Okay, okay, the title makes it seem almost as if I forgot everything that I wrote in my last lengthy tirade during the month that I mysteriously vanished. I am hypocritical. Happy now?
Maybe not. Allow me to elaborate. This isn't about how I vowed not to be one of the people who get a blog, update it a few times, and then leave it to rot - even though it feels like that's what I've been doing, technically that just makes me an oathbreaker. (Aaaaaand that makes me kind of depressed. But I'm back now, and as long as I keep coming up with unusual information that ought to affect the philosophies we live by, I'll keep coming back. Right. Moving on...)
Hypocrisy can be briefly summarized as the "do as I say, not as I do" principle. There is a weak use of the term that can be applied any time someone says one thing and ends up doing another - for someone to promote wearing seat-belts, but to be so absent-minded that he forgets to don one whenever he actually gets in a car, for instance, is certainly saying one thing but doing another, and by this general definition he is certainly a hypocrite.
This use, however, broadens the term to the extent that it encompasses any failure whatsoever - an athlete who says he will become an Olympian but does not perform to standards, an advocate of celibacy who nevertheless succumbs to lust, a pathological kleptomaniac who nonetheless acknowledges that theft is wrong. I would be hard-pressed to place such people in the same category as, say, Anthony Comstock*, who happily drove fifteen people to suicide in the name of the morals of the young and innocent. Human failures are ubiquitous (I think I shall make a proof of this in my next post); by so broadening the definition of the term until it is all-encompassing, we make it impossible to discuss.
* For the sake of fair hearing, the link refers to an article with a mixture of praise and criticism, and excellent depth.
So - rather than discrepancy between a person's claims and actions, let us talk of hypocrisy as the discrepancy between a person's claims and beliefs - not only saying one thing and doing another, but believing one thing and saying another. This must be considerably trickier to discern - how else are we to know what's going on in a person's head unless he says?
"Out of the abundance of the heart..."
Oh, even better: "By their fruits you shall know them." I think the usual way this verse is expressed (it's Matthew 7:16-17, by the way) can lead us to miss something key. "A good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit." Think about it. I don't know how it reads in the original Greek, but simply with regards to the agricultural analogy it seems it would be more accurate to say "A good tree is one that produces good fruit, and a bad tree is one that produces bad fruit." It agrees more with verse 16, too. Anyway, main point - regardless of what someone says, their actions will demonstrate where their true thoughts are.
And this - this is central.
I say I believe in free will. Very strongly (both the saying and the believing). Because it is inconceivable to me on the one hand that the thinking, perceiving, core that is me inside my head is just so much exhaust from the overcomplicated engine of my body that I can't in any way rely on what it tells me about the universe (as I conclude from various atheists), and simultaneously on the other hand that, awesome as it would be, a cosmos-sized Robinson/Goldberg machine is better suited than irreplicable free wills to glorify God (as I understand certain predeterminists).*
* I can build a Robinson/Goldberg machine - actually, I have built one. Building a cosmos-sized one would just require a cosmos-sized me, maybe not even that. Omnipotent God is infinitely more creative than a cosmos-sized me.
On the action end of thing... I have issues. I'd prefer not to elaborate, thanks very much, but suffice to say they are mainly psychological and neurological in nature, and I've made myself serious impediments to quite a lot of basic life, since graduation. I take medication, and it helps, to a noticeable extent, but quite a lot of it is simply bad habits. (Where did the good habits I used to have go? Excellent question. No idea.) And what I've done as regards this matter is... well, let's say that if we were to categorize my failures in terms of the cardinal sins, Sloth would be at the top of the list. And, this is the key part, basically all of my attempts to deal with these problems have involved modifications to my environment - working in a more conducive location, taking instructions from different people, spending less time on the computer, increasing my medication beyond its effectiveness, et cetera.
Since when is psychological behaviorism compatible with free will‽
(Notice my clever use of an interrobang there? I can't believe I finally remembered to do that!)
I feel like I'm going out of my way to validate the idea that the cognitive mind has little to no effect on the physical engine, which is not what I had in mind when I sought out this post.
