GR translation: there is a new election, a new preterition abroad

[Mike Jing]

Thanks all for the excellent explanation!

Mike

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Election and Preterition are Calvinist terms describing who is saved and lost.
> In theology this refers to being destined for Heaven or Hell; the
> additional precept of Predestination indicates that God determines
> (has determined, will determine, does determine) all of this without
> reference to any human action...
>
> Although I was brought up Presbyterian, that has never made very much
> sense to me - I think maybe he arrived at these precepts by a
> dialectic process because he was trying to counter other philosophic
> problems...
> why do bad things happen to good people, eg
>
> anyway, in theology they are misty and involved concepts much like
> epicycles in early astronomy.
>
> But just as Goedel's theorem (as Pynchon elsewhere writes) has a
> "brash, proletarian restatement" in Murphy's Law, so the Calvinist
> election and preterition terms, instead of referring to post-death
> destination, refer instead to predestining of worldly success.
>
> The common element, then, is a binary organizing principle of people's
> fates (or in even broader terms, an organizing principle of any kind
> of object, such as Maxwell's Demon)
>
> The behavior of the Londoners around the organizing principle of the
> Adenoid creates two classes - those he shuns and those he snuffles
> up...
>
> Election and Preterition crop up all over the place in GR.