❮❮prevnext❯❯

This holiday season (during a challenging season of life for me) I'm having a lot of weird synchronicity on religion and mythology. Lots of different threads, nothing really resolved.

The biggest thread comes from Joseph Campbell's "The Power of Myth" a book we're reading (based on a PBS series back in the day) for my UU Science and Spirituality class.

He's quick to make a distinction between mythology and religion, besides pointing out the archetypes that so many mythologies share. Going to a Sunday/Christmas Eve day service with my Mom and Aunt, I see all the stuff that I know came before or after Christianity in its most ascetic form; the Christmas tree, the poinsettias, even the time of year that has MUCH more to do with old moods of the transition of the seasons than any actual birthdate of Jesus. But in the Campbell context, I guess that makes the Santa-laden tradition I grew up with seem more resonant, not less. (Side note; As I'm writing this, I've been watching "The Chosen" with my folks which seems a pretty sophisticated retelling of Jesus and the Disciple's story. Last night had some "making of" around the Christmas special that was also kind of interesting.)

My superniece Cora is getting into "Therian" stuff - a community of folk who see resonant parallels between various animals (their "theriotype") and themselves. I'm glad she's not woo-woo about it (I think she's been instilled with a more or less humanistic and science-accepting framework) - It would be easy to dismiss it as just a furries-adjacent lark, but right now I can see - it's a pretty resonant mythology for her. Through the history of humanity people have found exactly these kinds of parallels so important to their development, and I think with a little poking I could see long and deep roots in shamanistic traditions that so many cultures have drawn from, though ones that are a little thin on the ground in the Judeo-Christian soil we walk on.

Another thread: The "Making Sense" podcast just had an episode with Brian Muraresku, who wrote a book about about ancient mystery religions and their use of psychedelics that might have had a strong influence in the Hellenistic strain of early Christianity. (Notably, Muraresku is Catholic, and abstains from psychedelics.) Like when you hear about older religions - many older than Greek culture - with aspects about drinking symbolic divine blood-wine, the path to the Christian "this is my body, this is my blood" sacrament of the Eucharist gets more interesting - just like how an appreciation for Mary's role led to a Europe full of cathedrals named Notre Dame.

There is so much that protestant American Folk Christianity leaves behind when it tries to strip away the trappings and get back to basics. (Actually maybe some of the snake handler / speaking in tongues Pentecostals get back to those earlier, more ecstatic forms of religion?) They even gloss over things in their own Bible - who is the rest of "Us" in "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness"? Is Sophia/Wisdom of the second half of Proverbs 8 just a poetic conceit, or is there something weird and older and more beautiful going on there? Explaining away those bits is kind of weird for a faith that claims to look to only its scriptures as God's protected final word for so much.

Still it feels my own path may always be a bit more humanist, and rationalistic and skeptical. The Protestant God I grew up deserved to control everything in me and my Preacher Parents' life in part because it was a faith that was true (and available) for EVERYONE - but that faith turned out to be brittle when I grew up enough to ponder the justifications for so many other, competing Faiths. So the biggest, most last impact of that fracture is that I tend to reject mythologies - anything that seems to rely on a special, one-time revelation that you have to take on trust. And in this model, humanistic (and non-authoritarian!) rationality is the most empathetic kind of belief, because the important thing is, you don't have to take anyone's word on anything and it's available to everyone. (Of course it gets snarled up in the "Paradox of Tolerance", since it has to accept that most people will always cling to their people's or their own special revelations.)

Which I guess brings me to my folks. For years I was afraid to bring my skepticism up with my mom (though I suspect she'll be reading this or I might even point it out to her.. Hi Mom!) Being a minister as well as being my mom, she represented the voice of God and judgement to me, but I knew she was bummed I didn't find a church when I went off to college, and so I tried to keep that side of me hidden. But many years ago we had a good conversation about it, and I think her view leans more into John 14:2a (In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.) than John 14:6 (Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me), which I think is compatible with the kind of humanist UU "multiple paths" approach I find most likely. (So technically, I guess I did find a church, but mostly I co-lead a science and spirituality discussion group there, and do most of my nurturing small community-ing with my activist street bands.)

