(no subject)

As of Monday night, 2,340 gay and lesbian couples have been married in San Francisco.

I look up and note that the sky has still not fallen.

...

Maybe, just maybe, that means God doesn't care. Or maybe, possibly, God is even happy about it.

Let me make my view on this absolutely clear. The forces of this world that would deny equal rights for queers, or assert that being deviant in itself makes one naturally inferior or some sort of threat to the "moral fabric of society" are the very same archontic and discordant forces that said the same of blacks and Jews in previous decades.

(no subject)

Weather forecast for the peak of Carnival as of today:

Friday
Isolated Thunderstorms (30%); High: 69; Low: 51

Saturday
Partly Cloudy (10%); High: 61; Low: 46

Sunday
Cloudy (10%); High: 58; Low: 50

Monday
Cloudy (10%); High: 64; Low: 50

Tuesday
Mostly Cloudy (20%); High: 66; Low: 52

Wednesday
Showers (50%); High: 65; Low: 52

As long as it holds to this, the traditional first-day-of-Lent rainstorm in New Orleans will recur.

Visiting friend forecast:
ubiquity arrives Friday night
lady_babalon with childling, and secret_willow arrive Sunday midday

(no subject)

Let's get back to Biblical standards of marriage. How much for your daughter?

(no subject)

I'm only 80 pages into it, but already I'm considering John Dominic Crossan's The Birth of Christianity to be one of the most important books I've read in a long time.

Crossan starts by delineating two major strands in Western philosophical thought which he has labeled "sarcophilic" (lit. "flesh-loving") and "sarcophobic (lit. "flesh-fearing"). He makes it clear that he favors sarcophilic tradition and considers sarcophobic tradition, whether moderate or extreme, to be inherently dehumanizing.

His argument is that distinctions between "catholic" and "Gnostic" Christianity (which are inaccurate anyway), and between "dualism" and "monism," have become so caught up in polemic and apologetics that they are best discarded at this point. I agree. I also agree with him that sarcophobic thought is inherently dehumanizing and have sought to distance myself and some of the early strands of Gnosticism from dualistic tendencies. (As I mentioned to digbydolben yesterday my efforts in this regard look like this and this.)

His assertion is that sarcophobic thought was not an inherent element of Christian thought until it was injected by Paul (who was a "moderate" sarcophobic) and later by extreme sarcophobics like the Docetae. The history of Christianity, he then says, is the slow victory of sarcophobia over sarcophilia -- which would account for the dehumanizing results that I have catalogued at length in challenging_god. (See for example this entry, this entry, and this entry by yahvah.)

There are points of disagreement already. For example, Crossan calls sarcophobia "Hellenistic" but conveniently overlooks distinctly Jewish forms of sarcophobia such as the teachings of the Qumran Essenes, who were radically flesh-denying and who sought to infuse Judaism with the Zoroastrian "war between light and darkness" -- and succeeded in infusing such thought into Christianity. (Matthew 24 would have been right at home with the Dead Sea Scrolls.)

However I'm finding Crossan's work invaluable to my own approach. His chapters on psychological researches into memory are unsettling (for example, the correlation between certainty and accuracy in memory is only 0.4 -- that is, being certain you are remembering something correctly gives you a 4 in 10 chance of being correct) and his overview of the way oral tradition differs in its conception from literate tradition of "word-for-word transmission" of a teaching is eye-opening.

Edit. Another plus is that the text is very readable. Crossan is a scrappy arguer, and relentless enough that I sure wouldn't want to come up against him. There is also a strong sense that he is a man of high academic integrity. For example, he considers it an ethical issue that scholars should not dismiss out of hand the Roman view of Emperor as divine incarnation while accepting without question the Christian view of Jesus as divine incarnation.