Into the Path of Gods - Kathleen Cunningham Guler
(Link to Into the Path of Gods)
***** (5-star)
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When I first recieved my copy of this book (courtesy of the LibraryThing Member Giveaway Program), I wasn't necessarily looking forward to reading it. It was the beginning of finals week at school and I assumed that I might get around to it eventually. By the time I finished reading the first page, I realized that I was quite wrong. I was unable to put this book down. It is well-paced, features engaging characters and a fascinating plot full of twists and turns, and draws the reader in to the timeframe.
The books shapes up to be an alternative take on the events surrounding the King Arthur/Merlin saga, following the lives of a powerful heroine with the gift of visions from the gods and a Prince who spends most of his time as a spy, fighting for the freedom of Britain. Their story, while very interesting in the King Arthur context, is well worth reading in its own right.
From the author's attempts to adhere as much as possible to names and words that would have actually been used in fifth-century Wales. One of the features that I've enjoyed ever since reading James Michener's 'Poland' is a pronunciation guide. Names such as Cunedda (Coo-neth-ah), Gwynedd (Gwih-neth), or Marcus ap Iorwerth (Yor-worth) would by horribly mangled by any modern reader not familiar with a Celtic language, but add a very Celtic feel to the whole book once you are pronouncing them in your head.
This book is absolutely worth the read, and I don't shy away from predicting that the other three books of the Macsen's Treasure Series are as well-written and as worthwhile as this. Five stars, and especially recommended for fans of the King Arthur story and of early British history.
Over the past few weeks this blog has seen more frequent posts (at least once a week now, for your reading pleasure!), a new name, and now a change in the color scheme. I'll probably keep playing around with the settings a bit until I get comfortable with the changes, and any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Other than those rather mundane updates, I have a couple of reasons for posting anew. First, Chairman Steele has been staring at me accusingly ever since my last post yelling at the RNC. I may have learned something valuable about using pictures of people whom you're yelling at. They tend to look angrily at you after the fact. Second, it's just one of those nights. Three in the morning, I should have been asleep a long time ago, but I couldn't. Certain trouble kept me up, and now I need some productivity before I can succumb to sleep. I'm going to compose some short prose and then go to bed. (In case you were wondering, an excellent soundtrack to a moody night includes Another Time by Hurt, I Drive the Hearse and the entire second CD of The Incident by Porcupine Tree, and Stuck by The Heavy. Playlist, shuffle, repeat.)
(Also, Mogwai is good if you're writing and don't want to be distracted by bothersome lyrics.)
The world is blank from behind my eyelids. There is no image, only the gentle play of blurred light. The cold breeze blowing in across the waves pulls at my imagination, lifting it out of my body and far into the upper atmosphere. From there, to a soundtrack of oceanic rhythm, I look out over the bay upon whose sandy dress I stand.
My awe radiates outward. First, I marvel at the beauty of the surrounding mountains and ridges keeping the sea at bay. The snow dusting their peaks match the cold of the wind. It is a refreshing cold, not bitter.
Out past these rocky sentinels of the land, a thin white line of foam and sand. Water and earth embrace as old friends, as old as time. This is the threshold between one world and another, and it is magnificent.
Beyond all of this, beyond the tall mountains and the old friends stretches a field of the deepest blue. The sea is uniform, flecked by the foam of cresting waves. White, blue, white, blue, white blue. It matches the sky, a brighter blue softened by wisps of passing cloud. White, blue, white, blue, white blue.
I breathe deeply, filling my lungs with the fresh and salty air which washes over me. It is cleansing me. I let it. What trouble of life could carry itself proudly in this court? What burden could claim precedence over this vista? None. They are all driven out, unworthy.
I feel better now, in this place. I will return here when again the weight of the world presses down too heavily. It isn't going anywhere. Or perhaps it is, just with infinitely more stability and grace than myself.
Found here is an article about the RNC's latest ill-advised scheme.
