ThinkBlog

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i.1

Augustine introduces the period of his life when he was acting out of vanity. He admits that there will likely be proud people who would laugh at him, but in so acknowledging them he rebukes them and notes that it is their own unhealthy souls that will find this unbeneficial.

ii.2

He was a sophist in the order of Gorgias in the Socratic dialogue of the same name. He also was in a monogamous non-marital relationship which was entered into for sex. Augustine seems to imply here that all extramarital relationships are characterized by the lust of the flesh, which I think must be true of relationships whose end is not a godly marriage.

ii.3

A good Manichee, Augustine professed hatred for killing of any kinds of animal for any reason, especially to demons–but notes that since his indignance was not Christian, he was making sacrifice of himself.

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References.
Augustine, St. Confessions. Henry Chadwick, trans. ISBN 0-19-283372-3 (Paperback).

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xi (20)

A powerful position on persistence in prayer: Monica prayed for nine years for her son before he came to know Christ, but was given hope and strength by this vision she had. How many in this day, myself included, would psychoanalyze a dream and dismiss it in times of despair!

xii (21)

I wonder how much credit we are willing to give the inquiring mind, here in the South especially, on matters such as theology. There is no room for exploration, no room for error: my mother has likewise wrung her hands for my sake in my studying philosophy and different theological positions, for fear that I will by them be led astray. It’s not a lack of faith, I’m sure–it’s a matter of fearing the unknown, and not accepting that a person has to make their own mistakes; or, if that analogy doesn’t suit, to scrape themselves up learning to climb the mountainside.

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References.
Augustine, St. Confessions. Henry Chadwick, trans. ISBN 0-19-283372-3 (Paperback).

I think the “meat of the nut” when it comes to motivation and the lack thereof is that peoples’ hopelessness is the most degrading, horrifying thing to spring from an indolent spirit and mind.

When a person throws up his hands and says, “Ah, well, so much for that: I simply cannot do X,” and then leaves it at that, it is a kind of stubbornness that leads from apathy to death. However foolish it is to cling to false hopes, dismissing viable ones is just as bad. Whether it’s the Christian who stops going to church and reading the Word and praying, or the student who drops out, or the couch potato who’s letting his body go, all of these people have made that damnable mistake of letting their laziness get in the way of achievable goals.

Specifically in reference to lack of exercise and other vices of excess or deficiency in which willpower is involved, I’ve been trying to analyze what’s so repulsive about laziness, either in myself or others. I think I’ve nailed it.

It’s about not taking crap from yourself. Let’s explode that a second. When the person who doesn’t ever exercise just throws up his hands and says, “Ah, well, I should, but I can’t,” which amounts to “I don’t want to, because the `should’ compulsion isn’t as strongly felt as voiced”—this is an instance where the most powerful voice in oneself is the indolent one.

But physical exercise is really the least of my pet peeves, however indicative that may be of a deeper problem (or a genuine lack of time or the presence of a serious handicap, though this much more seldom than people would like to think). What really gets me is that, when it comes to capitalistic syncretism in the church, or major ethical issues, or things like that, people just throw up their hands and go along with the flow: “Oh, there’s nothing we can do. Besides, it would take effort….”

Sometimes I think I was born to be a mental drill instructor. When I go running or lift weights, even play basketball, there is an inner übermensch, a ripped Adonis with a quiet rage at any sign of my indolence: he stands at the sidelines, hands clasped behind his back, scrutinizing all that I do. The only time he lets me say, “I can’t go further,” and get away with it, is when there’s internal bleeding and/or projectile vomiting. (External bleeding, of course, is never a good excuse.)

I love him. He is myself, as the hardass that I am, when it comes to dealing with myself. His rage becomes my rage: I channel him when dealing with people trapped by indolence in their own ignorance—while that inner superman helps with all his might the willing student with any sort of handicap but with the desire to learn, his wrath falls heavily on those who disbelieve in the worth of real thought. It is only through grappling with the superego-esque “tact filter” that I let him manifest himself, though the more tired I am, the more he comes through—both in myself and outwardly directed.

“You’re too hard on yourself,” have been the words of lovers and friends alike. Yes, that may be so, but I’m also quite easy on myself: betimes the socialite sophisticate comes out, the Michael-with-a-monocle in a pressed smoking vest, pipe in hand, inviting me to partake of a fine brandy or cognac and a full, rich smoke.

