Imagine that while passing by on a walk, you see another adult kick their dog - hard. Which of the following would be closest to your response?

• Lecture the person.
• Inform the authorities.
• Kick the person - hard.
• Ignore it.

One of the extremely few things that could provoke me to punching someone in the face is if I see them abusing a dog (or cat, or fish, or ferret for that matter). You just don't do that shit.

Do you enjoy meaningless sex?

• Yes
• No

Why in the world would I enjoy anything meaningless?

...that it's 3:24 a.m., I'm still wide awake, and I have no one to talk to?

Sleep is for the weak, people!

So...I've tried National Novel Writing Month for the past two years. The premise is simple: write a novel, 50,000 words, in 30 days. Both times, I have failed. I realized that no one I knew really cared and, being the tremendously insecure person I was at the time, promptly abandoned my project.

*dramatic pause* But this year...will be different. I think.

The question is, who else out there is going to do NaNoWriMo? Anyone in the Reno/Sparks/Carson area? And if so, would you be interested in a NaNoBuddy to help you keep to your goal?

(cont. from my last post, read that one first)

Science is about taking away all truth and meaning and giving just the facts, ma'am. Religion is about constructing individual and social meaning. That is its primary attribute, not belief in the supernatural (i.e. the Church of England, the San Francisco Giants and sXe all comprise religious behavior).

So where does that leave us? Scientific knowledge, if viewed as the sum of all knowledge not known to be false (yay Karl Popper!) has ruled out omnipotence (Oxford philosophy), omniscience (Godel, Russell, Heisenberg), omnipresence (Einsteinian relativity) and a designed universe (evolution, quantum physics, complexity theory, common fucking sense). This is trouble for the Rationalist West, which for centuries has been laboring under the Idealist model of a linear universe operating under strictly binary symbolic logic. Even Western atheists often fall into the trap of presuming an essentially rational, deterministic universe with rules and constants we need only discover.

Other cultures can more readily adapt to this. Judaism and Islam traditionally respect ineffability and decline to put limiting descriptions on religious experience (see: Job, Ecclesiastes, the Koranic concept of "zanna"). Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism already see an underlying reality that brings forth individual manifestations of the Divine/Tao/Atman/Anatman and decline to make analytic definitions or distinctions. But A/Theism in the West generally does not.

I propose a breed of neo-theologian, a neologian. The school of neology will mold tradition in the public mind under that very tradition is transcended, will fearlessly incorporate new information in order to update the cultural paradigm as often as possible. The neologian will create a new religion, a postreligion, one that self-deconstructs on a momentary basis, that relinquishes the stranglehold on "truth" traditionally claimed by the dominant religion and never ceases questioning. We will create a poetic language game that nestles snugly into the gap between linguistic and alinguistic thought, that latches onto the public consciousness and expands it beyond our current limited imaginations.

Chaos magick. The fiction of Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Ken MacLeod, Ursula K. LeGuin and Iain M. Banks. The non-fiction of Don Cupitt and Mark C. Taylor. The comics "The Invisibles," "Transmetropolitan," and "Promethea." These are the birth pangs of the new theology that will carry us into the 22nd Century and beyond.

So if language is never nominative, but sometimes evocative, what about non-evocative language?

Evocative language can be classified as performative speech, speech that is meant to enact change in the world. At bottom, all language is composed of actions, as in saying "The sentence 'The sky is blue' is true" and saying "The sky is blue" are functionally identical. Each one is an action, not an abstraction. But "the sky is blue" is a descriptive speech act, as in it makes a falsifiable claim about the material world.

"The sky is blue."
"The chair is by the door."
"Global warming is anthropogenic."

These are descriptive speech acts.

Performative speech acts, however, do not do this. A performative speech act is meant to not only act, but provoke a reaction. They do not provide testable claims about the world but attempts at directing behavior.

"Look at the sky!"
"Bring me that chair."
"Global warming will kill us all unless we act right now."

Well, that last one is testable, inasmuch as any future prediction is testable (i.e. not really; you don't really know until it's already happened). But the purpose of that third statement is not to assert the truth of global warming, it's to incite action and change.

This is the difference between linguistics and rhetoric, between knowledge and inspiration. This is also the primary difference between science and religion.

to be cont.

A lot of confusion when discussing matters of religion and philosophy comes with the difference between perception of what language is and what it should do. Nominativists are convinced that language has an isomorphic relationship with material reality; namely, that all language in its relationship to material reality must conform to it. Steven Pinker is a big advocate of this position, and it encourages a very literalist mindset wherein philosophical and religious statements can be evaluated solely on how they conform to the material universe.

Evocative language, in contrast, seeks not to describe, but to enact. The goal of theologians (and magicians, natch) is not to accurately contain reality within its models, but to change it, by changing peoples' lives.

The problem with the nominativist position, as I see it, is that there is no good reason whatsoever to assume that language is ever nominative. Metaphor is at the root of all language, and it's universal to make sense of concepts in terms relative to each other (like George Lakoff points out in "Metaphors We Live By," we're running on the metaphor "arguments are war" in our culture, as in "he attacked her argument"). The idea that language even can or should conform perfectly to material reality is unsupported.

That's why I don't concern myself with dogma or the "literal" truth of mythology, or worry about the objective existence of deities. It's a million miles past the point.

And I need to leave for work in an hour and a half. Don't you just hate dreading the inevitable as the minutes tick down?

The network crashed yesterday and all day we got calls from people whose cards didn''t work, most of which were apparently either...

1. Trapped at a gas station in the desert,
2. At Disneyland with their families, or
3. Buying graduation dinner.

And, in each and every one of the roughly 125 cases I heard yesterday, my answer was the same:

"We apologize, and are working very hard to make sure it's fixed as soon as possible."

Why don't people just accept that life is unfair, sometimes stuff breaks down, and you need to be prepared for when that happens? Why do so many people only carry their check card with them, and have no means of paying for anything if it fails? Are cash, checks and credit cards really that difficult to keep handy?

If your car breaks down, do you scream at your mechanic that this has ruined your day and you expect to be compensated?

I don't understand the public sometimes.