Originally posted by DGB454
Just like every living thing it changes although the thing that makes it what it is never changes.
This, to me, is the central problem with all the major religions. They long for some state of total stasis, and aspire to the prefection of god. When they can't say in good conscience that living things never change they say instead that life never changes, utterly ignoring a little thing called time. But that is false.
God is perfect. No Christian would ague against that. But I wonder how many understand what that has to mean. Perfection is a final state. Nothing more can be done, achieved, attained, etc. It is a sort of divine grid-lock. And I don't see how it can be a good thing. After all, "perfectionism" is a liablility in many people, always striving for the impossible.
In contrast to static perfection is something you could call becomming. Becomming would characterize life as it actually happens. It would also characterize any sort of creation.
Then how can perfection create anything at all? How can the world change? How would one account for the seasons? All of these things are indicative of becomming.
Why would god "create" a world where the central aim is to avoid and/or renounce most of it (deliverance from temptation, longing for permanence and perfection) in order to be with him after you die?
But I don't think this state of prefection is inaccessible, only the way it is expected to be from a superficial interpretation of the Christian literature would tend to make it seem so. I mean, lets face it... the bible is thousands of years old. How attuned could we really expect to be to it. It has undergone so many translations and modifications, especially in the middle ages, that the messages originally contained in it are mostly hidden to us. The language we read it in didn't even exist at the times it was written.
So if never-changing perfection is, indeed, possible, how is it?
It is in the becomming. It is the exact opposite of what rote, inaacurate biblical regurgitation suggests. It is perfect that a flower should bloom and then die. It is beautiful that civilizations and religions have come to be, declined, and died. It is beautiful when a baby is born, even though everybody knows it will suffer many times throughout life for different reasons, and then die. What could be more perfect that the fact that everything is constantly renewed? It is perfect that these tings will continue after we die, and that we are a speck of dust observing the monumental change that life and the universe are. Nothing "never changes"... nothing, in and of itself, is perfect. Believing that somewhere, out there, there is something that never changes is an emotional cop-out, a defense against the perfection and the totality of constant change, which is growth, which is life. Life is perfect because of birth and death, not in spite of it. Holding out one thing (god) that is exempt from life only serves to diminish the preception and experience of it. It would seem then that the only way to truly experience perfection would be to embrace becomming and change, the only tenable object of faith.
Nothing is perfect. Nothing never changes.
Pretty much growing up, I shut most everything out, and now I'm playing catch up. 
So we're both PK's and Guitar Players. Too Cool!!!
