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Big Mac, God sculpted your face so that you could play Michael Score of Flock of Seagulls in the movie version of 1984 musical history.

At slate.com

[ LINK ]

But I do love to make odd pictures, especially for my work neighbor Mice.

Check it Out.

Snow Crash was a great book! It’s one of those gold plated volumes of the cyberpunk fiction canon and rightly so. It features all of the standard conventions: cyberspace, rogue-ishly sexy mercenary girls, and a wily hacker with swords.

The part I found most interesting was the discussion of ancient Sumerian myth and “deep neurolinguistic structures”. The idea being that if you could master the fundamental linguistic atoms that humans use to perceive the world you could re-program them. Think a second. Can you think without using words?

No really. Try. Nope? Something changed in how you think when you started realizing you wanted to say something and the big people who bring you food and fresh diapers respond, curiously enough, to sounds associated with those ideas. Fun premise, no?

Continuing on, this book is very much like the other works of Neal Stephenson: adventurous romps across strangely familiar landscapes that you don’t quite recognize.

Interestingly enough Stephenson writes about systems of social control in primitive society. He envisions early men as automata, slave to tradition and information dictated by Witch Doctors (or their equivalents).

(Aside: Hardt and Negri did an excellent breakdown of systems of distributed social control in their book Empire)

Modern man, Stephenson’s characters opine, began when a rational basis for knowledge was formulated. When people integrated the wisdom of Witch Doctors, evaluated it, and then, of their own volition, decided to let pieces of it go.

This is very interesting to me. It reminds me of the slaughter of the Gods when Thales, Anaximander, and Anaxagoras called the myths of Olympus “myths” and boldly urged the Greeks to move towards philo-sophia and science instead of xenophobic fundamentalism and the will of a bunch of nonsensical entities.

Aren’t we glad to have left the Witch Doctor’s wisdom back in the BC era?

Embryonic stem cell debate moves to the Senate President Bush renews his veto threat…[saying] “The use of federal dollars to destroy life is something I simply do not support”

—From CNN.com Source

Hm, apparently the work of moving men from ignorance to science has yet to reach its end.

(Aside: Although I would love to see the man who can’t explain how Social Security is better off in the free market pin down the answer to: “Tell me, Mr. President, where does life begin, exactly, and how do you know?” )

In any case, the Witch Doctor’s apprentice at 1600 Pennsylvania drive notwithstanding, Stephenson also wrote about obsessing over the word and demanding church intercessors for one’s faith. Having grown up Protestant I gave Neal a hearty “Hear, Hear”. I’ve just recently shared my agreement with that sentiment here and am surprised by the synchronicity that brings Snow Crash into my life so shortly after having written that post.

Stephenson offers a splendid quote on page 401 in my edition:

Christ’s gospel is … an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is teh message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tob hoping to find his body and instead found nrothing. The message was clear enough: We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people. People whe were used to the rigid theocracy of the Pharisees couldn’t handle the idea of a popular, nonhierarchical church. They wanted popes and bishops and priests… (Stephenson, Snow Crash, pp 401-2)

I wrote in my book journal, after reading that:

What is Jesus Christ but a koan? Looking for Him, we find only ourselves. Searching ourselves, we find Him. His essence is the latent nothing of Sein (pure being) [cf. Heidegger].

I suppose that it is this mystical Jesus the god-man who told his disciples to forget his body, forget his personage and instead remember his ideals. This is the beauty of the Holy Spirit - a way to make the mystical last forever without the need for the intercessors blocking Pure Communion with God

John 20:22: “And with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit…’”

Look at that, the Holy Spirit resides in the breath, take Him in, let Him out. Breath gnosis in, breathe gnosis out (take yoga, master pranayama?). I think Christ’s ministry was of subtlety, of the ineffable, of the quantum. The exact opposite of that? Saint Peter’s basilica?

I’m convinced more and more that this eschewing of blind adoration of the word and the pontiff is where Christianity is/was meant to go.

Obviously this train of thought is still developing…pre-Socratic Greek, Gnostic Christian, Zen traditions, Existentialist interpretations of being, Kierkergaard, Sein und Zeit…they all collapse into something somewhere.

Where? What?

In any case, I enjoyed this book very much!

