It wouldn’t be easy to run through hot taffy; the thick goo would slow you down. You ask, “Who in the world would run through taffy?” You also ask, “Where in the world would one encounter a puddle of taffy—hot taffy—large enough to become an obstacle to anyone’s movement? The idea is silly, and certainly such taffy would be unexpected.”
Seismologists and volcanologists believe that the magma chamber beneath Mount Aso, Japan’s most active volcano, stopped the spread of seismic energy from a 7.1-magnitude earthquake on April 16, 2016.* Magma, not taffy of course, was the thick goo that both redirected and absorbed the energy, preventing probable widespread destruction, injury, and even death that most likely would have occurred.
At times the magma of Mount Aso is a threat. On April 16, it was an unexpected saver. There’s always a compensating irony, isn’t there?
Irony abounds in both fact and fiction, and maybe there might be no easier way to demonstrate the helpful nature of something either dangerous or evil than first to mention Mount Aso’s role on April 16, second to mention the use of atomic bombs to end a drawn out war that threatened maybe a million or more additional lives in 1945, and third, to draw on fiction, to mention Pulp Fiction.** One of the characters in the movie, Jules Winnfield, played by Samuel L. Jackson, quotes from Ezekiel (a passage altered by Tarentino), a book that seems to carry one particular theme: God will send brutal men to seek vengeance on evildoers. In the movie, brutal men do wreak havoc on bad people, and in doing so, they individually save—more or less—someone in the process. There’s compensation; good and evil appear to be entangled in a complementarity.
In the nineteenth century Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that compensation is a fundamental principle; “bad” things are countered by “good” things. No, the brutalized aren’t necessarily compensated, but somewhere the compensation occurs. In the twentieth century Neils Bohr said complementarity was at the heart of the universe, citing the strange nature of light as wave and particle. In both compensation and complementarity Emerson and Bohr suggest a dualism underpins an indifferent universe.
We never know when or where hot taffy will inhibit our run through life or save us from disaster. We never know when something seemingly dangerous or even evil will ironically prevent a disaster—or even save us or someone else from something bad. And just as we have difficulty understanding how light can be both wave and particle, we also have trouble comprehending the unpredictable rise or fall of both good and evil.
I’m not advocating the use of brutal men, nuclear bombs, or magma chambers—or even hot taffy—but I’ll make the point that has been made repeatedly: There’s always, to say it as Emerson did, some compensation, some potential, though not necessarily apparent potential, for good.*** The world is neither perfectly good nor perfectly evil; it appears to be an indifferent world, caring neither for good nor evil, favoring neither one nor the other. None of us escapes some kind of hardship or tragedy; all of us have the potential for a compensation. So, a volcano that can kill is also one that can save.
You and I, unfortunately, can rarely know when or where there will be some intervening taffy; you and I might never know. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered terribly; they never got to see themselves as intervening taffy, the magma that interrupted the energy of war and kept it from destroying others. The use of the atomic bomb is in retrospect, one of the most horrific acts in a war that was filled with horrors and the deaths of more than 50 million people in many countries. No one can definitively enumerate the number of lives “saved” because the war ended before an all out assault on Japan occurred.
I can tell you personally, that I might have grown up without a father because of that terrible destruction. My dad was a marine who fought on Okinawa. After the battle for the island, he and his unit were scheduled to move onto the southern islands of Japan. A brutal act saved him and the other marines from going and from doing what they were trained to do: capture, injure, and kill the enemy at the risk of their own lives. They were themselves brutal men of necessity. More deaths, possibly even the death of my father, would have occurred—the military experts tell us that casualties would have been legion. The fire of the bomb, hotter than the magma beneath Mount Aso, stopped the greater carnage that would have accompanied the attack. Like the hidden magma, the bomb was itself a secret. My father didn’t know about it until after it had been dropped. The “magma” intervened, probably saving him. There was the bomb, and there was the compensation: I grew up knowing my father.
At the end of any catastrophe, regardless of its cause—natural or human—some will have suffered, but occasionally some will find some help from hidden sources, such as a magma chamber deep below a volcano, a stranger who veers off course to prevent you from being in a car accident, or a soldier who sacrifices so you live. This is not a religious message, and it is not one of blind hope. It’s just a report on the way a seemingly indifferent world is one of duality.
