Because science has become so prominent in modern life, it has attained a very pragmatic and functional truth status for everything that we do today. We live and move and have our modern being in the results of the scientific method which was industrialized and commercialized into all of the products which govern our lives. It has so vastly governed our lives that the latest generation seem to prefer a completely virtual life to actually being present. And even when people go to big box churches and stadiums, they watch the contest or the preacher on a big screen.
Perhaps Covid-19 will help us appreciate actual presence again when virtuality is forced upon us as the main way to relate with each other because with actual presence we could infect each other.
Lest we despise the virtual too much let us admit that the Bible is virtual. Written text was a technology of memory which stood in the place of "not being there." A biblical text did not permit and actual give and take with the actual writer, so it is a virtual communication. The author of the text becomes very weak; he or she cannot defend or specify or determine a certain meaning of the words written. The author is weak because the words come to depend upon those who are interpreting. When it comes to biblical words, traditions of how to interpret the words have arisen and differences in interpretation account for the different communities within Christianity and in Judaism.
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