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.

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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Christian Children’s Fund of Canada is using John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War is over) as background music for their latest funding campaign.

It’s been forty-two years since that whole “(we’re) bigger than Jesus” thing, so I guess it’s a case of forgive and forget.  Clearly, he got off easy — it took about 380 years or so for Galileo to be cleared. 

We went to the Steveston marina in Richmond on the weekend.  The fishers there priced their catch uniformly — which I’m assuming wasn’t an unplanned coincidence.  It’s unlikely any of them had a big enough competitive advantage to undercut their peers and offer lower pricing to consumers.  Even if they did, they’d probably figure it better to pocket the extra profit instead risking being shunned by their partners-in-trade.  I believe Canada’s big banks work on the same system. 

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Perhaps because creationism is a meme and not a gene, it’s easy to see its evolution over time.

After unsuccessfully trying to re-brand itself as “intelligent design”, its latest metamorphosis appears to be “strengths and weaknesses”. As in, strengths and weaknesses of evolution — the weaknesses being that evolution doesn’t fit the creation mythology of the Hebrew Bible (which much of Christianity, with supercessional disrespect, unfortunately presumes to call the Old Testament.)