February 2007
Cool/Uncool
Cool/Uncool. Cool things:
- Nintendo Wii
- Red Steel. Guns! Swords! (No Sword-chucks, unfortunately.)
- Zelda: Twilight Princess. I like being a wolf.
- The Twelve Kingdoms
Uncool things:
- Having your bike stolen.
- Concrete trucks and seriously cussing workmen outside your window at quarter to seven on a Saturday morning.
#70
No one was claiming, of course, that my county road atlas ought to be read as the inerrant, infallible and authoritative Word of God, so my fundamentalist teachers would not have disagreed with my choosing, in this case, to regard my own experience of the terrain as worthy of consideration.
Nor did they deny that I would encounter similar disparities when consulting the “map” of scripture. In that case, however, they taught that I must always side with the map. That is what it means to be a fundamentalist.
Thus, to cite one of the more infamous examples, we were taught that evolution was a lie. The map, the Bible, said that the world was only 6,000 years old, and if that’s what the map says, then this must trump any claims of “science” or any other observation about so-called reality. If reality and the map conflict, then we must reinterpret reality to conform to the map.
… Since this is what he believes the Bible teaches, and since he believes that this biblical teaching outweighs any other source of information, he is forced to concoct an elaborate system for reinterpreting all of reality.
— Slacktivist’s “Let us reason together” (Read it all, it’s good stuff.)
Can you afford good health?
Can you afford good health? Doctors’ fees are not a problem for me, with a decent income all to myself, but how would a family on a less substantial income ever survive? I know of discounts by way of Family Support and Community Services, but I still can’t see how the poor can afford decent healthcare. Can anyone shed any light on how this works, or are the poor just shafted once again?
How to tell when an author has gotten carried away
How to tell when an author has gotten carried away. (or “Proper Nouns per paragraph: an examination”):
The great oaken gates of Camaar stood open, for the war that had raged on the plains of Mishrak ac Thull, hundreds of leagues to the east, was over. The vast armies that had been raised by the Princess Ce’Nedra to fight that war had returned to their home, and there was peace once more in the Kingdoms of the West. Belgarion, King of Riva and Overlord of the West, sat upon the throne in the Hall of the Rivan King with the Orb of Aldur once again in its proper place above his throne. The maimed God of Angarak was dead, and his eons-old threat to the West was gone forever.
— Guardians of the West, David Eddings (p.19)
That’s 11 times, 31 words out of 112, in one paragraph. That’s 27% of the text. The worst bit is, I flicked over a couple of pages and there were even worse examples readily at hand. High fantasy, eh?
(Actually, it’s not a bad book so far. He has a keen sense of the absurd, which is making the book quite funny, although I can’t tell if this is intentional or not.)
Language and Gender
Language and Gender:
English has no gender-neutral third-person pronoun. Genderless (‘it’), and gender-indeterminate (‘they’ in the singular sense) are available, but there is no truly gender-neutral term. This causes problems for Christians with feminist sympathies, who think it bad form to refer to God as ‘he.’
Japanese has male- and female-gendered collective pronouns (gendered forms of ‘they’ or ‘you’), but with interesting usage; an all-female group is Kanojora (かのじょら, her-plural), but if there is even one male in the group it becomes Karera (かれら, him-plural).
German nouns are all gendered, with the definite articles ‘der’ (masculine), ‘die’ (feminine, pronounced dee), and ‘das,’ (neuter). For instance, dog (‘hund’) is masculine, so even a female dog would be ‘der hund’.
See also Wikipedia on grammatical gender and gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender.
Oh, AJ
Oh, AJ:
“I hope that you and I find true love like Brehaut and Ruth.”
Closely followed by:
“Everything about you is longer than normal.”
I’m sorry, A-ron, but I don’t feel that way about you.
I've been a bit worried about the afterlife recently
I’ve been a bit worried about the afterlife recently. Actually, to be blunt about it, I’ve been wondering if there even is one. (Being incarnationally-focused has its downsides.) At the same time, I’ve been beginning to grasp just how futile and, in the grand scale of things, how empty human life is. Last night, my brain finally put the two together, in what I shall call Wilson’s First Law (I’m sure Andrew or KT will point out who actually came up with this):
- If there is a truly benevolent and active supreme power, there must also be some kind of existence beyond this one.
My reasoning is this:
This life is, in the end, a futile empty tragedy. Not in some emo I-want-to-cut-myself-to-let-the-darkness-in-my-heart-leak-out sense, just that, eventually, ourselves and those we love will all die, having made very little difference to even the small part of the universe we lived in. (That’s your cheery thought for the day.)
Therefore, if one assumes an active supreme being (I do), there are only two options:
- This is a huge, cruel joke at our expense, or reality itself is truly evil and corrupt, or, as the Buddhists say, reality is suffering (the supreme being is not good.)
- There is something else beyond this life (the supreme being is good.) (I don’t specify that the something else is better; I suspect that it would be, but it could be no more than the same thing again—‘see how you do this time.’)
There are a couple small holes in my reasoning, but I’m feeling a lot better about things today.
Last night I went for a walk
Last night I went for a walk. It was getting dark, and I was by myself. I was starting to get a bit worried, but then I realised I was the one with the shaved head and the denim jacket.
Why do they have to make James Bond so awesome?
Why do they have to make James Bond so awesome? It’s not believable that someone could be like that. Why not make him more of a normal guy? Let’s see him arguing with a bus driver over an expired transfer ticket or getting his necktie stuck in escalator. Why not have him downing an entire bottle of sherry in one hour and then calling up his mother and weeping because he thinks his eyes have become permanently crossed? Wouldn’t you much rather see someone like that? Someone like you? Someone like me?
— 123 I Love You