Essentially, what we have here is a proposal by ten RNC Committee members to force candidates running for public office that want financial support and the endorsement of the RNC to adhere to at least eight of ten requirements. These requirements leave no room whatsoever for moderate candidates. They are (taken directly from the article linked above):
(1) Smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill
(2) Market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;
(3) Market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;
(4) Workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check
(5) Legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;
(6) Victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;
(7) Containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat
(8) Retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;
(9) Protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and
(10) The right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership
This may seem like a laundry list of basic conservatism, but the principle behind it is quite flawed. This leaves any potential candidate who disagrees with just three of these positions with three poor options:
(1) Maintain their integrity and either run as an independent or as a Republican without the financial support of their party.
(2) Sacrifice their honesty and lie on the application about their position in order to receive financing. Only after being elected could they reveal their true intentions.
(3) Defect and join the Democratic Party, who for all of their flaws don't systematically exclude moderates.
As a tentative Republican and a moderate to boot, it pains me to see my party acting in such a poor, exclusionary way. I have met Chairman Steele and he seems fairly level headed. I can only hope that he sees through this nonsense and convinces his fellow Republicans of the foolishness of this move. If not, this pushes the GOP one unfortunate step closer to a schism or, even more frightening, complete irrelevance.
This proposal cites, of all people, Republican hero Ronald Reagan as its inspiration and justification. Somehow, I have trouble believing that Ronald Reagan, were he still alive today, would support this move. For the sake of Ronald Reagan's good name, let's hope that the RNC backs away from this.
Welcome to the Rambling's first ever book review! From now on, I will be posting reviews of books that I read (and I read a LOT of them) for your pleasure. So I hope you enjoy reading these reviews and hopefully trying the good books out for yourself. If there is a book you like which you want me to read and write up a review for, just say so. I can't promise anything, but if I can fit it in, I will!
The Alphabet Challenge - Olga Gardner Galvin
(link to The Alphabet Challenge)
------------------------- Brilliant! The Alphabet Challenge portrays New York City in the year 2061, at a time when political correctness and social welfare have been escalated to levels of absurdity. The U.S. Congress, supposedly locked in permanent, four-party gridlock, still manages to find the consensus to constantly add more and more federal laws protecting people from all sorts of discrimination and oppression, both real and imagined. In a world where driving without insurance will get you a slap on the wrist, but failing to recycle empty bottles or comply with zoning regulations will get you years in prison, Howell Langston Toland is trying to make a living. All he wants is to earn enough money to move with his ex-in-laws to Australia and to live a first-class life there, free of the oppressive regulation of the United States. He starts an organization called The Alphabet Challenge which promotes the equality of people whose names begin with letters in the second half of the alphabet. His attempt to scam people out of their money earns him national fame, a fight with the omnipresent corporation PeopleCare which resorts to strong-arm tactics to maintain control of the nation’s many activist groups, and an activist group of his own that he can’t seem to get rid of.
The Alphabet Challenge combines humor, potent social satire, and a very creative history of the U.S.A over the next fifty years to create a politically-charged, clever and hard-to-put-down story! This is a promising first effort by Olga Gardner Galvin, and I look forward to her future literary efforts.
These are some thoughts written down while I was sitting around thinking about things the other night. It turns out, writing on paper makes the thoughts flow much more clearly.
Is this the pinnacle of human existence? Sitting in the quiet which only culture and society could provide, unworried by the uncertainty of the external world, thinking? I like to think so. MY admiration for the profundity of this achievement is Sagan-esque in quality. As our very existence is a cosmic near-impossibility, so too is the security of a quiet moment of profound thought nearly impossible on the cosmic level. Abstract thinking at all, beyond the basic evolutionary functions of primal instinct (eat, sleep, mate, survive, etc.), is hard to fathom. What evolutionary purpose does higher thought serve, what need does it satisfy? Clearly, as the advances of humanity prove, it serves a very great evolutionary purpose. It elevates humanity above all else in its sphere of existence.
