Michaelmas

Today is the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels: Michael ("Who is like God?"); Gabriel ("God is my champion"); Raphael ("God heals"); Uriel ("God is my light").

"El," pretty obviously, is a Hebrew suffix (or prefix) that means "God." So: Michael, Gabriel, Ariel, etc. More about this:

The word El appears in other northwest Semitic languages such as Phoenician and Aramaic and in Akkadian ilu as an ordinary word for god. It is aso found also in the South-Arabian dialects and in Ethiopic, and as in Hebrew it is often used as an element in proper names. In northwest Semitic texts it appears to be often but not always used of one single god, of "the God", the head of the pantheon, sometimes specifically said to be the creator.

El is used in both the singular and plural, both for other gods and for the God of Israel. As a name of God, however, it is used chiefly in poetry and prophetic discourse, rarely in prose, and then usually with some epithet attached, as "a jealous God." Other examples of its use with some attribute or epithet are: El ‘Elyon ("most high God"), El Shaddai ("God Almighty"), El ‘Olam ("everlasting God"), El Hai ("living God"), El Ro’i ("God of seeing"), El Elohe Israel ("God, the God of Israel"), El Gibbor ("Hero God"). In addition, names such as Gabriel ("Hero of God"), Michael ("Who is Like God"), and Daniel ("God is My Judge") use God's name in a similar fashion.

This must be where they got the names, too, for people on the planet Krypton, in the Superman stories: Jor-el, Kal-el. It all comes together at last.

Some more angels:

Ye watchers and ye holy ones,
bright seraphs, cherubim, and thrones,
raise the glad strain,
Alleluia!

Cry out, dominions, princedoms, powers,
virtues, archangels, angels' choirs,
Alleluia! alleluia! alleluia!
Alleluia! alleluia!

The reading at the mass was from Revelation 12:

7 And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,

8 And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.

9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

10 And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.

11 And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.

War in heaven! Between the dragons and the angels!

I've got to read this book someday.

Is this science, commerce, or religion?

Private rocket ship aims for space prize

MOJAVE, California (Reuters) -- A three-seat rocket plane with stubby wings and a nose studded with round windows will try to blast out of Earth's atmosphere above the Mojave desert on Wednesday to qualify for a $10-million prize designed to spur commercial space travel.

The Ansari X Prize will go to the first team to build a spacecraft without government help, launch three people or their weight equivalent at least 62 miles straight up, then repeat the feat with the same craft within two weeks.

SpaceShipOne, the first to try for the prize, was built by aircraft designer Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, and financed by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen.

Watching a piece on this, this morning, on the news, I realized that the old world is falling away beneath us all now, and the old religions will not be able to compete - at least, not in their present form. What could the story possibly consist of? Jesus as Rocket Man? God=mc²? Ayn Rand may win, after all: the engineer as diety.

V_e=sqrt(2G*M/R), alleluia, alleluia!

Next: Leviathan Tours, Inc. Accompany the whales in the Sea-pod Swimmer Angelfish, as they migrate to their southern breeding range! I'll get right on this.....

Religion and art?

I've been searching the web for months now, trying to find something substantive on the topic of Christianity as Muse. Eighteen centuries of religious art, music, and literature, and at least two centuries of continued exploration of religious themes in secular art - and I've found one or two mildly interesting leads.

Bizarre. Maybe I can get a grant and do some research myself.

China, Christianity, and totalitarianism

Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power

That's Eve Tushnet's review of a book by David Aikman, from which here are some excerpts:

It seems gauche to address the political effects of Christian conversion. Nonetheless, Aikman offers many predictions. On his account, Chinese Protestants tend to be reformist rather than radical, emphasizing a slow transition to liberal democracy. They do not engage in much political agitation. In short, don’t picture a Protestant Solidarnosc.

Even if Protestant leaders decline to play an explicit role in bringing China to liberal democracy, the spread of Christianity will almost certainly aid in that transition. Russia emerged from the furnace of Communism devastated both economically and spiritually. Slowly, Chinese entrepreneurs are beginning to build the habits of the market. But liberty—economic or otherwise—relies on an underlying network of trust. Societies where people believe nothing, where they have had belief kicked out of them, lack this necessary foundation.

