Well I Was In The Neighbourhood

[nameandnature]

sitecopy now fulfills my FTP uploading needs, enabling me to maintain my websites without mucking about with Perl or Python scripts. It can be made to look at the files' hash values rather than modification times, so the BINS program's habit of regenerating all the thumbnails every time it runs won't cause sitecopy to upload them all again. Which is nice.

PaulB has pictures of me singing at terriem's birthday party. I remember doing "Lady in Red".

I make a particularly good Chris de Burgh. In the words of that Bill Bailey song (1.5 Mb MP3 link):

Beautiful ladies in danger, danger all round the world,
I will protect them, because I am Chris de Burgh.

Beautiful ladies in emergency situations

Beautiful ladies are lovely, but sometimes they don't take care,
They're too busy with their makeup, or combing their lovely hair

To take basic safety precautions.

More pictures from the good almost-Doctor

I have finished Norman Cohn's Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come and started on Anita Diamant's The Red Tent. Cohn says that the early Jews were polytheists who saw the God of Abram as their god but didn't deny the existence of other gods. It's interesting to see this played out in the fictional lives of Jacob's wives in Diamant's book. I'll review both of them at some point.

Comments

[liv]

the early Jews were polytheists
You may be interested in this discussion in daegaer's journal on this topic. (It's also one of the coolest LJ posts I've ever seen, for several reasons.)

Re:

[nameandnature]

That is interesting. Thanks. I've started using the memories feature as a bookmark system for interesting posts, so I've added that one.

daegaer says more or less what CC&TWTK said, about how Israel's god took over the roles of the Canaanite El and how Asherah was likely to have been seen as his consort (and Red Tent has the women baking cakes for the Queen of Heaven, too). Cohn's interested in how there are echoes of older combat myths, where the god fights off the forces of chaos, in religions like Judiasm and Christianity. The sea and sea monsters references in the posting seem to be an example of that sort of thing. He also speculates about how much Zoroastrianism lead to Judiasm, and hence Christianity, becoming more dualist.

Thinking of your post, I guess one reason why Christians do not engage the text is sometimes that they uncritically accept the the traditional authors and times of writing for the texts. This was certainly true among the evangelical community of which I was a part: it was unthinkable that the prophecies in Daniel were actually written when the events described were history or that all the Pauline epistles were not by Paul. Their reason for this was that their arguments for infallibility rested on the authority of the authors (and of course, something that claims to be prophecy but is actually history is trivially infallible, but not really what they're after :-)

From lethargic_man's comments on that thread, it seems there are some strands in Judiasm which have similar views. Does engaging with the text include considering that El might originally have meant a different god from Israel's, in your view?

And finally, I'm using circumlocutions to avoid naming the Name (not that I could do so in the right language anyway), because I don't know whether that would give offence, so I'd be interested to know whether it would.

[nameandnature]

not that I could do so in the right language anyway

My command of English doesn't seem to be doing too well either.

judaism judaism judaism judaism judaism.

There, that should sort it.