Besides all that, what’s the point if you’re too easy on yourself? What good is a life that’s all cush? Isn’t that what everyone strives for, every commoner on the planet, for an easy time of it, a life full of orgastic pleasure and copious procedural memory without any real intellectual or spiritual chewing on the meat that matters?

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/317296p-271224c.html

Now to reiterate something we’ve all known for a long, long time! Funny article.

Ready for a real relationship? Ditch the
pretty boys and grab yourself a geek

Yes, ma’am, that’s right.

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. - George Washington

I’m not normally one to quote the founding fathers unless it’s early July or a political cocktail party where most people don’t realize what a randy fellow Ben Franklin really was, in his day; but I really liked this quote, especially after what’s been going on lately. This goes along with something that Camus says in his Notebooks about friendship and expectations—but I’ll get there in due time.

I’ve been learning German quickly as possible through the Pimsleur Method. It’s slow but steady going. My professor tried to talk me out of it, though, when he heard that I was starting from scratch with this and I got near-fluency on Spanish lo these many moons ago. I may end up having to do Spanish for my foreign language, but I’d rather just learn that on my own time as need dictates: German is the über-tongue, pun intended.

Incidentally, here is a nice list of the “Best German Films for German-Learners“. Also, an entire series of freely-streamable (but not freely-downloadable) television-based German lessons here. (”Fokus Deutsch” is a classroom method, book not included on the website.)

A parting thought. Is the alienation we feel in America, the sociological WASP problem (i.e., single white male Protestants are the most likely demographic to commit suicide—need I look into Orthodoxy? ), and the general anomie people tend to experience with capitalism—is all of this being addressed by Eastern thought? I have a feeling that what’s pushing most of my peers to dabble in Buddhism (Zen, Theravadan, or otherwise) instead of straight, all-American atheism or some such, is at least the illusion of communion with others, a community atmosphere, a collectivist mindset. Your thoughts?

http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/absurd%20reasoning.htm

It took me a few minutes to realize that the section I was reading in the little paperback I received a while back was actually an essay completely separate from The Myth of Sisyphus; in fact, though, this essay—entitled “An Absurd Reasoning”—is so compelling that I intend to read this all the way through. Here are a few points that really hit me, with more to come.

 

• “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.” The more closely aware we become of the absurd, the more we have to face the fact that death is a part of life, and we must choose either to be happy or to, essentially, kill ourselves. It seems Camus is arguing that anything but these two options is intellectually dishonest.
• Suicide, for Camus, is tantamount to confessing that life is too much for you, that you don’t understand it. On the other hand, “the body shrinks from annihilation,” and so does the mind; so it takes an enormous effort—it seems to me—to either kill oneself or to not kill oneself, once aware of the absurd.

  Now, I’d like to summarily say that this problem does not exist for the Christian. That the absurdity of life is, negated because death, for the Christian, is not death in an absolute sense, only the beginning of a metamorphosis, or of a second phase, or what-have-you, to life. But this denies the fact that the Christian mind is not at all aware of the absurd, or need not deal with it, when in fact, this is not the case at all. A friend of a friend recently committed suicide. She was active in the church, seemed fairly undepressed insofar as we all are at this uncertain stage of life, and left no note. What drove her to commit this act? Was she confessing that life was too much for her, or that she’d rather be with God than on Earth? How could she have overcome the “backshrinking”? I don’t pretend to know.

• In the next section, “Absurd Walls,” Camus discusses knowing an actor even just a small bit better simply by watching him act, though we know nothing of the man himself necessarily. I’d have to agree; I think this is true of any actor we more or less admire.
• Weariness with a rhythmic, mechanical life gives birth to reflection, to the asking of “Why,” “tinged with amazement.” This sounds suspiciously like the universal definition of—or at least, the common understanding describing the exploration of—philosophy itself.
• When we assert our place in time, when we become aware of it, it ceases to carry us; we carry it, and whereas we were wishing for tomorrow, it has now arrived, and in our awareness we fear the acceleration unto death. This has personal significance: when I turned seventeen, I remember being in a panic for almost a week, because I was “almost eighteen, which is practically 21, and 25 is just a step away, and then you might as well be thirty, and life just keeps slipping away!” An exaggeration at which we laugh now, but at the time I was serious as death (no pun intended); and aren’t we all just flickers after all? How is it any more ludicrous than the man who considers death when he’s reached fifty, or eighty? What’s eighty years out of the history of the universe?
  “Not enough.”
• “In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates’ `Know thyself’ has as much value as the `Be virtuous’ of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate.” This is most troublesome to me, and why I so enjoy Kant and the “professional rationalists,” as Camus calls them, but I know that there is no truth in that absolute sense, to be gained apart from Christ.