If primal instinct provides the desire, and if higher thought provides the means (the will and the way), what can be derived? First, let us divide higher thought into two sub-categories to enhance the theory. Abstract thought, the first sub-division, is lingual in nature. The ability to condense ideas, actions, items, and everything else to be had in the physical world into words is a great advantage. Words allow for an accessible compilation of past experiences and thoughts, which can be easily referred to at a later point when they are needed. They can also be manipulated with far greater ease than the physical world itself. These factors allow for reason.
Quantitative thought, the second sub-division, is numeric in nature. As reason provides a system for understanding the world, quantitative thought allows for it to be interpreted, codified, and manipulated in the physical world. Here, reason is the method, quantity the input. For example, effect A operates as it does due to the interaction of input X and input Y. Reason allows us to identify these parts. Once we have done so, a quantitative calculation allows us to identify how best to alter X and Y to change the outcome. Let us say that outcome B is preferable to outcome A. Outcome A is a result of X=1 and Y=2. Through quantitative thought, we can identify that outcome B can be produced if X=2 and Y=3. We can then codify the numeric truth that A becomes B if X+1 and Y+1. In this way, the effect (outcome A) has been controlled to the specification (X+1 and Y+1) of the controller to a more desirable effect (outcome B).
We can now return to the question of what is derivative of the combination of primal thought, abstract thought, and quantitative thought. The answer has now become clear. Primal instinct provides the power for the whole process, reason provides the focus of that power, and quantitative thought provides direction for how the power should be used. What is derived from this process is a means of accomplishing tasks and goals far beyond the scope of any other cognitive creature in humanity’s sphere of existence. The applicability of this formula for control extends as far as this writer imagines human endeavor expanding.
The argument against the government running up an excessive debt to be paid off at some later date has always been both an interesting philosophical debate and a pertinent real-world one. Does the government have any right to spend beyond the means provided it by its revenue? I may follow up later with a more comprehensive argument, but for now I'm just going to share a passage from Tom Paine's Rights of Man, Part One that struck me as being particularly applicable to the topic.
"Man has no property in man. Neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, has no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who chall be its governors, or how its government shall be organized, or how administered." (The italics are Paine's). *
Now, I acknowledge that the specific topic which Paine addresses is NOT economic in nature, but rather whether or not the English monarchy has a hereditary right to rule over the English people. However, he argues from the logical base that inter-generational control is invalid, and emphasizes this as a broad truth with the words "in any shape whatever".
By running up a debt, and especially one as large as the current one, the government is promising that the American people are responsible for paying it back at some point. One might argue that the American government is responsible for this debt, not the people, but is not our government by the people and for the people? Therefore, the operating budget for the government is limited to what it is allotted by the people through taxes. However, according to the U.S. Treasury website, the United States has not had a balanced budget since the Eisenhower administration in 1957. So already, the American taxpayer is responsible for a debt imposed by the previous generation, and is set to impose an exponentially larger debt on the next generation through the actions of the government. I, personally, don't find this to be a tenable situation.
I believe remarks were also made about the unacceptability of imposing debt on future generations somewhere in the Federalist Papers. I'll have to look it up.
It turns out that once a person goes from the general "I want to write something, sometime" phase to the actual act of sitting down and writing, things get very complicated. I now understand what Jeff Smith-Luedke (himself a twice-published author) meant when he railed against people who are going to write a novel "once they have the time." There are so many more thing involved than time.
I'm starting to appreciate that as I'm transitioning from my general desire to be a writer to actually doing it. The ideas only connect themselves into something even remotely worthwhile after hours and hours of painfully refusing to cooperate. If the first sentence didn't take hours, its probably no good.
So as I begin this long and difficult process of pulling this story out of my mind and expressing it just so on paper, wish me luck. Here I go.
