Blazer-Sharp, Prattle-Ready, Brainless Steel Samurai Banana

In response to this comment:

I’d be very interested in the atheist-to-orthodox “take” on this sort of discussion.

I'm not even sure if I count, since I was brought up as a Christian before I became an atheist (de facto in my teens, explicitly in my twenties), but it did get me to try to articulate just what might've been going on in my head in the months leading up to my visit of St. John of Shanghai Orthodox Mission on the evening of February 1, 2014.*

( Read more... )


*a date that I've always remembered as January 30 or 31 until I checked the day of the week just now. The reading of the life of St. Brigid I remember more distinctly.

First, a passing thought:

A good design is seamless, unified, harmonious, whole. A bad design is fragmented and arbitrary, its elements stuck together ad-hoc with no consideration as to how one flows into the other. When the intelligent design researchers (and what they do is genuinely, legitimately research - I say this as a barrister and solicitor) look for signs of design, the usual formula is to isolate a harmonious design, deny the existence of its effective cause within creation, and conclude therefore that God must have done it. This is to deny that the effective cause is part of the harmonious whole, and to claim that there has been some kind of unnatural severance within creation. In other words, the signs of flaws and corruptions of the unified design of the original. If these are the signs of the Designer we seek, then that designer is not the One who designed causation for our use, Who is everywhere present and filling all things, Whose designs are at all friendly to us.

And now, have some cave worms (note: taxonomically not worms) to cleanse the palate.

According to this study, if you're white, male, well-educated or in the scientific "in", you are more likely to believe GMOs are safe. Or, rather, distrust increases the further you move out of this inner elite circle. There appear to be no controls for socioeconomic class. Am immediately reminded of Lewis' critique of Man's power over Nature being ultimately the mere power of some men over others.

Relatedly, I'm not the first to compare our economic system to a Paperclip Maximizer. The only real debate is just what is analogous to paperclips - mammon itself, or consumer products.


And now for some less short-form reblogging...

Fr. Stephen Freeman posts a trilogy of posts about sex and gender.

In case the blog is ever moved and the pictures are lost again, here are the pictures the accompany each:( cut for spoiler - their best impact is when you read each article itself )

All three are well worth reading. That said, one quote struck me in particular:

In all discussions of our gendered existence, Christians must remember that male and female are eschatological images – they are images towards which we are moving, not givens according to which automatically live. The male who is not self-emptyingly male, is not yet what he shall be nor what he should be. The female who is not self-emptyingly female, is not yet what she shall be nor what she should be. And, of course, our situation is still more tragic and broken. For some, the experience of the energies of our nature is changed – whether through the brokenness of genetics or nurture. They are not yet what they shall be nor what they should be. We share a tragedy that is common to all humanity.

This is incomprehensible without an understanding of what Blessed Mother Maria Skobtsova was getting at in her reflection concerning the emulation of the Mother of God. It also provides, in my experience possibly for the first time, a framework for how we should approach masculine and feminine identity and prescription, in a way that finally relates to the theology of kenosis and the Cross (beyond the way in which all suffering so relates).

This leaves, of course, the content open: just what is male and what is female kenosis? Mother Maria's analysis is tantalizing, providing enough to offer a start to the dialogue but leaving nothing close to a clear, yes-no-depends method of recognizing either or both in another.

I'm starting to understand how Thomas Aquinas felt.

One possible answer: the distinction, outside of biological functions, is more descriptive than prescriptive in that if we simply follow the Way the means of that expression will make themselves known. But why then are there any commandments aimed at consciously maintaining the distinction?

Then Dana comments on Part 3 referencing a book called "Flight From Woman", and another hint suggests itself: every known effort to create a genderless society has only succeeded in creating a misogynistic society. Whatever the reason for it, it just happens that in our civilization the male is unmarked and the female marked, and to try to reform society such that everyone conforms to neutral the obvious thing to do (given the mindset of the revolutionary who is typically also an iconoclast) is to purge that which is marked. The requirement to maintain the distinction - especially in the New Testament where the early Church was going up against the gnostic heretics - may be (inter alia) a safeguard against that evil, which would be toxic to (again, inter alia) anyone who would otherwise have sought salvation through the feminine route.

I say "anyone" at the end of that paragraph. I do not believe in a strict individual (lit. individuus) binary where being on one side on one thing necessitates being on that side on everything else to the exclusion of the other. To believe in such exclusion would be to deny that any woman can carry her Cross, or that any man can be pierced to the heart by the sorrows of another - a denial both theologically monstrous and obviously untrue in experience. One of the most liberating and beautiful things I've found about Orthodoxy compared to Western theology is that to say X is Y is not to imply, in the absence of a genuine contradiction, that X is not Z.

But then how are we by (prescriptive, theological) nature male and female, but not all androgynous (~male and female created He every one of them~)?

