:eyeroll:

[beccaelizabeth]

I just spent a whole bunch of time going through every piece of paper I've had from my English degree. Not just this year, all the years. I even dug through the Access stacks. I didn't pull out each sheet individually and read it, but I pulled the whole stack and found the handout bundles for each topic and... it was a lot of looking.
Just when I was ready to email my teacher and explain I appeared to have lost the entire set of handouts from this semester, they reappeared. Exactly where they should have been.
Mystifying. But I can live with it.

I can only assume my eyes skipped right over the very things I was looking for repeatedly as I picked them up and read them and put them down neatly again.

So now I'm frustrated, tired, and feeling rather stupid.

Also this entire process took up the time that should have been used for more productive things, like the actual homework that required said sheets.


Cleaner was here. House is clean. Is good. But cleaner was two hours later than I expected and my whole sense of the shape of the day is wonky now. So I'm in a grump.

On the plus side I've done a whole bunch of reading about Christian and Classical... something or others, which bits got used how by Renaissance dudes. I have useful new vocabulary.
... yes, really.

But I now know so much about Catholicism, Protestants, Puritans, Calvin and Luther and a whole list of other Christian dudes who think they know all everything that I kind of want to study up on Buddhist and Hindu stories and, well, Everything Not Christian to rebalance my brain. It's all very well knowing how to spot Calvinist predestination and what despair and pride and presumption meant in that context but since I'm still not Christian it's... all very annoying.
The version that says that not only can we only be saved by God deciding to save us but that God made a whole bunch of people and decided in advance that they'd go to hell is without doubt the most annoying. Free will! Choice! Not having to rely on some dude getting nailed to a plank and then hearing about it! The god some of these people believe in is such a bastard I'm quite happy I'm not getting in to his heaven. Except of course if that means eternal torment and suchlike. I'm not a big fan of transient torments even.

Religion should be about Doing Good Stuff, not just Believing In Good People. A proper practical god wouldn't much mind if you believed in him or not, just if you were excellent to each other. People should help people because that's a helpful thing to do. Much more simple. And actually possible.

Comments

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

Religion should be about Doing Good Stuff, not just Believing In Good People.

Christians call that salvation by works and not by grace. The thing is, from a dispassionate point of view, (which see the conversation I'm having with Sue over on the Main Thread) there's no single definition of what is a good thing, and no bright-line guide to what things are right. All the guides (including especially religious texts) are ambiguous and internally contradictory, and new cases arise all the time. And if you only believe in doing good stuff, without the possibility of making mistakes and being forgiven, then there's no point to changing from doing bad to doing good; some of the most destructively judgemental writing I've seen lately comes from atheists who argue that there is no way to make up for doing wrong, that once you have done a big wrong thing (variously described) you will never again be a worthy person. Which makes the hard work of apology and reconciliation pointless, and the easier path to just keep doing bad/behaving selfishly.

It's all very complicated.

Julia, so what we do is keep wallowing on through our own imperfection, I guess.

[beccaelizabeth]

*nods* about works
*nods nods nods* about the multi definitions and fuzzy lines

I don't follow from 'without the possibility of making mistakes' on. The point of doing good stuff is good stuff is done. Good stuff works better. making up for bad and being forgiven are seperate from just doing good stuff.

But I know lots of people have lots of disagreeing with me.

... also, I compare my behaviour towards The Uncle We Don't Name with my theoretical attitude to forgiveness and, er, yeah, practice/preach, we has a gap there. must work on it.

complication + imperfection = why we has story
work things through on paper, much less destruction.


Though I still read many critics and wonder if we're even talking about the same plays. And that's the ones where translation and editions aren't an issue.

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

I have- or, thankfully, had- an Uncle We Don't Talk About (except in hushed voices, and as the worst of bad examples) so I know exactly what you mean, there.

The making mistakes... part is meant to address the issue of what Christians call salvation by grace, which, in social terms comes down to the idea that one can do wrong things, even big wrong things, and that the good that you are or do is still of value, despite the big wrong things. Some people reject that utterly: T.S. Elliott's poetry, for instance, is of no interest or value to them because of his antisemitism, ditto Wagner's music for the same reason. Nothing Eric Clapton has ever done is of value because he once made a statement in favor of the BNP. That attitude, on a daily, personal level makes the payback for people to stop doing bad things and apologize for them in whatever way they can pretty small; changing is hard work, and if you're told you'll never be worth anything (not forgiveness, or love, or a decent job) because of bad things you've done in the past there's pretty much no reason to stop doing the practiced, automatic, easy bad things.

I tend to think the world works best when both Doing Good and ceasing to do bad are recognized and reinforced.

Julia, this would be easier if I had, like, hand gestures and the information security to use examples which violate other people's privacy.