Thessaly's Tooth

Part two, here it is. It occurred to me while writing that perhaps I should do some prep work for this, since I’m going to be talking about a lot of things I don’t know much about, not only economics this time but also the Bible.
But blogging is no fun if I have to do prep work, and the only reason I blog is for fun. Further, if I did prep work for a blog post, I would seem to be implying that I know what I’m talking about. And I don’t want to be on the hook for that. So following are some of my completely unauthoritative, unsubstantiated thoughts on the subject.

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The most ambitious rhyme ever attempted in rock?
My blood’s so mad
Feels like coagulating
And I’m just sitting here
Contemplating
Doesn’t quite work, but I admire the effort.

A giant economic treatise by me, the length of which is in direct proportion to my lack of knowledge of the subject. This is inspired by an awesome post on ThinkChristian and the subsequent discussion. I commented a couple of times there, but I don

We get phone calls for people other than ourselves pretty frequently. The first phone number we were assigned when we moved to GR showed up on everyones’ caller IDs as “Michael Flowers.” I believe it was after a very confusing call from someone in Chicago who really, really wanted me to give her Michael Flowers’ current phone number that I decided to call the phone co. on that one. Several months/more phone calls later, the phone co. decided they couldn’t fix the problem and assigned us a new number.
After that we started getting calls for Amy all the time; this culminated in Amy herself calling to ask if we could give them her new number. Thus I embarked on my new career as a message service. We still get calls for Amy (after this # has been all ours for at least a couple of years), but lately we’ve been getting calls for some mysterious new entity as well.
Last week we got a message from a fellow who wanted a “brochure” from some company he was trying to call–the name of it sounded like “Amumblemumblemumble.” (By the way, I’ve noticed that when people are leaving phone messages, they tend to mumble information that is very familiar to them, like their own names. I’m sure I do that at least as much as anyone else does, but in my secretarial avocation this leads to problems when taking messages: “Um, Muhmumble called and wants you to call him back, his number is 555-82mumblemumble”).
Sometimes I ignore these calls, but other times I call the person back to let them know their message didn’t reach its intended hearer. I did that today with the brochure guy.
It has occasionally happened on these calls that people want me to give them the new number of the person that they are trying to contact. Now, I hate to cloud the issue by the fact that I do indeed have Amy’s new number; but in general, how on earth would I know contact info for the previous holder of the phone number that was randomly assigned to me?
The brochure guy seemed confused, like most recipients of my well-intentioned corrective calls do, but he also kind of tried to argue with me. “Well, I was trying to reach Amumblemumble. This is the number I was given.”
I wonder what he was expecting? That I would crumble and admit that I was actually a representative of the Amumblemumble company all along, and promise to send out his brochure immediately?
Haha, he won’t get me to admit my complicity with Amumblemumble that easily. Nice try, brochure guy, but you’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to fool Michael Flowers–I mean Amy–I mean, um, yeah, me.

(I’ve turned comments on on this one, despite the fact that anonymous individuals continue to attempt to sell all types of crazy crap to the readers of my blog)
A random one: I was thinking about the use of gender-inclusive language, etc., and realized that while I use gender-inclusive language myself in writing and speaking, I am really not bothered when others do not do so. I’m also not bothered by the idea of God being primarily represented as masculine in the Bible etc. I think there’s two main factors in this:

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The Simpsons has been on TV for exactly half my life. I must have sometimes watched the Tracy Ullman show, on which it of course debuted, because I remember one short about Bart stealing cookies and saying Maggie did it, also one about Bart and Lisa pretending to be tribesmen or something using Homer’s ties, and getting yelled at by Homer’s original voice. On the other hand, I don’t remember anything Tracy Ullman did on the show.
I was 16 and a junior in high school when it started. Well I remember its, and my, early years. I remember I had to watch it on a tiny black and white TV because my mom wanted to watch something else in the living room–Monday Night Football maybe? Did it used to be on on Mondays? I remember writing an essay for an Earth Day contest in 1991, while watching The Simpsons on the tiny TV. For my Civics class, I had to volunteer at a community center, and I remember one time trying to watch it on a TV mounted to the wall, without sound, while kids swarmed about kicking up a ruckus. And of course, I had one of the T-shirts.
I was so pleased with myself that I understood the literary references in the Kamp Krusty episode; and wished I could understand what Bart was saying in the one where he goes to France and learns French. I didn’t understand the controversy over Bart being a bad influence–and now I understand it less than ever. Though I wouldn’t let any children of mine watch hardly anything on TV now, which shows you the difference between 16 and 32.
I didn’t watch much TV while I was in college, but kept watching faithfully when I could. Who could forget the Halloween episodes, Otto’s wedding, the death of Maud Flanders, the time Ralph went on a date with Lisa, the Monorail, and the proud day that Homer was promoted to Safety Manager at the power plant.
I never thought the show could get bad, and I hoped it would keep going on even if it did, because I thought it could be just as funny if it became a deliberate parody of itself. But I haven’t watched many of the new episodes in the last few years, and those I have seen haven’t done much to bolster my confidence. Bart joining a boy band? Which is really a front for Navy recruiting? Huh? Then there was an incomprehensible one which culminated in the Mad Magazine building blowing up. I seem to remember that one was on shortly after 9/11, and I couldn’t believe they put it on at all.
If this trend of badness keeps up, and if the show is still on in another 16 years, you can bet I won’t be allowing any of my kids to watch it…instead, I’ll be making them watch the DVDs of the first 10 seasons or so with me. Won’t they be thrilled?

