Recite to yourself some of the traditional attributes of the word 'spiritual': mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied, ideal, platonic. Is that not a definition of the electronic-digital?
... I have developed, over the years, some sense of the difference between real horseshit that you can step in and Ideal Platonic Horseshit that exists, evidently, only in the contemplation of those who worship such abstractions; and I continue to notice that Natural Law bears an uncanny resemblance to ideal Platonic Horseshit.
In some ways it's hard to see electronic music as a genre because the word "electronic" just refers to how it's made. Hip-hop is electronic music. Most reggae is electronic. Pop is electronic. House music, techno, all these sorts of ostensibly disparate genres are sort of being created with the same equipment.
The powers of darkness are still part of the spiritual world - they don't become something else when they rebel against God. Disembodied believers are, by definition, also part of the spiritual world. So are God and Christ.
Our daily life is filled with electronic pianos, ring tones, the disembodied voice giving you your bank balance over the telephone. Even silence can be electronic, courtesy of sound-canceling headphones.
In a word, to perceive an object abstractly means not to perceive some aspects of it. It clearly implies selection of some attributes, rejection of other attributes, creation or distortion of still others. We make of it what we wish. We create it.
Business isn't some disembodied bloodless enterprise. Profit is fine - a sign that the customer honors the value of what we do. But "enterprise" ( a lovely word ) is about heart. About beauty. It's about art. About people throwing themselves on the line. It's about passion and the selfless pursuit of an ideal.
To say that God is an incorporeal substance, is to say in effect there is no God at all. What alleges he against it, but the School-divinity which I have already answered? Scripture he can bring none, because the word incorporeal is not found in Scripture.
One of the things I love about Joel and Ethan Coen's movies is that there is this element of the ethereal and the mythic that they play with.
The stored-program digital computer has three major attributes: it is fast, it is accurate, and it is stupid. The first two attributes are often used to disguise the third.
A definition is nothing else but an explication of the meaning of a word, by words whose meaning is already known. Hence it is evident that every word cannot be defined; for the definition must consist of words; and there could be no definition, if there were not words previously understood without definition.
The influence (for good or ill) of Plato's work is immeasurable. Western thought, one might say, has been Platonic or anti-Platonic, but hardly ever non-Platonic.
Everyone thinks I'm ethereal. But I'm not like that, you know. I'm not ethereal. Well, I might have a little bit of that quality to me, that 'old soul' thing, but I'm not ethereal.
All we know if an angel is that it is incorporeal, immaterial, and only by comparing it with God-who is incomparable-can we see that it has some density and body after all, since in reality only God is truly immaterial and incorporeal.
All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is"... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol-all have their counterparts in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics.
In this same tradition, beauty is inextricably bound up with the principles of order and harmony believed to underlie the cosmos. Artists in the Classical tradition, inspired by Platonic idealism, strove to create images that represented not the world of particulars-with all its defects-but an ideal image conceived in the mind, which was taken as representing some absolute, pure, ideal form of which all particular, material forms are but a mere shadow.
That's a spiritual lifestyle, being willing to admit that you don't know everything and that you were wrong about some things. It's about making a list of all the people you've harmed, either emotionally or physically or financially, and going back and making amends. That's a spiritual lifestyle. It's not a fluffy ethereal concept.