Magnum opus

  Having argued with several Jewish Orthodox people (and just plain idiots), and noticing even smarter people tend to repeat those mistakes unwittingly, let’s make things nice and sparkling clear:

1. When you talk about something ‘superior’ to man, you mean something beyond man’s control. In a religious debate, this entails several ideas which may or may not be interlinked.
   
2. First of all, there are the laws of science in general: biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, working in that order of purity. You can generally call them the ‘laws of nature’.
3. If you are an atheist, you believe the chain of causality when going back along ‘what made this, what made what made this, what made that, &c.’ stops at the laws of mathematics, which have always been there and needed no creator; if you’re a monotheist, you believe that chain stops at an omniscient, omnipotent, scient being called ‘God’ (we will not discuss here deism and polytheism, or the Buddhist concept of deities, or Jainism and its lack of deities within a religious framework).
4. Many different religions ascribe different names and characteristics to this ‘God’ entity: the Abrahamic religion say his name is Yahweh/Jehova/whatever (according to archæologists this name has existed since long before the Pentateuch was spposed to have been originally written, if not before when Young Earth Creationists believe the world was even created, and that name referred originally to a certain Semitic deity of the polytheist pantheon of that time and place), who dictated the Pentateuch to Moses; Zoroastrians believe his name is Ahura Mazda and the official authority from which we are to learn about Him is the Avesta and some other scripture; Tenrikyo followers believe His name is Tenri-O-no-Mikoto (among other names) and that He revealed himself to a woman of rural, poor samurai origin named Nakayama Miki, who later became a living embodiment of Him and wrote a book of poetry titled Ofudesaki which outlines the tenets of His religion. Those are all fundamentally different characters, even if they serve the same role.
5. Even when two religions adopt the same character, they do not necessarily believe in the same ideas referring to that character, or even ascribe the same scripture to Him. Qaraite Jews believe only the Pentateuch is reliable, Samaritans believe in the Book of Jesus Nave as well, ‘normal’ Jews believe in the whole Old Testament, Protestant Jews add the New Testament, Catholics add a few more books, and Muslims believe in a completely different book as binding: the Qur’án.
   
6. Even in one religion you can find huge differences between denominations, even if they adopt the same scripture. Rabbinical, Orthodox Jews see the Talmud’s interpretation as binding; Conservative Jews allow some room for advancing with time (for instance, while Orthodox Jews maim their baby boys at 8 days old, Conservative Jews often want it done at 18 years, for various reasons), and Reformed Jews are extremely critical of it and overlook entirely anything that they regard as backwards (this may or may not include maiming babies).
   
7. Even within a certain denomination there are sub-denominations: Orthodox Jews are divided into Mitnagdim, Khasidim, national-religious, &c., each with its own set of values and whatnot (read: each is scum in their own way; Mitnagdim by their clear hatred of anything other than themselves, Khasidim by their sheer stupidity and blatant xenophobia, and national-religious by being the militant cancer chipping away at this shitey little country). Even within each of these there are various rabbis with various opinions, but they tend not to deviate too much from the line they form together, for unity’s sake.
   

  A particularly stupid Orthodox Jewish woman told me today that the people in New York failed to realise there was ‘something above them’, and when I tried challenging that retarded statement and say that’s not necessarily God but it can be nature, she said the name didn’t matter. Well, you dumb bitch, it does. What that woman did was pretty much jump from step 1/2 to 6/7: from the existence of scientific facts and facts of nature she practically concluded Jehova wants us to be pious Orthodox Jews, unless we were born gentiles, and then we have to be pious Noachides instead. (My grandfather often makes a leap from 1 to 3 without listening to anyone trying to explain to him why THAT DOES NOT WORK. But that’s a different matter.)

  But the thing is, these sort of leaps between steps are very common when talking to more shameless and/or ignorant religious people. If you’re an Orthodox Jew, the existence of Jehova entails adherence to Judaism (makes sense according to their reasoning), and then more specifically Orthodox Judaism, as the Talmud is allegedly binding. This is not the case. And the worst offence? Equating between God and Jehova. Practically everyone in the Western world does this without even noticing how Abrahamic religions monopolised the concept right under their nose.