  Now, that’s also easy to say. But the more theology I study, the more I read, the more I hear, the more fragmentary and less certain even doctrines seem. On everything from speaking in tongues to the rapture to the exegesis of certain large swaths in Paul, there are so many interpretations. This is not reason for indolence, as so many try to escape the study of scripture for just this reason, or some other half-assed excuse involving the little catch-phrases “organized religion” or “I can’t read Greek and Hebrew.” I have a dark place in my heart, I must confess, for people who hide behind those stupid smoke-screens and so dismiss the edification of their souls with a simple phrase. But it is difficult. Exegetical fallacies abound (in fact, D. A. Carson has written a book on them), and the Truth is elusive and comes only to the humble seeker.

• Science can’t tell us anything about real truths of the world. Camus is at least intellectually honest; so refreshing after dealing with research psychologists who believe that they have the keys of the universe because they know how to read an fMRI cerebral scan.
• “Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into a privileged moment.” Perfect. Doesn’t that sound like fun? That’s why I run this blog!

Endnotes:

You can find a complete copy of the paperback I’ve been reading, including “An Absurd Reasoning” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” by clicking on the title of this post.

Thanks to the good folks at Saluda Restaurant in Five Points, Columbia, SC, for running a free WAP.

Those of you who noticed the gaping hole in my blog updates till just now, well, just know I’m still here—due to unforeseeable circumstances I lost my ‘net connection in the apartment Thursday evening. This should be temporary; I’ll definitely be back when I move to the new place (circa August 10th), but hopefully I can get in touch with the necessary parties before then. Here’s looking at Monday morning.

Be well, and drop me a line! I’ll continue to check my mail as much as I can.

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§17

Intention and appearance aren’t always congruent, and it’s good that Augustine makes this distinction without implying that we can truly know someone’s true intentions all the time.

I agree with Augustine’s assumption that there is a reason for every Divine precept or law. This is like that perennial discussion about logic being a natural part of the universe, and that logic is not an arbitrary construct but is an outpouring of part of God’s nature into man.

Broad statements: all the acts of God’s servants should illustrate present need or future happenings.

§18

Manichee understaanding of divinity and nature sounds a lot like a Gnostic construct with pantheistic overtones.

§19

Two points of interest here: Augustine gives weight to dreams and visions, and he notes that God cares for each individual as though s/he were the only one on earth–and also that He cares for the totality of souls as though an individual.

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References.
Augustine, St. Confessions. Henry Chadwick, trans. ISBN 0-19-283372-3 (Paperback).

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=AS...=9325

§15

Shameful sexual acts are a way that man uses man, treats him like an object in the Kantian sense: deviance makes men means to ends.

When God commands us to do something, even if it’s new to us, we must act. This seems about a given, but we question and wait—perhaps partially because there may be an idea that since God is transcendent and never-changeing that he will have laid all His cards on the table from the Get-Go, or that (more legitimately) we are testing the spirit in which a word comes. It’s not the case, though, that He would lay out everything at once to us—we couldn’t handle it anymore than if we had seen the very face of God and hoped to live.

§16

Interesting that he says that someone may attack another out of fear, to avert evil. I’ve often thought that the bigotry of today was caused by the Fall; before the Fall, to eschew the unknown was merely to eschew evil/sin, because God’s goodness and blessing would have been fully known, in at least the sense that no good thing was withheld.

Can God be “injured” according to Process thought?

Wicked actions harm our own souls, not God, though He is negatively affected by our transgressions because He is our Creator—so He is hurt in that sense, when we subject to damage what He has wrought, but not in a personal sense (form a Thomistic view).

Another part of aesthetics and adaptability: when we indulge our personal likes and dislikes, that’s one thing, but it’s entirely another to assert the authority of our personalities, as it were, over a person or a situation. To equate one’s own (aesthetic) tastes with what is morally preferable, me make gods of ourselves and lead straightway to legalism and bigotry.