I'm going to go disturb the universe now, 'kay? Back in a minute.
26 August 2010
10 June 2010
The Mousetrap
Because I have the end-of-quarter approaching, this post is brief and noticeably different from what passes for "the usual" on this blog.
I finished reading Agatha Christie's famous play, The Mousetrap, yesterday, and I'm not sure that it was worth the hype derived from its well-known resistance to exposing the ending. However, in the interest of furthering the joke, I will note that the following concerns the denouement and, thus, contains spoilers.
...
The female lead gets a nice hat, and the pie burns.
I finished reading Agatha Christie's famous play, The Mousetrap, yesterday, and I'm not sure that it was worth the hype derived from its well-known resistance to exposing the ending. However, in the interest of furthering the joke, I will note that the following concerns the denouement and, thus, contains spoilers.
...
The female lead gets a nice hat, and the pie burns.
03 June 2010
Use the force
Take a slinky and stretch it out so that it's fairly taut - across a room, say. Wiggle one of the ends up and down. Notice how whenever you disturb part of it, the disturbance moves away down the length of the slinky?
This is what in physics we call a wave - a disturbance that moves. There's a whole bunch of interesting stuff that happens with it that you can play with (what happens when the disturbance reaches the end of the slinky? is a good place to start), but there's one thing in particular I want to draw your attention to.
Disturb the slinky again and pay close attention to the little loops that compose the spring. What you should notice is that while the disturbance as a whole travels away, the individual pieces of matter basically only move back and forth in line with however you disturbed it; up and down, side to side, whatever. This shouldn't be a huge surprise, right? It's not like you grabbed part of the slinky and threw it across the room or something. The particular loop of the slinky you disturbed just pulls on the neighboring loops, which pull on their neighbors, and so on; it's a function of the fact that the slinky is springy and tries to return to its original shape due to tension forces. The "wave" isn't an actual object, it's just a description of the process as a whole.
So then what happens if you set up something, like a domino chain or something, next to the far end of the slinky and then disturb the slinky sideways? You can try it if you like, though what happens is essentially what you'd expect - the wave propagates down the slinky and runs into the dominoes and knocks them over.
But we just said that the wave isn't a physical object. It's just a little disturbance in the force (heh heh); you just accomplished the same thing as if you'd thrown a baseball down to the other end of the room to knock the dominoes over, only the only thing that moved across the room is a mathematical description of the force and energy transference taking place in the slinky. No actual, physical object crossed the room at any point.
Of course, you could argue that the same thing happens if you just stretched out a chain of dominoes across the room to reach the domino on the other side, but each individual falling domino moves slightly towards the next one. There's a net motion involved in the right direction. But with the slinky, each little bit of matter only moves from side to side (if you were careful). Not only does no object cross the room, no object even moves in the right direction to cross the room.
Congratulations. You just affected an object a whole room away from you with nothing but the power of math.
This is what in physics we call a wave - a disturbance that moves. There's a whole bunch of interesting stuff that happens with it that you can play with (what happens when the disturbance reaches the end of the slinky? is a good place to start), but there's one thing in particular I want to draw your attention to.
Disturb the slinky again and pay close attention to the little loops that compose the spring. What you should notice is that while the disturbance as a whole travels away, the individual pieces of matter basically only move back and forth in line with however you disturbed it; up and down, side to side, whatever. This shouldn't be a huge surprise, right? It's not like you grabbed part of the slinky and threw it across the room or something. The particular loop of the slinky you disturbed just pulls on the neighboring loops, which pull on their neighbors, and so on; it's a function of the fact that the slinky is springy and tries to return to its original shape due to tension forces. The "wave" isn't an actual object, it's just a description of the process as a whole.
So then what happens if you set up something, like a domino chain or something, next to the far end of the slinky and then disturb the slinky sideways? You can try it if you like, though what happens is essentially what you'd expect - the wave propagates down the slinky and runs into the dominoes and knocks them over.
