between the rock and the cold, cold sea

So, you know, we're at the work portion of this year's entertainment.

'The Book of Jeremiah and the rights and wrongs of alliance with Egypt: discuss.'

I need to be able to talk for five minutes on that topic this Wednesday, and you know? I don't know nearly enough. Hopefully I will be able to find The Recommended Book in the library tomorrow, and learn a little more.

But. Talking about a biblical text is so incredibly complex. Particularly the pre-exilic prophetic texts. Because you have, maybe, what the prophet said, and then you have what other people said that the prophet said, and then you have the exilic (Deuteronomistic) and later editors coming in to the text and adding what they think the prophet should have said.

And then we get into original intent, and redactionism, and other things.

( Read more... )

Whew. I started with bitching, and ended with a draft. It's weird how there things work out, no?

I have been granted the incomparable boon of a deadline extension for not one, but two assignments. Pardon me while I breathe again.

*breathes*

Right, now. Only 1500 words of assignment required this weekend. I need good sources on the Mycenaean period so-called 'Mask of Agamemnon,' excavated by Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae. Fortunately, there appear to be several reputable articles online. I thank various minor deities for the existence of Google, daily.

*

There are some downsides to feeding my music habit with Pandora. The major upside is I don't have to listen to crap (unless I run mad and actually start wanting to listen to Westlife, in which case I hope somebody euthanises me quickly). The downside is, of course, that I can't listen to any track on demand: I have to wait until the algorithm throws it up again.

This is an improvement over terrestrial radio. But I have a desire to listen to Loreena McKennitt right now, and this time it seems I can't game the program to give me more, now.

You win some, you lose some.

*

Criminal Minds is teaching me more about layered narratives than I ever thought possible to learn. They do it every week, and they do it well: it is immensely freaking brilliantly wonderful. (And no, I'm not answering questions as to how come I can watch it when it doesn't show on Irish TV. That's a secret)

When the DVDs come out for Region 2, I'm there, stat.

Assignment 1, 500 words and one-quarter done. Send extra functioning brains, please. There has been a shortage.

Watch this space for gibbering and howling at the moon. But not until tomorrow.

So, here's the thing. I caught a dizzy viral-bug-thing that was going around, was floored for about three days or so. Now I have less than 120 hours to write 3000 words of assignment. Complete with research and relevent references.

So. Cover me, I'm going in. See you on the other side.

Tonight was a night for the lecture on forensic archaeology by a British professor who had assisted the police in England on, he said, about eighty or ninety homicides. He'd also worked on excavating mass graves in Bosnia and in Iraq.

The techniques of forensic archaeology are very similar to those of the more general kind. It's really only the questions they're trying to answer which are different. He talked for an hour and a half. It was a very interesting presentation. Some of the slides - and some of the cases he described - were gruesome, but really, very interesting.

Going to a lecture on forensic archaeology the day after a presentation on the Holocaust might not be exactly the best recipe for good dreams. Just saying.

*

I'm writing this on the train. I'll probably end up posting this and going to sleep, because between course lectures, assignment work, and this evening's decomposing-body-extravaganza-lecture, I'm wrecked. Tomorrow, of course, is another day of more busy-ness. Thursday and Friday likewise: all the really interesting extra lectures seem to be on evenings this week, so inasmuch as it is possible, I want to get to them all. On Thursday, for example, there's a lecture about Egyptian trophies and how they were taken by Rome for display in Rome itself. On Friday, there's a biblical studies evening lecture about religious beliefs and practices in early Judah and Israel: does the evidence suggest polytheism? Or were the Israelites and/or the Judaeans always monotheistic?

I should probably stop writing now, before I trail away into greater incoherency. Night, all.

One of our lecturers arranged a talk this morning, from a Holocaust survivor. It was... impressive.

Tomi Riechental is a short man. He doesn't look seventy: he's more like a grey-haired fifty-five. But he was born in Slovakia in 1935, and in 1944 was deported to the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen, with his mother, his brother, and some others of his family. Eight months later, at the end of the war, Riechental and his immediate family were among the few survivors, and Riechental himself didn't speak out about his experiences for over fifty-five years. Because, as he said, he just couldn't. It was too terrible.

He told us about the men and women who looked like walking skeletons, with their skin stretched tight over their bones. About the bodies in the dead of winter, piled outside the barracks in their dozens, in their hundreds, frozen, decomposing. About the hunger and the unrelenting horror.

And about the duty he feels now, with so many of the older generation dying off, to speak and bear witness to what he has seen, that it may be remembered. That it may never be repeated.

At the end, we stood. We applauded. We showed our respect the only way that was in us to do, and I was left feeling that it wasn't enough.

I'll remember that short, soft-spoken man speaking with a guttural accent of things that seem so divorced from that white-walled, sanitary seminar room for the rest of my life. Because, as he quoted, the horror of the Holocaust is not that it is beyond human capacity. The horror of it is that it is within human minds to plan, and human hands to carry out, genocide on a continent-wide scale.