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References.
Augustine, St. Confessions. Henry Chadwick, trans. ISBN 0-19-283372-3 (Paperback).

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=AS...=9325

§12

Augustine could be deceived because he was unaware of the higher reality—God— and so we have this classic question.

Evil as the privation of good. Finally! Auguseine’s theory of evil here not as substance itself, but as lacking that vital Being and, therefore, goodness, endowed of God.

Interested to find Plotinus’ tracts on omnipresence versus physical diffusion, but unsure where to begin looking. Seems like a trip to the library is in order.

§13

This entire section is a fantastic argument against legalism as a valid expression of religion or religious zeal. It is also interesting that a theory about personal interaction that I’ve been working out dobetails quite well with this bit. Viz., the core of the individual will not change even if the ways in which he expresses his personality do. For instance, if it is within me to give salutation to an individual, it makes no real difference whether the words that exit my lips are, “Hello there” or “Yo, ’sup?” Both, in their proper contexts, express greetings; one may be more appropriate per-situation than another, but I remain unchanged in my desire to express those greetings. It is a gross error in judgment due to man’s wisdom to think that a man’s identity and sense of being is unequivocally tied to an expression of his psyche.

Countless other examples exist. It is this kind of numbnness, closed-mindedness, rank stupidity, and stagnating ignorance that calls, e.g., Baroque art pornographic, calls the old hymns “out of date,” calls new songs “sacrilegiously popular-sounding,” and so forth.

§14

The Golden Rule is absolute; its expressions relative.

Every moral precept’s foundation is love.

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References.
Augustine, St. Confessions. Henry Chadwick, trans. ISBN 0-19-283372-3 (Paperback).

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=AS...=9325

§10

Manichees sound a great deal like Gnostics, professing for themselves knowledge that the rest of us fail to access.

To the intellectual Satan will appeal as truth the highly heady and interesting; to the aesthete, to bright and beautiful, e.g. the gilding on the pages of a finely bound book, or the succulent taste of a favorite dessert. Where we are weak for the things of this world, there he strives.

Augustine here notes that the things of the world didn’t satisfy him; the knowledge of the Manichee order wasn’t truth, so it didn’t sate him. So according to Augustine, by implication, we can test whether spiritula food is of God by seeing if it satisfies us.

Platonic progression here: image—body—soul—spirit; echoed in terms of knowledge thus: precept—actuality—understanding—source

We depend on God for life; He depends on no one.

§11

Even what he taught he didn’t enjoy knowing. Knowledge of God is unlike knowledge of raw facts or that pseud-knowledge of lies.

Instead of seeking God in reason or outside of himself, he seems to have dwelt on his own desires and motives.

“Living outside myself”—extraverted. Jung, Augustine, and other “quiet types” seem to agree that seeking truth with in is better than without; or that, more precisely, the gathering of vital energy should take place from within oneself and not be drawn from circumstances, people, &c. apart from ourselves. When living without, we are in the flesh, always seeking; when inwardly, we are using Reason and are at peace. This seems a bit simplistic, but I can’t afford to run through the Jungian conceptions of introversion and extraversion presently.

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References.
Augustine, St. Confessions. Henry Chadwick, trans. ISBN 0-19-283372-3 (Paperback).

http://www.seanadams.com/perltris/

Sean Adams posted a perfect little block of Perl on Slashdot and at his own site that runs a great game of what looks exceedingly like Tetris. J and L are left and right, respectively; K is flip; and spacebar is drop-more-quickly. Note the elegance! The grace! The smooth way it usurps all your free time at work, and with pretty colors, nonetheless!

I simply opened up nano under Cygwin (FC4 coming soon), saved the code to perltris.pl, and ran it fullscreen. Smooth. Very nice job, Sean.

