quiet thoughts

[traditional-with-a-twist]

[tranquilchurchmouse]

Allura is a goddess of the hunt and Shiro is a devotee. He lives his life in her service, not realizing that he’s in love with her, until she offers him immortality. Shiro is old and on the verge of death and she restores his youth (or maybe dying young of his disease?) He knows his service was not perfect but she loves him anyway.

He’s lying in bed weeping with frustration because he can’t leave an offering when she comes to him. He always offered seed cakes shaped like mice. The main offering to Allura is fire dancing the night before a hunt. Shiro was one of the best and most athletic before his illness broke his body down.

Allura is a star goddess. The fire dancing represents the movement of the stars.

[tranquilchurchmouse]

New idea: Shiro is actually the worshipper of a rival god or goddess. His illness causes him to get wounded, and he loses his place as a fire-dancer. Keith is taking care of him but the laws of society say he should be left to die. Shiro feels like he deserves death. Maybe he does? Maybe he committed a crime? Obviously he killed someone but why? I want him to experience grace - Allura accepts him into her service when no one else wants him. How far do I have to go to make him undeserving - maybe he killed her followers in war like St. Paul

[traditional-with-a-twist]

[tranquilchurchmouse]

Allura is a goddess of the hunt and Shiro is a devotee. He lives his life in her service, not realizing that he’s in love with her, until she offers him immortality. Shiro is old and on the verge of death and she restores his youth (or maybe dying young of his disease?) He knows his service was not perfect but she loves him anyway.

He’s lying in bed weeping with frustration because he can’t leave an offering when she comes to him. He always offered seed cakes shaped like mice. The main offering to Allura is fire dancing the night before a hunt. Shiro was one of the best and most athletic before his illness broke his body down.

Allura is a star goddess. The fire dancing represents the movement of the stars.

[tranquilchurchmouse]

We were talking about how the government supports virtue, and how it’s important for all the citizens to have the same understanding of justice in order to live together in a community. Some people say that in the U.S. system, all that’s necessary is for people to agree not to harm each other - but for that to be possible, you have to have some shared idea of justice and what harm means!

If a society has differing ideas of morality centered around justice, moderation, and temperance, it can’t hold itself together. It doesn’t really matter what the laws are because powerful people can manipulate the laws to fit their own idea of justice.

[tranquilchurchmouse]

Revisiting the question, is there something fundamentally wrong with communism? and if so, why did the early Christians engage in it?

You could say that it all comes down to the issue of force. The early Christians were willing members of a community, and they all decided together to hold things in common - no one was required to do that. Ananias and Saphira were even told that they didn’t have to give up their property if they didn’t want to. Any Christian was free to leave the community if they wished. The problem with communism is that, in practice, it’s one group imposing communism on other people against their will. If you don’t have unanimous agreement about this sort of regime, and if you don’t have the option to leave this regime (which you usually don’t, in communist countries) then it’s an evil practice.

People should always have the option to exit. That’s how they give their consent.

[tranquilchurchmouse]

Erasmus rated very highly the phrase, ‘between friends all is common.’ He wrote that in a commonwealth, all citizens should be friends - and therefore all things should be common between the citizens. It’s an interesting question because there are always matters of degree: People have special friendships. If all the citizens were friends (assuming they were all equal in regard for each other), you would either lose that sense of a special relationship between people - and it would be the same as not having friends at all. There would be nothing to contrast with it.

This is Aristotle’s argument against having family relationships held in common in Politics - he argues that it’s better to be one person’s cousin or brother than it is to be everybody’s son. Is it really more Christian to not have those special relationships? It’s a difference in loves: We’re told to love everyone with agape love, but does that preclude having limited storgy loves - loving things because they belong to you? This is a hard question to answer, because it’s obviously natural for us to love things that belong to us -- but is it natural in a fallen way, or as part of God’s design?

[tranquilchurchmouse]

Keep my statutes and do them; I am the Lord who sanctifies you.

Leviticus 20:8

[tranquilchurchmouse]

Cicero said that private property is essential to the existence of cities because if you want people to fight and defend the city, they’ll do it for the sake of their own property - not for the city at large - and not only for their own property, but for their own families. For the government to take property from some citizens and give it to others, is both evil and harmful.

It’s interesting to find arguments like this in a text as old as Cicero’s On Duties.

[tranquilchurchmouse]

A bunch of cool bread was on sale, and my sister and I were trying to find bread in our style identities (vis-à-vis https://www.truth-is-beauty.com/style-analysis.html)

[tranquilchurchmouse]

What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

Philippians 4:9

[tranquilchurchmouse]

Five ways the military might of the West has checked itself since the beginning of history:

Even in ancient Greece, they had anti-war movements where the society wouldn’t be united in the war effort, and there would be pressure at home to end it. These were early republics, and in republics, people disagree.

