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Daily Archives: June 23, 2008
In the California Summer, Van Gogh Meets General Motors
On an evening walk with my camara I saw a vintage, baby blue truck with a baby blue “Starry Night” sunscreen. It’s an odd combination: high art mass produced for casual visual consumption, and perhaps purchased at a museum store, contrasted … Continue reading
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Tagged Apollo, Apollonian, art, baby blue, California, calm, camara, capitalism, cars, classic cars, Detroit, Dionysian, Dionysus, Enkidu, General Motors, Gilgamesh, high art, Jacob, Jacob wrestling the angel, mass production, meditation, meditator, night, nostalgia, religion, Starry Night, trucks, Van Gogh, Van Gogh's Starry Night, Vincent Van Gogh, yoga
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Moses, Monotheism–and Akhenaten
I recently read the book, “Akhenaten and Tutankhamun: Revolution and Restoration” (Silverman et. al. 2006). The book is 188 pages long. About half of those pages are taken up by image, the other half by text. Thus, in about 90-100 pages you … Continue reading
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Tagged Akhenaten, ancient history, archeology, art, Aten, bust of Nefertiti, Egypt, Moses, myth, Nefertiti, Santi Tafarella
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Gay for brains?
The Washington Post reports today on yet another major study linking homosexuality with brain differences. The evidence is not conclusive, as reading the article fairly notes, but if scientists, over the next twenty years, solidly lock down the evidence that … Continue reading
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Tagged brain, brain differences, Buddha, Buddhism, Christian, Christianity, civil rights, discrimination, environment, free will v determinism, gay, gay marriage, gay rights, genes, Hindu, Hinduism, homosexual, hormones, Islam, James Dobson, Jesus, Jesus Christ, John Macarthur, Mc Master University, Muslim, Ontario, Pastor Michael Alexander, Politics, religion, same-sex marriage, Sandra Witelson, science, sexual orientation, The Washington Post, womb
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Jacob and the angel–or Enkidu and Gilgamesh
The Gilgamesh Epic embodies the tensions between order and wildness, not in the gods Apollo and Dionysus, as Nietzsche claims that the ancient Greeks do, but in the god-like characters of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Gilgamesh is a city-dwelling ruler of a … Continue reading
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Tagged ancient Greeks, Apollo, Bible, Blake, city, Dionysus, existentialism, Genesis, Gilgamesh Epic, God, Jacob, Jacob wrestles the angel, literature, myth, nature, Nietzsche, Norton Anthology of World Literature, poetry, religion, Sarah Lowall, soul, symbol, William Blake
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Fraudulant Attribution: Gilgamesh, Moses, the Apostle Matthew—and Ancient Authorship
The Epic of Gilgamesh began perhaps around 2500 BCE as stories told orally, and were not written down until perhaps 1200 BCE. The version we have (discovered by archeologists in Ashurbanipal’s Nineveh library) dates to 700 BCE. Nevertheless, it claims Gilgamesh himself … Continue reading
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Tagged agnostic, apostle, atheist, Bible, Deuteronomy, Epic of Gilgamesh, literature, New Testament, poetry, Santi Tafarella
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Gay Children’s Gender Confusion Book Proposal: Eve has Two Mommies—Or Are Those Daddies?
This is a curious late-Medieval image. Gender seems oddly reversed—God the Father appears rounded, as if pregnant, and Eve comes out of Adam’s body, rather than the other way around. Perhaps Eve’s first words out of the womb were the same as Miranda’s in Shakepeare’s the Tempest: … Continue reading
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Tagged Adam, Adam and Eve, Adam's rib, art, Bible, Christian, Eve, evolution, feminism, garden of Eden, gay marriage, gay rights
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Bart Ehrman’s book, “God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Tell Us Why We Suffer”
I read Ehrman’s book recently and strongly recommend it. I liken Ehrman to an intelligent chess player who puts the squirming reader (who may not, at first, be inclined to agree with him) into methodical and logical checkmate. Ehrman shows why … Continue reading
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Tagged poets, problem of suffering, prophets, reason, religion, Revelation, Santi Tafarella, skepticism, squirming reader, traditional, Wilfred Owen
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Predator and Prey–and Alliteration and Rhyme
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History yesterday, I learned a little memnonic device for distinguishing predators and prey. Predators tend to have eyes oriented to the front of the skull and prey tend to have eyes oriented … Continue reading
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of gay marital drama
Let the pursuit of happiness, equality, freedom, and newly discovered marital drama ring:
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Tagged agnostic, atheist, California, Christian, Christianity, gay, gay marriage, liberty, life, marriage, Politics, pursuit of happiness, religion, youtube
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Pastor Michael Alexander: The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness
An anti-gay rights pastor in my local area seems to be auditioning for the lead role of John the Baptist in the ongoing drama of gay marriage in California. He has manage to get quoted in not just the Antelope Valley … Continue reading
Gilgamesh: A literary Pompeii
When we talk about reading the Epic of Gilgamesh today, we are talking about a version of the story discovered in 1872 at Nineveh, the city perhaps best known for its prominence in the Biblical book of Jonah, in the … Continue reading
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Tagged ancient literature, Ashurbanipal, Assyria, Bible, Christianity, English, Epic of Gilgamesh, Genesis, God, Greece, Homer, Jesus, Jonah, Judaism, literature, literature in translation, Mesopotamia, Nineveh, Noah, Pompeii, religion, the flood, world literature
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