But we just said that the wave isn't a physical object. It's just a little disturbance in the force (heh heh); you just accomplished the same thing as if you'd thrown a baseball down to the other end of the room to knock the dominoes over, only the only thing that moved across the room is a mathematical description of the force and energy transference taking place in the slinky. No actual, physical object crossed the room at any point.
Of course, you could argue that the same thing happens if you just stretched out a chain of dominoes across the room to reach the domino on the other side, but each individual falling domino moves slightly towards the next one. There's a net motion involved in the right direction. But with the slinky, each little bit of matter only moves from side to side (if you were careful). Not only does no object cross the room, no object even moves in the right direction to cross the room.
Congratulations. You just affected an object a whole room away from you with nothing but the power of math.
20 May 2010
Worldbuilding Worldview
I like to write stuff.
Actually, strictly speaking, I don't like the actual act of putting words on paper so much as I like coming up with the things that can be turned into words on paper, but that's part of the reason I got this blog in the first place.
Anyway, in either case, this is probably not a huge surprise.
What I was doing recently, while I was writing - or, as the case may be, not writing - that's a well-worn joke by now, I'm sure - was designing a universe. Not from scratch, that's rather beyond me, but starting with our universe and... tweaking things about it. Adding new and interesting particle sets that act in unusual ways, making gravitational fields act perpendicularly to the movement of electrical charges, that sort of thing. But, since none of these worlds are particularly interesting without people in them, I get to worldbuild the people too - and, even more interestingly, how they think. This means some primitive sociology, since to understand how my fictional societies think I need to figure out how normal people think first. Tricky.
The modern world operates on what might simplistically be termed the scientific method - we try different approaches and use the ones that seem to work. Why is that, exactly? Well... we've tried it before, and it seemed to work, so we keep using it.
That's very intuitive, yes?
That's when it occurred to me that this is rather similar to the charge thrown at various religions by ardent scientific humanists - you know the one, that "you only believe that book because it tells you to!" This, in turn, led me to wonder what other kinds of worldviews I can self-justify in this way. Here's my list...
(*NOTE: This is a thinking exercise more than anything else, so it's okay if I'm reductive to absurd lengths.)
- Scientific: Try everything and keep what works. We've done this before, and it seems to work.
- Post-modern: We took a poll among everybody, and we all agreed that we're mostly sane and have an accurate perception of reality. So if we ask each other, we've got a good chance of getting the right answer.
- Separatist: No need to bring in other people. I'M more usually right than wrong. Right? Right.
- Authoritarian: This guy here is really smart/enlightened/powerful/inspired, and he's right most of the time, which indicates a strong connection with the truth. So when he says we can trust him, it makes sense to believe him.
- Intuitive: My very existence can be described as "I am true". I have this in common with everything else that's true, a connection I should notice. The things I know best are those which are most familiar to me, so the things that feel most familiar are most likely to be true - actual familiarity as well as gut instincts, intuitions, and feelings of deja vu. It gets trickier if things don't seem familiar, so I should keep finding more information until it does connect with something familiar.
- Gnostic: Everything I encounter, true or false, has in common that I have encountered it, and is therefore connected to everything else I've encountered. By exploring this inner existence and finding what is true about myself, and following the connections from myself to the world, I can determine truths about the world. Deep inside, you know I'm right.
What this exercise is demonstrating to me, more than anything else, is the importance of paying attention, not to where your theory is right, but to where it is wrong. You can prove anything you like; but you can't disprove the truth, and if you succeed you obviously did something wrong.
Actually, strictly speaking, I don't like the actual act of putting words on paper so much as I like coming up with the things that can be turned into words on paper, but that's part of the reason I got this blog in the first place.
Anyway, in either case, this is probably not a huge surprise.
What I was doing recently, while I was writing - or, as the case may be, not writing - that's a well-worn joke by now, I'm sure - was designing a universe. Not from scratch, that's rather beyond me, but starting with our universe and... tweaking things about it. Adding new and interesting particle sets that act in unusual ways, making gravitational fields act perpendicularly to the movement of electrical charges, that sort of thing. But, since none of these worlds are particularly interesting without people in them, I get to worldbuild the people too - and, even more interestingly, how they think. This means some primitive sociology, since to understand how my fictional societies think I need to figure out how normal people think first. Tricky.