Perhaps to all these statements should be added "without limitation", as the lawyers do. Are we each created, then, to find only the highest fulfillment in only one of the paths, however great our works may be down the other? We might, instead, speak not of paths but aspects, or abilities and potentials, or differing gifts of grace, or even statistics in an RPG (tempered, of course, by the constant remembrance that without God our works are nothing).

Or perhaps another test question is: which is worse off: a woman devoid of the feminine and a man of the masculine, or a woman devoid of the masculine and a man of the feminine?

I offer a very crude example.

The former (failure of own gender's virtue):

• a group of men. One suffers emotional turmoil. The others lash out angrily and bitterly, say all manner of evil against whoever they feel may be responsible, fail utterly to bring consolation or solve the problem.
  
• a group of women. One suffers emotional turmoil. The others do not know how to handle it and leave in shame.

The latter (failure of other gender's virtue):

• a group of men. One suffers emotional turmoil. The others do not know how to handle it and leave in shame.
  
• a group of women. One suffers emotional turmoil. The others lash out angrily and bitterly, say all manner of evil against whoever they feel may be responsible, fail utterly to bring consolation or solve the problem.

If both are equally bad, then this gives us no reason to believe that humanity is not fulfilled by total positive androgynity; if the former is worse, then that supports what we are taught.

This is increasingly becoming a matter of "I'll know it when I see it", without any ability to formalize what is going on. The Thomist understanding frustratingly remains.

Will hit Post for want of a logical conclusion.

Part 1: Returning to Christianity
Why We Don't Believe in God
A Faith That Cannot Be Defended
Modern Man and Coldness of Heart
Orthodoxy Versus Christian Materialism
Superstition and the Material God
Legal Problems
Being Saved – The Ontological Approach
The Church and the Scriptures
Hidden in Plain Sense
Christianity in a Plain Brown Wrapper
An Important Conversation – How Should We Think About the Bible as History?
The Scandal of the Transfiguration

Part 2: God is in Hell
The Senselessness of Suffering and Death
Unbelief and Good Friday
More on the "Justice" of God
The Modern Project
The Invisible Shame
Look Who's Talking / Comfort for a Child – Speaking Peace to Shame
Is the Universe Tragic?
Tolkien’s Long Defeat
God’s Absence on the Cross
It's A Crying Shame
The Bridegroom and Judgment

Part 3: A Life of Prayer
The Problem with Going to Heaven
You Have One Job – Pray – On Behalf of All and for All
Be Still and Know God
The Erotic Language of Prayer
Why Does God Hide?
Let's Get Physical
The Grammar of the Faith
Rational Sheep and the Word of God
When Icons Became Windows
A Particular Scandal
Self-Emptying Prayer
Begotten of the Father
Saving Mary
Being Saved – The Ontological Approach
How Good Is Your Will? Part Two of The Ontological Model

Conclusion
Thinking About Good and Evil
The Cruciform Human
The Church and the Cross

Further Reading
It Is Good To Be Here

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.

I was not aware of this. tl;dr brown Aragorn is canon, God said it, I believe it, end of story


Ask versus Guess culture. (h/t conuly)
More judgmental commentary here. Given I had reblogged this with the tags "shame culture" and "guilt culture" I will admit I agree with this commentary.


one tab
the immediately following tab
Totally unintended.


overlooked D&D monsters.
Also his comic (arbitrary example) is my Best Thing Ever of the whole week. (It really is.) (seriously.)


helarxe, I would be surprised to learn you had no part in the making of at least one of these alien races.

I hope one day you will
forgive me.


The Swarm is a vast, complex, self-correcting set of algorithms executed over the network that takes everyone's opinion on something and crunches it all together into a (usually, hopefully) unified whole that represents the democratic voice.

When people consult the Swarm, they access the network and enter 2 or more questions, each question written by one of the parties immediately involved in the discussion and the order of which is shuffled and the sequences randomly distributed among the viewers. All cameras watching the persons involved relay the last few minutes of footage along with the question, or if the parties are communicating over the network, the last 3000 words of the discussion. A 15-minute break is called and everyone available is expected to comment anonymously to the Swarm; if enough commenters request more time, more time is granted, but still giving a preliminary first-impression opinion is considered "polite" (as far as that concept may apply to faceless network commenting). It is also safe, as requests for more time are seldom granted, or more accurately seldom ultimately requested.

Anyone with the hardware to run it can install a new Swarm. Many specialized communities have a Swarm that only takes information from people in that group, or from that group plus whatever it could mine from other similar groups. Some people can even install an ad hoc Swarm to settle a discussion between 2 people, but the result is usually less than satisfactory (or comprehensible).