*

In other news, today was a good day. I attended lectures and the gym. I ran, and did weights, and almost achieved a respectable pull-up.

Life is sometimes more forgiving than I expect it to be.

(This was suposed to get posted yesterday, but LJ was b0rked.)

Being an outraged feminist is tiring.

The Irish government refuses to fund or support the HPV vaccine. Many young women are getting it anyway, and many mothers are going into debt to give it to their daughters. The HPV vaccine has been shown in testing to reduce the rate of cervical cancer by 80%, but if you're Irish and want it, you're going to have to shell out around six hundred (600) euro.

(insert rant about how if this was a vaccine for penile cancer in men, the government would be bending over backwards to ensure its provision.)

The latest Health Services Executive anti-STD advertisement campaign, from what I've seen of it, places all the responsibility for preventing the transmission of STDs on women. Sample advertisement: picture of a woman and a man kissing. Thought bubble above the woman's head: "I'm too embarrassed to suggest a condom." Thought bubble underneath the woman's feet: "But how embarrassed would I be if I got clamydia?".

Men and women are equally responsible for their sexual hygiene and the safety of themselves and their partners. But, pray tell, how often are men made to feel ashamed of asking their partners to take basic health precautions? How often are men pressured into having sex with their partners because they're part of a culture that assumes that if they're dating, there's something wrong with them if they're not fucking? How often are men made to feel ashamed of sex, full stop?

(insert rant about living in a patriarchal, bishops'-rings-kissing country that still, no still hasn't thrown off all of its Victorian prejudices, much less replaced them with something sane.)

The Irish Independent ran an article today about how women have overtaken men in nearly all levels of education (the exception is education that leads to well-paid trades, such as apprenticeships) and how we need to think of ways to encourage the poor boys to hang in there and not let the girls outdo them. This, when studies have shown that the gender gap in wages in Ireland starts immediately after college graduation, and men are consistently paid more than women for the exact same work. Not to mention the fact that the trades are booming, and in many trades companies simply won't employ women, however qualified. (One of my uncles-by-marriage is an electrician. I've heard him laugh about this.)

Yeah, the poor boys really need hand-holding through their education. I don't think.

You know, when I was still a student at an all-girls school, I didn't think that sexism was a problem. We were taught to believe we could do anything, be anything, that we wanted to be; that we could go anywhere that we wanted to go. That we were on equal footing - no, better, because we were getting a better education - with the entire world.

Thank you, world, for disillusioning me.

*

I will not feel guilty about not writing when I've written (including deletions and revisions) over 2K worth of college assignment this week. I will not feel guilty about not writing when I have over 7K worth of college assignments to do before next Friday, and some eating, sleeping and exercise to throw in there as well.

I will not feel guilty. I will feel accomplished.

So, the topic for theology this week was religious experience, and its nature. I feel moved to discuss it here, if only to clarify to myself how I feel about it. Somebody should probably stop me.

Some - many, in fact - theologians hold that there is a universal experience of the divine or supernatural. Some, like Friedrich Schleiermacher, hold that it is the experience of a sense of 'absolute dependency' on a greater power, or, like H.D. Lewis, argue that it comes from an apprehension of the limitations of human existence and the human world and the awareness or feeling that there must exist some unconsidered, infinite, or absolute being beyond human existence and upon which human existence is utterly dependent. (Others, like Feuerbach, contend that 'God' is a projection of human desires, but that's not entirely germane to my discussion.)

Theologians who generalise from their own specific experience of religion overlook one thing, however: the problem of the observer.

The problem with constructing theories from specific or personal experience in theology or philosophy is similar to the problem of adjusting for bias in science: one cannot, quite literally cannot, divorce the observer from the thing observed. Thus all conclusions that the Observer reaches about the Phenomenon (unless one takes adequate care to adjust for bias, which is sometimes done in science and never in philosophy or theology) are therefore coloured by the Observer's preconceptions.

'Religious experience' can be intrepreted in different ways. The experiences which believers term 'religious' could be communications from an absolute Being or reality; or they could be an effect of the brain chemicals; or they could be some mix of the two; or nothing of significance at all.

But if one is raised with religion*, in a culture wherein belief in a supreme Deity is the rule rather than the exception, is one not predisposed to view such experiences as communications from the specific Deity which one has been raised to think is present and active in the world? If one is a Christian, one would be predisposed to believe it was God or the Christ, if Muslim, Allah, if Jewish, YHWH, not so?

So how, therefore, can a theologian generalise from their specific experience to a 'universal' theory of religious experience, and thus the validation of a specific framework of belief?

I mean, I've had 'religious' experiences, and I'm a freaking agnostic.**

(I was a deist at the time, and felt quite comforted by the thought that there was Something out there. I've since come to believe it was a false comfort, and self-deluding. There is no redemption and no absolution, and if nothing has meaning, then everything must, and one owes it to oneself and the world to be the best, most decent freaking human being one can be.)

