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Grill a Christian  (13+) Word & AI: Revelation, Creativity & Human Connection in the age of robots & supercomputers #2327636 by LightinMind

As the official Judge of this contest, I have the following comments to offer for "What Time is It?"  Congratulations on your victory in this month's contest.

Did you answer the question?

You opted for sequential time, had your experiences and a watch to measure it with, were sceptical about the Multiverse, and eternity is a place/state where you hoped that time did not stop but rather continued to progress.

Use of quotes, proof-texting or AI - could I hear your voice?

Genuine work.

How consistent was your argument?

You adopted a Christian position on most of the major time questions, but with some creative twists like the concept of the timewire. This was less about changing the direction of time or its fundamentally sequential nature than about our experience of time, though. Your comments about reincarnation were ambiguous but it seems you dismissed the notion that God was a cosmic recycler of our souls.

My thoughts on the substance of what you said

I was interested in your description of short stories at the end of your piece. The standard format requires conflict, character growth, and a beginning, middle, and end. This mirrors the Christian perception of spiritual history. Writers have tried to write in different formats, but most people do not understand these, and so they are less successful. As you say, the Christian story is governed by a beginning (creation), Fall (the problem or conflict to be overcome), Redemption (The solution and the plan), and Restoration (how it all works out). The main difference between English Literature and true faith is that the antagonist is never the equal to the protagonist and his empowerment is more to do with our own problem with sin. Christianity is a happy ending narrative for those who buy into it, but not for those who do not. If a person loves darkness, the story makes no sense, and they are not receptive to it.

There are two kinds of people in this world ( - that always sounds silly, but bear with me).

Some write from their souls and have a holistic, semantic integrity to their outpourings. These kinds of people can appear to waffle and repeat their themes to the other kind. These live in the moment and record its changing details in a more precise and episodic fashion. The first kind has a transcendence of detail and facts, preferring the integrity of the storyline to being bogged down in the moment and precision of measurement. The second cannot understand your meaning unless you describe the particular details, which need to be shown and told, and they will not speculate. The sensual record is all that is real, and that is always changing. It has its moments of beauty and ugliness, but there is a sense of despair at where the journey is heading. I guess the ideal writer must blend the two styles, expressing his soul in the moment in a way that makes that moment itself a timeless event accessible to all. I would suggest that you are more of a soul writer than a detail person, your stories have more happy endings than the second kind of writer will accept as real. That said, as you wrote, your experience of time has not been as happy as your stories imagine it could be. You mourned the fact that you did not have more glimpses of eternal glory to inform your perspective. Overall, your answers inhabit a framework that is not bound by our mortality to see the seconds rushing to an end. Time is a gift, not the dominant paradigm governing your thoughts with a sense of impending doom.

Somebody once told me that the train timetable was the beginning of time for most people. From then on, you needed to watch the town clock or your first digital watch to take the train to work. I wonder how home office working changes the experience of time for people who are not calendar-driven and now no longer have a commute schedule either.

As I grow older, I look back analytically, hoping to trace a path of increasing wisdom and maturity.

I was reading some old diaries the other day, and then a major work I wrote decades ago. In my diaries, I saw a purity, naivety, and faith that was in so many ways better than today. I found wisdom and understanding in my writing that I had forgotten. I suspect that we all have our peak moments, that in fact we may have many of these. Our experience of the earthly time highway to the grave is marked by the urgency and scarcity of the hours we have left. But our peak moments come at times when our lives best interact with eternity and the life of the Divine. In these glimpses of glory, there is a richness and power to life lacking in the valleys that follow the mountain peaks. Does an Olympic athlete define his life by his gold medal experience, while the rest of his time just filled in the gaps?

The concept of time wire, with a sequential current but spiraling up and down, seems to fit the human experience very well. Sometimes we hit the accelerator to our inevitable doom, and sometimes we gain an inspiring glimpse of glory as our souls soar upward and time seems to stand still for a moment in the light of eternity.

I tend to agree that the multiverse is something we will probably not experience in this life, but Marvel can use it to change plots and resurrect old characters. C.S. Lewis' two major works on time and its interaction with eternity would have to be 'The Last Battle' and 'The Great Divorce'. His idea of hell was the stagnant time of the shadowlands, where the occupant never grew beyond their bitterness or anger and was continually fated to repeat the same patterns. His idea of the human experience of eternal time was sequential and referred to Aslan's country, where the call was forever to 'Come further up, come further in!' and the fullness of joy was ever increasing.

I really enjoyed your entry this month. Thanks for sharing.

Mechanical issues

Focused on the content.


Thanks again for entering.
LightinMind

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My Philosophy of Rating and Reviewing  (E) How do I assess people's work when reviewing? #2259390 by LightinMind

My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .