And now, a musical interlude…
Found this on the Friendly Atheist. Great stuff.
From the Youtube blurb:
A music video to watch while you skip church this Sunday. Written and performed by Julie Wittner (co-creator of “2 Hot Girls in the Shower”) and Ryan Smith (a staff writer for “Mad TV”), and directed by Kim Evey (creator of “Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show”).
Dr. Jim got depressed for some stupid reason the week of the Religious Studies conference, and ditched Facebook. Now, without Facebook, I feel strangely normal, and that is very disconcerting. Should I go back?
Hmmm.
I do miss getting poked. But I’m not sure I miss the pseudo-social life of sitting around staring at it. Not that I have much of a social life anyway. Now I’m depressed again.
From a thread called “Real Estate Jesus” on Internet Infidels, a gem from ICinsideU from Mississippi: Just in time for the global day of Pretend! The discussion is about one person’s experiences with an evangelical landscaping firm and contributors come around to the topic of whether or not God has his priorities straight in caring about whether or not this guy sells his house. Then we read:
Speaking of his priorities, just today I was in a public bathroom, and the guy in the stall next to me is obviously struggling. Grunting and groaning and pushing. Then, I hear a plop as he pinches it off, and, clear as day, I hear the man say, “Thank you, Jesus.” I would have wet myself laughing, if I didn’t already have my pants down.
Woo hoo! Holy Crap! Straight from the bowels of heaven! Now, theologically, can we say that Jesus removed his obstacles, or that this is a case of creation ex-cremento?
With her eighteenth! Holy (repeated) fuck!
41 year old Michelle Duggar, baby factory delux, has another bun in the oven. One wonders if Michelle with her, shall we say, rabbit-habit, even go into labour anymore, or do the sprogs just drop out when she does the dishes?
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - It’s a happy Mother’s Day for an Arkansas woman — she’s pregnant with her 18th child. Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year’s Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins. …
The Duggars’ oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old.
The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled.
Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.
The new show looks at life inside the Duggar home, where chores — or “jurisdictions” — are assigned to each child. One episode of the new show involves a “jurisdiction swap,” where the boys do chores traditionally assigned to the girls, and vice versa, Duggar said.
Well, I suppose if they can afford it, who can complain, but then again, this is the internet, and so why not? OK, so its a TV and internet spectacle. That won’t harm the kids. Being gawked at by millions while you are growing up and having a million of fundamentalist Christians live their vicarious “family values” through you really is the way to live out your nervous teenage rebellious years.
If they want to make spectacles of their kids, why not have a laugh? Perhaps they are not fundamentalist protestants after all. They sound like Roman Catholics (at least according to Monty Python).
Good thing SHUFFL proposed a well fitting religious bra for her some time ago!
What is funny, however, is that their old, very Christian, website that I linked to in the bra post (http://www.duggarfamily.com/) that had this to say:
“God has opened many doors for them to share that children are a blessing from the Lord! They have been featured on four Discovery Health / TLC documentaries entitled,“14 Children and Pregnant Again!”, “16 Children and Moving In!”, “Raising 16 Children!” & “On The Road With 16 Children!”. … The Duggar’s desire is to make Christ known and for others to see that the Bible is the owner’s manual for life.”
now simply redirects to the Discovery Heath site linked to above. This site really hasn’t got much to say about God at all! Hmmm. I guess they figured that Christ has already been made known to everyone and that most folk already has picked up a copy of life’s manual, and so now they can just be a spectacle for a commercial media empire with a clean conscious! Isn’t God great? Or… is God getting quite irate?
Got it from Saturday Morning Breakfast.
It never ceases to amaze me how hyper-intellectualized theologiwaffle is, and for all the big words, bigger books and incessant bleatings about its continued relevance, it never really comes to terms with the obvious, it is based on the scribblings of a bunch of 2000 year old nobodies, who thought that their place in the universe depended on splattering sheep innards on an altar…
Well, term is done, the conference I organize is finished for the year, and I’M ON STUDY LEAVE UNTIL SEPT 2009!
So, in between gardening, fishing and stuff like that (and working on the book I’m supposed to write on myth in the biblical prophetic literature), I can do a bit of blogging.
And since SHUFFL likes to take religious fuckwits to task, there is no time like now to get back to our roots:
From the Holy Harry Potter file…
From Pharyngula, a link to a Tampa news source story over the firing of a teacher FOR DOING MAGIC TRICKS!
That’s right, substitute teacher Jim Piculas got fired from Rusche Middle School in Land ‘OLakes for a 30 second magic trick (he made a toothpick appear and reappear) after someone complained that he was practicing “wizardry”, although school officials also say he wasn’t following lesson plans.
Well, alright. If there were reasonable grounds for terminating his temporary employment, fine. But if that was the case, then why the hell bring up “wizardry” accusations? It makes a mockery of any serious objections the school may have had with Mr. Piculas. How can you even begin to defend yourself against complaints that really do strike at the questions of whether you are doing a good job when you have to also address an accusation so bizarre and so stupid it probably does not matter if you can successfully refute the objections to your performance?
Sadly, the article does not give a lot of information about who made the accusation or other details. Still, who the hell in the school system would take such accusations seriously? If the complaint originated from a student, the stupid twerp should be made to apologize to the instructor. Even if a parent complained, so what? When are schools supposed to be projections of parents’ own paranoias and/or religious bullshit? Schools should have the right to tell parents to grow up. If the objection came from the school itself, then Florida really does have problems!
The University of Lethbridge’s annual Research in Religious Studies conference schedule is (FINALLY!) done. We have 44 papers from students in 9 insitutions in Canada and the US!
The conference goes next weekend (May 3-4) here in Lethbridge.
I posted the schedule in on our Dept. Website and my “other” almost forgotten about Blog, and the Dept. Blog, the (Up)Loaded Canon, so there’s no point repeating it here. Anyway, organizing this thing is one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging so much lately. Oh yeah, that and the pile of essays I have to grade…
I should say “Thanks” to Matthew Salmon, my much harried faithful student assistant (who has his own blog here, and its even about serious stuff), and Bev Garnett, our dept. admin. assistant, and all the presenters, etc etc. And Anne Moore of the University of Calgary, who has always supported the conference by twisting arms, threatening and otherwise encouraging her students to come down to Lethbridge for it!
Actually, I came back from Edmonton almost a week ago to an office full of work and deadlines.
I did have a good time at the “Exile” workshop up at the U of Alberta. Hung out with some old friends, read a paper on myth theory and the Hebrew Bible prophets, drank some beer and ate a ton of curry at the New Asian Village.
I also got to finally enjoy a liquid rationalization with Ian of Terahertz fame, Sonia, Bill, Nathan and a representative sample of the rest of the University of Alberta Atheists and Agnostics Club. Ian and co., of course, are the twisted minds behind the FSM “expelled” trailer spoof, and are jolly good company over a few jugs of beer.
Here is the trailer:
Anyway, the A&A@UofA were busy writing a letter of complaint to the university higher ups about the way the text for the graduation ceremony includes some kind of reference to the purpose of a university education is to glorify god. Let’s hope they get that changed!
Anyway, thanks to Ian and crew for the hospitality and the club buttons.
I was going to post this in my more serious Biblical blog “Dr. Jim’s Thinking Shoppe and Somewhat Quirky Biblical Blog” but force of habit led to it showing up here first. So it is now in both places.
I will be away from windy Lethbridge all next week attending the following Academic Extravaganza
This workshop brings together scholars from the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich (LMU) and the University of Alberta, along with colleagues from other European and Canadian universities. This workshop is part of a newly founded cooperation between LMU and the UofA and is conceived as the first of two workshops. The second is planned for Munich (2009).
The workshop is meant to explore, from multiple perspectives, the concept of “Exile” in ancient Israel, mainly but exclusively in prophetic literature, including the social and historical setting against which it evolved and in a way that is informed by comparative ancient materials.
