among other things

"Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself, touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." Luke 24:38-39

Bahai's believe that Christ ressurected spiritually and has already returned with the same heavenly body, though a different physical body.

Investigating this matter requires looking at other Biblical scriptures and uncovering the meaning of 'body'. Is there only one meaning, well lets see. Paul the apostle, a persecuter of the Christians, turned convert after a confrontation with Christ, was a primary shaper of the Christian Church. He speaks of Christ appearing to him in a similar manner to the other apostles

"Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles; and last of all, as it were to one untimely born, He appeared to me also" 1Corinthians 15:7

For a more detailed explanation, read Acts 9. He then proceeds to explain that as Christ is raised, so are his followers;

"But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. for since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. for as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive...Otherwise, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why then are they baptized for them? 1Corinthians 15:20-29

Now he gets to the crux of the argument, how are the dead raised? How was Christ raised? What does it mean that Christ appeared among his apostels three days after his crucifiction and ate with them, touched them, etc? Read on...

"But someone will say, How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come? You fool! That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies; and that which you sow, you do not sow the body which is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body just as He wished, and to each of the seeds a body of its own. All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, and another flesh of beasts, and another flesh of birds, and another of fish. There are are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one, and the glory of the earthly is another...So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown a perishable body, it is raised and imperishable body; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body, if there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So it is written, "The first Man, Adam, became a living soul." The last Adam(Christ) became a life-giving spirit. However the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual. The first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven, heavenly. As is the earthy, so also are those who are earthy; and as is the heavenly, so also are those who are heavenly. And just as we have born the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable." 1Corinthians 15:35-50

These versus almost unequivically show that it is not Christ's physical body that mattered, but his heavenly body. His physical body was sown to be raised a spiritual body. Likewise, his return is a spiritual return, ie. he is not going to come physically out of the sky. Christians now are in danger of making the same mistakes the Jews of Christ's time made. That is the expectation of a literal return. The Jews expected Elijah to return in a similar manner Christians expect Christ to return now. When Christ was asked about elijah's return, he said

"For all the prophets and the Law prophesied until John. And if you care to accept it, he himself is Elijah, who was to come."Matthew 11:13-14

John the babtist was not the physical return of Elijah, but the spiritual.

Baha'i believe in progressive revelation, meaning God sends messengers throughout eternity to bring salvation and a set of laws neccesary for the time and peoples capacity. In this day, Baha'is believe Baha'u'llah is the return prophesized in all the holy books. This is the day of fulfillment, the building of the New Jeruselum, based on the core precept of the unity of humankind. I invite Christian's to critically search deeper within their Bible and also to critically investigate the claims of Baha'u'llah for themselves.

Data Mining

I am now actively trying to decide on and plan for my master's thesis. While I am developing a clear idea, some important philosophical questions are coming up. In many ways I don't know if I can have a clear idea of what my results and correlations will be until I do the research. So while I can have a general hypothesis, I am waiting on the results and conclusions. The danger with this approach is that my research could be reduced to data mining, meaning that I look at the data to tease out a problem. If I use this approach, then I ask myself, why am I even here? What good is it to look for problems that that don't really exist, or at least do not have the relavancy to be noticed?

While talking to my friend Ryan, a fellow graduate student, he brought up the point that in order to have real purpose to our studies, we need to have a clear conceptual model of what we are looking for an what we want to find. Since we are both Baha'i, the ultimate conceptual model would be the unity of humankind, of which anything that we are studying should utimately give heed to. While I agree, I believe that is of upmost importance to be aware of our lenses, and to maintain objectivity while investigating the dictates of our conceptual model. For example, If I truly believe that urban sprawl in ABQ is bad because it wastes rescources and destroyes the environment, which by using a few more logical connectives, runs counter to my belief in the unity of humankind, I will orient my research to amplify this belief and propose alternatives according to my belief. What if my research doesn't prove this, what if instead it shows that the environmental consequences are negligible and that the economic benifits (which could or could not be a proxy for human well being) are substantial?