The modern world operates on what might simplistically be termed the scientific method - we try different approaches and use the ones that seem to work. Why is that, exactly? Well... we've tried it before, and it seemed to work, so we keep using it.
That's very intuitive, yes?
That's when it occurred to me that this is rather similar to the charge thrown at various religions by ardent scientific humanists - you know the one, that "you only believe that book because it tells you to!" This, in turn, led me to wonder what other kinds of worldviews I can self-justify in this way. Here's my list...
(*NOTE: This is a thinking exercise more than anything else, so it's okay if I'm reductive to absurd lengths.)
- Scientific: Try everything and keep what works. We've done this before, and it seems to work.
- Post-modern: We took a poll among everybody, and we all agreed that we're mostly sane and have an accurate perception of reality. So if we ask each other, we've got a good chance of getting the right answer.
- Separatist: No need to bring in other people. I'M more usually right than wrong. Right? Right.
- Authoritarian: This guy here is really smart/enlightened/powerful/inspired, and he's right most of the time, which indicates a strong connection with the truth. So when he says we can trust him, it makes sense to believe him.
- Intuitive: My very existence can be described as "I am true". I have this in common with everything else that's true, a connection I should notice. The things I know best are those which are most familiar to me, so the things that feel most familiar are most likely to be true - actual familiarity as well as gut instincts, intuitions, and feelings of deja vu. It gets trickier if things don't seem familiar, so I should keep finding more information until it does connect with something familiar.
- Gnostic: Everything I encounter, true or false, has in common that I have encountered it, and is therefore connected to everything else I've encountered. By exploring this inner existence and finding what is true about myself, and following the connections from myself to the world, I can determine truths about the world. Deep inside, you know I'm right.
What this exercise is demonstrating to me, more than anything else, is the importance of paying attention, not to where your theory is right, but to where it is wrong. You can prove anything you like; but you can't disprove the truth, and if you succeed you obviously did something wrong.
06 May 2010
Something quick to catch up
Let's suppose you're thirsty, and the only convenient source of drink nearby is a vending machine, dispensing $1.25 drinks.
You have only $2.00 on you, in bills. The vending machine doesn't give change.
I happen to be walking by, though, and I have a couple of quarters on me. I'll give you my two quarters if you'll give me a dollar.
Alternatively, you could just put $2.00 in the machine and let it keep the change, which would cost you an extra $.25 than if you bought my quarters.
Or you could go without a drink, but you're really thirsty and don't want to do that.
So... How did my $.50 suddenly double in value?
You have only $2.00 on you, in bills. The vending machine doesn't give change.
I happen to be walking by, though, and I have a couple of quarters on me. I'll give you my two quarters if you'll give me a dollar.
Alternatively, you could just put $2.00 in the machine and let it keep the change, which would cost you an extra $.25 than if you bought my quarters.
Or you could go without a drink, but you're really thirsty and don't want to do that.
So... How did my $.50 suddenly double in value?
29 April 2010
Groups
I am not a Christian.
There are lots of people who think that this term is used far too often, by people who call themselves this simply by habit, or preference, without actually understanding what it means and living it. These people tend to prefer to call themselves "believers" or "followers of Christ" or something equally ethereal and pleasant-sounding, to distinguish themselves from the petty heathen who have mistakenly confused their own beliefs for the perfect and life-changing doctrines espoused by our Lord Jesus Christ.
Unfortunately for the proliferation of these terms, the people who use them almost never agree on the manner in which one's life should be changed, and consequently are as disunited amongst themselves as the remainder of the church that they criticize.
I am not a believer or follower of Christ.
In the common parlance, people tend to refer to the kind of people who believe that their beliefs are right and everyone else's are wrong as "fundamentalists" (typically described as "taking the Bible literally"), because that is so mean to all the people who are wrong to actually tell them so, and it is wrong of you to do that! (And fundamentalists advocate, like, killing people who disagree with them, but we only mock them, so we must be better people than they are!)
