Saturday, November 29, 2008

on God/Caesar quote from Jesus

The quote from Jesus is "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Render unto God what is God's." I read this to be a straight application of the orthogonal relationship between relevant and irrelvant values. Caesar's values, the relevant ones, do not affect the ledger for God's values, the irrelevant ones, since they lie along a different coordinate axis. You can have responsibilities in each tender. Discharging one does not reduce the debt in the other. Of course this is not the whole story. It deals with the purely additive properties of relevant, or real, and irrelevant, or imaginary, values, not the multiplicative ones that produce a negative when two irrelevant, or imaginary, values are multiplied.