I still have 'religious' experiences, in fact, only now I intrepret them in terms of fluctuations of the brain chemicals. So what makes my interpretations less valid, in the eyes of certain sections of society, than anyone else's, simply because I prefer not to believe in a Deus Pater? Or, for that matter, in the authenticity of revealed scripture?***

*

*Note that my experience and field of study is with Christian religion, and that I'm an agnostic and a skeptic by inclination. As such I hope to wear my biases on my sleeve.

**I was raised by the latest in a long line of Lapsed Catholics, attended a non-denominational - for which read Anglican - primary school and Catholic secondary one, and decided early I had no use for hypocrisy. My declared agnosticism is really a logical progression (from childhood Christianity through adolescent Deism to adult agnosticism) but you know, I still catch shit about it from some people. And not just when I call them on grounds of hypocrisy, either.

***I'm a historian-in-training. The Bible contradicts itself multiple times. If it was indeed 'inspired by God', then to paraphrase theologian Keith Ward, God was very definitely not interested in making himself clear - as a Omnipotent Being ought to be able to, if It so desired.

Yesterday, instead of doing the work I was supposed to be doing, I wrote 2K words of short story and read a Kim Harrison novel (A Fistful of Charms) between my lectures. Today, after discovering my 1700 hours lecture was Not Happening (can we say 'Hurrah!'?), I came home and slept. For four hours.

I could blame the weather, since it's finally become cold - snow is a possibility tonight* - but really, I think it's the laziness factor kicking in. It's been dark and damp for five months now and I want a holiday. Preferably somewhere warm.

Barring that, a week off to read books and huddle under the covers would be nice. But, you know, tough luck. The world still stubbornly refuses to arrange itself for my convenience, but I haven't given up hoping yet.

+

Dear body,

Eating, sleeping, and exercising on schedule are not optional requirements. Please fulfil your contractual obligations in a prompt and organised manner, or the Management will be forced to take Measures.

Yours,

the rest of me.

+

Memo to: brain
From: Mgmt.

Rediscover willpower ASAP. Thank you.

+

Fiction 19, Book 20: Kim Harrison, A Fistful of Charms.

Fourth book about witch Rachel Morgan, in a setting where witches, vampires, werewolves, pixies, fairies and various other supernatural sorts are an acknowledged, if not universally accepted, part of society.

Rachel Morgan's ex-boyfriend is in trouble. Cue rescue, with complications.

Fast-paced, well-characterised, does not (thankfully) use urban fantasy tropes to the point of cliché - and unlike certain other authors I will refrain from mentioning by name, does not substitute Pointless Sex for Plot - and unexpectedly funny in parts. The other characters in this series are slowly becoming more fleshed-out - I read the first three after the 2005 Worldcon, so my memory might be lacking - particularly Ivy and Jenks, and I'm interested to see what's coming next.

+

*Will the country come to a standstill for half a centimetre of snow?** Find out tomorrow!

**I hope it does, but I don't think I believe in snow anymore. Been lied to before, you understand.

Not one raises his head among the Nine Bows.
Desolation is for Tehenu; Hatti is pacified;
Plundered is the Canaan with every evil;
Carried off is Ashkelon; seized upon is Gezer;
Yanoam is made as that which does not exist;
Israel is laid waste, his seed is not;
Hurru is become a widow for Egypt!
All lands together, they are pacified;
Everyone who was restless, he has been bound.

- from the Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian border monument, c1250 BC, notable for the first mention of Israel in the historical record, where it appears named not as a city or a nation, but as an ethnic group.

Because it is wet and windy outside, I decided not to go into town to college. This means, of course, that I must construct at least the beginnings of my thesis for my essay, The Development of Kingship in Israel and Sumer here at home.

Because I'm a terrible (or very talented, depending on how you want to look at it) procrastinator, I've decided to share my work.

So. The essay is going to have to rely on the compare-and-contrast method. So far I am at bullet-point thinking:

In Sumer:

- rulership the province of the en, steward of the city god.
- as cities grow large enough that they must compete with each other, there is need for a war leader, the lugal
- at first a temporary position, the lugal quickly becomes the most important post in the city.
- Sargon of Akkad conquers many cities and needs a method of justifying his rulership
- which leads us to the first official royal theology, attributed to his daughter, the priestess Enheduanna
- give examples of subsequent uses of similar royal theology
- do we need to include Assyria and its approach to the gods of the conquered?

In Israel:

- stimulus diffusion? (and thanks, cristalia, for that very handy term)
- rulership the province of 'judges' - power localised? temporary?
- rise of war leaders
- Saul as the first (recorded? factcheck time) warleader to try to make his position permanent
- the rebellion of David, (competing warleader)
- the construction of Davidian royal theology
- the secession of Jeroboam in the reign of Rehoboam son of Solomon (division of Israel and Judah)
- differing royal theologies of Israel and Judah
- pos. including the reforms of Josiah and the Deuteronomists?

*

Well, I suppose that's a start, anyway. Now all I need is to do the reading tomorrow and Friday, sort out the timeline, and add evidence, quotations, and some insightful analysis, and I'm sorted.