#!/usr/bin/perl

$_='A=15; B=30; select(stdin); $|=1; select(stdout);$|=1; system
"stty -echo -icanon eol \001"; for C(split(/\s/,"010.010.010.010
77.77 022.020.020 330.030.030 440.044.000 055.550.000 666.060.".
"000")){D=0;for E(split(/\./,C)){F=0;for G(split("",E)){C[P][F++
][D]=G} D++}J[P]=F; I[P++] =D}%L=split(/ /,"m _".chr(72)." c 2".
chr(74)." a _m");sub a{for K(split(/ /,shift)){(K,L)=split(/=/,K
);K=L{K};K=~s/_/L/; printf "%c[K",27}}sub u{a("a=40");for D(0..B
-1){for F(0..A-1){M=G[F][D];if(R[F][D]!=M) {R[F][D]=M;a("m"."=".
(5+D).";".(F*2+5)); a("a=".(40+M).";" .(30+M));print " "x2}}}a(
"m=0;0 a=37;40")}sub r{(N)=@_;while(N--) {Q=W;W=O=H;H=Q;for F( 0
..Q-1){for D(0..O-1) {Q[F][D]=K[F][D]}}for F(0..O-1){for D(0..Q-
1){K[F][D]= Q[Q-D-1][F]}}}}sub l{for F(0..W-1){for D(0..H-1){(K[
F][D]&& ((G[X+F][Y+D])|| (X+F<0)||(X+F>=A)|| (Y+D>=B)))&& return
0}}1}sub p{for F(0..W-1){for D(0..H-1){(K[F][D]>0)&&(G[X+F][Y+D]
=K[F][D]) }}1}sub o{for F(0..W-1){for D(0..H-1){(K[F][D]>0)&&(G[
X+F][ Y+D]=0)}}}sub n{C=int(rand(P)) ;W=J[C];H=I[C];X=int(A/2)-1
;Y=0;for F(0..W-1){for D(0..H-1){K[F][D]= C[C][F][D]}}r(int(rand
(4)));l&&p}sub c{d:for(D=B;D>=0;D--){for F(0..A-1){G[F][D]||next
d}for(D2=D;D2>=0; D2--){for F(0..A-1){G[F][D2]= (D2>1)?G[F][D2-1
]:0; }}u;}}a ("m=0;0 a=0;37;40 c");print "\n\n".4x" "." "x(A-4).
"perltris\n".(" "x4)."--"xA."\n".((" "x3)."|"." "x(A*2)."|\n")xB
.(" "x4). "--"xA."\n";n;for(;;) {u;R=chr(1); (S,T)=select(R,U,V,
0.01);if(S) {Z=getc;}else {if($e++>20){Z=" ";$e=0;}else{next;} }
if(Z eq "k"){o;r(1);l||r(3);p}; if(Z eq "j"){o;X--;l||X++;p}; if
(Z eq "l"){o;X++;l||X--;p};if(Z eq " "){o;Y++;(E=l)||Y--;p;E|| c
|c|c|c|c|n||goto g;};if(Z eq "q"){last;}}g: a("a=0 m=".(B+8).";0
" ); system "stty sane"; '; s/([A-Z])/\$$1/g; s/\%\$/\%/g; eval;

In Hebrew, adding “-im” (pronounced “EEM”) to the end of a word makes it plural. So “Ben,” or “Son,” becomes “Benim,” “Sons.”

To that end, it has become fashionable in recent years to use “Seraphim” in relation to oneself as either a screenname, an avatar, or just a “cool thing to which to liken something.” Unfortunately, however cool it sounds, it’s often misused.

Seraphim is the masculine plural form of the Hebrew noun “Seraph” (also transliterated “saraph,” a Hebrew verb meaning “to consume with fire” or, less probably, a noun meaning “a flying, fiery serpent”). Seraphim are the first order of angels, of which traditionally Gabriel and Lucifer are two, and are described in the sixth chapter of Isaiah to have three pairs of wings—one covering their eyes, one their feet, and one by which they are borne up. They are distinct from the cherubim (or “cherubs,” as your or someone else’s grandmother has probably described a gathering of infants), who veil or disclose God, in that they are active, ministering servants.

The Wachowski brothers, whatever else people might accuse them of having screwed up with the Matrix series, got the singularity of Seraph’s name right. Keep it in mind next time you hear reference, and see if it’s understood as plural or singular.

ThinkBlog.org and the ThinkForums are now running perfectly up-to-date! Let me know if there are any problems or bugs. Thanks!

http://corbeledg.blogspot.com/2005/07/hacking-cardomain-and-facebook.html

Wally J has done it again! I enjoyed this post about how to craft URLs to feed variables to the webserver and make it do your bidding unawares. Check it out—he explains what I’m talking about better than my Benadryl-befogged mind could right now.