Journal #3

During last class meeting, the class had a little fieldtrip to the backyard of wherever my class was at. It's sort of silly but I have already memorize where my class location is at so the useless information of what the location's name is have been moved to the back of my head. But our assignment was to write what we see, smell, feel, and just becoming more aware of our environment. This is what I wrote down:

I smell the earth, though I see many bird doodoo. I also see a lot of
leafs that reminds me of the taro's leaf. These trees must have been
here for over hundreds of years to grow this big and expand that far.
I just stepped on some kind of brown berry and it must have been here
for awhile. Orange gush came out from it but it doesn't look like
there are seeds in it. I wonder how these trees get so much nutrient
when the base is covered with so much dead brown leaves. I also hear a
bird that I do not recognize. Looking at it, it must be foreign
because I have never seen their kind before until recently this
summer. It has long skinny legs, looks like an athletic dove with
about 1" in length of their beak with dark black beady eyes. There's
more of them now. During the summer, I had seen only two but now it's
six.

How does this relate to Descartes' philosophy and Plato? I'll need to
think about this.

Descartes and Plato had similar philosophy. Plato came into scene during the 4th century. I'm not sure if I really understand what was going on in Descartes' mind but the chart that Professor Sharon Rowe drew out for Plato helped me a lot. It reminded me of a Christian Philosopher and professor at Hawaii Pacific University where he explained this world as a dark cave and there was a small light that came in from a small hole, probably at the roof of the cave. And that there was a person standing right in the diameter of the hole where his shadow was being projected into the cave, and those in the cave saw his shadow and perceived it to be something. Basically outside of the cave was the invisible world of idea, knowledge and understanding, while inside of the cave was the visible world of senses.

How does this relate to whatever I saw? Plato says that I'm in the visible world right now and Descartes basically said whatever I saw, the birds, trees, everything is just a robot. I believe my Pastor once said that animals have no souls and so that pretty much makes them robots. But we are different, we have souls and we find that because we have our own will. Our own will to do whatever he like. So I'm approaching it from a biblical stand point of view. Jesus did not die for us to be moral. The Bible (which was originally written in Greek) said that Jesus died to save us and by doing that His blood covers our sin. In Proverbs, King Solomon wrote that love covers a multitude of sins. Jesus said that there's no greater love than a he who lays down his life for a friend. Blood to the Jews was a symbol of life. Jesus laid down his life, in love, and paid that price when it covered our sins. Plato wrote about how there was one true, good, beautiful, something. I believe that Jesus came to restore that time when Adam and Eve first broke their relationship with God. We see that when they sinned, instead of repenting and coming back to God they tried to destory each other by blaming one another which started like this decay. Throughout Genesis, we see that men's live started getting shorter. From 900 to 800 to 600 to 300 to whatever. I guess Plato realized something along the lines and Descartes believe that "I think, therefore I am." Right?