Today's entry will seem a light and summery dish compared with the heavy food for thought that I usually post. For this I make no apologies. It is a relief to post something (for once) that won't require days and days of contemplation to piece together.
For a Political Thought class that I'm taking this semester, one of the required reading books is The Republic of Plato. The copy that I purchased is a very nice edition translated by Allan Bloom. He writes a very well thought out introductory essay and interpretive essay.
In the introduction, Bloom mentions that he has many things to add about the dialogue, but consigns them all to footnotes and the interpretive essay. I agree with him on this point, the translation should in no way be affected by the translator's personal thoughts or opinions.
So, excited for what promises to be a good reading, I flipped to Book I of the Republic itself. Trouble. Apparently Mr. Bloom has a lot of thoughts. Enough that Book I alone has 45 footnotes, mostly concentrated to towards the first ten pages or so of the book. This in itself isn't a problem, I appreciate the fact that Bloom is taking such care to make his translation transparent. The trouble lies in where he PUTS these footnotes. At the back of the book. I had to flip to the back of the book three times before the first sentence was complete. Needless to say, this makes it difficult to follow the overall arc of what's going on in the dialogue. Sort of an extreme case of not being able to see the forest for the trees.
Personally, I think he should have adopted the footnote style of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag Archipelago' (or at least, the edition that I read. I'll re-update with WHICH edition and publisher I read once I look it up). All of the footnotes (and there are a lot, and they are very lengthy) can be found on the bottom of each page. Sometimes this means that there is very little of the actual text on the page, but it allows you to read or at least skim over the notes without having to flip away from the page you're reading from.
I suppose for the casual reader who may want to avoid any extra reading, this system of placing the footnotes in the middle of the text would be a potential annoyance. However, Bloom specifically states in his introduction that Plato is a difficult work at best, and that his translation is aimed to be most useful for 'serious scholars'.
First of all, I want to congratulate the Iranian people for taking to the street to protest against a government that clearly no longer represents their interests. It reminds us Americans of our own core principles that so often get lost in the cynical political maneuvering of today.
If the unconfirmed reports of Iranian military personnel being arrested for expressing a desire to support or even join the people's 'green' movement, its entirely possible that any moves by the establishment to crush these protests in a Tiananmen Square-style military move will collapse. With any luck, we can witness a fairly bloodless revolution like the one that broke apart the Soviet Union and brought down the Berlin Wall. Sadly, from the pictures that I have seen, there seems to be no end of street thugs willing to take hints from the government and crack some heads at the demonstrations.
I'd also like to comment on the use of technology by the Iranians to announce and expand their movement. I find it particularly interesting that a nation as repressive as Iran has such a dense population of bloggers. With the Iranian government actively repressing global media, sites such as Twitter and countless foreigners are reaching out to help these bloggers carry their story to the world. The international support they are garnering will be invaluable.
Politicians in the U.S. are currently pushing President Obama to declare official support for the reformists in the street. While I applaud their enthusiasm, I do have to agree (rather to my dismay) with the opinion of an article in the ultra-liberal magazine The Nation. They point out the fact that Americans are more than capable of showing their public support for the reformists without needing a government proclamation. An official government stance on the matter would only give the Iranian government a target for its blame. It would allow them to stir up anti-Western sentiments, blaming the unrest on 'western lackeys' and whatnot.
So, best of luck to the Iranian reformers, lets just hope that they can take hold of this opportunity to secure their FULL rights as people and not just oust a dictator in favor of a more subtle dictator.
Peace and strength to those on the streets tonight fighting for their rights,
This is a research paper written for my English Composition class at the University of Akron. Enjoy!