Some corporate lobbyists have been trying to get a clampdown on "free" Swarms for years, insisting that such practices be regulated to approved professional providers such as their client entertainment and security firms, but the vast proliferation of Swarms both general and specialized has been such a useful data collection source for marketing and government surveillance that these efforts are generally allowed to be crushed by grassroots opposition (many of whom express their grievances through the lobbying firms' own Swarms).

(Who programs the Swarm? Best not to think too hard on that.)


In other news, the following thought just went through my mind while checking the dominant spelling of a word: "Google was quite happy to give me those results." (emphasis on "those")


( In further news, a depressingly conservative futurism, in all senses of both words. )

Still nothing motivating a dramatic, fundamental change, while yet even this cannot possibly last forever.
I may revisit this later on.

First, to soften you up for the link that follows, proof that there is a God.

First the parted stream of ants, now the River of Fire.

In which someone finally explains a non-retributive model of Hell to me in a way that doesn't feel like a copout. Incidentally, it occurs to me that it is precisely the stakes posed by Pascal's Wager that I am far less inclined to believe in God than I am to believe in, say, electrons. (Actually I've often gone by the reverse Pascal: if such a God really did exist and I am damned, I'm happy to let my one lasting achievement be the eternal defiance of such a manifestly evil tyrant.)

tl;dr (and it really quite tl): I was brought up with the idea that God made Hell to punish God's creation for disobeying God's rules and that God had to kill Jesus/himself as a proxy to save us from Hell because our disobedience was so horrible that someone had to be killed to satisfy the blood debt; I thought this was either bonkers or barbaric (a Christian might use "pagan" here) and am happy to learn that there's an entire tradition of Christianity that feels similarly and has a coherent alternative.

See also: http://glory2godforallthings.com/2009/06/16/more-on-the-justice-of-god/ and comments thereon


Also: Curiously, wonderfully optimistic quote of the last week:

If we, the faithful, who are sinners, who are unworthy and who with our frequently ungodly lives give reason to people to criticize and fight Christianity for two millenia have not yet managed to destroy it, then I am confident that no outsider really stands a chance.

...

Even though we drink nothing but tainted milk powder, we still must kill all the Japanese.
Even though we consume gutter oil everywhere, we still must brandish our knives and slay the dwarf pirates.
Even though all we eat is meat laced with clenbuterol, we still must send troops to destroy [those who inhabit] the Eastern Sea.
Even though every day we are "represented", but we still must regain the Diaoyu Islands.
Even though in our old age there's no one to take care of us, we still must occupy Mt. Fuji.
Even though are old homes are forcibly demolished, we still must capture Ai Fukuhara alive.

...

And speaking of pirates, here's a small but hopefully important and lasting victory against corporate raider scum.

[42] Mason says TELUS is participating in a smear campaign. It does not matter whether Mason’s primary purpose is to exit profitably from its arbitrage plan. Shareholders invest with a view to a profit and it matters not how Mason intends to profit.

...

[109] Mason argues that the problem of empty voting is irrelevant. The question of conversion ratios is a legitimate issue that affects all Common Shareholders and is something that should be discussed. Mason’s interest is aligned with the interests of the other Common Shareholders, in that both Mason and the Common Shareholders have an interest in being compensated for the historical premium paid for Common Shares. Mason further argues that s. 167(2) leaves no room for the court to look behind a shareholder’s voting interest in shares into their true economic interests or purposes.

[110] I cannot agree with Mason’s submissions on either point. While the issue of conversion ratios is indeed a matter of legitimate concern to all Common Shareholders, it is of overriding concern only to Mason. Only Mason stands to profit if the price differential between Common Shares and Voting Shares increases. And only Mason is indifferent to the overall value of TELUS itself.

[111] The fact that Mason shares some interest with other Common Shareholders does not mean that its interests align with those Shareholders in a broader sense.

[112] Nor does s. 167 oust the power of the court to consider the reasons underlying a requisition. Section 167(7)(d) specifically contemplates an investigation into the motivations behind a requisition. And s. 186 gives the court broad discretion to make orders relating to the calling, holding and conducting of meetings “for any ... reason the court considers appropriate.”

[113] That said, in light of my findings regarding the validity of the Requisition, it is unnecessary to consider whether the Court ought to exercise its jurisdiction in this case.

Appeal to be heard in a couple weeks. In barbaric South Nation terms, let's hope the appeal result is more Roe and less Kelo.

On the one hand I finally start to understand what helarxe and the Dan were on about back in the early '00s.

On the other:

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."

What is the logic behind the jump from the first to the second? An "innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about" has always* been my understanding. What is the philosophic and cultural context I am missing here? The worst I can imagine evolution predicting is that every so often we will have trouble drawing the line between one sort of organism and another and at worst we have to draw a line somewhere and choose something arbitrary - I doubt, having read almost the rest of the book, that Chesterton would have such a crude understanding of the problem to strawman it like that, having not done the same with the chairness of any given chair or any matter of law.

