Biblical Post

I have tried to post a blog consistently between each class, but as time goes on I am getting worser and worser at it! (You say worser isn't a word?) However, I'll continue doing what I am doing until I reach the point of complete irrelevance not only to this class, but the rest of humanity in general. It's a long way to fall, but hell, this late in the semester who cares anymore? Seriously, I am exhausted with all the tests, quizzes, sentence diagramming, reading, debit and credit, demand and supply, equilibrium, monopolies, excise and sales taxes, it goes on and on and on and never really ends until you're dead or senile. Quoting the song, Make Mistakes, by the Infadels, "Life was easy before the numbers came". But thank God I am majoring in Finance, because I really don't want to be teaching English some day but would rather make money investing in something then retiring at a crisp age of 50 (with all this technology, I'll be living to like 5 billion anyway). Mmmmkay, biblical stuff. I'm sure I got something interesting under the hood. Engine is revving up, vroooom, vrooom, vrroooom. Okay, I got nothing of interest to say to anybody whose name's don't begin with N and end in K (I'm the only Nick in the world right?). I admit I am extremely narcissistic, but so are the best writers ever, and also drunks. Hey, I could corner both markets pretty soon.

I've realized from my group project thing that I am extremely melodramatic. I ladle up the melodrama like soup from a big bowl of soup. I think it is a distinctly Jewish "woe is me" sense of humor, and I've also developed a thick layer of cynicism on top of it. (You see, I'm like an onion, I got layers.) My fears were confirmed this weekend when I starting channeling an old Jewish woman's accent after a few too many alcoholic beverages. I really like our Jonah presentation script. What I enjoy most is the each writer adding something different to it. Tai is a naturally funny guy, and his humor tends to be filled with references and wordplay. Jamie tends to make funny faces and has more character driven sort of comedy (with gestures and all). I guess I would call my contributions extremely melodramatic, even falling on the depressing and violent (the work of an extremely psychotic mind!). My hope is that you will be able to see where the different authors come in. I don't suppose it will be that hard, since most of the significant dialogue for each character comes from the person acting it. Anyway, I know this was a highly unorganized sort of rambling, speaking out loud kinda brouhaha, but blogging is important.

Bleh

Bleh, that's all I can say about this week from hell. I now have to do the stuff about what I liked about the Slave. It was tragic, depressing, and surprisingly haunting. It bites at your interior for awhile like any good art will, and left me feeling hollow. I liked it, related to it, felt Jacob's pain and suffering. Because the Slave left me sad and futile and caught in a mystifying world, I will probably do my paper on how the Slave relates to the Book of Ecclesiastes. O vanity of f**king vanities, right, right? Today Biblical lit helped me decide what I wanted to do. I had forgotten about the hobo jew, and I'm surprised because he was one interesting dude (What with his very Buddhist philosophy, slave to things, blah, blah, blah, interesting yes, yes). And it relates well with the "woe is me, life is vain" attitude I am currently possessing, or is it possessing me? The tricks I play. I have no high-brow goal in writing this paper, sorry. Nope, my goal is make this thing so depressing that you will weep; you will bend down over yourself, fall on the ground in a fetal position, and you will cry. But I'll end it with a happy ending, because that's funny.

Revelation, Part 2

"I wonder, I wonder, what you would do if you had the power to dream at night any dream you wanted to dream? And you would of course be able to alter your time sense, and slip seventy-five years of subjective time into eight hours of sleep. You would I suppose start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You could design for yourself what would be the most ecstatic life: love affairs, banquets, dancing girls, wonderful journeys, gardens, and music beyond belief. And then after a couple of months of this sort of thing at seventy-five years a night, you’d be getting a little taste for something different, and you’d move over to an adventurous dimension, where there were certain dangers involved, and the thrill of dealing with dangers. And you could rescue princesses from dragons, and go on dangerous journeys, and eventually get into contests with enemies. And after you had done that for awhile, you’d think up a new wrinkle, to forget that you were dreaming, and think that is was all for real." - Alan Watts

