Category Archives: Uncategorized

Very Very Harry!

No spoilers... I promise.

Just wanted to say that I greatly enjoyed this last Harry Potter book. I thought it was much better than the last couple in the series; there was a lot less of the stuff I didn't like in the others, and a lot more of the stuff I did like. The whole series works out to be a pretty impressive work of storytelling, too; she managed to-tie up all kinds of things in this book, including things I had completely forgotten about. Also, good timing on the release of movie 5 - there's a lot of back-references in this book to stuff that happens in that book. Seeing the movie last week ended up being a useful refresher.

Unhappily, I had the basic gist of the ultimate ending spoiled by someone who failed to put a warning on a message board post the day the book came out. Nonetheless, it was still good.

By comparison: this one (750 pages) took me about ten hours to finish. I've been working on Pynchon's Against The Day (1070 pages) for eight months.

We're Idiots. They Know It.

And Tony Snow proves it:

    Politics sometimes manages to muddle the obvious. The war in Iraq, authorized by three-quarters of the Senate, was launched in response to Saddam Hussein's refusal to abide by 17 United Nations resolutions — and by the fact that Saddam clearly supported terror movements around the world. We never argued that he played a role 9/11; political opponents manufactured the claim to question the president's integrity.

Here's part of the authorization for the Iraq war:

    Whereas the President and Congress are determined to continue to take all appropriate actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;

Colin Powell said:

    "We know members of both organisations [Iraq and Al-Q] have met at least eight times at very senior levels since the early 1990s. In 1996 . . . bin Laden met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Khartoum, and later met with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service."
    In September, after Cheney asserted that Iraq had been "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11," Bush acknowledged there was no evidence that Saddam's government was connected to those attacks.

oops

Even now, Bush reinforces the connection. Here he is last week, July 13, 2007:

    In rebuffing calls to bring troops home from Iraq, President George W. Bush employed a stark and ominous defense. "The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq," he said, "were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that's why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home."

Or, if you like it with moving pictures, take a look at this (via Ugh, way over yonder on another site).

Our leaders think we're stupid, and we give them no reason to think otherwise. An country of intelligent people would've impeached Bush years ago.

Theistic Apology

Mark Kleiman writes:

    Religious thought, writing, and speech, at its adult level, is always metaphorical. "Humans are created in the Image of God," taken literally, is nonsense, if you remember that it is a part of a religious tradition that says that God is an infinite, omniscient, beneficent, immortal being "without parts or passions," which is the opposite of finite, finitely rational, ethically challenged mortal beings with physical bodies and emotional drives.

Of course it's nonsense. But does anyone in the world besides Mr Kleiman think that religious thought, writing, and speech, at its adult level, is always metaphorical ?

A simple Google search on "Bible literal truth" gives such non-metaphorical answers as:

http://www.gotquestions.org/Bible-literal.html

    Question: "Can / Should we interpret the Bible as literal?"

    Answer: Not only CAN we take the Bible literally, but we MUST take the Bible literally. This is the only way to determine what God really is trying to communicate to us.

Not metaphorical.
http://www.dailyadvance.com/.../05/08/0507editGrayLet.html

    Context is extremely important when quoting scripture. Take God at his word. If he says he created the world in sixliteral, 24-hour days then that's exactly what he did. If scripture shows the earth is relatively young compared to evolutionary models, then it is. Not because man says so, but because God does. Evolutionary scientists will not point us to the creator; his word will.

Not metaphorical.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43957

    At a time when the public display and discourse about matters of faith have been under attack, a new poll indicates most Americans – 63 percent – believe the Bible is literally true and the Word of God.
    ...
    When broken down into different demographics, the poll showed 77 percent of Republicans believe in the literal truth of the Bible as do 59 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of those not affiliated with either major party.

    Among Evangelical Christians, 89 percent believe the Bible is literally true and just 4 percent say it is not. Among other Protestants, 70 percent believe the Bible is literally true. That view is shared by 58 percent of Catholics.

63 percent of Americans say Mr. Kleiman is completely wrong. 63%.

OK, but that was searching on "Bible literal truth". Not exactly the same as "is the Bible metaphorical". So, let's try that:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=15-10-019-v

    But Christians believe in realities. When we speak of the Virgin Birth, we mean that a woman who could not possibly have been pregnant had a baby, and that baby was God. When we speak of the Resurrection, we mean that a dead man came alive again, that a body that should have rotted into dust is now—this moment—the living body of Jesus of Nazareth. When we say that some angels freed St. Paul from prison, we mean that some angels freed St. Paul from prison.

    We will insist, against the liberal, that there is no good reason to treat these events as metaphors. They might have happened, and a reasonable argument can be made that they did. The liberal insists that they did not happen and must be turned into metaphors only because he believes that they could not have happened. His faith begins in a dogmatic assertion whose truth is not nearly so obvious as he thinks it is.

Clearly, Not metaphorical. And clearly, this directly contradicts what Kleiman is asserting.

To be fair, there are many more hits that say the Bible isn't literal truth, or that talk about metaphors in the Bible - ie. individual metaphors used as rhetorical devices within the Bible. But that's not the same as saying the whole thing, including what you're supposed to believe, is a metaphor. And since Kleiman said "Religious thought, writing, and speech, at its adult level, is always metaphorical" , we can either conclude the Klemain is completely wrong, or that he believes all those people, including 63% of Americans, are failing to think at an "adult" level.

And it's obviously clear, even without Google, that many people believe there really is someone up there granting wishes, torturing, sickening and killing people to teach opaque lessons, waiting eagerly to send your soul to hell for silly transgressions, etc.. And they bend over backwards, donate their time and money, and arrange their lives around pleasing their God. And it's not just Christianity, of course: people all over the world take their faith literally - they take it literally right to the fucking death. How much more non-metaphorical can you get than someone who's willing to kill himself and others in the name of religion?

Oy.

For more joy, PZ Myers gives Kleiman a truly righteous spanking for this.