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Is there anything to interest a scientist, in considering lilies or ravens?`

What might one be curious about, in thinking about the beauty of lilies or the self-sufficiency of ravens? Is there anything in these topics one might ask some kind of scientist about, even today, even 2000 years after the sayings were said? I suggest three possibilities: 1. It is odd that people find flowers and birds generally beautiful, worth emulating in their own sewing and weaving. Flowers have colors, birds have colors, for reasons that have nothing to do with human beings. We know also, for some such colors, that the eyes they relate to most closely, bee-eyes and bird-eyes, have a different range than human eyes, see a different slice of the spectrum. So, why should natural beauty, natural color schemes, appeal to US? Why shouldn't they be alien schemes, relevant to the worlds of flowers and birds, to their natural audiences?  2. It is odd that people carefully preserve fabric creations that they think to be greatly inferior to the natural color schemes of flowers. Flowers

Lingering on the Image in a Saying, Before Moving on to the Moral

  If one reads Jesus saying about lilies, the most basic thing one might say is that, if this saying has any connection to Jesus at all, it makes him out to be someone who thought about lilies in a certain way, as effortlessly beautiful and (perhaps) puzzlingly under-appreciated. Every version of the saying goes on to make that the premise in an argument, or in some other way  uses it to grease the skids for a bit of advice or a recommendation.  It is my preference, in interpretation, to linger for a long time on the basic fact: Jesus thought about lilies in this particular mood of appreciation. Partly, that's because there are various ways of arguing out to advice preserved, and so it seems at least possible that early editors encountered a lily-observation and decided to make something useful out of it. That is one reason for not taking the advice all that seriously, at least at first.  Three other general reasons occur to me (for lingering with the topic of a saying): (1) the ad

What am I doing, when I ask someone to consider something?

" Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." Luke 12:27 At Luke 12:27, Jesus asks his hearers to consider the lilies. The call to ‘consider’ makes us expect various things to come next. In a courtroom or a political argument, that call often signals the start of an argument, as in “Consider the defendant’s actions on the day before the murder.” When we hear that from a prosecutor, we just know that the lawyer is going to try to convince us that the defendant was already planning the murder. I am guessing that this use of “consider”, as leading into an argument, is the first thing that comes to mind, when we hear the word. Let’s call this the argumentative use; it signals that someone intends to convince us of something.   A second use of ‘consider’: it points to a phenomenon worth attention but not necessarily well understood. One might say, “Consider how resilient prairie p