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kamary99
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Name: Kate
Birthday: 12/4/1985
Gender: Female
Interests: playing ultimate frisbee, singing to myself, walking barefoot, reading, following jesus, looking through microscopes, drawing, skygazing, navel-gazing, living in filth, deepening relationships, using gerunds and parallelism, socks
Occupation: Student
Message: message me
AIM:  kamary99
Member Since:
10/7/2004
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| Erin Toolis: One time I read in my sister's diary that she liked to read my diary. Oh, I was so mad. ....Wait, we were really young.
I showed Erin the goatse picture, mirrored on http://www.goatse.cz. She'd never even heard of it before.
Erin Toolis: [talking to John on the phone] Yeah, that's pretty weird. [to me] Sure, what's weird? AAAAAAHHH! [runs to bathroom] What, no, Kate just showed me this picture online and it was... I don't really know what it was. It was terrible. I can't describe it.... No, I don't know if there were animals involved. There was just.. glistening... parts... that I don't want to see. ....It was like death in front of my face.
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| Jesus, you walked with the sinners in Rome and Galilee and showed them a way out of their sin and isolation. They did not know firsthand of God's love until until you physically entered their lives. Walk in spirit with us now, the body of believers in Christ, because many of us have become splintered and disorganized so that one Christian does not know another. Most importantly, walk with the citizens who surround us and do not yet know You: for the believers have the benefit of knowing your love even without the capacity to sense your constant presence, but the unbelievers go through life unaware that you are there to guide them. Show them that they are not alone in this life; we are not alone.
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| That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. "Teacher,"
they said, "Moses told us that if a man dies without having children,
his brother must marry the widow and have children for him. Now
there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and
since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?" Jesus replied, "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not the God of the dead but of the living." When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching. Matthew 22:23-33
I thought of this passage today while in a New York City taxi, listening to a radio talk show personality bash Christianity, and then respond scathingly to the few pitiably brave Christians who ventured to call in to his show to defend their faith. This guy was pretty callous, speaking with dripping sarcasm as he pretended to be swayed by the argument of one caller, who earnestly asserted, "God works in mysterious ways." For a different caller, the host had all kinds of tough questions about Christianity to throw around, hardly giving the man a chance to reply before cutting him off with a new question, and finally cowing him into silence after repeatedly declaring the caller "brainwashed." The radio host was clearly proud of coming up with so many clever, unanswerable questions about Christianity. Now I've heard that for any challenge you're going through, you can find a parallel to it in Christ's life, and so far that seems pretty true to me. It turns out that Christ even experienced people throwing clever, unanswerable questions at him, which may be useful for the average beleaguered believer today to know.
When I read this passage in the New Testament, I usually pause after the Sadducees' question, because I tend to forget what Jesus' answer was and I want to see if I can answer it myself with my own imperfect knowledge of the Hebrew Bible. The Sadducees aren't described as having evil intent the way the Pharisees are in the story preceding this story, but they're asking about an important component of Christ's teaching that does not align with what they believe, because (as far as I'm aware) the Old Testament does not really address the particulars of an afterlife. Jesus did make claims about an afterlife, and he also claimed that none of his teachings departed from the Hebrew Bible. This question about how to reconcile the two teachings therefore seems like a very clever question to me; maybe even an unanswerable one. What exactly can Jesus say that will be satisfactory to all sides? He's basically being examined here for his fitness as a religious leader. There's nothing compelling him to answer the question; he's not in immediate danger from this group or anything. He probably could have ignored the question and talked some more about poor people, or done a few miracles to distract the audience from a thorny subject. But he does none of these things: he answers the Sadduccees' question immediately.
I always feel a little jolt of surprise when I see that he is able to answer his challengers right away like that, with patience and thoroughness as well. I'm consistently and foolishly surprised because his answer is so totally unlike any of the answers the Sadducees (and me, pretty much every time) thought of as possibilities. Because instead of giving them any kind of answer they were expecting (she'll be the first man's wife? the last man's? she'll be wife to all them somehow?), Jesus basically says the underlying assumption behind the question is incorrect, making the question irrelevant. The afterlife is not going to be like earthly life now. Very little of this new teaching is going to uphold the status quo of earthly life, so any question that assumes it will is fundamentally flawed.
To clarify the small picture, the Sadducees, who did not believe in resurrection of the dead, were confronted by a Teacher proposing a new and contrary belief that he nevertheless claimed was perfectly in line with the old beliefs. Curious about how to reconcile this contradiction, they asked what probably seemed like a clever and instructive question, only to be told that their interpretation of their own holy texts was incorrect, and their bible actually supported his seemingly "new" teaching. It was the constraints of their own religious understanding that had prevented them from realizing this before.
