Mark Siljander
speaker
279 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Mark Siljander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
They seem, the Muslims, the people who commented in particular, and the people who were there, seemed very relieved and excited that a serious conversation about at least quasi-theological matters was possible, and that could be done respectfully. They were... Pleased to be, I don't know, invited to the table for the discussion? Something like that.
Okay, so now you're seeing that when you're talking to the Palestinians, and now you're starting to broaden out your contact network, I presume. Yes. So what happens after that?
Besides, so the idea of the sonship of Jesus can be mitigated to a hair split between Muslims and Christians. Yes. And then they'd bring up other issues. What about the Trinity? What about the crucifixion?
Yeah, that's the question I was going to ask you.
There's a whole litany of issues that really, if done lovingly. Now, what I mean by love is not like and agree so much. But in 1 Corinthians, there's a love chapter. And every wedding in America, and probably Canada, love is patient, love is kind. We decided to do, one of our studies was to do a deep dive in what are the 14 words used in that chapter in Aramaic. What are the sub-meetings?
What are the cultural context? How do we look at it in antiquity?
To flesh out the... Absolutely. Large language models are very good at that, by the way. You can use them technically to do that. So we've done that, something very similar with the word God. You can ask a large language model to... specify the semantic domain of God. And one of my colleagues has found a set of words that can be used to replace the concept of God with 99.5% completeness, right?
So you imagine that the concept of God could be explicated by a cloud of closely related words, which is, it sounds like that's what you're trying to do with the concept of love. Exactly. Okay, okay.
So you're doing that in Aramaic. We find that the Hebrew cognates And the Quranic cognates, because they're all sister languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic are similar to Spanish, French, and Italian. They're all based on Latin. Most of the Arabic and Hebrew are based on Aramaic, the most ancient language.
But they're all cousins, regardless of the scholarly debates of which came first, which is frankly irrelevant. They're all similar. They use similar words, understandable words. And as a consequence, we're using these... New common ground discoveries. Yeah, yeah. To engage people. That's what was missing in Palestine during the visits. We could talk about tea and coffee and family. Right.
But I was ignorant in terms of faith, in terms of their faith.
Well, you also said something very interesting, which we should also not gloss over, which is that— You could imagine that the secular view of conflict is that it's primarily political and economic, right? And that's always struck me as wrong. Political and economic conflict is secondary to conflict about first principles, about conflict about—and that's really theological conflict—
when you get right down to it. So it seems to me to be completely... It's as absurd to presume that you can make peace without a theological discussion as it is to assume that if you decapitate a tyranny, it will turn into a democracy. Right. Those are equally...
These nonsensical propositions, and that seems to be especially obvious, as you pointed out, what, it's 120 conflicts in the world right now, and what's the proportion of those that have to do with religious conflict? Well, I didn't say religious.
Yeah, okay. See, that word, we can get into it later. Yeah. It's a word I hardly ever use. Okay. With respect, because I know you use it frequently. Yeah. It's not in the Old Testament. It's not in the New Testament. And the Quran's use of religion, the word deen, that's the Arabic, really means the state of one's life in submission to God. So the notion of there is a institutionalized religion
religious structure there was in the Old Testament, but they didn't even call it religion. There's no notion of religion in Hebrew.
And the only time religion is mentioned in the New Testament, this is an important backdrop, I hope, is in James, and it says, true religion is helping widows and orphans and keeping yourself unstained from the evil of the world, which is what I believe is the real Quranic jihad, incidentally, is an anecdote.
But getting back to it, the word is in Aramaic as ministry, not religion that implies creeds, doctrines, hierarchy, and so forth. And religions divide people. Even tribes divide people. People are divided by so much besides religion and even denominations can divide people. But I found one thing that unites people.
including a story, and you might read in the book, about the Dalai Lama, and that's Jesus. Jesus does not have baggage of Christianity. I'm not against it.
Yeah, yeah.
Showing 141–160 of 279 · page 8 of 14
← Previous
Next →