Humanity’s collective memory reaches back far into its past, pushing into the fog of the long ago and recalling scenes of a simpler time.Humans, of course, do this individually.Everyone has vague recollections of their formative years, of undemanding times when the expectations of society have yet to exert their full pressure.In these years you see a more pure personality, one that hasn’t yet been sugar-coated with those social niceties that dress up our base instincts.Humanity as a whole underwent a similar process.In a primitive world where civilizations were separated effectively by large distances and seemingly insurmountable geographical hurdles, systems of morality and values were absolute.This child-like certainty of truth and goodness was often incompatible with the truth and certainty developed under widely varied circumstances by a different group.What is necessary for the desert folk of North Africa to survive may seem appalling to the highland folk of Northern Scotland and vice versa, but this potential denigration of one’s cultural practices by another culture does not give the weight of authority to either.This is because there is no ‘authority’ to be had.What follows here is a clear argument in defense of the notion that right and wrong are not universal truths but, rather, that morality and ethics are dependent on perspective and only gain the weight of authority in those societies, cultures, and groups to which they apply.
Deep within a forest, there exists a clearing.At the center of this clearing, there exists a tree.The tree in question is old, its branches gnarled, twisted, and blackened by brush fire and lightning alike.The forest with the clearing with the tree is the home of two tribes of natives.To the south of the tree is the South tribe.The South Tribe lives in a relatively calm and mild climate.In this climate all sorts of berries, edible roots, nuts, and pleasant clear-water springs provide a bountiful existence for those lucky enough to live there.The pleasant simplicity of this southern lifestyle breeds many things, but organized violence is not one of those things.What need has the tribe for organized violence when the land provides them with all of the necessities for survival?Many miles to the north, past the clearing of the tree, live the Northern Tribes.The northern climate is much harsher.The biting cold and resulting scarcity of thriving flora and fauna makes life much more difficult for the inhabitants of the area.These inhabitants of a harsher world are harsher people, having to provide for their families and communities by whatever means available.The instinctive will to survive introduces violence into the population, causing factions of these rival tribes to raid each other’s communities for food, supplies, and whatever other useful things they can lay their hands on.The economy of survival makes these people calculating, cynical, and crafty.
The gnarled blackened tree stands between these two societies of people.For the Northern Tribes, the tree stands as a symbol of prosperity.The northern people see the tree as a battle-scarred omen of good fortune as they pass through on occasional raids of the South Tribe.To them the tree symbolizes their harsh, calculating survival.The members of the South Tribe, of course, see a different picture.To them, the tree is a foul omen.For such people of prosperity and good living, the tree symbolizes the bitter foreign land to the north and the unpleasant raiders that often come out of it.Such association with negativity leads the southern people to imagine that the tree is cursed.The essential point here is that these two different groups of people see the tree in very different ways, although the tree is the same.For a member of the Northern Tribes, the tree absolutely represents good because it represents survival and the prosperity to be had in the South.The people of the South Tribe will likely assert that the tree absolutely represents evil because it represents the harsh men and life of the north and the bane that these people present to prosperous society.As a spectator far removed from either side of this conflict, the reader can see that each side’s belief is relative to its situation.The important question to apply here is to ask why the spectator, armed with this realization of relativity, cannot apply the theory to his own situation.
The first subject that must be dealt with when addressing the issue of moral relativity is that of religion.The majority of the world’s population today adheres to one of the variations of three major religions: Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.The basic foundation that all three of these religions have in common is that they all center on the concept of monotheism.Historically speaking, monotheism is the latest of two religious formats, the other being pantheism.Pantheism involves the worship of many gods with each god having its own realm of control while monotheism suggests that combining these petty, conflicting gods into a single deity.In terms of morality, this transition is an important marker in a shift in thought.Most pantheons had gods which engaged in seemingly petty arguments, laid wagers, used humans as pawns to do their bidding, and even engaged in sexual activity with humans and spawned half-godly offspring as a result.For example, in Greek lore the god Zeus was known to have frequent sexual relations with mortal women.Rather than appealing to some heavenly sense of right and wrong, societies based their moral conduct on more practical grounds.Indeed, how could behavior such as murder or sexual activity be condemned by humans in terms of ultimate good and evil when their own gods participated in such activity with an appetite!What’s more, when pantheons collided (as with the expansion of the Roman Empire), they tended to be fairly capable of accommodating new gods without sacrificing the worship of the old.By uniting the powers and responsibilities of all of the gods in a single god, monotheistic religions make the jump from the relativity of competing gods and cultures being embraced under a single religion to creating a single, universal standard by which to adhere.New gods that could easily fit into a pantheon would most likely contradict in some way the absolute standards of the new monotheism.As a single deity cannot argue and quarrel in the way that multiple deities can, room for disagreement or competition between ideas rapidly disappears.A single God encompasses all of the supernatural power of the world and so must be omnipotent; similarly the morality of this single God must also be the absolute morality.