Drawing this out in the bigger picture, isn't this pretty much the exact process that you, as a curious non-Christian, go through as you learn about beliefs Christians hold that are different from your own, and start thinking of questions and objections that seem irreconcilable to you? Many of those questions probably seem very clever to you, though to be honest, they have been probably already been raised much more probingly by skeptics with much sharper wit than yours (just as this topic has been covered much more eloquently by people with much better credibility than me). The margins of my Bible are covered with notes and questions I had about the text when I approached it from a constrained, non-theistic point of view. Some of these questions are cheeky or even belligerent, and some are honestly curious about what I increasingly perceived as a valuable and possibly even truthful worldview. Some of them I even thought I had the answer to. Yet I can honestly say that of the questions I eventually got answered by people with greater experience than me in the faith (that is to say, almost any committed Christian anywhere), none of the answers resembled anything I might have been expecting. It was so discouraging to get my expectations contravened every time that I finally gave up trying to provide myself with easy answers, and settled down to the difficult business of accepting that I just don't know almost anything about anything. In other words, I, as a metaphorical Sadducee, had the slightly stunning experience of being told that fundamental assumptions of my worldview were incorrect, thereby rendering irrelevant many of the conclusions I unconciously assumed were valid starting points for my questions about a different worldview.
People like that radio talk show host don't even realize the things they don't realize, if you know what I mean. They're like the Sadducees who approached Christ's teachings from a pre-existing set of assumptions, and then object when Christianity doesn't conform to those assumptions. The tricky thing is conveying this error to someone who generally does not even recognize that they have such a handicap to begin with. Jesus managed it pretty effectively, but then he had the considerable advantage of actually being God. We plebeian followers have got to figure out some other way on our own, and it may not involve actually answering any questions at all. When I asked questions, it was extremely instructive for me to hear other people's answers, but I think the most important strides in my faith were made when the answer I got was nothing like what I expected-- even when I received no answer at all.
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| kamary99 (12:30:08 PM): this is the thing
kamary99 (12:30:25 PM): there are some writers who do not think english contains the precise word they need for a certain concept
kamary99 (12:30:37 PM): so they basically make up a word
kamary99 (12:31:46 PM): but the biggest problem with that method is, that actually English DOES have the word you need, and if it doesn't have a single word that properly encapsulizes your concept, then your concept is too complex for a single word anyway
kamary99 (12:32:45 PM): the precise examples that made me think of this injury to the language were some words in this essay:
kamary99 (12:32:48 PM): 1. hypercanonical
kamary99 (12:33:47 PM): that one is a little contrived, but forgiveable. You know what the person is going for, it's a fairly robust-sounding term, whatever, I guess it's fine.
kamary99 (12:33:51 PM): 2. uniaccentual
kamary99 (12:33:55 PM): COME ON
kamary99 (12:34:12 PM): i actually looked for this in google just to see if anyone has ever used it before
kamary99 (12:34:54 PM): there were less than two hundred instances in the entire(googlified) internet
kamary99 (12:35:17 PM): that's a pretty good indication that this is not a good word
kamary99 (12:36:15 PM): the problem with words like that is that it basically takes the reader longer to figure out what all the parts of that word are supposed to signify, than it would take to read a longer description of the concept the author is trying to illustrate
kamary99 (12:36:57 PM): you know what i mean? you shouldn't be making your reader stop in the middle of the sentence to stare at your ugly-ass word and figure out what it means
kamary99 (12:37:12 PM): that is actually counterproductive
Antonius Fractus (12:37:15 PM): haha
kamary99 (12:37:22 PM): and i am, clearly, very angry about it
kamary99 (12:37:23 PM): hehe
Antonius Fractus (12:38:44 PM): i can see your point in specific, but are you saying that, generally, the english language is perfect and should have no addition of words.
Antonius Fractus (12:38:48 PM): ?
