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Monday, December 02, 2002 |
What is this tale?
Richard Powers conjures Sheherazade in this brilliant, affecting story currently appearing in Salon. It's called "Literary Devices:"
Who else was there, but us? The machine was not some other, alien, inhuman teller. It was our same old recombinant tale, recut and retold. And every night this latest Scheherazade went on telling me, "What is this tale, compared to the one I will tell you tomorrow night, if you but spare me and let me live."
This is a brilliant story, growing out of the intersection between technology and the need to tell stories. It's totally hip about the current world of the web (and has savvy links buried in it). At the same time, it's as literary as stories come, and wise about the literature. Highly recommended. The two Powers novels I've read were a little uneven, but both were provocative and highly memorable. I don't think I'll be going back to his earlier stuff, but I'm very likely to read new books as they appear.
It appears as part of the curious collaboration between Salon and Zoetrope: All Story, Francis Ford Coppola's magazine (which I've seen but not read). Oddly, stories will appear in Salon only four times a year, and then, apparently for only two weeks. Read this one while it's there. (If you're reading this later, there's a description of it here, with a link that'll let you buy the magazine.)
9:46:06 PM Permalink
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How to be a Democrat
I got a bit of email nonsense today, a screed called "How to be a Democrat." Now I enjoy political satire, but when you read this thing you find nothing that's funny, ironic, interesting. Instead there's thinly veiled hate (homosexuals, Chinese, the U.S. government). I inserted some comments in it, trying to reply and figure out what the point was.
5:49:56 PM Permalink
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Einstein and God?
Did Einstein believe in God? It seems clear he didn't believe in a personal god:
I get hundreds and hundreds of letters but seldom one so interesting as yours. I believe that your opinions about our society are quite reasonable. It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. I have no possibility to bring the money you sent me to the appropriate receiver. I return it therefore in recognition of your good heart and intention. Your letter shows me also that wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
From "Einstein's Writings on Science and Religion." And this is pretty great about teaching religion to the young:
As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came - though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents - to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment-an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections. It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the "merely personal," from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.
2:57:19 PM Permalink
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Thomas Jefferson
Here's an amusing attempt to turn Thomas Jefferson into a Christian hero of some sort, and to distort him:
This short letter is interesting in view of the fact that so many modern anti-religious types have tried to paint some of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson in particular, as agnostics, if not atheists. Clearly, Jefferson shows familiarity with Christian concepts and demonstrates a belief in heaven. These are not the words of an agnostic or of a deist who believed that God created the world and then walked away, leaving it like a clock to run itself.
Part of the problem many Americans have in understanding the Founding Fathers is a general ignorance of America's colonial and revolutionary period. Failed public education is the chief culprit. The other part of the problem is failing to read the words in the context in which they were written.
Fascinating. It's not just modern day anti-religious fanatics who have tried to make Jefferson an infidel. Tom Paine wrote:
"When I was in Connecticut the summer before last, I fell in company with some Baptists among whom were three ministers. The conversation turned on the election for President, and one of them who appeared to be a leading man said, 'They cry out against Mr. Jefferson because they say he is a Deist. Well, a Deist may be a good man, and if he think it right, it is right to him. For my own part,' said he, 'I had rather vote for a Deist than for a blue-skin Presbyterian.'"
And when Jefferson's works were first published, the New York Observer, then the leading Christian journal of this country, gave them the following notice:
"Mr. Jefferson, it is well known, was never suspected of being very friendly to orthodox religion, but these volumes prove not only that he was a disbeliever, but a scoffer of the very lowest class."'
It's also pretty clear that Jefferson didn't think much of those who would say that the laws of the US are based on Christianity:
"I was glad to find in your book a formal contradiction at length of the judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such the judges have usurped in their repeated decisions, that Christianity is a part of the common law. The proof of the contrary which you have adduced is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet Pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character had ever existed. But it may amuse you to show when and by what means they stole the law in upon us. In a case of quare impedit in the Year Book 34 H. 6, folio 38, (anno 1458,) a question was made, how far the ecclesiastical law was to be respected in a common law court. And Prisot, Chief Justice, gives his opinion in these words: 'A tiel leis qu'ils de seint eglise ont en ancien scripture covient a nous a donner credence,' etc. See S.C. Fitzh. Abr. Qu. imp. 89. Bro.; Abr. Qu. imp. 12.
Of course, it's always easy to make assertions about them terrible liberals and the state of modern education. But the facts don't always hold up. [Internet Infidels
2:34:14 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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