With this transition we can observe the polarization of competing ideas into those of absolute good and absolute evil.The neutral underworld, the final resting place of souls in Greek and Roman religion, becomes the purifying Hell of Christianity in which sinners must suffer for violating the absolute good.Similarly, the negative and positive aspects of life become blessings and punishments for abiding by or violating an absolute sense of good.The trouble with the idea of monotheistic absolute good is that the very existence of more than one monotheistic religion an underlying relativity to the whole affair.
In his book, A Primer on Postmodernism, Stanley Grenz explains that ever since the Enlightenment the pursuit of truth has been viewed as inherently good.“The modern scientist, for example,” he points out, “considers it axiomatic that the discovery of knowledge is always good.” (Grenz, 4)He goes on to explain that the postmodernist intellectual movement holds that truth and, by extension, good and evil are always relative and not inherent.The shift in the intellectual community towards postmodernism helps to address some of the more difficult conflicts between modernist science and ethics.During the twentieth century the early rumblings of moral relativism and postmodernism could be heard in the thoughts of men such as Sir Isaiah Berlin and Max Weber.They recognized that at least within a single society that there are “a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective […]”(Lukes, 98)Values within societies and between them are experiencing a reevaluation as the very frame of intellectual and philosophical thought evolves.
Being that morality is often tied to religion, discovering scientifically that the predisposition for religion is hard-wired somehow into the human brain and that small differences from brain to brain would result in different religious outcomes would go a long way in supporting the idea of moral relativism.Professor and biologist Richard Dawkins attempts to do this, to some extent.In his book, The God Delusion, Dawkins elaborates on the idea that aspects of the mind (which he refers to as ‘modules’), like other aspects of nature, evolved through a Darwinian process.“There is a model for dealing with kinship, a module for dealing with reciprocal exchanges, a module for dealing with empathy, and so on.Religion can be seen as a by-product of the misfiring of several of these modules, for example the modules for forming theories of other minds, for forming coalitions, and for discriminating in favor of in-group members and against strangers.” (Dawkins, 208).The resounding scientific refutation of religion on all fronts that Dawkins seeks probably will not occur any time soon, but the postulation of thoughts, ideas, and scientific research in the search for that refutation can and will clearly have an impact on how we look at our own perception of the world and begin to comprehend how this system of perception that we exist in actually works.
With these thoughts in mind, the question of the relativity of morality becomes a simple one. Yes, morality certainly is relative. When a system of moral absolutism is in effect, the very existence of a second system of absolutism makes the first relative to the second. All that remains is whether or not to dogmatically assert the absolute and total goodness and righteousness of a certain standard over other societies, communities, and cultures. Whether it be a reversion to pantheism, a progression towards atheism, or simply the advent of greater scientific understanding of the mind and the dynamics of group perception, monotheism cannot reasonably continue to insist that its single moral absolute, its single Truth, is applicable everywhere and all of the time. Eventually the postmodern shift and everything that comes with it will cause monotheism to adapt, and even to evolve in the Darwinian fashion towards a more competent system that can operate in the postmodern world.
Works Cited
Dawkins, Richard.The God Delusion. New York:Houghton, 2008.
Grenz, Stanley. A Primer on Postmodernism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.
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