In ages past, the civilized and the uncivilized alike seemed to have accepted the presence of the enlightened as something of a necessity. The bible is fraught with these men and women who received visions in hallucinogenic dreams; in many ways, they were an extension of shamanism. Examples include the major and minor prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zecharaiah, Malachi), Elijah, Elisha, Micaiah, John of Patmos, and many, many others, but perhaps most intriguingly suggested by Northrop Frye, our pal Moses (The Great Code 126) (Deuteronomy 34:10). Aaron's priestly functions, Frye says, are distinct and separate from Moses' prophetic ones. Left alone, "Aaron goes wrong and makes human mistakes, the voice of prophecy in itself is conventionally regarded as infallible [that is, Moses]" (Frye 126). According to Frye, the difference between Aaron and Moses is this:

"The wise man thinks of the human situation as a kind of horizontal line, formed by precedent and tradition and extended by prudence: the prophet sees man in a state of alienation caused by his own distractions, at the bottom of the U-shaped curve." (Frye 128)

In class, we discussed the difference between prudential and skeptical wisdom. The wise man Frye describes has prudential wisdom (Proverbs, for example), but the prophet suffers from skeptical wisdom (Book of Ecclesiastes). This is an important distinction. Instead of relying on history, the prophet's main goal isn't to pacify us with words, but to wake us up. James Joyce said, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". Clearly Joyce liked prudential wisdom as much as Sid Vicious did. Today, we have an overabundance of prudence, but a shortage of prophets. Like Polonius told Laertes to avoid "... wine, women, and songs", we are distracted by television, sports, politics, and consumerism/debt, but these are all merely diversions from the truth. There is a blanket (a fog, if you will) placed over our eyes by a group of people trying to control us, and they accomplish this by pacifying us with distractions. We forget who we are, what we are doing, and why we are doing it. By getting rid of the prophet, we have done a way with our only protection against the ruling class. There is few trying to wake up the citizens of America. Much like Aaron wavered from his duties when Moses went away, so has society. We need the prophet's return. We need to be waken up and the sooner the better. Frye describes metanoia as a "change of outlook or spiritual metamorphosis, an enlarged vision of the dimensions of human life" (Frye 130). We are suffering from a lack of this metanoia.

But where did the prophet go? Northrop Frye describes:

"In the post-Biblical period both Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism seem to have accepted the principle that the age of prophecy had ceased, and to have accepted it with a good deal of relief. Medieval Europe had a High King and a High Priest, an Emperor and a Pope, but the distinctively prophetic third force was not recognized." (Frye 128)

From what we can see from modern examples and artifacts from the past, prophets were accepted by the community uneasily. They made predictions, good and bad omens, had the ability to heal, and 'saw' visions. They were also associated with evil spirits and other foreboding things (as we can see from the Biblical example of the Witch of Endor). However, no matter what society felt about them, the enlightened prophets were an important counter-balance to the ruling class. They were advisers to kings and princes, and though their prophecies were often angrily received (or rejected), the elite realized the importance to their kingdom and court. However, as history progressed, slowly the prophet died away. They were to be replaced by bureaucratic clergy and royalty. Without the prophet, the ruling class and organized religion easily become parasitic, and their only way to continue ruling is by making us believe we need them. One doesn't have to look far in today's society to identify these blood suckers. They are the people that create nothing, yet lord themselves over mankind. Just like religious institutions need to make their followers believe they need them to speak to God, the US government needs to make the citizens believe it needs "it" for protection. If the bible is any guiding point, government is to be looked upon with suspicion. The Kings of Israel weren't established until much later then the prophet and the priest, and even after that, only David and a few later kings seem to exemplify good leaders. In almost every other example, the king is incompetent or unfaithful, and the prophet needs to call him out (the story of Elijah and King Ahab for example). Even David did wrong, including sending Uriah to die in battle so he could steal his wife, Bathsheba.

Ultimately, without the prophets' presence, we have no voice. The religious institutions and the ruling class surely don't want us to wake up, that would endanger their position of power. The genius of the Constitution was that it gave the American citizens the power to fill this void. However, we have become so pacified by our rulers that we are berated for standing up. We are pushed back down. We are laughed at, spit at, scorned. There is no room for the prophet anymore in America. We no longer have great art, but corporate-funded explosion orgies. We no longer have great poetry, great literature, great anything, at least none that is read by the masses. We are blind, and when we are told to do something by our masters, we do it without thinking (poor man or woman who says any differently). Again, this gets back to the main theme of Revelation. The only way to receive a revelation and "see" the world as it really is for the first time is through the prophet.