Antonius Fractus (12:39:15 PM): i should have said complete, not perfect.
kamary99 (12:41:08 PM): no, good call, i really meant that english has such a very vast lexicon of incredibly specific words that the odds are overwhelmingly good that the word you need has already been coined
kamary99 (12:41:23 PM): unless it's some current-events kind of word, like weblog or something
kamary99 (12:41:40 PM): it totally makes sense to come up with new words for concepts that never existed before
kamary99 (12:42:03 PM): but these people come up with really tortured new words for old concepts
Antonius Fractus (12:42:14 PM): ok, yeah.
kamary99 (12:43:06 PM): i feel like in that case, your new word had better be really darn brilliant to justify its use in lieu of whatever the existing word(s) are
kamary99 (12:43:17 PM): uniaccentual
kamary99 (12:43:23 PM): is pretty much an abomination
kamary99 (12:43:32 PM): in my humble opinion
kamary99 (12:43:33 PM): ![<IMG height=15 src=]() " src="aolbart:/1024/id/2B000001E4/3A2D29" unselectable="on">
kamary99 (12:45:20 PM): thanks for listening to my word-nerd rant, i feel like a great vocabularical (not a word) weight has been lifted from my shoulders
Antonius Fractus (12:46:22 PM): i like that you seem to have been primarily concerned about the effect it would have on the reader, and not necessarily the literary significance of the act.
Antonius Fractus (12:46:29 PM): haha, i'm glad : )
kamary99 (12:50:49 PM): haha, yeah, good call. Wait, actually, you've sort of identified one of the huge debates in linguistics, between the prescriptive school (kind of like the French, who think the language should be purged of impurities and held as constant as possible) and the descriptive school (who think the language should be allowed to shift around according to how people really use it)
kamary99 (12:50:59 PM): but maybe you already knew that
kamary99 (12:51:43 PM): the descriptive school would say the meaning matters most, and if the reader can easily understand the meaning, then that's ideal
Antonius Fractus (12:52:03 PM): i'm vaguely familiar, but that was a useful description.
kamary99 (12:54:07 PM): well now that i've answered all your manifold wonderings about what i think of english, tell me what you're up to?
kamary99 (12:54:40 PM): (wait that was a joke, i know i totally went off on a nerdy lil monologue there)
Antonius Fractus (12:55:43 PM): haha, i just have to let you go and do my best to keep up, sometimes. : )
Other relevant things I want to talk about:
The reason writers might use somewhat obscure words-- for instance, "verisimilitude" instead of "believability" when discussing the plot of a novel-- is because they are concerned with precision. English has a lot of words that are basically synonyms but have subtly different connotations, or one of the words is more specific than the other. It adds a lot of polish to your writing if you are able to pinpoint the word that precisely expresses the concept you're going for, instead of using a mere close-enough word. I got the verisimilitude example from a conversation with my mother, who asked me what it meant and then got offended when I defined it with a synonym. "Why didn't you just say believability in the first place, then?!" Because they actually don't mean the same thing! I'm not just being difficult, Mom.
That happens a lot, that someone will ask me what a word means and I explain it using a related word, because that's just easier. My mother is the only one who's ever called me out on this, but I sometimes worry that I'm leading people astray by not being more descriptive in my definition. Sometimes
if the distinction seems important, I'll mention how the connotations
are different, but I don't think many people actually care that much. I think it's often clear by context how the word in question is different from the word used to define it.
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| I've been going through my emails from Erin because they're pretty entertaining when I want to be distracted, and found something I wanted to post here:
the other day I ate an orange and tried to pretend that I'd never seen
an orange before. They're a pretty weird fruit if you look at them
like that. Once you scrape off the attractive nubbly outer covering,
it turns out that they are helpfully sectioned into bitesize pieces
in a way that no other fruit is. And if you peel off the thin
membrane of each section, you can see that there are even smaller
sections-- packets really-- inside each one, containing the juice.
Maybe if we could see the juice, it would be sectioned somehow too.
Oranges are like fractals. they taste good too.
[Thursday, September 28, 2006 3:27 AM]
it's not plagiarism because I wrote it myself
oranges are pretty weird when you think about them
everything is pretty weird when you think...
I was just sitting here contemplating whether I should also post something of Erin's that made me laugh, but then I thought maybe she wouldn't like a private message to be made public like that. But actually I feel fairly certain that if I asked her, she would say of course I could post parts of her emails, and she'd laugh and be surprised that I thought I had to ask. But you know, I think you do have to ask, even if you think you know the answer. Sometimes it's the act of asking permission that makes whatever you want to do okay. It's courtesy. If I have some food, and you know that I like to share so you just take some, I would probably be okay with that, but I would be even more okay with it if you asked me first. And actually, depending on my mood and especially depending on who you are, I might even be mildly not okay with you not asking. So if I remember, I'll mention this to Erin so I can use her words in the future, even though I know she wouldn't really mind if I did it now.
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