Rainbow god circle

MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu
Fri May 3 15:26:04 CDT 1996


(1) Jeff Reid concludes his post on rainbows and--nature's laws:

>  This is a particularly satisfying interpretation from an
>atheist point of veiw where nature's laws are more important to our
>existence then any theological construct.

Forgetting the possibility, as is the atheistic wont, that--nature's laws--are 
themselves theological constucts;

(2)  Isn't one connotation of the title precisely not to choose between the materialist 
and the transcendentalist world views, but to split that 0-1 w/ an image of a 
gravity's tainbow which has one foot, as it were, in each realm?  The first word is 
rooted to our spacetime physicality, mucketymuck and will-we nill-we, but the 
rainbow, as most of these very interesting posts acknowledge in one way or 
another,  has a different order of existence, can be thought of, with only a little 
torque, as a visitation from some transcendent realm (i.e., the realm of 
consciousness itself, which, despite things like neural darwinism, has not been 
shown to yield to any materialist explanation).  So it occurs to me to say, torque in 
cheek, that the phrase--gravity's rainbow--if not the novel of that name, *solves* 
the mind/body problem!

(3)  Along these lines, didn't I learn way back in grade school that what we call a 
rainbow's arc is only half the rainbow?  Don't rainbows continue, under the Earth 
as it were, and eventually join up into a full circle?  Isn't the parabola of a rainbow 
actually a perfect semi-circle and not  the often-assumed bell-shaped curve?  If we 
could--pick up--the rainbow and project it onto the sky, wouldn't it be a perfect 
circle?  So half of every rainbow is missing, an absent presence, and the--real-- 
rainbow meets itself like Kekule's serpent, only we can't see that because of the 
horizons.

This might lead us to thoughts of the absent presence in GR generally, like that 
rocket. . . .

john m






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