The West is never monolithic - so often Western countries would fight and turn their military might against each other, instead of fighting non-Western countries.

Once the West invented a new weapon, there were plenty of non-Western countries who would adopt the weapon. They wouldn’t know how to make them - or even maintain or fix them, but they would be able to use them for a short time and gain parity with the Western powers (e.g. the Spaniards’ rifles and breastplates in South America)

The West would make rules of warfare for themselves - what they considered fairplay. For a time, the Greeks tried to outlaw the use of arrows in warfare, and the European powers made rules about poisoned gases after WWI.

...and I can’t remember the last one

(from a talk by Victor Davis Hanson on the overwhelming war power of the West, and how it has persisted for most of Western civilization - and the problems that have dogged it for just as long)

[tranquilchurchmouse]

Jane Austen perfectly encapsulated the two purposes of fiction: to delight and to instruct. She drew these little portraits of people so that you could recognize them - even today, you can see people you know in Jane Austen’s characters. That helps you to know by example what kind of person you want to be.

One speaker at the conference said that you can’t really summarize a moral - you just look at the characters. If you want to know what a gentleman is, you look at Mr. Darcy or Mr. Knightley. The moral decisions her characters face are very Aristotelian in that they are small choices in the moment -- but making them creates a habit of mind that forms your character in the long run.

[tranquilchurchmouse]

Today in class, the professor said, you don’t have a right to hold public office -- an interesting statement, because the people are sovereign so they all have some degree of authority ... but serving in public office is different. Historically in the USA, the government was allowed to place restrictions on eligibility, especially the state governments. There was a sense that you had to prove that you were qualified.

Today, if you said that to someone, they might be confused - or offended. A right is something natural to you, that exists outside of the government. So of course you can’t have a right to public office, because that’s an institution of the government. Nowadays a right is defined more as something that people deserve to have...but that wasn’t the original conception.

[tranquilchurchmouse]

I thought it was interesting how the character cards added an element of narration to Love and Friendship - which is very hard to do in a movie - especially when adapting an epistolary novel, which doesn’t have an omnipotent narrator (only the characters as unreliable narrators).

The intrusive dramatic quality of the movie, together with the character cards, increased the satirical quality of the movie. What was it satirizing? Not the genre... maybe it was satirizing the expectations of the audience.

[tranquilchurchmouse]

The prevailing idea in America’s founding generation was that the practice of and belief in religion made you a better citizen. This was possible because both religion and the government recognized natural law, and they were both aimed at fulfilling the natural law. Now we live in a time when the civil government and the Christian religion disagree with each other over the ends of government and the definition of justice. From the perspective of the civil government, being a Christian no longer makes you a good citizen.

That means as Christians, we must choose between our allegiance to our faith and our allegiance to the civil government. This is the same situation as during the religious wars in Europe. At this point, it seems the best we can hope for is to either change the ends of the civil government, or that the government will leave communities of Christians alone to govern themselves.

[tranquilchurchmouse]

There was a big, fantasy-style war. A couple was fighting in it. The woman was a healer. It appeared that her husband was killed, and he came to find her. She tried to find his body, but something went wrong with her magic. She realized that he couldn’t be dead because otherwise she would be able to use her magic on his spirit. So she went searching for a teacher who could tell her what was happening.

Eventually she found this tribe who had a ceremony for doing astral projections. Sometimes people would ‘drop into the gaps’ during the ceremony, and their spirits couldn’t return to their bodies. They promised to teach her about it, so that she could use her magic to find his soul and return it to his body.

[tranquilchurchmouse]

My son, eat honey, for it is good, and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste. Know that wisdom is such to your soul; if you find it, there will be a future, and your hope will not be cut off.

Proverbs 24:13-14

[tranquilchurchmouse]

I was thinking about how colleges used to have all their students study the same great works of the classics.and do the same disciplines of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. It’s frustrating that that’s gone away now, because there’s no longer unity between the subjects. This has even trickled down to primary education, where there’s a stark separation between English, Mathematics, History, and Science. It’s particularly damaging in colleges because students don’t have that sense that all learning brings us to a similar place. Instead we have this atomization of education where everyone is a specialist in their own subject, and the specialists can’t talk to each other or even understand each other. There’s too much focus on expertise and not enough on knowledge.

We’ve completely lost the idea that studying the great works means forming character. It makes it hard to be in a community with each other when you don’t have a common foundation for the people you’ve grown into. I think it contributes to our divided society.