Physical destruction and ideological construction, history and memory, nightmares about the past, didactic knowledge and dreams of a utopian future, basic points of reference for self-identity and for self-narratives; all the above directly relate to the topic of the workshop as they are all involved in the concept of Exile.
A Babylonian campaign against Judah in 587 BCE led to a political and social disaster for many in Judah, and for most of Judah. The monarchy collapsed, Jerusalem was destroyed, along with its temple, and many areas suffered from a drastic drop in settlement. Some of local elite were exiled to Babylon and a concept of Exile began to develop.
In ancient Israelite literature (both prophetic and historiographic) Exile is construed as a central turning point within the course of the history of Israel. In these texts “the Exile” is a central ideological concept in itself and because of the ways in which it is connected to, and connects other fundamental ideological concepts. It serves to explain the destruction of the monarchic polities and the social and economic disasters associated with them in terms of YHWH’s punishment for Israel’s/Judah’s abandonment of YHWH’s ways. As it develops an image of an unjust Israel, it creates one of a just deity. But YHWH is not only imagined as just, but also as loving and forgiving, for the exile is presented as a transitory state: Exile is deeply intertwined with its discursive counterpart, the certain “Return.” Promises and announcement of the latter are often intertwined with those of Exile. As the latter comes to be understood as a necessary purification or preparation for a renewal of YHWH’s proper relationship with Israel, the seemingly unpleasant Exilic conditions begin, discursively, to shape an image of YHWH as loving Israel and teaching it. Exile is dystopia, but one that carries in itself all the seeds of utopia. As the latter is by definition unrealized (and unrealizable), it is no wonder that the concept of Exile continued to exercise an important influence in the discourses of Israel in the Second Temple period, and was eventually influential in the production of eschatological visions.
Exile becomes also a central turning point in the HB, and a theme in the basic metanarratives of Israel, in its construction of the past, and in the construction of collective memory and remembrance. Because of spatial discontinuity with the land, narratives of exile and return become archetypal for constructions of patriarchal narratives and Egyptian sojourn and slavery that led to the Exodus. As such, the concept of Exile links to concepts such as “Israel outside the land” and “Israel inside the land;” and, in turn, leads to images such as “the empty land” during the Babylonian period.
My paper is entitled “Myth of the Exilic Return: Myth Theory and the Exile as an Eternal Reality in the Prophets” and at present I’m not quite sure what it is about. Something about Chinese archetypal biographies and the failure of Jiang Quing (Mao Zedong’s widow) to successfully rehabilitate the mythic biographies of some ambitious and powerful women from China’s imperial past. Don’t ask how I got onto that, but I found a neat paper on the subject of “Archetypes of the Self” that dealt with it and the lack of a clear distinction in China between the persistent notion of a dichotomy between “mythic” and “historical” consciousnesses in Religious Studies. It is especially present in Biblical studies. So I want to look at the prophets as “mythic” characters, built on the archetype of Moses who then provide archetypes for the 2nd temple era scribes who put the prophetic corpus together. I’m going to argue that in doing so they also employed “cosmic” myths of creation and divine combat in new ways to articulate the historical experience of deportation and repatriation to Jerusalem as mythic events in their own rights. The biblical archetype of explusion (from the Garden of Eden, the ‘exile’ of the northern state of Israel) is one of no return: eternal banishment and the Torah affirms this in its construction of the covenant. The bible is deeply concerned with the southern remnant of the old Israelite United Monarchy, Judah, that persisted for several decade’s after the fall of the North.
In the second temple period, when Judah and Jerusalem were rebuilt, then, the ideologues and mythmakers of the 2nd temple period, then, had to employ this archetype but in a new way that allowed for restoration. In this, I’m going to talk about Wendy Doniger’s ideas on ‘metamyth’–myths about myths– to show the acceptance and yet repudiation of the “exit only” archetype. They do this by portraying the restoration as a fundamentally new creation, thus linking cosmic themes of origin to historical events.
Or something like that. Its not finished…
I have until Wednesday morning to finish it. It is not looking good.
The rest of the schedule is here.
Wish me luck
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