Posts by Kracklite
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to nzlemming,
One thing keeping me from any established religion is their requirement that I acknowledge a specific text (and I would suppose that that would be the Bible, due to my cultural conditioning). The Bible is indeed a kluge, and I could only accept it anagogically, perhaps allegorically, but not metaphorically... not sure where that leaves me then...
There's a nice little story, "Inherit the Earth", by Stephen Baxter, lapsed Catholic, former scientist and very hard sf writer, that posits posthuman creatures in a far-future Earth who do not even know what human beings looked like seeking an AI Pope: it's intelligent, articulate but not conscious and is therefore incapable of faith. Where does that leave the church? With the faithful followers who have questions, but know that they can never receive answers. Hours of melancholy fun are to be had unpacking the implications of that parable.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Simon Grigg,
You might be interested in this:
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to nzlemming,
Apropos my previous ramble… well, as someone who isn’t explicitly a Christian or someone following any faith, I find myself compelled to defend the idea of faith. I might almost say that I was playing Devil’s Advocate, but that would hopelessly confuse matters :)
I can find plenty of reasons to spurn the Roman Catholic Church, or any denomination based on any or all of its practices, but that is not necessarily the same as abandoning one’s faith, I would think. The institution is not the same as the motive for that institution… at least that’s the only way I can explain the existence of Marxists who aren’t idiots as well.
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While many believers may seem to be "inconsistent" (and often are – Leviticus also condemns shaving and Jerry Falwell always seemed to have a smooth array of chins), religious beliefs, by their nature, propose transcendental and metaphysical realms therefore have different kinds of meaning in addition to the mundane (or empirical, scientistic as oposed to scientific or what have you).
Dante, in a letter to a patron, outlined what he called a ‘polysemous’ layering of meaning: ‘for we obtain one meaning from the letter of it, and another from that which the letter signifies’
There is first, the literal, then the allegorical, then the moral and then the anagogic layers of meaning ascending from the observed mundane reality.
This is related to the distinction between ‘form’ and ‘substance’ – this, what has the form of wine can have the substance of blood.
Something can be empirically true and anagogically true, but different criteria apply. I think that both hardline atheists and religious fundamentalists make the mistake of insisting that what is true in the mundane is true on the same terms in all aspects everywhere. A fundamentalist like bin Laden or Falwell will insist that what is given in a sacred text must be absolutely mundanely true, while I can imagine Richard Dawkins stamping his feet and demanding that William Blake produce specimens of the invisible worms that engage in nocturnal flights and which have been infesting his rose bushes bottled in formaldehyde before dismissing him as a flaky cryptozoologist. The fundamentalist atheist misses the point, while the religious fundamentalist actually commits heresy by denying the distinction of the transcendental and the mundane.
One can, I think abide by a sacred text while practicing in a purely secular means in the mundane world without being “hypocritical”.
That said, Leviticus is pretty explicit about mundane rules, and I'd describe myself as a merely agnostic secularist, I’ll leave the amateur theology there.
And because I must:
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Islander,
It's, quite shocking in the cruelty that is studied, but Taylor is a very good writer, and is able to turn his analysis on himself too, with genuine depth of reflection. I'll think that you'll enjoy it.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Islander,
why not acknowledge that being highly disrespectful to dead human bodies has been part of humanity ever since we were mere homonoids?
You might be very interested in Timothy Taylor’s The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death. Taylor is an archaeologist and the book is a damned good read, looking at the idea that burial rituals are fundamentally aimed at ensuring that the division between the worlds of the living remains inviolate. Some rituals indeed show a deeply respectful process of sending the souls of the dead on their way, while others are incredibly spiteful displays aimed at ensuring the eternal torment or complete annihilation of the deceased – but all nonetheless are aimed at ensuring that they don’t come back, as their existence in an undefined, intermediate state is fundamentally disruptive to the order of the living.
The ritual of burying ObL at sea is, I think, politically calculated to ensure a positive closure and relations with the Islamic world. James Bremner wanted vengeful desecration, and it fits just as well into Taylor’s paradigm, but it would, if one views this spiritually as well as politically, serve to curse and humiliate the “enemy” (as he sees it) of Islam itself, provoking more violence and thus continuing the cycle of hatred, reinforcing and justifying his own essential hatred. Apart from being vile, that is as existentially depressing as the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
BTW, there’s a nice sarcastic quip from Yevtushenko that Stalin’s grave should have a permanent honour guard – to make sure that he stays in it.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Actually, even that analogy is off. James’ assumption seems to be, repeatedly stated, that Islam itself is unworthy of respect, the implication being that Osama bin Laden is representative of Islam as a whole. He refers not to “terrorist butt-licking” but “Islamic butt licking,” so your analogy should be “German butt-licking” perhaps, or “Catholic/Lutheran butt licking.”
Respect shown to the remains of bin Laden or Goering, Himmler <i>et al</i> does not necessarily mean respect to those individuals, but to the general community of those affiliated to the same faith who explicitly were not guilty of their crimes and therefore do deserve courtesy. That is how I understand the rituals surrounding death.
Just as James cannot distinguish between Islam and terrorism, he seems to confuse common decency with humiliating submission, which means that he has no concept of what common decency is at all.
I love the irony of defending the actions of American armed forces to him.
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Quirks I like; the more the merrier. Here’s to the accumulation of more of them. I am being a bit mischievous, I admit. Absurdity is a virtue in itself for me.
As to the third language, here’s the video that convinced me that sign language is beautiful and expressive and not just a substitution code for English (even if it is Australian Sign Language):
I would love to see more of this on official occasions.
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Coming late, and not having yet read the preceding, and perhaps overly pedantic...
(well, the "overly" might be redundant)
Random witterings:
There is a distinction between the Body Corporeal and the Body Politic, which gives us "The King is dead, long live the King!", meaning that the character of the individual monarch is irrelevant to the institution of the monarchy, thanks to the reforms of the last half millennium (Idiot/Savant for one, seems to think that the current monarch is King John). That is, the sovereign may die, but the sovereignty continues, and in theory, a sack of potatoes could fulfill the role and the institution as it is now would be none the lesser.
It is simply fortuitous that E II R is good at her job... though, I have to say, it does seem that politically and diplomatically, she does seem to be personally astute and useful and this may be related to the fact that she has to be. Maybe therefore C III R will be a good King...
While I revere the practice of representative democracy, I do feel that having someone around for a long time, and by whatever means, is a boon. Government must, I believe, have a long-term perspective, and if representative democracy cannot ensure that, then a complicated system that includes a component that is in place for a long period is a good thing. I don't think that this is inconsistent with a representative democratic executive government.
New Zealand is de facto a republic anyway. Whether it is such de jure seems to be merely symbolic.
Monarchy is something that I support insofar as it is an institution of constitutional monarchy, not executive monarchy, and as such, discussions of elitism seem irrelevant.
On the night of the wedding, I watched a Werner Herzog documentary, not to make a point, but simply because it interested me. Kate and Wills do not interest me; I feel no sympathy or antipathy for them at all.
Also, to me, the most appealing thing about a constitutional monarchy is its intrinsic anachronism and absurdity. I'm deeply suspicious of "perfect" systems. Setups that are imperfect, but which we have had the time to adapt to, and have adapted, are probably far better and more practical than things that work best in theory. Possibly in a few hundred years we'll get a republican system to work with the necessary quaintness and theatricality, but the state of America today doesn't bode well.
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Hard News: A Work of Advocacy, in reply to giovanni tiso,
This should be the opening sentence of a novel.
The classic, Lytony aside and sadly never used, was Edward Bryant's "One day, the Pope forgot to take her Pill."