TACKER: barnacle SUBJECT: buddhism vs. taoism DATE: 13-Aug-04 17:10:30 HOST: sverige buddhism seems to contain an inherent contradiction (admittedly, this is probably a result of applying my adversarial, dualistic, deductive western mind and latinate-germanic language to eastern concepts). on the one hand, buddhism 'advocates'(1) living in harmony with nature, being nice to people, etc -- being concerned with living your life in a 'right' way. On the other hand, buddhists scholars write about the illusive nature of all perception, the indistinguishability of this thing from that thing, and the one true nature of reality. Buddhism often speaks to something very much like an unknowable, platonic, universal ideal. It can get pretty abstract if you're not careful. But then again, maybe this is a problem with western language/culture trying to wrap itself around buddhism. taoism is, from what I understand, similar in a lot of ways to buddhism. The difference seems to come from the absence, in taosim, of something like a 'universal ideal,' which may or may not be present in buddhism. Hehe, i bet you're glad I cleared this all up ;) anyway, if there are some people who have studied this more than I have and would like to contribute to a discussion on what, exactly, makes buddhism different from taoism, I'd be eager to read your posts. buddhism seems to stress transcedance, while taoism seems to stress living your life in harmony with nature. -- (1) here's an example of the language problem: buddhism doesnt really 'advocate' anything, doesn't really present any 'concepts,' and in fact 'isn't' anything -- the whole network of categories and names and properties employed by the western mind and english language doesn't rest as comfortable over eastern philosophy as it does over science and logic. There's a reason computers, technology, and science are rooted in the west: the western mind is well-suited to such procedural minutiae, to 'distinguishing this from that,' something that is necessary to the quantization of reality that makes science and deduction possible. Unfortunately, it makes a pantheistic spirituality difficult. TACKER: barnacle SUBJECT: .. Condoms DATE: 13-Aug-04 18:04:47 HOST: sverige earhorn, I think the bible is pretty clear on not conding homosexuality. But no argument is irrefutable, and a lot of people who are determined to call themselves 'christians' because of the connected familial and cultural baggage have done quite a bit of lawyerly language-manipulation so they can do so. Instead of trying to resolve the conflict, consider the possibility that the abrahamic world-view is destructive, reductionist, violent and nonsensical, and should be abandoned for more tolerant, pragmatic views of science and history. i mean, come on...it's primitive. We're talking about a tribal god of the ancient hebrews, ca. 2000 BCE. Reconciling abrahamic faith with contemporary spirituality and science is like trying to fix the microsoft operating system -- it'd be a lot easier just to start over (har har, sorry). TACKER: barnacle SUBJECT: .. Condoms DATE: 13-Aug-04 19:42:57 HOST: sverige i suppose I should read the thing before criticising it -- this is generally good practice. some of the bible verses pieckiel posted were just good, common-sense advice on how to live your life. Others were culture and time-specific stuff that is pretty irrelevant now, like all that stuff in leviticus about not screwing your stepmom, etc. i think herein lies the biggest problem with the weird relationsihp judaism and christianity share: all of these culture-specific contextual moral practices get taken out of their context and re-applied to the universe by evangelical christianity (or islam). This recipe, of ancient hebrew moral and legal code plus the translation of this (especially dualism -- good vs. Evil) into some kind of 'eternal truth' give rise to holy war, 'convert or die,' torture, rape, slavery, etc. i don't have any problem with the jews (or the parsis, bahais, sikhs...any other non-evangelical 'people of the book' that come to mind), but I dont want to be forced to be one (in the sense that I would be made to adopt abrahamic and hebrew cultural and moral practices) by the spanish inquisition, pat robertson or osama bin laden.
What follows is a post on the SDF bulletin board. I've been doing most of my writing there recently, and I didn't want my blog to be lonely. The name of the thread is 'after high school,' and was started by a 16 year old girl (handle:hapiworm) asking that people tell her about their post-HS experiences. Everyone loves to write about themselves, so the thread filled up quickly. Here's my contribution.
I was a bit of an idiot in HS (i realized this after talking to a lot of the kids on SDF -- I wouldn't have been fit to interact with them when I was their age). I graduated with a 2.7 GPA, but was admitted to a pretty good school (st. Mary's college of MD) on the merits of my SAT scores, essays, and a few 'honors' classes. I was always 'the art guy' in HS, but I think I felt as though I didn't want to narrow my world-view with an art degree, and so decided to concentrate on a 'liberal arts' education. This was all about 11 years ago.