Moreover, embracing Christianity brings Chinese seekers into a mindset that replaces traditional Chinese nationalism and xenophobia with the community of believers. Under Communism the central relationship is between the individual and his master, the state. Replacing this threatened, isolated understanding of the self is one of the crucial tasks in renewing a society that has suffered through totalitarianism. Even non-Christians should welcome the spread of Christianity in China as an extraordinarily good sign for that country’s renewal. (Aikman also argues that Christianization has the potential to transform China from an antagonist of the United States into an ally.)

Eudaemonia, the Good Life

Why I think religion (or something quite like it) has a future:

Flow, however, doesn't have shortcuts. When I was an undergraduate one of my teachers, Julian Jaynes, a peculiar but wonderful man, was a research associate at Princeton when I was an undergraduate. Some people said he was a genius; I didn't know him well enough to know. He was given a South American lizard as a laboratory pet, and the problem about the lizard was that no one could figure out what it ate, so the lizard was dying. Julian killed flies, and the lizard wouldn't eat them; blended mangos and papayas, the lizard wouldn't eat them; Chinese take-out, the lizard had no interest. One day Julian came in and the lizard was in torpor, lying in the corner. He offered the lizard his lunch, but the lizard had no interest in ham on rye. He read the New York Times and he put the first section down on top of the ham on rye. The lizard took one look at this configuration, got up on its hind legs, stalked across the room, leapt up on the table, shredded the New York Times, and ate the ham sandwich. The moral is that lizards don't copulate and don't eat unless they go through the lizardly strengths and virtues first. They have to hunt, kill, shred, and stalk. And while we're a lot more complex than lizards, we have to as well. There are no shortcuts for us to reach flow. We have to indulge in our highest strengths in order to get eudaemonia. So can there be a shortcut? Can there be a pharmacology of it? I doubt it.

The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There's no shortcut to that. That's what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it's unlikely there'll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it's impossible that there'll be a pharmacology of meaning.

Homer Sweet Homer

Epic poetry, religion, and research. I've hit the trifecta this morning.

In a new study, European researchers suggest that the rhythms of ancient poetry can synchronize the body's heart and respiration rates. Similar positive effects have been linked to the Catholic rosary prayer and the yoga mantra.

It's far from clear if doctors will ever consider prescribing required reading lists to their patients. But the results are definitely intriguing, said Francois Haas, director of cardiopulmonary rehabilitation research at New York University School of Medicine.

"If there's a message, it's that our internal rhythms can be modified by external stimuli," Haas said.

In the new study, researchers from Austria, Germany and Switzerland studied 20 healthy men and women, average age 43, who repeated parts of a German translation of Homer's The Odyssey after they were read to them. Machines monitored their hearts and lungs as they read.

Their findings appeared recently in the current online edition of the American Journal of Physiology — Heart and Circulatory Physiology.

I'm not in the least surprised by this. And of course - O Rejoice in the Web! - I was able to find a German Odyssey online! (That is a great site, BTW. Another great site.) Apparently the German translation retains the hexameter, but the English doesn't. Anyway, here's a section:

Sage mir, Muse, die Taten des vielgewanderten Mannes,
Welcher so weit geirrt, nach der heiligen Troja Zerstörung,
Vieler Menschen Städte gesehn, und Sitte gelernt hat,
Und auf dem Meere so viel' unnennbare Leiden erduldet,
Seine Seele zu retten, und seiner Freunde Zurückkunft.
Aber die Freunde rettet' er nicht, wie eifrig er strebte,
Denn sie bereiteten selbst durch Missetat ihr Verderben:
Toren! welche die Rinder des hohen Sonnenbeherrschers
Schlachteten; siehe, der Gott nahm ihnen den Tag der Zurückkunft,
Sage hievon auch uns ein weniges, Tochter Kronions.
Alle die andern, so viel dem verderbenden Schicksal entflohen,
Waren jetzo daheim, dem Krieg' entflohn und dem Meere:
Ihn allein, der so herzlich zur Heimat und Gattin sich sehnte,
Hielt die unsterbliche Nymphe, die hehre Göttin Kalypso,
In der gewölbeten Grotte, und wünschte sich ihn zum Gemahle.
Selbst da das Jahr nun kam im kreisenden Laufe der Zeiten,
Da ihm die Götter bestimmt, gen Ithaka wiederzukehren;
Hatte der Held noch nicht vollendet die müdende Laufbahn,
Auch bei den Seinigen nicht. Es jammerte seiner die Götter;
Nur Poseidon zürnte dem göttergleichen Odysseus
Unablässig, bevor er sein Vaterland wieder erreichte.