It’s true, I’ve turned off comments on new posts due to the ratio of unsolicited sales “comments” to real comments having become about 50:1. Apologies to all of you kind folks who read & comment here from time to time.

As I drove to work today, I was listening to “Fresh Air” on Public Radio. Today, Terry was interviewing a man named Bart Ehrman who has written a book called Misquoting Jesus. Bart used to be an evangelical Christian, but gradually became an agnostic as he discovered contradictions within the Biblical text and alterations in the text over the centuries.
Terry asked him how he felt, as an agnostic, about Christmas. I found his reply interesting. He said that unlike some other people he knew, he didn’t dread the Christmas season, he liked Christmas. He liked Christmas trees and giving gifts. Then he said something I didn’t follow about “demythologising” and then, to my surprise, related the gospel message:
The story of Christmas is the story of God’s son who was given to us as a gift, and later gave his own life for us.
The story is one of giving, he said, and the moral is that we should be more giving. It probably comes as a surprise to no one that this moral didn’t send me very far. God becoming man, ministering face-to-face to all Judah from the humble to the mighty, dying an excruciating death on the cross to reconcile sinful humanity to God, then coming back to life and ascending to heaven to rule with the Father seems awfully, well, forceful to get across such a simple message that we probably all could have agreed on anyway.
This man doesn’t seem to be anti-Bible at all, and he said in the interview that the Bible is at the heart of our civilization and culture. It just has the unfortunate flaw, he believes, of not being true.
As Hercule Poirot would say, it gives one furiously to think.

Disclaimer on these Thoughts from Me: they’re poorly edited to say the least and I’m not sure my claims about the Bible or Ancient Near East are actually true.
Christians and culture: Professors of Biblical studies or Ancient Near Eastern studies seem fond of pointing out parallels between the Bible and other ancient texts. In the Psalms scholars read allusions to the Mesopotamian creation myth and to the Canaanite pantheon. In the story of the birth and upbringing of Moses, they see another example of the common Ancient Near Eastern “hero exposed at birth” motif. The ANE concept of the king as “good shepherd” and the role of the king as defender of the powerless foreshadows Biblical ideas about God and the imperative to care for “widows and orphans.” And the law codes contain clear parallels to other ancient Near Eastern codes: for example, Exodus 21:29 contains a law concerning the “habitually goring ox,” a very similar law appears in the Code of Hammurabi (and possibly other law codes), written several hundred years before the law of Moses. Such professors often take this evidence to indicate that the Bible is of a piece with Ancient Near Eastern literature in general–nothing special or especially divine about it.
It disturbs me that the faith of many students is shaken or modified by such assertions. And it surprises me that it should come as a surprise to anyone that the Bible is in keeping with its cultural context. How could the ancient Israelites have understood God’s message in any way but through their own cultural lens? God transcends any particular human culture and is beyond human understanding; but he graciously presents Himself in ways that we as humans can understand, and the way we can understand is shaped (though not completely determined) by our cultural environment. I believe, then, that in the Bible He reveals Himself (1) in a way that was culturally relevant to the Israelites, so that they could understand; and (2) in a way that is relevant to all of us through the ages, regardless of our particular culture.
God’s covenant with the Israelites uses the concept and form of covenant that was current in the Ancient Near East, givng the Israelites a way to understand the nature of their relationship with God. The form and often the content of the Mosaic law would have been familiar to the Israelites–would it have made any sense for God to have given the law to the Israelites in 21st century U.S. legalese? They wouldn’t have known what to do with it. Or should He have given them the ultimate, transcendant mind of God in its entirety? The limited and fallen human mind couldn’t comprehend or handle it.
Insofar as the Bible was written by humans, those humans used the terminology for the divine that they knew. Insofar as it was written by God, He used terms and forms that the Israelites could understand. This cultural relevance allowed the Israelites to establish a base understanding of God by relating His revelations of Himself to their cultural context; and in doing so created a basis for comparison by which God could show how He is different from what the Israelites might expect based on their cultural presumptions.

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in academia:
transgressive
gender-bending
narrative
discursive
subversive (a rhyme!)
longue duree (history only)
zeitgeist
Sitz im Leben
trope
world system
evolution
underused words in academia (AS WELL AS IN LIFE):
claptrap
pandemic
solipsism
risible
humility