I am not a fundamentalist.
In lieu of continuing this ridiculous pattern further than necessary, I will also proclaim the following: I am not an American. I am not a Caucasian. I am not a brunette. I am not a gentile. I am not a logician. I am not a scientist. I am not an artist. I am not a philosopher. I am not a body. I am not a soul. I am not a mind. I am not a human. I am not a person.
At least, not in the way you are probably thinking of any of those things.
The thing is, those things are all categories. Categorizing is a human and, you may be surprised to hear me say, good thing to do. We have to stick labels on things in order to make sense of the universe, and just because we label it doesn't mean that the label is arbitrary or wrong, like so many nominalists would have you believe. But, when we do this, we tend to assume that labeling something is like placing it into a file instead of a pasting a sticker on it. Truth is, if everything exists outside your own head, it has to be the latter.
If we describe something as a door, what we're really saying is that this thing can be opened and closed, and when it's open you can walk through it.
If we say something is an electron, we mean it's tiny thing possessing a certain amount of charge, and a certain amount of mass energy, and behaves like this in these situations.
If we say something is a fact, we mean that it's a statement about the universe (and usually, that it happens to be empirically true).
If we say it's a number, we mean it's a abstract object that can be counted or measured.
In fact, the only real noun in English, or any other language, is "thing". Every other noun just means "thing with descriptions X, Y, Z, etc", "thing with adjectives". Some of these properties are extremely complex, like for words like "human", but it can still come down to something like "thing that is alive, and as an adult is able to walk on two legs (things used for walking), manipulate things with two hands (things used for manipulating, that have smaller things on them that can grip other things), and talk, see, taste, smell, and hear with a head (thing attached to another thing that is able to react automatically and contemplatively in a lot of different ways to things around it) and performs abstract and conceptual thought and communication, OR is descended from another human".
All I'm saying is that you have an independent existence from any of these stickers, and if you and the sticker don't match, the sticker is wrong. Object-oriented linguistics, if you will. I think this is important, because being capable of abstract and conceptual thought means that we end up fixing or adjusting what each sticker means constantly, and a lot of the time something that the sticker used to accurately describe no longer does. Especially when we start referring to the collection of all objects with a particular sticker on it as part of some uniform whole, as if the sticker was there first. No, I'm not being a pedant about this whole thing.
But perhaps I'm being a little pedantic.
There are lots of people who think that this term is used far too often, by people who call themselves this simply by habit, or preference, without actually understanding what it means and living it. These people tend to prefer to call themselves "believers" or "followers of Christ" or something equally ethereal and pleasant-sounding, to distinguish themselves from the petty heathen who have mistakenly confused their own beliefs for the perfect and life-changing doctrines espoused by our Lord Jesus Christ.
Unfortunately for the proliferation of these terms, the people who use them almost never agree on the manner in which one's life should be changed, and consequently are as disunited amongst themselves as the remainder of the church that they criticize.
I am not a believer or follower of Christ.
In the common parlance, people tend to refer to the kind of people who believe that their beliefs are right and everyone else's are wrong as "fundamentalists" (typically described as "taking the Bible literally"), because that is so mean to all the people who are wrong to actually tell them so, and it is wrong of you to do that! (And fundamentalists advocate, like, killing people who disagree with them, but we only mock them, so we must be better people than they are!)
I am not a fundamentalist.
In lieu of continuing this ridiculous pattern further than necessary, I will also proclaim the following: I am not an American. I am not a Caucasian. I am not a brunette. I am not a gentile. I am not a logician. I am not a scientist. I am not an artist. I am not a philosopher. I am not a body. I am not a soul. I am not a mind. I am not a human. I am not a person.
At least, not in the way you are probably thinking of any of those things.
