What’s the second best Web-based video online today? Meatrix, by those masters of animation, Free Range Studios. Soon Free Range Studios will release “Meatrix II: Revolting.” Sneak preview now online.
(Best online video, also by Free Range Studios, is here.)
Professors, students, anyone who’s involved in academia — I have a special gift for you. Next time you need a paper to submit to a peer-reviewed journal, or next time you need a term paper or dissertation proposal, just head on over the the Postmodernism Generator [Link], courtesy the blog “Communications from Elsewhere.” Each time you click on the link above, you’ll get a high-quality academic paper randomly generated with postmodern jargon. Here’s a sample:
If one examines predialectic theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject the textual paradigm of narrative or conclude that sexuality may be used to marginalize the Other. It could be said that if subcultural modernist theory holds, we have to choose between the textual paradigm of narrative and postcultural feminism.
“Sexual identity is intrinsically responsible for hierarchy,†says Derrida. The premise of the neodialectic paradigm of discourse states that the goal of the observer is social comment, given that narrativity is distinct from truth. Thus, Lyotard promotes the use of Marxist capitalism to modify and read society.
Yeah, baby. Sounds good to me. Now that I have access to the Postmodernism Generator, I can go back to grad school and get that Ph.D. in Postnarrative Philosophy.
A serious question, prompted by a beautiful graphic in the Febrary, 2006, issue, of the Canadian magazine “The Walrus.”
What would Sun Ra do? Post your answers, if you have any, in the comments sections below.
Update: A mystified reader sends email asking who Sun Ra was. Link
Close to 70 degrees again today, with beautiful sun. Carol has been subletting one of the units in Cambridge Cohousing, and as we ate breakfast we could watch one of the residents disassembling the small ice skating rink in the yard below us: pulling up the stakes, knocking the side boards apart, rolling up the plastic sheet that held the water in. No more skating this season.
We walked over to the supermarket and I heard two Common Grackles, the first I have heard this year. Their harsh cries sounded musical to my ears: spring is coming, spring is here.
And I feel a faint tickle in the back of my throat, a little shortness of breath after I’d been walking for two hours to Central Square and back: tree pollen is out, and hay fever season has fairly begun.
Carol and I walked around Fresh Pond in Cambridge this afternoon. It must have been 70 degrees; sunny, too.
The ice is off about half of Fresh Pond. A stiff breeze was blowing across the pond, and on the windward side, you could hear the ice crunching along the edge of the pond. We watched it for a while: the wind pushed the ice sheet against the shore, pushing it up onto land, little pieces of ice breaking off.
Already I’ve noticed there are many fewer ducks and loons on New Bedford harbor than a month ago, for the waterfowl are beginning to move back inland. No waterfowl yet on Fresh Pond, but soon they will move off their wintering grounds along the coast and stop here on their way to their breeding grounds.
The intermittent rain has been working on melting the last of the snow: snow piles left by shoveling and plowing, snow protected from the sun on the north side of buildings, and the snow left in the courtyard of the Whaling Museum across from our front windows.
Two days ago, a woman started working in that courtyard, pushing the snow up towards the main entrance of the museum. As I sat eating my lunch and drinking my tea, I couldn’t figure out what she was doing at first: why bother clearing away all that snow when it was going to melt in a few days anyway? But gradually she piled it up into a definite shape, and when I came back in the late afternoon the woman was gone, but she had left behind a sperm whale fashioned out of snow, with a black beady eye and a jaunty tail that, due to the limitations of the medium in which she worked, had to be a little too small.
This morning I sat at my desk, working my way through the Dhamma-kakka-ppavattana-sutta in preparation for this week’s sermon. I vaguely heard rain begin to patter on the roof and skylights. Barely conscious of it, I thought only that perhaps I’d get wet when I went for a walk today. I read on:
That this was the noble truth concerning sorrow, was not, O Bhikkus, among the doctrines handed down, but there arose within me the eye (to perceive it), there arose the knowledge (of its nature), there arose the understanding (of its cause), there arose the wisdom (to guide in the path of tranquility), there arose the light (to dispel darkness from it).
At last I had to get up and stretch. I wandered around, and looked out our front window to watch the rain coming down. The poor snow whale was being melted by the rain; its tail lay shattered on the ground behind it. Above it, tiny crimson flowers begin to open on the maple just across from our windows. The gray stone of street and courtyard reflect the gray sky. A woman walks by, clutching the hood of her blue coat so it will stay on her head.
Hmm. My evil alter-ego, Mr. Crankypants, is definitely up to something. He has been grinning to himself when he thinks I’m not looking. I have to step out for a minute, and I just know that while I’m gone he’s going to try to post something on this blog. If you don’t like cranky people, best to stop reading right now. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
(Hah! Thought he’d never leave.)
Mr. Crankypants here, feeling particularly cranky this week. Why so cranky? Well, wouldn’t you be cranky if you started thinking about children and church?
