Linkdumping about transcendence.

[mc776]

The best stupid pun ever.

But I don’t want to stop there. There a few deeper and more mysterious applications of this. The Lamb slain at the foundation of the world as a type of evolution.

That said, another, biologically more, philosophically less cf. colonials: more* ambitious take on the Nth Men story.
(Also he has thought out giant spiders :O :O :O||||~)


*2014-08-21 EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I think Bogleech is right. This is better in every way: humane where MAM was profoundly misanthropic, humble where F&LM was arrogant and certain, hopeful even in death where MAM and F&LM are ambivalent. This is what science fiction ought to be.

Comments

[helarxe]

hopefulness is the ONLY arrogance

[helarxe]

But on the theological, it remains very interesting to see the devouring and devoured god of the Aztecs, and the continually birthing and dying man of Rabelaisian popular-festive humanism, Xted. My closest contact with that Christianized doctrine would be in GW's Book of the New Sun.

I usually feel a certain discordance between the conception of the Absolute as unchangeable, like in "always-slain", and its presentation as an unfolding. (Not that [it] and [revelation-of-it] have to abide by similar rules, but some sleight of hand may be suspected.) It devalues Act (hence Time, etc) to establish that that cross did not change [not-slain] into [slain]; afterwards claiming the world of infinite changes to be somehow analogous to this unchanging thing...

It does have a certain ring to it though, the formulation "unchanging but not changeless"?

By the way, the ending filibuster of AT seems to run against the grain of living by the Christ Story as PPaul gently offers.

[mc776]

Along similar lines to this, re: Xted?


[...]It does have a certain ring to it though, the formulation "unchanging but not changeless"?

I've always thought it fit neatly into time-as-dimension, and the theological logic of absoluteness. That the result feels more like "it won't fit anywhere else, we're stuck" than "hey yeah look at how neat and reasonable and concise this is!" is what suggests its [reasonable-working-approximation-of-]truth to me.

The devaluing, however, I do wonder about.


What do you mean by filibuster?

[mc776]

Relatedly, from the diary I keep at work:

11:53 2014-08-21
On Sol III the dominant species is a yellow grass with very big seeds. It grows in large squares all over the dry land of the planet. It is spread and serviced by a symbiote that gathers resources for it and greatly alters the landscape to more of it might be grown. In return the symbiote is rewarded with a portion of its seeds, which have evolved to contain large nutrient containers within them but are apparently subject to further processing by the symbiote. The symbiote is capable of language and the hive mind coordinates itself by emitting a combination of radio and sound waves. Some have argued that it might be simpler to frame this ecology as these symbiotes being the dominant species and the grass a hanger-on; but the facts on their face do not support this analysis, as it is observed that several factions within the symbiote hive-mind literally worship the grass's gift as their god.