God, the Duality of Black, and the Fabrication of Divine Transcendence (the Spook God) By Wesley Muhammad, PhD Most of the worlds languages today outside of Africa probably have as their ancestor a language that emerged in northern Afrabia ca. 20,000 years ago (eclipsing or absorbing most of the pre-existing langauges), which linguists inappropriately call *Borean. A distinctive feature of this language as reconstructed is that it (and the ethno-culture that spoke it) lacked the concept of firm and absolute (ontological) distinctions. The preference for blurred rather than absolute distinctions is illustrated by the linguistic phenomenon called range semantics: terms that are semantically each others opposite (wet/dry, up/down, dark/light, etc.) used the same or very similar consonantal root and that root had a semantic range that encompassed the entire range between both opposites. Only context could determine the meaning of a term along the inherent gradient. So the *Borean root *HvRv could mean both liquid and stone (solid). A more recent example: the English word black derives from the Proto-Germanic *blik(i)an, which derives from the Proto-Indo-European *bhleig, to shine bright. Thus, the word (black) and its opposite (shine bright) derive from the same root. This Indo-European example is a rare modern reflex of the more ancient phenomenon that characterized the ancestor language. We find the same in Classical Arabic. There the linguistic phenomenon is called Al-Dadd. The Arabic word ABYAD thus means white in one context and black in another context. The ancestral language and its speakers did not think in terms of dyadic opposition, as we do today, but in terms of Maatic Balance or Yin-Yang: every distinction has within it the seed of its opposite. This linguistic model had its theological analogue: God and Man were not distinct and opposing ontological realites. They were spots on a gradient and the one could morph or slide into the other, and vice versa. It was only with the rise (in Eurasia) of the myth of absolute binary opposites that God became Not-Man, and Man became non-God. Aristotles influential Principal of the Excluded Middle postulated that something is either X or it is not X: there is no middle ground. This in turn facilitated the rise of the thelogical principle of Divine Transcendence which characterizes Judaism, Christianity and Islam today and which claims that God is the Absolute Other, and Man must be totally non-God. There can be no middle ground between the two. On the contrary, Truth is: Just as light is both ray and its opposite, particle; Just as Black is both dark and its opposite, brightly shining; So God is both God and Man, and Man is both Man and God.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 04:44:58 +0000
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