EclecticLip

We came back from Toy Story 3 today — a great movie, with a dense, well-plotted storyline.  (It’s amazing what happens when you invest your money in the writers, instead of star actors!  A lesson HBO clearly learned, long ago…)  Haven’t seen the latest Shrek instalment, but that’s not material to the current web post.

One of the wonderful things about ancient mythology is how storytellers would (often) amalgamate past traditions into their current narratives.  The most obvious example in the West, is how the writers of the Christian Gospel of Matthew linked everything they recorded Jesus doing, to passages the Hebrew Bible — what Christians refer to as the “Old Testament”.  (Out of respect for the Jewish tradition, I’ll be referring to them as the Hebrew Bible.)  Virgil also meshed his Aeneid to Homer’s Iliad, by linking Aeneas to Troy.

In the East, the Ashtavakra Gita linked itself to the Ramayana by adopting as its eponymous protagonist, a relatively minor character from that epic.  Doubtless, there are innumerable other examples.

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Now, the Toy Story and Shrek franchises are really interesting in that they also build on pre-existing platforms; namely, classic toys and fairy tales respectively.  As such, they’re almost like modern “remixes” of earlier cultural traditions.  And like other “adaptive refreshings” of cultural traditions, they’re doing it in today’s dominant genre, the movie.

(images from Wikipedia)

I recently had a chance to catch up on some podcasts.  (Much like my “not-yet-read books” bookshelf, I’ve got many a megabite of unheard podcasts on my hard drive.)  This one was a CBC Ideas episode called The Moral of the Story Is; it’s dated March 22 2010.  It starts off with Bertrand Russell’s remark that:

“Most of the greatest evil that man has inflicted upon man comes throuhg people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.”

Partway through, the narrator interviews one Dr. Robert Burton, a neurologist at Mount Zion University of California Hospital.  At about the twenty-minute mark, he suggests that the brain’s reward system activates, when one has the sense of being right — in the same way it activates when people smoke, drink, use drugs, or engage in other addictive behaviours.  Basically, feeling indignant gives you an upswell of (bio)chemical pleasure.

At about 22 minutes, there’s a wonderful exchange:

Narrator: are you suggesting Bill O’Reilly is some sort of junkie, in a way?

Burton:  I’m not suggesting.

This rings true for me.  I’ve experienced the intoxicating sense of indignant righteousness when arguing with people who were “clearly wrong”.  Nowadays, I try to maintain an unrippled calm; and temper any anger with humour.  My media habits reflect this: I used to enjoy listening to American progressive talk radio, but now tend to find it agitating, again on account of the subsurface exasperation.  Of course, that’s nothing compared to what relatively little I’ve experienced of its conservative cousin.  I prefer The Daily Show, Colbert Report and Bill Maher, as their jeremiads are leavened with humour.  Our modern jesters, I suppose.

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While Dawkins maintains his composure here, he carries a lot of anger — indignation — towards the shallower strands of various religion traditions.  If memory serves, he gives Buddhism a pass in The God Delusion; his real problem is with literalism in the Abrahamic faiths, and Christian fundamentalism in particular.  Brutish and backwards as they may be, they’re not worth tripping into addictive indignation over.  Surely other approaches are better.

I was reading a book on the Crusades, that jihadist period of European Christendom, to learn more about the events that doomed Asian Christianity.

Basically, Christianity had more adherents across Asia and Africa than in Europe until about the time of the Crusades — meaning that the heretical Jacobites and Nestorians  outnumbered the followers of the orthodox Catholic and Orthodox churches.  Jenkins suggested that the fall of Asian Christianity was due to the emergence of hardline Muslim leaders across Asia who weren’t as tolerant of the other Peoples of the Book (Christians, Jews) as prior leaders had been.  These leaders emerged at a time when the Islamic world was troubled by repeated Christian invasions from the West, and existentially threatened by Mongol invasions from the East.  It appears that when the Khans converted to Islam, they became the most intolerant rulers of all.

But back to the Crusades.  Professor Tyerman’s description of crusade recruiters made me think immediately of modern motivational speakers.  Only, instead of motivating their audiences to sign up for a follow-up course, they were trying to motivate them to pick up arms and travel for several months so that if they survived the trip, they could engage an enemy, on said enemy’s territory, surrounded by said enemy’s allies. 

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That’s my vote for the epitaph to George W. Bush’s Presidency.

For all his violations against law and land — which were legion — I rank his authorization of torture as the very worst; the summum malum, the apex of evil.

Setting up the Guantanamo Bay gulag, revoking habeas corpus, and implementing extraordinary rendition make for a formidable axis of malice of their own.  But torture… torture is sui generis, a class of horror of its own.  And as the title points out, torture is what the Romans did to Jesus.

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…until at least the weekend.  Workday priorities and such.

Meanwhile, the following phrase from Christopher Tyerman’s Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades struck me as postworthy:

Ironically, for all its political success, the Albigensian Crusade failed to eradicate the Cathars, a task effected by the more pacific and reasoned methods [?!?!] of the Inquisition.  (p68, hardcover edition)

The more pacific and reasoned methods of the Inquisition?

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The debate in Christian scholarship about the correct place for the Gospel of Thomas (earliest and thus most authentic Gospel?  Heretical late-comer?) is fun to follow — maybe because I’m not religious, and have no theological stake in the matter.

I imagine it’s similar to the debate in Buddhist circles as to whether the Mahayana tradition is as old as the Theravada tradition, or a centuries-later development.  (Whereas the Theravada tradition has a strongly monastic undercurrent, the Mahayana is more lay-person oriented; Tibetan and Zen Buddhism are strands of Mahayana Buddhism.)

For both Thomas and Mahayana, it seems as though the majority opinion is that they’re latecomers.  My gut feel is that Thomas is early, but Mahayana is a later development, perhaps even mildly influenced by Christian expansion into the Indian subcontinent in the first century CE.  To co-opt John Donne’s words, no religion is an island. 

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I was reading a book of Viking wisdom yesterday.  It included the memorable line ‘no lamb for the lazy wolf‘ (a corollary for ‘the early bird gets the worm’) but peculiarly, no tips on plundering villages.  Personally, I prefer ‘the second worm doesn’t get eaten’, but that’s just me.

Banking and fairies below the fold! 

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