Ahmed FASIH @22@octodon.social

Holy kami, the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies is fully open access!?:

http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/publications/jjrs/listofjournals/

Don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me for a few weeks.

Couple highlights:

Breen on the sale of Ise amulets: http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/3020

Miura on kibyoushi, irreverent religious tales from the Edo period http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/4631 (which led me to https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=14826 “Jesus and Buddha have decided to take a holiday in Japan”…).

"[The Force] is a deity for a rationalist world. Even today we know that things don’t always turn out the way they should. Juries make the wrong decisions, computers still crash, even even two space shuttles—highly sophisticated though they were—failed and exploded during routine operations. Many find the white-bearded God untenable, but somewhere out there amid the comets and stars, there seems to be a moral force guiding us in the constant struggle of good versus evil"

https://steveawiggins.com/2014/11/29/the-force-re-awakens/

One of my hobbies: visualizing Christianity, or Buddhism, or the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, or (you see where I’m going with this), when they were in the same phase that Jediism is today.

“Jedi teachings are generally considered suggestions and guides rather than rules. This often brings about different approaches to the teachings among various groups. None are necessarily viewed as improper or incorrect” https://www.thoughtco.com/jedi-religion-jediism-95690

Like imagining a wizened elder as a mischievous toddler&vice versa

'The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it seems, is going the way of the somewhat more serious Jediism and Avatar religions in that people are deliberately electing fiction as their faith. Interestingly, this may not be a new phenomenon. We are told, for example, that Zarathustra deliberately outlined a new religion… In those days the strict division between fiction and fact may not have been a mental filter yet discovered.' https://steveawiggins.com/2016/04/20/prayer-before-meals/

From the Steve Wiggins NRM goldmine.

"Even should a founder have had less than pure motives, that doesn’t translate to any less verisimilitude on the part of the faithful. Some viable religions have been based on known fictions." https://steveawiggins.com/2015/04/06/new-faiths/

"Paganism began to reassert itself only last century. There had been a social stigma with lying outside the territory claimed by church, synagogue or mosque. … a large, and increasingly expanding, variety of religious options exist for the seeker." https://steveawiggins.com/2015/10/12/nature-of-religion/

"People are not becoming less religious—they’re becoming differently religious. The old sacred texts are being replaced by the fictional Necronomicon. Ethereal beings that have always been there are bowing before ancient aliens who aren’t really eternal or omnipotent, but who feel more real in our culture." —Steve A. Wiggins, https://steveawiggins.com/2016/03/31/cthulhus-tea-party/

I love Steve—I first heard about him when his brother-in-law Neal Stephenson cited their chats about Asherah for "Snow Crash".

@nolan Your comment reaches to the heart of human priestly activity and religion generation and reminds me of this:

"I come from Bangalore, a city in which Pelé is god. I do not mean this metaphorically. In a neighbourhood called Gowthampura, around the corner from where I live, residents have erected a lovely shrine to four local icons – the Buddha, Dr. Ambedkar, Mother Teresa, and the striker from Santos."

https://africasacountry.com/2014/06/neymar-and-race-in-brazil/ has a photo that I have to share.

https://octodon.social/media/N52V9edKcvTKt2sERmY

@nolan !!! Thanks for mentioning this! I remember having to go through all kinds of Amazon AWS cloud TLS DNS insanity to get this to work ~six months ago and I grumbled to myself then how in six months GitHub would fix the issue and here we are 😛!

Them: "How have you dealt with data that's too big to fit comfortably in memory?"

Me: "I ask the CEO to buy me a 1 TB RAM workstation."

This exchange is a bit embarrassing but I don't think I can be condemned as practicing bad engineering without a lot of careful thinking.

Also, 1 TB RAM makes many of our most important datasets "small data" again and it is So SO GOOD to be able to spend my time on real engineering instead of big data linux bullshittery.

“Japanese students prepare for high school entrance exams in the equivalent of ninth grade, and the school they get into can play a major role in determining the rest of their lives. Despite an increased interest in sex, romantic relationships are considered a waste of precious studying time. Friendships are on the cusp of breaking apart because people may get into different schools.” —Caitlin Moore, #AnimeFeminist

https://www.animefeminist.com/feature-fushigi-yugi-adolescence-apotheosis/

Very wary of cultural insensitivity but this is brutal💀

@starbreaker Same.

@starbreaker Yes, but, well, they can't as easily embody their gods' love if they join secular organizations, can they?

The example of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the existence proof of working through a religious establishment to embody agape, the love of universal brotherhood. His example ("I would rather die than hate you") is a high bar for anyone to meet, and alas seems conspicuously absent from religious folk today (in my experience). But it should be possible and I do look for it.

@starbreaker Many missionaries sent to developing countries say that’s what they do.

@stefan
@kensanata
Consider the first people to encounter gorillas, and their wonder if these were human.

And the Papua New Guinean highlanders’ astonishment at meeting whites, from Australia for the first time, less than a century ago! They inspected the visitors’ poop and (apparently) had women sleep with them to confirm that they were indeed human.

Today there’s a lot of support for skepticism about “supernatural”. A thousand years ago, much less so—who knew what wonders existed far away?

I think telling your kids “people who don’t believe in god (specifically the one I’ve just described) will go to hell” is child abuse. Not only because it makes it so hard to relate to other kids, many of whose parents are programming them with different gods, but especially because it can create enormous fear in the child, for themselves.

I recognize this is a dissenting view, so I hope awareness expands and this form of child abuse disappears.

Teach your gods through love, not through fear.

@stefan well then here’s my question. Were the people listening to Beowulf a thousand years ago taking it as fiction or as a folk tale or as history? I realize now that I was suggesting to the child that Beowulf’s singers did actually believe dragons and monsters likely existed—unlike today!, when they’re popular but only as fiction (flat earth and reptile men conspiracy nuts notwithstanding)—but likely the truth is more complicated than I summarized.

“If he kills us, he will also kill our families and our pets, burn down our forests, even poison our water. The enemy is not a human being.”

A hundred years after the Great War, parents like us are reading “The Enemy” by Cali and Bloch to their kids to prepare them for the future.

We don’t program our kids with ideas of religious or racial or gender superiority. But we do teach them that others will disagree with them. Even about this book.

https://octodon.social/media/n4KfossAAhHW-MhcTls https://octodon.social/media/KAQ8440y_beDW1lU-3s

Child was reading and loving a rendition of Beowulf and was curious about monsters and dragons. My attempt at explanation: before we had cameras and airplanes and internet, it was reasonable to believe that monsters and magic and dragons existed.

Like how we tell stories about aliens. Our descendants will explain to their little ones how 21st century people lacked faster-than-light and nanotechnology and synthetic cognizance so they could entertain weird ideas about alien life.

I used to judge people by their gender, their race, their ancestry, their beliefs, their majors, their hobbies… all kinds of things. Now I judge people mainly on how much they judge others. Life is better this way.