Posts by Chris Waugh
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to JacksonP,
Huh. Nice. Hadn't realised that. Just sneaking some fun in while I'm supposed to be working. Seems like I'm making some progress.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Lilith __,
But there is the ongoing problem for atheists that many of us would like a positive definition rather than a negative one (ie. calling ourselves “atheists” is defining ourselves by what we don’t believe)
Materialist? As in "This material world that we can see, hear, touch, taste and smell is all there is"? It does seem surprisingly hard to define such a philosophical statement without going into negatives. That may say something about the dominant role religion has played in many societies* for so long.
*which sparks a tangent into classical Chinese philosophy which seems to have quite happily trundled along without bothering to speculate much about the existence or otherwise of God, gods, spirits, etc. Then again, Chinese people have always made up for that with their own folk religion(s) and superstitions.
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Oh, wait, this one wasn't too bad.
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My other attempts at flower/early spring photos weren't quite as good. I have to work on how I look through the viewfinder. I naturally look at an angle which has me trying to peer through a corner of my glasses, not good, doesn't make it easy to figure out what, precisely, the camera is focussed on when the edge of my glasses lenses are making everything blurry. Have to change that habit.
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I find the very first leaves to appear to be quite pretty in their own right. No idea what this tree is.
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My wife says these are 玉兰花, which, according to Baidu Baike, are Yulan Magnolia or Magnolia denudata. In another of the courtyards in our housing estate.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Ah, yes, seen that tree many times, although I didn't realise it was a replica. It always has a small crowd of tourists around it.
Incidentally, if you're ever in Beijing, make sure you visit Jingshan Park. There's always a small crowd of tourists at that tree and a much larger crowd at the top of the hill, but from the top of the hill you can get a brilliant view of the entire old city, especially the Forbidden City which is immediately to the south. Then you get yourself away from the tourists, which is very easy in Jingshan (just wander off down any of the trails down the hill - the tourists stick to the two main roads up) and enjoy the many mature trees, flowers, and local people getting a bit of exercise or hanging out with their friends, family, choir... Beautiful place, and very cheap entry (2 yuan last I checked).
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Ross Mason,
But the chances are that there will be a physical and rational explanation for the death.
And that's what I'm getting at. Maybe there's a taniwha at that proposed bend in the road because there's some underlying geological problem or it's unusually flood prone. Maybe we can take Tangaroa as a reminder that it doesn't matter how good a boat we build or how great our sailing skills are, the ocean is always going to be far more powerful. There's no need to take any of these old beliefs as being literally true, but it is worth remembering that there is a lot of wisdom encoded in what seems to modern, rational, scientific eyes as irrational superstition.
And I find some of us are getting a bit cocky with all the advances of science and technology and forgetting that we're still just as much a part of nature and subject to nature's whims as the ancients were. Traditional knowledges contain wisdom that could temper some of the worst excesses of scientific hubris.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Ah, thanks Joe. Those pictures look very much like what I saw. And yes, we'll definitely be going there, and August is quite likely, seeing as neither of us can stray too far in the summer.
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Allow me to propose a definition of spirituality inspired by many of the comments so far:
Spirituality is the thoroughly describable but utterly inexplicable experience of being human.
I propose this because I see so much to identify with in everybody else's comments, and yet your experiences are all so completely different from mine, and vice versa. And science is awesome, but it doesn't seem to do much more than attempt to describe the workings of the physical world around us, all the while raising a thousand new questions with every answer it generates (and don't get me wrong - that's precisely the beauty of science - we never stop learning until the moment we die (and then, who knows?)), and even if consciousness really is nothing more than a complex interweaving of a gazillion more chains of chemical reactions than we've currently got a handle on, science still doesn't come close to describing our experience of life.
And when we look at traditional knowledge(s) we see a lot that is really weird and doesn't stand scientific scrutiny, but we also see a lot of true wisdom about ourselves, our lives, our psychologies, our societies, and the environments we live in encoded therein. Science may discount the existence of taniwha, but we'd be fools to rule them out of our lives - see the currents of the Cook Strait or the Waikato Expressway for examples.
A fair chunk of what I find so powerful about Tiki Taane's Tangaroa is the 'wow, shit, I've never seen anything like this before' factor. But mostly it's because I have far too many memories of sitting on a remote section of Wellington or Dunedin coast in my teens and early 20s looking out to sea and feeling deep in my bones Tangaroa's presence and power. This is not to say I believe in Tangaroa's existence - I was raised Christian and I'm Pakeha - but I've seen enough of the ocean to know that it must be treated with the utmost respect. Tangaroa's existence may be only metaphorical, but that doesn't change the fact that what Tangaroa wants, Tangaroa will take. One can apply a similar principle to any other form of traditional knowledge - it may be 'only' metaphorical or allegorical truth, but it remains truth.
