World of Warcraft characters

In case anyone wants to come looking for me some night on Argent Dawn (RP-US). Listed roughly in the order of likelihood i will be playing them at any given time.

Hyacynthe: level 80 Undead Priest <Bloodmoon Chosen>
Coraxo: level 80 Blood Elf Mage <The White Oath>
Sobralia: level 79 Orc Rogue <Velvet Claw>
Lotuslily: level 73 Night Elf Hunter <Agency>
Jerolian: level 60 male Blood Elf Death Knight <The White Oath>
Siatris: level 43 Blood Elf Warlock <Velvet Claw>
Sabraea: level 31 Blood Elf Hunter <Velvet Claw>
Poisonflower: level 50 Tauren Druid <The White Oath>
Magalogosh: level 15 Orc Shaman <Velvet Claw>

All of my chars are female unless otherwise noted.

This entry will be updated periodically, and i'm going to put a link to it in my "links" list.

Last updated August 25, 2009

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Hmm. Some small town in Philadelphia has a debate over Intelligent Design in the classroom, and it's front page news for days.

The official Vatican newspaper writes an article supporting evolution and rejecting Intelligent Design, and news of this in the US is buried in the Science section.

This is just one example of a campaign in the mass media i've mentioned before, led by the Religious Right, to downplay the deep differences between Fundamentalism and Catholicism for political purposes.

was Christianity hijacked?

The last night of Prof. Koester's class was an open-floor question night. The question which my fellow students pressed for almost an hour was this: when was the moment, precisely, when Christianity was hijacked? By this, they meant, at what moment did it stop being a Jewish liberation movement and become what it is today? They kept pressing, because no sound-bite answer was forthcoming.

There is a lot of presumption just in the asking of that question. It is a notion that is becoming increasingly popular, fueled by popular works like The DaVinci Code and the movie Stigmata, and even books like The Jesus Mysteries: the idea that Christianity was taken over by a Roman emperor or a council of ruthless power-hungry bishops and became, overnight, the opposite of what it had been the day before. There was this coup at the top, and suddenly upstanding Christians who knew the truth about what had happened were now heretics who were persecuted and burned at the stake. Scriptures which told the truth were burned and new forgeries were put in their place.

There is no truth to this idea. Well, it is obvious that Christianity is not a Jewish liberation movement. And there was a long history of persecution of heretics and destruction of heretical writings. But there was no "coup" within Christianity, no fourth-century empire-wide Kristalnacht, no conspiracy to cover up the truth at Nicaea.

It's tempting to buy into this notion, though, because otherwise one is hard-pressed to explain how we could have come from Jesus who said "Love thy neighbor" and "It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven" and who welcomed the company of imperfect sinners, to witch hunts, inquisitions, crusades, and finally the modern worldwide media-savvy empire of greed and intolerance which the Fundamentalists have constructed.

This is a notably dualistic (and biased) way of looking at the evolution of Christianity, though it is one familiar to those of us who have become disenchanted with the religion they were raised to be a part of. And, this idea supports the notion that Fundamentalism *is* Christianity, a notion that the Fundamentalists have been working very hard to plant in people's minds. They don't care whether you love them or hate them, so long as you accept that they are the sole heirs of Christianity. The only reason they have toned down their attacks on Catholicism is because their precious GOP needs the Catholic vote.

The progression took place over centuries with a succession of small, gradual changes.

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wow connectivity question

We've been having problems in the house staying connected to WoW.

Just now, i was booted off, and Norton Firewall told me my computer was under attack, with a pattern that fit the "NMAP XMAS SCAN." I have the IP address of the computer that was trying to do this. But now, i can't get back onto Scarlet Crusade, though i seem to have no trouble getting onto Shadowsong. It doesn't give me an error or a place in queue, it just goes back to the server selection screen without comment.

Has anyone who plays WoW had any problems with the Firewall mistaking WoW for a Trojan Horse?