I guess what I am getting at is that over or under abundance of subjectivity can be harmful. Science cannot be conducted and interpreted enslaved to an ideology, nor can it be a purely objective endeavor that forgets to acknowledge that we, the scientists, citizens, and beings, who this research is utimately meant to serve, are part of the equation. We can and should have a conceptual model of reality that informs all our research, but it should not affect what we find, only what we choose to do with those findings.

This is the extent to which I have thought about my philosophical dilemma, I am open to ideas and comments from anyone. I am still searching.....

Thoughts on life

"In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God."

What a far out statement! To me this implies that that the root of everything is God, is Oneness, is a singular continuum........Now with life, their are so many categories; School, relationship, Spirituality, work, love, sex, intellect, emotion, ego, Religion, books, money, television, family, thoughts, action, future, past,,,,,,,,,,So many things to talk about, but it really all boils down to the present moment, to pure consiousness. To think of it a bit different, because everything is One, everything should inform everything else. There are no closed compartments in life, or there shouldn't be. So often I struggle to find the balance between my inner life, my school life, my home life, my work life, my love life, and everything in between. This isn't just with regards to time, but also energy, and mind-state. Often I enter one activity bringing the energy from another. The transition at first is rouph, but after a while I sink into it, it becomes the dominating world. How do we look at every situation in life from a totally hollistic view? While I am at school, I do I inform my work with spiritual insight while still being 'credible'? While in community life mode, how do I inform my decisions with patience, sensitivity, but also intellect? I guess the state that I am talking about is wisdom, knowing how to use knowledge when and where, in what quantity, and with what paradigm. Three cheers for wisdom, I am still working on the first cheer.

Beautiful Taos Fall: Need I say more?

We were bored.Beautiful Taos boardwalk

This cute creature was at the annual Taos Fall wool festival

So was she. Check out the blue eye.
Nothing like a picure of yourself surrounded by beautifull fall trees.
My dad getting ready for his Native American Church prayer meeting
My dad's back yard.
the tipi that my father used for the meeting
A breathtaking Taos street
This was at a gallery right near the Taos plaza

Los Tent Rocks

La bella en rosa

A New Friend: Seniorita Moo. I offered
her some beef jerkey but she declined.

Inside the belly of the beast: Que Romantico!
I am posing for a picture....
Now I am seducing the picture
The ancient kingdom of funny hats
Cutie!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sweaty, exhausted, and apparently happy
I am the worm

I love sjona

Academic Focus - At Last!

So my last blog about school had me all stressed out and all over the place as to what I want to do with my life. Since then I have dropped one of my classes, which has given me some breathing room, and also and more importantly I feel much more focused in my studies. I have decided that I definitely want to do a master's thesis, and I most probably want to eventually pursue a PhD in Geography. My areas of concentration (I think) will be divided into two camps. The technology camp wich include GIS/Remote Sensing/Geostatistical modeling. Essentially these tools are used to model the ecological and social environment spatially and statistically. The pictures above and below are cute examples of some applications. The other camp will, of which the above technology is usefull, includes urban studies, Economic Development, and Human/Environment interactions.

Some Fun Pictures

Already over my head.

THis is the second week of Grad school, and already I feel stressed with it. Oy, bad omen. It is my fault, I am taking 5 classes when I should only take three. My challenge is that I my interest is studying the underlying patterns within many disciplines, especially those which attempt to understand macro-phenomenon in a quanitative manner. I feel this puts me in a unique position to bring different professions together, but at the same time it hinders me from gaining a focus to my studies. Instead of narrowing, I still want to broaden. Right now I am in the Geography grad program. From this I hope to enhance my GIS and remote sensing capabilities. At the same time I want to gain a better grasp of statistical and economic modeling tools, computer programming, and math. I have finally cancelled out the idea that I want to eventually become a civil water engineer, which is good, but I still have no idea what I want to end up doing. The only anchor of focus is that I want to learn the tools (ie software) that are usefull for effective Geog, stat, and econ modeling and are attractive to employers.

My classes right now are:

Remote Sensing:
Hopefully this will be a good class to sharpen and knowledge of the subject and get experience using the software associated with applying it. I worry though that it will be too academic and not hands on enouph

Digital Image Processing:
This Class seems like it will be a more hands on version of the previous class. The good thing is each class will be using different software so I will get experience in both.

