EclecticLip

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.)