What's the relevance to this blog? Another quote from the article:

Even in its German translation, The Odyssey is written in a complicated rhythmic formula called dactylic hexameter, in which each of the six sections of a line of poetry include a long syllable followed by a long syllable, a short syllable or two short syllables.

According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.com, here's an example of a dactylic hexameter: "Down in a/deep dark/hole sat an/old pig/munching a/bean stalk."

As they read the verses, the breathing rates of the subjects slowed down, and their heart and breathing rates became more synchronized. The rates fell almost entirely out of tune when the subjects breathed normally while not reading, suggesting the same thing happens in everyday life.

Previous research, which examined the effects of reciting the Rosary devotion — also known as Ave Maria or Hail Mary — and the "OM" yoga mantra, found that both reduced respiration levels to six breaths a minute, helping the heart work more effectively. The authors suggested the rosary may have become popular because the physiological effects of saying it made people feel better and perhaps more amenable to the devotion's religious message.

Zero-grav

U.S. company offers public chance to experience weightlessness

After years of effort, the first commercial tour service to offer zero-gravity airplane flights in the United States is finally open for business. For just under $3,000, regular folks can get a tamed-down taste of what astronauts feel on NASA's "Vomit Comet."

Passengers aboard the modified Boeing 727-200 jet will experience weightlessness for about 25 seconds at a time, courtesy of the plane's special parabolic flight path. The physics behind the experience is analogous to what happens during a roller-coaster ride or a fast elevator descent. But inside the jet's padded passenger cabin, fliers are able to tumble in the air or do a "Superman" fly-through, similar to the acrobatics performed on the international space station.

This is the way Hollywood has always created the weightlessness sequences in films like Apollo 13.

I've read about this before, and it really does look like fun. One guy I saw interviewed on TV after a flight had a completely rapturous look on his face; he could barely speak, his eyes sort of bright and unfocussed. That was ten times better than sex, is what he was thinking; of this I have abolutely no doubt.

So, naturally, I think: why not take folks on a tour of the Mysterium Tremendum of God? Why not some sort of venture, probably altruistic rather than capitalistic, to work at getting the same sort of effect through mysticism? I'm sure it would be "parabolic" also. And I have to believe it would be at least twice as good as Zero-G - which makes the M.T. of G. twenty times better than sex, minimum! And it's free, and available anytime.

Well, something to think about, anyway, as I finish The Cloud of Unknowing. If I ever do, that is. (That is one seriously boring book, I must say, considering the topic.)

Religious zero-grav....

Freud vs. Lewis

The Question of God, on PBS last night.

Watched this last night with one eye while I was doing some work on the computer. I hate that PBS playacting thing - actors playing Lewis and Freud and pontificating at the audience, in phony accents, from behind phony desks. It's truly annoying. Definitely not "Ken Burns' Civil War."

But some good points raised during the panel discussion. One of the women said something I've been saying for years: we can't shunt emotion off to the side, as if it were some sort of impediment to rational thought, some damper on the intellect. Emotional reactions are part of our perceptual faculty, and it's necessary to understand them in order to get the Truth. The example I've seen used at times is the "hair standing up on the back of the neck" thing when we're walking alone on a dark street and we hear or see something worrying. (Actually, as I write this I realize that this is certainly the same physical response that my dog has - the raising of the hackles - when he's frightened. It makes us look bigger, like cat fur puffing out in the presence of an enemy?) We have these reactions for a reason, and we'd better pay attentiong. This wasn't fleshed out in relation to religious experience, though, I suspect because nobody knows how to express it yet. (I found it interesting, and telling, that the women were the ones who raised this point.)