I spent about two months in college down in southern Maryland. I never read a page, and I think I wrote something like one essay. I dropped out after an unpleasant incident involving a bottle of ritalin and the st. Mary's river. The dean followed up with a rather nasty letter to the effect of 'you are not welcome back here.'
I spent 6 months or so working at the library of congress as a peon and living with my dad before returning to school, in the form of community college, as an undeclared music major. I spent the next 6 years or so taking different freshman-level liberal arts classes (including a stint as an illustration major), interrupted by various legal and hospitalization incidents.
After coming out of howard university hospital, I returned to the community college, took a few more random classes, and eventually finished up my AA degree. I remember my dad and step-family held a 'graduation party' for me, this 26 year-old oaf 'graduating' from community college. It was appreciated, but still pretty depressing.
I went on to UMBC, where I was a declared psychology major for a year. I was in the 'industrial psychology' program, because I understood the futility of pre-professional preparation with a BA in psychology and wanted to augment this with some business associations. I hoped to enter HR or something like that. Anyway, this concentration lead me to actually take a management class, which was possibly the most useless class I've ever taken, and which I'm still paying for (among other courses) today.
After a year in the bowels of the psych department, I was admitted to the art program and finished it up in a year and a half. The 'imaging and digital arts emphasis, interactivity track' was marketed as pre-professional training for web development (this was before the .com crash), but was clearly a fine arts program. This was probably for the best, but the kids in the program wouldn't have been unhappy about it if they'd given it some thought. My main complaints were that nothing professionally useful (like web scripting, apache configuration, or even html) was taught, and that I wasted a lot of time reading masturbatory essays by people like foucalt and derrida when I could have been either making art or learning about computers.
In may of 2002, I graduated from UMBC with a BA in visual art. I began my education in September of 1993, almost 9 years later, and $25,000 in debt. I'm currently unemployed.
This thread seems to be about regret -- people saying 'dont you be like me!' and citing their abysmal college-era experiences. I suppose if I had it all to do over, I would do it differently, but regret is sort of pointless. For better or for worse, I am who I am today because of my experiences.
As far as advice to hapiworm goes: just do something -- it honestly doesn't matter what, as long as you put your heart and brain into it, and keep applying your creativity, pattern-recognition and drive to new problems. The specifics are a bit superfluous.
I bought a brita filter and a huge glass. I really don't have the energy to blog.
I had a jury summons for tomorrow, but I was excused by recorded message because my 'call number' was too high. I guess they only need a certain number of potential jurors, and they overbook. Although I'm sort of grateful that I won't have to get myself to and possibly find parking at the courthouse, I'm admittedly a little bit disappointed that I won't be able to cast my vote for innocence if the defendant is poor, guilt if s/he were rich, regardless of crime.
If it were a civil trial, I would assign monetary advantage to the party with less money to begin with.
I guess this is what they call being a 'liberal juror.' I call it being a 'postmodern juror.' what is guilt, really? What does it mean when we say someone did something, that something definitely happened a certain way in the past? The past doesn't exist -- ultimately the question of 'what happened in the past' is a philosophical question, and impossible to approach with any objectivity. Knowing this, and knowing that the courts are class-biased, I see it as my duty as an american to make sure the poor don't suffer at the hands of the rich.
I'm all out of theories.
I replaced my perl/cgi search form with one that uses google's index of my blog. The cache is about a week behind my postings, so be sure to check the most recent blog-page by hand. This is mainly for my own selfish purposes -- whenever I needed to find something in my blog, I found it much easier to use google's nearly-complete index of my writings than to use the perl script I'd taken from deadbarnacle 's script archive. The perl script didn't support quotes, and it searched the entire html file as opposed to a browser's interpretation of it. Ie, a search on 'head' would return every single page in my html directory, because the word 'head' appears in the html code for each of the 45 or so pages. Also, with the google search form, all of google's neat little tricks are supported, like OR, +, _, filetype, date, etc.
It's sort of scary the degree to which we rely on google. I'd hate to see them turn evil. Maybe they are already.
Sunday is normally a good day for watching movies on tv, but there's nothing on today. That's essentially what I do: migrate from one screen to another. When one screen gets to be too much, I switch off. Repeat until hungry, sleepy, etc.