(no subject)

[nameandnature]

I had an enjoyable weekend. Had dancing and college friends over for a barbeque on Sunday. PaulB turns out to be quite paternal :-). There was an unexpected after-party when some more people arrived just as I'd cleared everything away. We watched Phone Booth, which was suspenseful, short, and, as Salamander pointed out, quite arty for a big release film.

I finished Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep this week. Vinge is famous for his treatment of the Singularity. He copes with the narrative problem of having inscrutable post-Singularity gods around by positing that the galaxy is split up into concentric zones, with godhood only possible in the outer layers. The book gets rave reviews on SF sites, so it was probably impossible for it to live up to the hype. Like another reviewer out there, I found the manipulation of supposedly sophisticated humans by primitive aliens a bit unrealistic. Nevertheless, it's worth reading for the ideas. Some similarities between this and Iain M. Bank's Excession, although I'd say Excession was harder to read.

I also finished Karen Armstrong's A History of God recently. Armstrong takes us through the history of three monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The book is heavy going at times, but worth perservering with. Armstrong has a clear bias towards the personal, inner experience of the divine rather than rationalist religious systems. The book shows that the struggles between the people the mystics and the rationalists have been going on for centuries. She also argues strongly against a personal God.

A quotation from Holbach which struck a chord with me as an ex-evangelical. He writes that poets and theologians had done nothing but:

make a gigantic, exaggerated man, whom they will render illusory by dint of heaping together incompatible qualities. Human beings will never see in God, but a being of the human species, in who they will strive to aggrandize the proportions, until they have formed a being totally inconceivable.

In other news, a controversial display of burnt work has divided the world of art into non-identical halves, like a dead bisected animal. Martian.fm has the full story. Classic.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

>PaulB turns out to be quite paternal

More avuncular, I hope. (I'd be dreadful if any kids were my own...)

Paul

[lisekit.livejournal.com]

And in today's installment of "Sentences I never thought I'd actually use":

Cute pictures of PaulB!

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure how to take that...

[lisekit.livejournal.com]

Alright, we'll try this as an experiment:

Sentences I regularly use:

Cure pictures of PaulB!

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

mmm sounds interesting I really liked Excession.