* http://www.livescience.com/56571-how-volcano-stops-an-earthquake.html
** https://mattsbibleblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/hollywood-bible-1-pulp-fiction-and-ezekiel-2517/ As it is in Ezekiel 21:31: “I will pour out my wrath on you …I will deliver you into the hands of brutal men, men skilled in destruction.” (http://www.biblestudytools.com/ezekiel/21.html )
*** http://www.emersoncentral.com/compensation.htm
Seismologists and volcanologists believe that the magma chamber beneath Mount Aso, Japan’s most active volcano, stopped the spread of seismic energy from a 7.1-magnitude earthquake on April 16, 2016.* Magma, not taffy of course, was the thick goo that both redirected and absorbed the energy, preventing probable widespread destruction, injury, and even death that most likely would have occurred.
At times the magma of Mount Aso is a threat. On April 16, it was an unexpected saver. There’s always a compensating irony, isn’t there?
Irony abounds in both fact and fiction, and maybe there might be no easier way to demonstrate the helpful nature of something either dangerous or evil than first to mention Mount Aso’s role on April 16, second to mention the use of atomic bombs to end a drawn out war that threatened maybe a million or more additional lives in 1945, and third, to draw on fiction, to mention Pulp Fiction.** One of the characters in the movie, Jules Winnfield, played by Samuel L. Jackson, quotes from Ezekiel (a passage altered by Tarentino), a book that seems to carry one particular theme: God will send brutal men to seek vengeance on evildoers. In the movie, brutal men do wreak havoc on bad people, and in doing so, they individually save—more or less—someone in the process. There’s compensation; good and evil appear to be entangled in a complementarity.
In the nineteenth century Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that compensation is a fundamental principle; “bad” things are countered by “good” things. No, the brutalized aren’t necessarily compensated, but somewhere the compensation occurs. In the twentieth century Neils Bohr said complementarity was at the heart of the universe, citing the strange nature of light as wave and particle. In both compensation and complementarity Emerson and Bohr suggest a dualism underpins an indifferent universe.
We never know when or where hot taffy will inhibit our run through life or save us from disaster. We never know when something seemingly dangerous or even evil will ironically prevent a disaster—or even save us or someone else from something bad. And just as we have difficulty understanding how light can be both wave and particle, we also have trouble comprehending the unpredictable rise or fall of both good and evil.
I’m not advocating the use of brutal men, nuclear bombs, or magma chambers—or even hot taffy—but I’ll make the point that has been made repeatedly: There’s always, to say it as Emerson did, some compensation, some potential, though not necessarily apparent potential, for good.*** The world is neither perfectly good nor perfectly evil; it appears to be an indifferent world, caring neither for good nor evil, favoring neither one nor the other. None of us escapes some kind of hardship or tragedy; all of us have the potential for a compensation. So, a volcano that can kill is also one that can save.
You and I, unfortunately, can rarely know when or where there will be some intervening taffy; you and I might never know. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered terribly; they never got to see themselves as intervening taffy, the magma that interrupted the energy of war and kept it from destroying others. The use of the atomic bomb is in retrospect, one of the most horrific acts in a war that was filled with horrors and the deaths of more than 50 million people in many countries. No one can definitively enumerate the number of lives “saved” because the war ended before an all out assault on Japan occurred.
I can tell you personally, that I might have grown up without a father because of that terrible destruction. My dad was a marine who fought on Okinawa. After the battle for the island, he and his unit were scheduled to move onto the southern islands of Japan. A brutal act saved him and the other marines from going and from doing what they were trained to do: capture, injure, and kill the enemy at the risk of their own lives. They were themselves brutal men of necessity. More deaths, possibly even the death of my father, would have occurred—the military experts tell us that casualties would have been legion. The fire of the bomb, hotter than the magma beneath Mount Aso, stopped the greater carnage that would have accompanied the attack. Like the hidden magma, the bomb was itself a secret. My father didn’t know about it until after it had been dropped. The “magma” intervened, probably saving him. There was the bomb, and there was the compensation: I grew up knowing my father.
At the end of any catastrophe, regardless of its cause—natural or human—some will have suffered, but occasionally some will find some help from hidden sources, such as a magma chamber deep below a volcano, a stranger who veers off course to prevent you from being in a car accident, or a soldier who sacrifices so you live. This is not a religious message, and it is not one of blind hope. It’s just a report on the way a seemingly indifferent world is one of duality.
* http://www.livescience.com/56571-how-volcano-stops-an-earthquake.html
** https://mattsbibleblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/hollywood-bible-1-pulp-fiction-and-ezekiel-2517/ As it is in Ezekiel 21:31: “I will pour out my wrath on you …I will deliver you into the hands of brutal men, men skilled in destruction.” (http://www.biblestudytools.com/ezekiel/21.html )
*** http://www.emersoncentral.com/compensation.htm
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