The thing is, those things are all categories. Categorizing is a human and, you may be surprised to hear me say, good thing to do. We have to stick labels on things in order to make sense of the universe, and just because we label it doesn't mean that the label is arbitrary or wrong, like so many nominalists would have you believe. But, when we do this, we tend to assume that labeling something is like placing it into a file instead of a pasting a sticker on it. Truth is, if everything exists outside your own head, it has to be the latter.
If we describe something as a door, what we're really saying is that this thing can be opened and closed, and when it's open you can walk through it.
If we say something is an electron, we mean it's tiny thing possessing a certain amount of charge, and a certain amount of mass energy, and behaves like this in these situations.
If we say something is a fact, we mean that it's a statement about the universe (and usually, that it happens to be empirically true).
If we say it's a number, we mean it's a abstract object that can be counted or measured.
In fact, the only real noun in English, or any other language, is "thing". Every other noun just means "thing with descriptions X, Y, Z, etc", "thing with adjectives". Some of these properties are extremely complex, like for words like "human", but it can still come down to something like "thing that is alive, and as an adult is able to walk on two legs (things used for walking), manipulate things with two hands (things used for manipulating, that have smaller things on them that can grip other things), and talk, see, taste, smell, and hear with a head (thing attached to another thing that is able to react automatically and contemplatively in a lot of different ways to things around it) and performs abstract and conceptual thought and communication, OR is descended from another human".
All I'm saying is that you have an independent existence from any of these stickers, and if you and the sticker don't match, the sticker is wrong. Object-oriented linguistics, if you will. I think this is important, because being capable of abstract and conceptual thought means that we end up fixing or adjusting what each sticker means constantly, and a lot of the time something that the sticker used to accurately describe no longer does. Especially when we start referring to the collection of all objects with a particular sticker on it as part of some uniform whole, as if the sticker was there first. No, I'm not being a pedant about this whole thing.
But perhaps I'm being a little pedantic.
22 April 2010
A puzzle
You have a rectangular field containing an irregularly-shaped pond whose area you wish to know.
The tools you have at hand are the property deed for the field, a cannon, and an infinite number of cannonballs.
How do you find the area of the pond?
The tools you have at hand are the property deed for the field, a cannon, and an infinite number of cannonballs.
How do you find the area of the pond?
15 April 2010
Test Yourself
Please choose the best answer for each question.
Name:
Quest:
Favorite Color:
1) What is nescience?
(a) Orange
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) I don't know
2) What is veracity?
(a) Silver
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) I don't know
3) What is your favorite color?
(a) Blue
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) None of the above
4) What is melange?
(a) Grey
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) None of the above
5) What is contradictory?
(a) Vermilion
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) None of the above
6) What is the capital of Assyria?
(a) Ashur
(b) Calah
(c) Khorsabad
(d) Nineveh
(e) None of the above
7) What is the maximum airborne velocity of an unladen swallow?
(a) 1 m/s
(b) 5 m/s
(c) 11 m/s
(d) 200 m/s
(e) 42
8) Is this a question where one of the possible answers goes "blam"?
(a) No.
(b) BLAM
(c) BLAM
(d) BLAM
(e) Actually, I think several of your possible answer make that noise.
9) Cake. - True/False
10) Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - True/False
11) This sentence no verb. - True/False
12) Think of a number, any number.
13) Where's Waldo?
14) Fill in the blank: __________
Name:
Quest:
Favorite Color:
1) What is nescience?
(a) Orange
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) I don't know
2) What is veracity?
(a) Silver
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) I don't know
3) What is your favorite color?
(a) Blue
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) None of the above
4) What is melange?
(a) Grey
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) None of the above
5) What is contradictory?
(a) Vermilion
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) None of the above
6) What is the capital of Assyria?
(a) Ashur
(b) Calah
(c) Khorsabad
(d) Nineveh
(e) None of the above
7) What is the maximum airborne velocity of an unladen swallow?
(a) 1 m/s
(b) 5 m/s
(c) 11 m/s
(d) 200 m/s
(e) 42
8) Is this a question where one of the possible answers goes "blam"?
(a) No.
(b) BLAM
(c) BLAM
(d) BLAM
(e) Actually, I think several of your possible answer make that noise.