And that leaves me with my dad - or rather his absence, since he died when I was early in my own teenage time of growth and change. There's some dialog there that may never happen in the way I would have liked, maybe even conflicts that will never be quite resolved in the way I wish they could be. But as Joseph Campbell points out "Frequently, in the epics, when the hero is born, his father has died, or his father is in some other place, and then the hero has to go in quest of his father" so maybe there's hope for me yet.

Merry Christmas!

---

I'll probably be finishing the Campbell book today, and ran into this quote: "Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army."

That's some stirring synchronicity, given how much a fear of hell and The Salvation Army as an organization were two of the biggest shaping forces of my young life!

---

via

---

---

---

29 Strange Things People Do With Their Significant Other I find some of these weirdly sexy and romantic.
Have a Max Headroom Christmas including a song and TV special

---

The preacher mentioned we won't have another Christmas Sunday for 11 years, so I wanted to see what the pattern was.

The beautiful truth of Santa is that we are all Santa.

---

via

---

All I Want for Christmas is MIDI, Mariah Carey as shoved into a MIDI converter and then back out.

(It is sort of crazy how you can almost hear the lyrics come through)

---

My brilliant and talented friend Sophie reminds with this kid-friendly message about why vaccines! (fair disclaimer, she took some punch up ideas for some lyrics I had, so I'm not impartial :-D )

Donkey Kong Christmas Tree by Carlos Leituga

---

Repost (from 10 years ago!)
via Brandon Bird and Evan Palmer, available here

---

Repost, but I love reading Former wrestler Mick Foley write about transforming into a proper avatar of Santa...

---

---

Sigh. I used to make javascript-y Advent Calendars! ( https://advent2012.alienbill.com/ is still pretty charming)
Or virtual holiday cards...

This year I just noodled around to see if I could fake wrapping a bitmap around a sphere
https://stuff.alienbill.com/sphereit/
(spoiler...only kind of). More info.
Well-stocked Christmas Tree!


advent day 25

---

On my devblog, grumbling about HD space
advent christmas day

---

Messing around with a new logotype for http://kirk.is/ - I think I like the third one best... am thinking about making the "graph paper" background stretch at top across whole screen and then putting logotype on it, line up with the "graph paper", but over the content which will probably be fixed-width + centered.

It's fun teaching a computer to do the kind of graph paper font work I'd tool around with in high school. (See also "trifontula" http://kirk.is/2007/07/20/ ) In this case it would have been a lot easier had I not wanted to let the "graph paper" shine through.

Any suggestions?

---

---

"On this most unholy of nights, the outer god Yahweh set distant worlds to die in a blazing supernova to signal the birth of his flesh form."
--http://twitter.com/AdviceWitch
advent finale

---

I love the repurposed "Simon"

advent day 25

---

I liked this article on wrestler Mick Foley explaining how to channel Santa Claus.

---

via

---

Anybody who thinks that having an orgasm isn't funny is probably bad at sex.

---

For all Zuck's talk of the "speed of the native app", landscape mode and copy and paste on FB mobile would've been nice.

---

The new kitchen at my folks' place in NJ has these weird, magnetic or pneumatic no-slam drawers. Eerie how they slow at the end.

---

A&E really has a series all about parking tickets?

---

On North Korea -- Just read the book "The Cleanest Race" about North Korea propaganda, and it makes me thing that article is halfbaked. North Koreans eem to really believe their racial purity myths, and their entire internal system depends on the propaganda about their nuclear strength and the world's fear of that.

---

"It's getting colder- do you want to put on another sweater?"
"Gin is like another sweater."

---

http://todayspictures.slate.com/20091224/ - photo 06 is best holiday photo of year. Merry Christmas!