Tom,

You were awesome as Algren in “The Last Samurai”.

You return my favour with this ?

Thanks to the SocialBobcat for this bit o’ anathema.

Yes my friends, they finally got it right on the third and final episode. Some things are off from the sober reality (R2D2 being a little “too” perky). It’s everything Episodes 1 and 2 failed to deliver.

Anyone see something wrong in the pope’s activity?

In light of current research [LINK] it appears that 666 is not actually the number of the beast, it’s 616.

Often when discussing the Bible with my father I took the position something like this:

What’s so special about that book? It’s a collection of folk tales that happened to get on the most powerful broadcast medium of its day (the Roman news network). Had the Apache been in Judea, it might be in The Great Sprit we Trust. Pretty much every tribe has written a story about how they were the first, most beloved by God, deserve to have the good land, etc. What’s so special about the tribe of Israel? I mean the Bible was assembled by men at a conference, it’s not like *poof* a big hunk of scrolls dropped from the sky. Most of the books weren’t written at the time the people involved in the stories lived. And the extent of writing by the most focal character in the New Testament seems to have circles in the dust! [which I actually sorta like, but that’s a discussion for another day]”

My Dad would counter that one would have to believe that the book were assembled under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That instead of this conference being a boondoggle to go to Nicea and hang with similarly-minded people (I doubt the modus operandi of conference attendees has changed much in the last dozen centuries), this conference was different thanks to the unseen hand of the Spiritus Sancti.

This recent discovery would seem to undermine my Dad’s position.

Dad’s position can be logically expressed as:

“The assemblage of all text produced at the Council of Nicea is known today as the Bible.”

“For all texts selected at the Council of Nicea it was done under the guidance of the Holy Sprit”

“For all objects, if it is produced under the guidance of the Holy Spirit it is perfect.”

“For all objects, if it is perfect, it is true.”

Now, the news of the day is:

“There exists a fact in the Bible that is wrong.”

And we come to the uncomfortable position that either the Holy Sprit allowed man to be deceived or that there’s no good reason to believe that the Bible is flawless. This, of course, is nothing new to philosophers who recognize this as a permutation of The Problem of Evil.

Now the question as to whether God (i.e. the Holy Sprit) would allow man to be decieved is at the heart of Descartes’ meditations. Descartes loved God so much that he couldn’t allow God to be a deceiver (ironically enough, he had to obfuscate this position because he was afraid the Catholic Church would burn him for saying there was something God couldn’t do). I’m willing to side with Descartes on this one, anything worthy of the apellation “God” doesn’t go around like the petty Olympian Gods machinating to fool mortals.

By my own setup above, that means I have to accept my position that the Bible is a dusty book of folk tales, inspirational stories, tribal wisdom, tribal chauvanisms and propaganda (“Israel is the best! You get here, we’ll do the rest! Beat Nineveh for the Homecoming Game!”), and the story of a remarkably benevolent man who claimed to be the actual son of God and was nailed to a tree (thanks Douglas Adams!) for being a traitor to the empire.

I hasten to add that I’m not advocating the wholesale discarding of this book. For one thing it’s too culturally significant, it defines what it is to be Western in many ways. Secondarily, the power and comfort people find in this book is in no way lessened due to the fact that it wasn’t flawlessly assembled. Mankind evolves his relationship to his diety(ies) every day he continues existing [1]. That that relationship should evolve in custom, speech, practice and text is perfectly appropriate!

Nevertheless I think we stand at a new era of religion. The Protestants got rid of the the excessive and bloated machinery of the Pope’s fleet of intercessors in favor of the printed word’s relation with the worshipper. In the maw of Naturalism the Catholics reach for The Virgin as intercessor. In the maw of Naturalism the Protestants (best captured in American literature esp. Nathaniel Hawthorne) reached for The Word itself. This begat an unholy and unhealthy logocentrism - an overimportance of the words and the sentences themselves. It’s no accident that the study of structuralist philosophy began in divinity schools as the pious sought to wrench every bit of understanding out of the sentences themselves (i.e. Schliermacher).

But if the book is just as I’ve said it is, a dusty book, and the fascination with the words therein an obfuscation of the essence of its content, just as the machinery of the Catholic institutions obfuscated the spiritual content of the religion according to the Reformation, then what I’m proposing is something akin to a “second reformation.”