SAS Programming:
I am really excited to learn SAS. To clarify, SAS is statistical software tool that is very robust, and therefore complicated and hard to learn. It has its own language. Taking this will really help me at my work. I am able to edit programms that others have done, but after this class I should be able to make my own.

Math for Economics:
So far this is the most labour intensive class. I am taking it because I eventually want to take Environmental and Natural Rescource Modeling, which I tried but found that it was over my head.

Calculus 2:
This isn't a grad level class, but nevertheless it will require a lot of work. My reason for taking it. Math is the universal language of the physical universe, it will be usefull in whatever I do, or so
I'm told.

Mexico - Guanajuato

One amazing thing about this city is that the ground is made up of flat stones, this combined with the historical sites and multicolored houses make it quite a tourist spot.

More pictures of our Mexico trip - Guadalara

These are some pictures from Guadalajara's Centro downtown. These are the only pictures of the city I took because frankly, from what I saw, the rest of the city was fairly ugly.

Book Review

Author: Eric D. Beinhocker
Title: "The Origin of Wealth"
Rating: 10/10

I highly highly recommend this book for anyone that is interested in evolutionary thinking as it applies to business and economics. Many books on this subject attempt to make loose analagies between evolutionary theory and economics, that while interesting, provide little real value. This book draws from research on the cutting edge of computer modeling, evolutionary psychology, business theory etc. to show how the profession of economics must go profound changes if it is to be relevant to people in this century. More specifically he argues that The field of economics must stop thinking of the economy as a set of equations that will eventually reach equilibrium, only to be knocked out again by some outside force which will bring things to a new equilibrium. Instead, he argues, it must be seen as a complex adaptive system that is always changing and evolving endogenously, or by its own internal nature.

My description is very vague, but trust me, this book is good, and incredibly well researched.

Boulder and Mexico

Here Jarnah and I are sitting at a cute little plaza in Guanajuato.. we had food here a couple of times in our stay.
Here we are in Puerto Vallarta. It is nice, but overrated.
Sjona and I in Guanajuato, Mexico. This city was biig in silver and metals and the Spanish came here and took over the place. There are many churches and hitoric places. It is a very colorful city with multicolored houses. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Below are some photos of our previous visit to Colorado to celebrate my grandmothers 78th birthday. I havn't seen this many of my family members in one place for at least 7 years. My grandmother is amazing. A regular matriarch, she had six kids, and it is still she that glues the extended family together.



















My cousins and I. They are half Persian. Mitra is very outgoing, on our first night she managed to pull all of the tired family members on the floor to dance. Bijan is a very sweet guy....














Uncles, aunts, cousins...etc not a very good picture but the only group picture.







Vacationing was fun, but inevitably it has to come to an end. Grad school starts tomorrow, it will be a very hard semester, but I am looking forward to it....

Book Review

Title: "Making Trade Fair"
Author: Joseph Stiglits
Ranking: 9/10

This is a great book for those who are interested in international trade and development. Joseph Stiglitz, who is a Nobel Prize winning economist, is well know for his time leading the World Bank, being a top economic advisor for Clinton, and writing works such as "Globalization and it Discontents". This book begins by describing the history and current trends of trade relations and theory. He then goes on to argue that the means of agreeing upon and results of global trade rules are manifestly unfair for the poorest countries. Poor countries often do not have the money or influence to legally represent their interests. The result of this is that trade decisions get made by a club of 'elite' countries. This bulk of this book discusses what a true 'development' round of global trade talks would look like that could benefit all sides, especially the poorest countries. This book represent a clear choice between a just and unjust trading system. I highly recommend it.

Book Review

Name: "Storm from the East"
Author: Milton Viorst
Ranking: 9/10

I have just finished an relatively short but entirely engaging new book about the interaction of Western colonialism and rising Arab nationalism in the 20th century, peticularly after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The book is called "Storm from the East" by Milton Viorst. I highly recommend it. I think it gives a very fair account of this relationship, being objectively critical of both sides, and providing a narrative that helped me better understand the Middle East today and why its animosity towards the West is so great.

Mona and Chris got married this weekend. It was a beautiful location and ceremony, I am very happy for them!! Now they are moving to Phoenix to start their life. Wonderful!