  So, religious people, always remember: when you argue, you must always remember that reaching a certain step does not automatically entail the next. If you managed to convince the person you’re arguing with that there are deities, that doesn’t mean it’s just one, that its name is Jehova, or that it wants you to do X. You merely convinced that person that there are deities. The next steps will take some more work, unless you managed to find a way to skip over them (‘X happened, we agree that’s a miracle, ergo you should go get baptised’―wrong; ‘X happened, we agree that’s a miracle, ergo deities exist unless we have a better explanation for X, and now we’ll argue about which ones and how many, and once we’ve decided that we’ll argue over how to find out reliably what it/they want/s’, OR, which is far, far less likely, ‘I managed to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that this text is completely reliable evidence for the existence of the deity I believe in, its characteristcs, and its demands’―right). People who argue with religious people, always remember that.

  There. I just made the internet a little bit smarter.

  Unum diem...

  (P.S.: I’m back for year 2 in uni. It’s fascinating. I decided to do a field research on Icelandic for Advanced Phonology, so if you’re a native speaker of Icelandic, I need you to fill a little questionnaire, record yourself reading a certain text, then talking freely for about a minute or two, then asking other native speakers as young as four years old to help too. Takk svo mikið!)

  I wish I could, just for one day, bring Kino and Snufkin to meet. I’d love to listen to their conversation; but then again, I probably wouldn’t understand a thing, or they’d talk about nothing, or they’d talk about mundane things, or any combination of the three. But one day. One day.

  Anyway, I hope you all had a happy 9/11, because if you didn’t, the terrorists won.

  My late Persephone’s death anniversary was this Tuesday. Though I believe she must be a princess somewhere, I still lament for her. I need a new cat; her absence is making me mad, I need to move on. 

Once I’d died, Śiva, Brahmā too, / and Viṣnu sat to ponder so, |
Contemplating aloud how to / send me hither: a row fiery. ||

Lo: I was true to my dharma / and social debts so faithfully, |
I greeted every man alive / and paid each deity what he claimed. ||

Verily, I greeted every / person I met a-smiling so, |
Befriending all; alas, Viṣnu said / that yea, I should be born a man. ||

However, to a man what’s due / I gave, but while mocking foully, |
All that I could see in single looks, / and then went to gossip about. ||

In secrecy mocking every / rule and code of the great dharma; |
To gods and kings—purest, true scorn; / thus quoth Śiva: ‘He is a cat.’ ||

They argued on, egad, Viṣnu / insulting Śiva quite crudely, |
And Śiva Viṣnu, then: ‘Enough!’ / quoth Brahmā, and declared he thus. ||

‘Though he followed human traits, he / disrespected the great dharma, |
Shutting self from fellow humans / as many mysterious a cat.||

Thus I resolved: we give him due / reward at once—a soul manly, |
A spirit of a cat,’ so now / in this form I do roam the earth. ||

 

I shall now strive to splendid be / in moral codes and the right deed do, |
So that I shall be born again / as one, not a human feline. ||

An Cat Duḃ, 17.1.12

  Recently I’ve been thinking about the Furry Fandom and came to the conclusion we don’t honour our origins enough. Look it up on Wikipedia: the origin on the Fandom is in arts, but now if one should sign up to FurAffinity or InkBunny (just visiting as a quest won’t do) will show one mind-boggling amounts of pornography, which is a shame, really. If I were an artist I’d draw more respectable art myself, but instead, I can make a list of ideas for Furry art:

• Scenes from Ysengrimus. (In particular the scene when Reinardus and Ysengrimus talk after Reinardus fooled him for the first time.)
• Interactions between anthropomorphic Hindu and Egyptian deities (Hanumān playing dice with Anubis while Ganeśa keeps records, for instance).
• Artistic depictions of the roles of animals in human society via role reversals.
• Depictions of historic, mythic, and literary characters as Furry ones, in the same manner humans are.
  

  Fuck it, it’s too late now. I can’t think of anything properly. All I can imagine is the drawing I requested of my late Persephone as the Boddhisattva Avalokiteśvara.

  Good night.

  Unum diem...