We could get rid of our obsession with words (logocentrism) and get back to a primary spiritualism (that certainly would be welcome in the form of a Christian variety of course!) that is faith plus nothing in pursuit of gnosis.

When people can’t rabidly attach themselves and their logocentrism to dusty books, fundamentalism suffers (John Ashcroft and Osama bin Laden, watch out), and the spirituality that’s at the heart of religion blossoms again within each practitioner. It could be a religious renaissance, an 1800 year detour righted. In this sense The US Constitution is superior to the Bible; by being a series of principles it guides by generality and rules by its spirit. Dusty old book religions guide by the particular and (largely) hide the higher spiritual law of the actual practice.

Now I’ve taken Christianity to task a bit in this posting so let me clarify a few points. Far from the destruction of the Christian religion, I’m advocating a purification and a rebirth. When we’re no longer slaves to the social customs of the religion (selling of indulgences, papal courts) or the logocentric fascination-unto-distraction of the text (post-Reformation), we’re able to return to what spirituality is about: transcendence, communion, growth, and the flourishing of the human spirit.

We can be free and closer to God, if we want.

Update: I realize that, reading this, one could think that my father is a dogmatic sort of fellow. In fact he absolutely is not. He never asserted this position as a “that is the way it is” he asserted this position as a Jehova’s advocate to my line of reasoning.

Incidentally, the church knows well the stakes of making something that can be materially disproved part of their “one and only eternal truth.” This is why the stakes were so high for Giodarno Bruno (burnt by the Church for dogma’s sake), Galileo, and Copernicus.

The church had, as part of its one true, eternal, immutable teachings taught that the Earth was the center of the universe. When the heliocentrists espoused their view (backed by observation) the Church realized that this questioning might not have an end. If the material content of the bedrock book of the church can be held dubious, where does the questioning end?

Footnotes: 1. Aldous Huxley amusingly described this “We create our gods, our gods then exist outside of us, but yet we make them move” phenomenon by having the scarecrows in the fields in Island be made to be look like dieties. The image and story of the Buddha / the Christ / the X is a product of mankind, thus we “create” the god; then that story achieves immortality and the tellers die, and thus the god becomes immortal; yet it is human attribution that makes the gods move and act, so even now that the story surpasses the teller, it’s only by our attribution of activity to a god that it actually lives.

This phenomenon is something that the Greeks realized early. It would be a fruitful area of research as graduate work and is what I referred to in this previous post.

Could it be? Goonies ][ ?

It’s been an off-again almost-on-again affair for years now. The internet rumour sites don’t seem to really know what’s going on and Warner Brothers hasn’t been a source of strong support in the matter (alas!).

Boy that would be sweet.

Anyone know for sure if it’s a go / no-go?

• Greek Myth
• Cool glyphs - none better than cuneiform or Greek
• A quest against the gods
• An existential dilemma
• Pseudo (or actual) Latin chanting background music (? la Orff’s Carmina Burana)
• Great scenery and backgrounds
• Mysterious Oracles who say mysterious stuff

Extra bonus: Get great voice talent like SF icon and host of City Arts & Lectures, Linda Hunt, to do the role of the wizened narrator.

In short, God of War.

This game is, may I lapse in to gamer, T3H r00lz!!!111!!!.

You play Kratos - a very wan man in search of vengeance - seeking the death of Ares.

Digression:

Can Gods die? The Greeks had a very complicated relationship with this question. Furthermore, when belief dies is that not what truly kills a god? Furthermore there’s a great thematic resonance to the classic Harryhausen flick Jason and the Argonauts when Jason says [ something like ] Some day men will be better off when they learn to have nothing to do with the Olympian Gods. Interestingly one of the godesses asks Zeus why he doesn’t strike Jason dead for that remark but Zeus seems oddly at peace with the idea that his utility was finite. )

un-Digression

In your purusuit you swing these very cool blade weapons (“The Blades of Chaos”) and give many-a monster (Centaurs, Minotaurs, Sirens, and other beasts) a one-way ticket across the river Styx.

Let me re-iterate, T3H r00lz!!!111!!!.