EGINA Volume 2

For future posts, click here.

I discovered something the other day; this blog takes a very, very long time to load for a lot of you.

So I started to play with Blogger's Archiving feature, but a look at my site traffic stats reveals that many people, discovering this for the first time, scroll down and read the whole thing over the course of an hour. So I've decided to make this whole thing the archive, and create a Volume 2 at egina2.blogspot.com.

That's where all the new stuff will go, it'll look the same, and all the old stuff will remain here.

Rethinking "Williams": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Reasoning

I have four tools in my toolbox: each are heavy objects with a handle and a sticky label.

The first is a hammer with the label "hammer".
The second is a hammer with the label "hammer".
The third is a hammer with the label "hammer".
The fourth is a pipe wrench with the label "hammer".

As the label is sometimes used improperly, we must conclude that there really is no such thing as a "hammer" and we should dispense with the term altogether.

Further;

We have documented evidence that the Cathars had vegetarian diets, that is to say, diets being identical with that of modern-day vegetarians. However, nowhere in the contemporary accounts of Cathar meatlessness is the term "vegetarian" even used! Therefore we must likewise conclude that the Cathars were not vegetarian because they didn't themselves use the word.

Further further;

Medieval seafarers; upon seeing walruses for the first time, often mistook them for mermaids. Modern science of course knows that many of the attributes ignorantly attributed to mermaids (long hair, lovely singing voice, shell-covered boobies) do not apply to walruses. Therefore we must conclude there is no such thing as a walrus.

And yes, he really does employ this reasoning to insist that there's no such thing as us. Instead, we're "biblical demiurgicals"; a term which is merely an awkward euphemism for "Gnostic".

Bart Ehrman says "Doing away with 'Gnosticism' entirely would be to fragment our knowledge to such an extent that we can't know what we're talking about."

Setting Jonas and even Quispel's framing aside, the common thread among "Gnostic" scripture, myth, and movements was and is soteriological; what makes us free is the gnosis of who we were, of what we have become.

Political Tangent: Smart and evil.

So the Conservative government has chosen to commit suicide by calling a Fall vote on whether some Canadians should be less Canadians than other Canadians. Why would they do such a thing? Is it because they are dumb as well as evil? Oh no, Prime Minister Bush... er.. Harper, is smart and evil.

1) The vote will fail, and everybody knows it.

2) Harper is hoping the vote triggers a non-confidence motion, which will be successful and bring down his own government.

3) An election will be called before the Liberals' Leadership Convention in December. As this is scheduled to be a Coronation of the next Prime Minister, forcing a vote before the Coronation will catch the Grits off-guard.

4) Anger (at the Liberals bringing down the freshman cabinet) at such an early election before the Liberals have a chance to rebrand at the convention will result in the same minority government numbers, and give the Conservatives another year in power, at a cost of only $150M of tax payer's money for the election.

I'd do it, if I were their head spin-meister. Here's what I'd do if I were the Liberals.

1) Defeat the idiotic, medieval and mean-spirited vote.

2) Call the non-confidence vote

3) Whip the benches into abstaining from the non-confidence vote you just called.

4) The vote will fail, the Tories will be in power until December, and utterly, utterly humiliated.

5) Have the leadership convention in December

6) 30 seconds after the new leader is chosen – and seriously, who cares who it is, a frozen low-cal entree in a cardboard box would win a majority – call a non-confidence motion on the basis that the current government isn't Liberal, which is against the natural order of all things Canadian.

7) Motion passes, election called, Frozen Entree is sworn in as Liberal Prime Minister for the next 15 years, and we're back to normal.

[Don't like me calling an anti-gay marriage bill evil? One cannot reasonably be in favour of marriage and then exclude adult citizens from entering such an institution on the basis of who they are – it's exactly the same as denying green-eyed persons the right to own property, or keeping the left-handed from having passports. Evil, and I won't call it less.]

The Lost Gospel of Orpheus?

Waterhouse, Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus
Nah, that was a shameless attention grab from a degenerate and jaded copywriter (me). Interesting find nonetheless, as the stories of Orpheus contains seeds of both the Christ and JBap myths. This article's author even throws us a Gnostic bone.

ATHENS, Greece -- A collection of charred scraps kept in a Greek museum's storerooms are all that remains of what archaeologists say is Europe's oldest surviving book -- which may hold a key to understanding early monotheistic beliefs. [...]

"We were now able to read even the most carbonized sections, as there were pieces that were completely blackened and nobody could make out whether there were letters on them," Veleni said.

The scroll contains a philosophical treatise on a lost poem describing the birth of the gods and other beliefs focusing on Orpheus, the mythical musician who visited the underworld to reclaim his dead love and enjoyed a strong cult following in the ancient world.

The Orpheus cult raised the notion of a single creator god -- as opposed to the multitude of deities the ancient Greeks believed in -- and influenced later monotheistic faiths.

"In a way, it was a precursor of Christianity," Pierris said. "Orphism believed that man's salvation depended on his knowledge of the truth."

Veleni said the manuscript "will help show the influence of Orphism on later monotheistic religions."


– Associated Press