9) Cake. - True/False
10) Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - True/False
11) This sentence no verb. - True/False
12) Think of a number, any number.
13) Where's Waldo?
14) Fill in the blank: __________
11 April 2010
It's not Thursday yet, but this is just a tech update
I've added the feedback bar thing. I had wanted a nice number of dichotomies so you could tell me that your impressions are that what I write is kind or cruel, true or false, beautiful or ugly, confusing or clear, justified or unjustified.
Unfortunately, I can fit all those into the little box but they'll only put up a few anyway. Foul technology, curse your surprising but inevitable betrayal!
So now there's just three options - good if you think I was persuasive, bad if you think I was unkind, and ugly if it's just too confusing to tell what just happened. (I expect this one to be quite popular.)
Also, I've gone back and added a bunch of links into Socrates Meets Malacoda for explaining what I had in mind with all the various philosophy/literary/science-y geeky references I made - maybe this will clear things up a bit?
Unfortunately, I can fit all those into the little box but they'll only put up a few anyway. Foul technology, curse your surprising but inevitable betrayal!
So now there's just three options - good if you think I was persuasive, bad if you think I was unkind, and ugly if it's just too confusing to tell what just happened. (I expect this one to be quite popular.)
Also, I've gone back and added a bunch of links into Socrates Meets Malacoda for explaining what I had in mind with all the various philosophy/literary/science-y geeky references I made - maybe this will clear things up a bit?
08 April 2010
Sparkling angels, come and see
The idea of angels probably irritates me more than the idea of gods does. They're practically identical for all we know about them - they're supernatural and a Lot Better Than Mere Mortals, For Sure, but angels serve even higher beings and gods generally don't... but angels take the lead due to the outstanding problem that the book I've sworn to pledge as the truth, the important truth, and nothing but the truth, claims they exist and gives them fairly prominent roles in the story, and yet still manages to skimp on the details of what, exactly, they are, and how, exactly, they matter.
The details it does provide, however, are fairly clearly in direct contradiction to the average person's conception of them. If you manage to get a clear answer out of this hypothetical person on "such a religious question", she is likely to give you three images of what angels look like:
(a) A divinely cute infant or young child, but with wings.
(b) A divinely good-looking woman, but with wings.
(c) A divinely powerful knight, but with wings.
I suppose there's also (d) some combination of the above, usually (b) and (c) because both possible combinations ("female" plus "powerful", and "knight" plus "good-looking") are apparently synergistically attractive, and warrior children don't really seem like a very divine idea.
You may notice a couple of recurring elements, and oddly they're the only ones that come close to approximating biblical descriptions (which tends to multiply both the "divine" and "winged" aspects to redundancy and beyond). I can think of three good reasons the others are wrong:
First, a fact that I've heard circulated frequently and so I presume is fairly well-known, there are very few angels in the Bible who open their messages with a preamble of "Hey there!" It's generally closer to "Fear not". This would seem to rule out (a), for whom this would be unnecessary unless every biblical hero and heroine happened to have a horrible phobia of children with wings*, and (b), whom studies show should worry more about other emotions than fear getting in the way of the message. Similarly, I can't think of any explicitly described manifestations with more than a passing resemblance to a human being, barring when Raphael goes incognito for most of the Book of Tobit, which would seem to eliminate (c) and (d) as well.
* This isn't necessarily a bad assumption to make, but you do have to consider that among such heroines is Mary, who had very explicitly never had children before.
Second, whatever else angels may be, the Bible is fairly specific that humans alone are made in the image of God. If you believe this refers to physical structure, this should suffice; if a reference to God's triunity as mind, body, spirit - well, angels are obviously spiritual beings and occasionally rebellious, which would leave the body as the key difference.
Finally, outside of their allegiances demons and angels are fundamentally identical. There's no support for the notion that good is pretty and evil disgusting (or vice versa) other than peoples' astonishing tendency to merge goodness, truth, and beauty into a single axis; quite the contrary, metaphors involving demonic activity while "disguised as an angel of light" are common. If demons can be light and still evil, angels can be dark and still good.
