[net.religion] Biblical contradictions and the American voice

paul (03/15/83)

Those of you interested in the idea of contradictions, consider the
following quotes.  If they make sense to you, you will hopefully see the
idea of contradictions on a higher plane.  I am interested in this not because
of theology, but because of the impact of Puritan rhetoric on American
literature and various American "tropes" or modes of discourse.


	"Twelve o'clock reported, sir" says the middy.
	"*Make* it so", replies the captain.
	And the bell is struck eight by the messenger-boy, and twelve o'clock
it is....
	Hand in hand we top-mates stand, rocked in our Pisgah top, the whole
long cruise predestinated ours.

					Melville, White-Jacket

	Now in an artificial world like ours, the soul of man is further
removed from its God and the Heavenly Truth, than the chronometer carried to
China, is from Greenwich.  And, as that chronometer, if at all accurate, will
pronounce it to be 12 o'clock high-noon, when the Chinese local watches say,
perhaps, it is 12 o'clock midnight; so the chronometric soul, if in this world
true to its great Greenwich in the other, will always, in its so-called
intuitions of right and wrong, be contradicting the mere local standards and
watchmaker's brains of this earth....And it follows not from this, that God's
truth is one thing and man's truth another; but -- as hinted above, and as will
further elucidated in subsequent lectures -- by their very contradictions they
are made to correspond.

					Melville, Pierre; or, the Amgiguities


	I have not sent these Prophetes, saith the Lord, yet thei ranne:  I
	have not spoke to them, and yet thei prophecied.
						
						Jeremiah 23:21