What's amazing, though, is that we're still having the same "believer/skeptic" argument, and in the same terms, after all these years. There's some sort of disconnect (in language, I think) between religious people and non-believers. Maybe it's because religious people are careful not openly debunk what they may believe to be Biblical "myths," in deference to literalists; skeptics don't care at all about that. Perhaps we need to develop some language to talk about this, or at least to set out some basic axioms that everyone can agree to?

It's also hilarious when religious people try to describe religious experience to those who haven't had it! They always end up hemming and hawing and eventually saying: "Well, there are no words to describe it!" I think this tends to make the nonbelievers even more skeptical than they already are; you could see this in Michael Shermer's eyes, which would have been rolling if he weren't on camera, I suspect. I know exactly what is going on, from both sides, though.

Throwing the last stone

From this page.

In his essay "The Will to Believe" James speaks of religion as presenting a "momentous option." One must choose either to believe or not to believe. In James' view, given the nature of religion, remaining indifferent is, in effect, to choose not to believe. He goes on to say the following:

...Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things.

First, she says that the best things are more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. "Perfection is eternal" - this phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot be verified scientifically at all.

The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.

...To preach skepticism to us as a duty until "sufficient evidence" for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in the presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser than and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then, it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law.

I can't remember, anymore, what it was like to doubt. "Faith," according to Webster's 1913, is this:

\Faith\, n. [OE. feith, fayth, fay, OF. feid, feit, fei,
F. foi, fr. L. fides; akin to fidere to trust, Gr. ??????? to
persuade. The ending th is perhaps due to the influence of
such words as truth, health, wealth. See {Bid}, {Bide}, and
cf. {Confide}, {Defy}, {Fealty}.]
1. Belief; the assent of the mind to the truth of what is
declared by another, resting solely and implicitly on his
authority and veracity; reliance on testimony.

2. The assent of the mind to the statement or proposition of
another, on the ground of the manifest truth of what he
utters; firm and earnest belief, on probable evidence of
any kind, especially in regard to important moral truth.

Faith, that is, fidelity, -- the fealty of the
finite will and understanding to the reason.
--Coleridge.

3. (Theol.)
(a) The belief in the historic truthfulness of the
Scripture narrative, and the supernatural origin of
its teachings, sometimes called historical and
speculative faith.
(b) The belief in the facts and truth of the Scriptures,
with a practical love of them; especially, that
confiding and affectionate belief in the person and
work of Christ, which affects the character and life,
and makes a man a true Christian, -- called a
practical, evangelical, or saving faith.

Without faith it is impossible to please him
[God]. --Heb. xi. 6.

The faith of the gospel is that emotion of the
mind which is called ``trust'' or ``confidence''
exercised toward the moral character of God, and
particularly of the Savior. --Dr. T.
Dwight.

Faith is an affectionate, practical confidence
in the testimony of God. --J. Hawes.

4. That which is believed on any subject, whether in science,
politics, or religion; especially (Theol.), a system of
religious belief of any kind; as, the Jewish or Mohammedan
faith; and especially, the system of truth taught by
Christ; as, the Christian faith; also, the creed or belief
of a Christian society or church.

Which to believe of her, Must be a faith that reason
without miracle Could never plant in me. --Shak.

Now preacheth the faith which once he destroyed.
--Gal. i. 23.

5. Fidelity to one's promises, or allegiance to duty, or to a
person honored and beloved; loyalty.

Children in whom is no faith. --Deut. xxvii.
20.

Whose failing, while her faith to me remains, I
should conceal. --Milton.

6. Word or honor pledged; promise given; fidelity; as, he
violated his faith.

For you alone I broke me faith with injured Palamon.

--Dryden.

Assent. Confidence. Fidelity. Fealty. See?