This is all just a roundabout excuse for me to cite C. S. Lewis, who deals with this quite a lot in The Space Trilogy (another of the world's best stories nobody has ever read), especially because several of his "angels" are the personifications of planets rather than divine messengers. When two manifest near the end of Perelandra it takes them some time to figure out an appearance that won't cause the human protagonist to be physically ill; before they finally settle on sort of metallic colossi, some of their attempts are closer to vertiginous spaces swirling with geometric shapes than any real object. Lewis justified this elsewhere simply by pointing out that everyone expects the forces of evil to be terrible and threatening, and that's all very well, because you can always have faith that the forces of good will swoop in and save you. But when the same applies to the ones in which you trust for salvation... one way or another, you will have to undergo a very radical change of mind.
And when I am explicitly imperfect by nature, and wisdom begins with the perfect fear of an omnipotent God and ends with it being dispelled by his perfect love, that sounds far more real to me than any pretty fledged human.
The details it does provide, however, are fairly clearly in direct contradiction to the average person's conception of them. If you manage to get a clear answer out of this hypothetical person on "such a religious question", she is likely to give you three images of what angels look like:
(a) A divinely cute infant or young child, but with wings.
(b) A divinely good-looking woman, but with wings.
(c) A divinely powerful knight, but with wings.
I suppose there's also (d) some combination of the above, usually (b) and (c) because both possible combinations ("female" plus "powerful", and "knight" plus "good-looking") are apparently synergistically attractive, and warrior children don't really seem like a very divine idea.
You may notice a couple of recurring elements, and oddly they're the only ones that come close to approximating biblical descriptions (which tends to multiply both the "divine" and "winged" aspects to redundancy and beyond). I can think of three good reasons the others are wrong:
First, a fact that I've heard circulated frequently and so I presume is fairly well-known, there are very few angels in the Bible who open their messages with a preamble of "Hey there!" It's generally closer to "Fear not". This would seem to rule out (a), for whom this would be unnecessary unless every biblical hero and heroine happened to have a horrible phobia of children with wings*, and (b), whom studies show should worry more about other emotions than fear getting in the way of the message. Similarly, I can't think of any explicitly described manifestations with more than a passing resemblance to a human being, barring when Raphael goes incognito for most of the Book of Tobit, which would seem to eliminate (c) and (d) as well.
* This isn't necessarily a bad assumption to make, but you do have to consider that among such heroines is Mary, who had very explicitly never had children before.
Second, whatever else angels may be, the Bible is fairly specific that humans alone are made in the image of God. If you believe this refers to physical structure, this should suffice; if a reference to God's triunity as mind, body, spirit - well, angels are obviously spiritual beings and occasionally rebellious, which would leave the body as the key difference.
Finally, outside of their allegiances demons and angels are fundamentally identical. There's no support for the notion that good is pretty and evil disgusting (or vice versa) other than peoples' astonishing tendency to merge goodness, truth, and beauty into a single axis; quite the contrary, metaphors involving demonic activity while "disguised as an angel of light" are common. If demons can be light and still evil, angels can be dark and still good.
This is all just a roundabout excuse for me to cite C. S. Lewis, who deals with this quite a lot in The Space Trilogy (another of the world's best stories nobody has ever read), especially because several of his "angels" are the personifications of planets rather than divine messengers. When two manifest near the end of Perelandra it takes them some time to figure out an appearance that won't cause the human protagonist to be physically ill; before they finally settle on sort of metallic colossi, some of their attempts are closer to vertiginous spaces swirling with geometric shapes than any real object. Lewis justified this elsewhere simply by pointing out that everyone expects the forces of evil to be terrible and threatening, and that's all very well, because you can always have faith that the forces of good will swoop in and save you. But when the same applies to the ones in which you trust for salvation... one way or another, you will have to undergo a very radical change of mind.
And when I am explicitly imperfect by nature, and wisdom begins with the perfect fear of an omnipotent God and ends with it being dispelled by his perfect love, that sounds far more real to me than any pretty fledged human.
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