Most religious liberal congregations do not allow children to stay in “adult” worship services. The “little darlings” get sent off to Sunday school, where, presumably, someone educates them into full humanity. What really happens in Sunday school? Most adults don’t know, because they never go near the place; nor do they particularly care.
In “progressive” congregations, children are allowed in with the adults for the first fifteen minutes or so. The children are often put on display, for the amusement of the adults, during “story time.” “Story time” is when the adults pass off dumbed-down religion on the children.
Once the children leave, the adults stay in in the sanctuary. (By the way, what are the adults taking sanctuary from? Mr. Crankypants suspects most of us are taking sanctuary from the children.) The adults sit and listen to highly intellectual sermons. The adults know these sermons must be highly intellectual, because the sermons are too intellectual for children to understand.
For you see, religious liberals are actually pretty much like the Calvinists they claim to have revolted against. Religious liberals, like the Calvinists, feel that children are essentially depraved. Unlike the Calvinists, religious liberals do not feel that children are spiritually depraved. Instead, religious liberals feel that children are intellectually depraved. Because children cannot think as well as adults can, they are not fully human. Because they are not fully human, they cannot listen to sermons. Because they cannot listen to sermons, they must be intellectually depraved. Q.E.D.
Oh, but Mr. Crankypants has it all wrong. It has nothing to do with depravity. It’s just developmental psychology. Hah, hah, hah! silly Mr. Crankypants! It’s not theology, it’s all very scientific!
(Uh, oh. Here he comes, back again. Gotta run…)
What’s all thi– Good grief, what nasty, cranky things Mr. Crankypants has written! I just can’t leave this blog unattended for a minute. Dear, dear. My apologies, dear reader, that you have had to listen to mean old Mr. Crankypants. Tomorrow I’ll have a nice, low-key post on birds to make it up to you.
In an earlier post [link], I quoted from an old Unitarian Universalist pamphlet by Duncan Howlett, titled “What Do YOU Believe?” In the portion I quoted, Howlett wrote that Unitarian Universalism is not concerned with traditional belief systems. Indeed, Howlett explicitly rejects traditional belief systems (I’ve silently updated gender-specific language):
What then do we tell our friend who asks us what the Unitarian Universalists believe? We tell our friend in the first place that we reject all doctrines and creeds and theologies if they pretend to any finality. We think the fabrication of such systems valuable, but we do not believe one or another of them.
For me, that statement sums up the core of Unitarian Universalism. If you have the so-called “seven principles” posted in your church building, maybe you should take them down and replace them with a poster bearing the above quote. But you might want to add a positive statement about what we stand for (again, language silently updated):
A Unitarian Universalist is not an unbeliever. In fact, a Unitarian Universalist believes a great deal. Our beliefs are of a different order, but they are nonetheless real. The first of them is belief in humanity…. When we say that we believe in humanity we mean that we believe that human beings are endowed with the power to move toward truth. We believe that human beings are endowed with the discrimination by which to tell the difference between truth and falsehood and error. Yet we know human beings are fallible. We know that individuals make mistakes. Thus when we speak of humankind or humanity we mean the interaction of mind upon mind, experience upon experience….
We believe humanity is to be trusted — not each human being, but humankind taken together, with the testimony of each checked against each. We believe that humankind can find truth, know the right, and do good — again, not each individual, but taken together, with each checked against all the rest. We believe human life has meaning, that the high purposes of humanity may be achieved and the spiritual nature of humanity indicates something about humankind and the cosmos as well. In this faith we live, by it we labor, and through it we find the courage to carry on amidst all the tragedy, misery, and stupidity of life.
You could make all that into a poster — or into an “elevator speech,” a short spiel about our faith you could give to someone with whom you happen to be sharing a ten-second elevator ride. Either way, I find Howlett’s statement to be a far more satisfying (and accurate) summation of Unitarian Universalist “beliefs” than the “seven principles.”
John Bullard, a member of the Unitarian Universalist church here in New Bedford, has a powerful piece on global warming (and the leadership vaccum in today’s world) on the editorial page of today’s Boston Globe. Link
John writes, in part:
Right now we are showing (and our leaders exemplify) characteristics that, in combination, are toxic. We have believed since Genesis that we are apart from nature and our job is to achieve dominion over the earth. We believe we are in control of the earth. What hubris. We are largely ignorant of science, and we hope what we don’t know can’t hurt us. And lastly, we live in denial. This issue of the changing climate isn’t really that big a deal. Arrogance, ignorance, and denial — that is a fatal combination.
What we need from our leaders is the opposite. We need them to know that there is no more important issue than reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We need a proper sense of perspective. This isn’t just about Cape Wind. This is about more Cape Winds, everywhere we can put them. This is about nuclear power because the risks from long-term storage of nuclear fuel rods pales in comparison with the harm being caused right now.
When John speaks of leaders in this piece, I think he mostly means political leaders. But I want to extend what he says to religious leaders. Global warming is no longer something religion can ignore — what will our liberal faith do to make sense out of the looming environmental disaster, and how will our faith motivate us to strong and immediate action?