being within and among simultaneously

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July 29, 2025 update

I’m not a religionist. I venture that the essence of religious wisdom is secular (humanistic). In particular, religious life has anthrogenically served to secure public health and regional sustainability.

The implicit Heideggerian interest for this posting is his implicit valuing of identity-in-difference, signaled by his title Identity and Difference. No negation exists with his phenomeno-linguistic framing. But that point is merely implicit for me here.

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April 2020

First century BCE Palestine had been Hellenistic for centuries. So, Greek influence surely created a hybrid sense of Aramaic understanding.

When Jesus—a well-educated rabbi—“said.” according to the Gospel of Luke, that “the kingdom of God is within you,” Luke’s Greek is confusing (according to Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus, p. 146): Luke allegedly means ‘among’, but uses a Greek meaning for ‘within’. So, Luke’s Jesus is “saying” an ambiguity: The kingdom of God is at once within “you” (singular) and among “you” (plural). “In other words,” Mitchell notes, “the ultimate reality, though it is revealed in history, essentially belongs to the spiritual order…”