A point well made.
About the other September 11 ... I saw it on television but I lived it on Usenet, mainly through your posts.
This is a shock. Condolences to all who knew him.
I only met him a couple of times and remember him as utterly charming. Very good at putting you at your ease and still keeping you on your toes, he was. There's a reason why his Locus interview style worked.
#108: That suggests a lovely way to explain biblical criticism: the text is a wiki, and we can see traces of the edit wars.
The world would certainly be a different place if John Calvin hadn't convinced so many people that they are positronic robots. With original sin as a sort of inverse First Law: A Human Being Must Do Harm, But Shouldn't.
Debcha # 127: No, no - what I meant was that from the fundamentamentalist POV, being the Wrong Kind of Christian is as sure a road to perdition as outright unbelief.
Linkmeister # 128: Tongue in cheek.
Folks in general - my last comment could have been more tactfully phrased.
Raphael # 113: yes, people who were raised to believe that 1) the Bible is a book of inerrant Truth and 2) you can either believe that or become an atheist, for some reason seem to be a lot more likely to give up belief 1 than belief 2.
That's me all right. I'd rather go to hell for being an Atheist than for being a Catholic, a Liberal, or some other variant of non-fundamentalist Christian, because that way at least I get Sunday mornings in bed.
To put it more seriously, people who have broken painfully from one variant of woo are unlikely to find another variant attactive.
Charlie # 91:the biblical inconsistency shtick is really an intra-Christian argument (between the believers in biblical inerrancy and everybody else).
Yup.
Self-proclaimed atheists who try to use that argument either (a) need to examine their own belief structure a bit more closely, or (b) are trolling.
This needs one small qualification: atheists who try to use that argument against Christianity in general are [what you said].
Same goes for YEC.
But the fact is that people who were raised YEC or inerrantist may well give the whole religion thing a miss if they become persuaded that these positions are wrong, and that their esteemed parents and pastors have all along been either ignorant or lying like rugs.
Some readers of my The Night Sessions have decried as implausible the rapid deconversion of one character when a certain minor biblical problem is brought inescapably to his attention; at least one reader has told me he or she had a very similar experience.
Dragoness Eclectic # 37: I don't have the energy to explain the entire archaeological, historical and cultural context of the Ancient Near East, plus the history of textual criticism, plus scriptural exegesis to everyone who stumbled on "101 Contradictions in the Bible" and thinks it's the greatest new thing in religious criticism.
It's the fundamentalists/inerrantists who need all that explained to them, not the atheists. I got pried out of inerrantism by Foote and Ball's The Bible Handbook, a book that was certainly not the last word in religious criticism even when it was written in 1888, let alone when it was reprinted in 1948. But for many, many people such books are, so to speak, a revelation.
Of course, it can be irritating for a non-fundamentalist Christian to be mistaken for a fundamentalist, but this is the internet and such things happen all the time.
Rapael # 7: What exactly is surprising about nice sane people having strange and arguably disagreeable beliefs?
Well, nothing of course, but I'm beginning to suspect that their 'beliefs' are rather less strange and disagreeable than the people on the other side of the Science Wars made out. Which, again, would not be surprising. But I have a lot still to find out about Science Studies, so I could be wrong. More research is necessary.
I'm not entirely clear what the 'same stuff' is we hear constantly in the SF world. Dissing deconstructionism? Dissing mainstream novels? Or something else?
This year, I'm in the very funny position of working with Science Studies sociologists, who were the zombies in the Science Wars, intoning that science was just a cultural practice with no more truth-value than astrology while smashing laboratory glassware, practising relativism and eating brains. So far I have found them strangely human and reasonable, fascinated by science, and a delight to have as colleagues.
Mind you, I haven't been in the office at night.
Patrick, your post has just brightened my morning, for reasons which I'm sure will be obvious. You have my sympathy re time, and the slough. Laying everything out before a friend or even sympathetic acquaintance willing to listen but not directly involved in your work or personal life can help. They don't have to actually do or say anything.
Happy Christmas, and Get Well Soon.
(The Hallmark card for flu years! Now in carbon-friendly electrons!)
I've thought for some time that the future we're all heading into is well caught by Hillel Ticktin's phrase "capitalism with Russian characteristics".
That passage in Space Cadet is the first place I heard of St Barbara, and the first place I saw the word 'chicanery'. (I looked it up in the dictionary.) That book is also where I first encountered the word 'Monism' (which I also looked up, but couldn't figure out why in the book it was a religion).
Come to think of it, that book's also where I first learned that the Asteroid Belt is the debris of a blown-up planet - hey, I still get the chills thinking of that asteroid the space cadets come across with strata of sedimentary rock.
And ever since I read it, I've been confidently telling people that St Barbara is the patron saint of astronauts. (Which brings to mind the wonderful story told by William Dalrymple in his eye-opening book From the Holy Mountain, of finding a framed photo in a convent in Syria of Syrian (Muslim) cosmonauts who'd visited the convent to sacrifice a sheep to Mary in thanks for their safe return from the Soviet space station Mir.)
Science fiction, educating the youth of today for the challenges of tomorrow!
Henry #130: Scottish bank notes are not really private banknotes in that they are somehow pegged to the Bank of England. (I understand that gold used to be physically shifted back and forth between London and Edinburgh every so often.) OTOH the notes are not legal tender: anyone can refuse to accept a payment in them.
The Bank of Scotland is now Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) having been taken over by a de-mutualised building society, the Halifax. It went into crisis in the credit crunch and was going to be merged with Lloyds TSB (a bank formed by merging a private insurance company with a formerly mutual bank, the Trustee Savings Bank) but that's now off. The Royal Bank of Scotland now owns NatWest, and is in turn 'owned' by the UK govt through a large shareholding as of last week.
As you can see, I'm not really keeping up with this but the BBC Business news website has all the turns and twists.
The whole mess has a lot to do with what happens when mutual institutions are allowed to turn themselves into commercial and/or investment banks and run riot. (See also under Northern Rock.) That was a most unconservative Conservative implementation that is now near impossible to roll back.
Darryl #51: The Church of Scotland is Established, but you're right that its Head is not the reigning monarch. In presbyterian principle, the only Head of the Church is Christ (who, in Protestant principle, does not have a Vicar on Earth). The top post in the Church is the Moderator, annually elected by the General Assembly (of ministers and elders). There are at least two other presbyterian churches in Scotland that have left the Established Church but uphold the establishment principle: the Free Church and the Free Presbyterian Church. All three Moderators get invited to the Queen's garden party in Holyrood every summer.
Henry #52: Feudal tenure in Scotland was abolished years ago. Four years ago, to be precise.
I think the study of the British Constitution as a programming problem is long overdue, so I apologise for going slightly off topic.
Belated congratulations to all.
(I've been away from the Internets for a couple of days, my scientifictional futurological insightometer not being well-calibrated enough to register that the 5th of November is the day after the 4th ...)
This is a great, great day for the human race.
All that's stopping me (here in the UK) from staying up all night is that (a) I have to deliver an after-dinner talk at a scientists' confab tomorrow evening and (b) I have to get up at 0500 GMT (Nov 5) to get there ...
Fingers crossed for you, gals and guys.
I don't get what's good about it either.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 12 |
| 2008 | 28 |
| 2007 | 20 |
| 2006 | 13 |
| 2005 | 20 |
| 2004 | 15 |
| 2003 | 19 |
| 2002 | 1 |
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