*subject to a rather embarrassing eugenicist phase in my wasted youth, which has nothing to do with the sentiment Chesterton is describing here**

**...does it? D:


ED:

The best-publicised, and for some decades, the most popular (and simultaneously, most bitterly-reviled) view of this complex of issues was Richard Dawkins' gene-selection theory. Now, but Dawkins is arguably the best science writer since Peter Medawar, and he is a formidable thinker as well. His argument has a lot of merit, and he has honed and adjusted it in rational reaction to criticism. On the other side, group selection was not very competently presented, and not very cogently thought out. It did not fare well. For a considerable period it was reduced to pockets of resistance among the incompetent and inarticulate.

I exaggerate of course, but certainly the pendulum swung so far that it became quite difficult to find anything like balanced discussions of the theme. That was the good news.

The bad news was, as I saw it, was a confusion of concepts, but it is not my field and in any case I still do not have it properly thought out. It is a difficult conceptual field.

As I see it the key conceptual stumbling-block is in our difficulties in dealing with the concept of entity. That has been a pervasive, largely unrecognised and implicit trap for the unwary in every field of science that I can think of. In spite of the attitudes of exponents of fuzzy logic, that useful and ingenious discipline does not in itself solve the problem, though it certainly has scope for wider application and, I suspect, deeper and wider development. In Darwinism, ecology and related fields things are nearly as bad as they could get. The very concept of natural selection assumes a cogent concept of entity, and no such concept has been established. In fact, I have a nasty suspicion that part of the problem is that no one concept is sufficient for the requirements of this field, or, for that matter, many other fields. And what is more, I suspect that different mental toolkits would be necessary to deal with the concept of entity in say, Darwinism and quantum mechanics.

Part of Dawkins' argument that the gene was the only, or nearly the only, or at least far and away the most important, entity in Darwinism, he modified by an expanded view of the definition of a gene. He did so well and characteristically articulately, but I still think that he fell short.

In other words, stabbing versus kicking tires.


[2014-02-15 EDIT: Just over a year later I'm sitting here trying to imagine an example of a simple discourse about some biological observation or other that makes no use of any arbitrary classification terminology, maximally respecting the fluid nature of what goes on in living populations.

It is impossible to get anything done within a reasonable time. It is like building a watch and having to reinvent the wheel and lever each time a gear is placed.

Our best hope is what we do now, take reasonable steps to pull the bones apart by the joints and divide the meat based on the easiest parts to tear. At which point it is observed that the assumption that there is a roast beast on the table to do this to says a lot.

I'm hungry.]

Well, it's Thanksgiving weekend up here in the Imperialist Emirates of Soviet Canuckistan and I'm apparently down with the Sickness the Plague Ebola SARS a cold so I feel like shit.

So a lot of times when people feel like shit people remind them that at least they're not and then they point out someone who is less fortunate and the first person goes Oh I am so thankful I am not in that person's position! I think such behaviour is horrible and you people should feel horrible for perpetuating it, for this reason: by being thankful only in comparison to the person worse off than you, you're really being thankful that the other person is so bad off so you can feel that your circumstances are superior to someone else's.

So I am going to take a different route and be thankful for all sorts of calamities and curses that, but for my making them up for the purposes of this post, I would never have thought of.

I am thankful that, to the best of my knowledge and recollection:

1. I have never had an octopus peck out either of my eyes.
   
2. My orifices do not naturally heal themselves shut.
   
3. I am not so incapable of letting go of a person that I carry their putrefying remains with me wherever I go and insist on deference to my lifestyle choice.
   
4. My toilet paper has never, at least not on a regular basis, spontaneously developed sentience, consciousness and reason granting it rights to integrity and dignity.
   
5. I am not exclusively sexually attracted to the act of circumcision.
   
6. My gametes do not spontaneously generate HIV during meiosis.
   
7. I am not fatally allergic to ingesting trace amounts of any human protein, including my own.
   
8. I have never eaten the corporeal remains of any animal that, dead and dismembered, turned to stare me in the face with ersatz pore- or vessel-eyes and mouth and asked me, "Why?".
   
9. I am not married to a woman with chronic lotusboob.
   
10. My hippocampus has not been replaced by a parasitic crustacean.
    
11. I am not being stalked by my long-lost placenta seeking to reunite us and live the "good old days" again.
    
12. I have no taste buds in my urethra.
    
13. I am not successfully attempting to grow a rosebush in my lungs.
    
14. The proteins that were incorporated into my body from another living thing are not now rejecting their me-ness and coalescing together to form a crude, ersatz facsimile of that former living thing inside me.
    
15. I am not a P-zombie.
    
16. I have never been publicly scorned and ridiculed by everyone in the room for daring to speak to someone new.
    
17. I do not need to consume the immortal soul of an innocent on a regular basis to stay alive.
    
18. I have experienced existence.