---

Homeric gods, being corporeal, can and do laugh; we are told that Zeus, after his birth, laughed continuously for seven days.

---

The object in sexual congress, according to the Marquis de Sade, is to elicit involuntary noisemaking from your partner--which is precisely the objective of humor, even if the nature of the noisemaking is a bit different.

---

"Knock knock." "Who's there?" "9-11." "9-11 who?" "YOU SAID YOU'D NEVER FORGET!"

---

"Why is there something rather than nothing?" "Even if there was nothing, you still wouldn't be satisfied!"

---

A realistic expectation also demands our acceptance that one's allotted time on earth must be limited to an allowance consistent with the continuity of our species... We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions and trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died--in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.

---

...if any doctor tells me, as I lie in my hospital bed, that my death will not only help others to live, but be symptomatic of the triumph of humanity, I shall watch him very carefully when next he adjust my drip.

---

Got my Aunt one of those Plasma Ball lamp things - so sci-fi and cool.

To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com

snowno - source - built with processing

To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com
sugardum - source - built with processing Literary Bit of the Day

Nicholas Was...

older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.

The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.

Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves' invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.

He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.

Ho.
Ho.
Ho.

---

Music of the Day
Evil Chrismas Carols (vol 1) -- simple piano arrangements of the classic songs made twisted by putting them in a minor key. I've never quite understood what that means, musically (transposing without changing the key signature?) but Marty Witczak used to do the same thing to "Linus and Lucy" and it was morbidly fantastic. The Christmas songs are great though... not evil evil, but dark and burlesque. (FOLLOWUP: Oh, hey, there's a Volume 2 and Lo and Behold... it ends with Linus and Lucy! Nice)

---

Followup of the Moment
In Yesterday's Snowman battle description I left out one attack and counter. Miller had drawn a UFO charging up its deathray, which Kate had defended with a "Lybia Air" plane primed to explode. Between the drawing above the fold, and a few questions about the logic of "Lybia Air" explodability, we decided to kind of retrocon the exchange out and keep it to the original playing surface.

Still, you have to appreciate Miller's "wub wub wub" sound effect for the charging deathray.

M E R R Y
C H R I S T M A S ! Whoo, the twentyfifth already? I'm all confused because I had one my family's main gift exchange on the 15th or so, anyway, Merry Christmas y'all.

---

Quote of the Holiday

You are born in pain; you live in fear; you die alone: Merry Christmas.

---

Game of the Holiday
It's Sober Santa! Or, not-so-sober-Santa, as the game goes on. Kind of an interesting game, like a "what it's like to be drunk" simulator.

---

Link of the Moment
Heh...some young guy has written a virtual suck tour of Arlington, MA, where Mo and I used to live. Three sections: landmarks, bylaws, and excerpts and commentary from the police ledger. He writes some funny stuff, actually, I had forgotten how odd that place could be.

---

Comic Monologue and Link of the Moment

Cold Chicken!
It's the little pleasures that mean most in life.
Fortunately.

Make sure to click that link! ...right now it has a lot of annotated strips as Jimmy Johnson's "Christmas Gift" to his readers. You know, it's Christmas, and I have hardly anything to say about it, and nothing in the kisrael backlog that's very Christmas themed...

---

Quote of the Moment

"I'm prettier than you are! I'm prettier than you are!"
"...but you're still dumb."

---

Link of the Moment
OK, I lied about not having any Christmas-related backlog. There's a convincing salon.com article All Hail Pottersville, about how the "evil" alternative future of James Stewart's town in It's a Wonderful Life was really pretty rocking, and maybe Bedford Falls wasn't all that great to begin with. (I didn't want to post this quite yet because I haven't seen the dang movie.)

---

Image of the Moment

--I thought I'd do a Google Image Search for a spinning gift gif. Somehow this beauty came up. I find it disturbing on several levels at once.

Anyway, hope you all are having a good Holiday Season!