Northrop Frye describes Apocalypse as "the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared" (Frye 138). Seeing as this is a biblical class, I would like to refer to a movie with a biblical name, "Jacob's Ladder". The film, directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Tim Robbins in the title role of Jacob, deals with a returning Vietnam vet. He sees increasingly bizarre visions as he struggles to deal with the aftermath of war and the death of his son. Some of the more colorful examples include a woman dancing at a party sprouting a slimey tale, and a hospital being filled with the grotesque: a rusty bicycle, men and women in straight jackets, a man banging his head on a wall, strange mutant creatures on the ceiling, blood stained walls, piles of bodiless arms, and perhaps most horrifying of all, the crazed man Jacob has seen throughout the movie violently shaking his head. Jacob's chiropractor, Lewis, is often interpreted as Jacob's guardian angel. According to wikipedia, he cites the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, when he tells Jacob, "Eckhart saw Hell too; he said: 'the only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you,' he said. 'They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and... and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.'" At the end of the movie, we learn it all was a dying vision. Jacob approaches his son Gabe on a stair case and ascends up it. The credits role.

James Joyce's quote, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" is again palpable. Jacob, like all of us, is caught in a dying hallucination. We are trapped in a dream that we cannot awake. The movie is very similar to a short story I read by Ambrose Bierce named "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". The man is going to be hanged, but miraculously escapes into the river below, he swims to safety and narrowly avoids bullets. However, as he tries to return home, he reaches the end of the rope and his neck breaks. The entire escape was his dying vision. Wikipedia has also found another familiar connection, "The film [Jacob's Ladder] is also viewed by many, including the screenwriter, as a modern interpretation of Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead." Frye describes the Tibetan Book of the Dead as such:

"... where the soul is assumed immediately after death to be going through a series of visions, first of peaceful and then of wrathful deities. A priest reads the book of the dead into the ear of the corpse, who is also assumed to hear the reader's voice telling him that all these visions are simply his own repressed mental forms now released by death and coming to the surface. If he could realize that, he would immediately be delivered from their power, because it is his own power" (Frye 137).

We are prisoners not of some terrible force or devil, but our own inner demons and visions. Yes, there is many who love to keep us there, but it is our dream, no one else's. Once we finally come to the terms that we are dead, we will be finally without ego. We will receive Frye's apocalypse; it was there all along. We will wake from the nightmare; we will be free of the world's distractions; we will see the world as it really is; we will have a revelation. "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32).

Revelation, Part 1 (Updated)

"So in the drama, somebody has to be the villain, and the hero plays against him. If you go to the theater for a good cry, then you let the villain win and you call it a tragedy. If you go for a thrill then you let the hero win. If you go for a laugh then you call it a comedy. There are different arrangements between the hero and the villain, but in all cases when the curtain goes down at the end of the drama, the hero and the villain step out hand and hand and the audience applaud both. They don't boo the villain at the end of the play, they applaud him for acting the part of the villain so well, and they applaud the hero for acting the part of the hero so well, because they know the villain role and the hero role are only masks. And you see behind the stage there is the green room, where after the play is over and before it begins the mask is taken off. So the Hindus feel behind the scene, that is to say in reality, under the surface, you are all the actor marvelously skilled at playing many parts, and getting lost in the mazes in your own minds and the entanglements of your own affairs as if this was the most urgent thing going on, but behind the scenes, in the green room, you might say in the back of your mind in the very depths of your soul, you always have a very tiny sneaking suspicion that you might not be the you you think you are." - Alan Watts

Yesterday I was laying in bed. The sun was peaking through the blanket I have hung over the window. Frankly it sucked. I was comfortable, and my eyes were all merrily shut, and generally I was happy doing nothing. I didn't want to move. The pillow was perfectly placed under my head, the blankets, oh my God, it was perfect. I didn't want to get up, and I especially didn't feel like getting in the shower. But the day beckoned, so I got in the shower, and that was nice so I didn't want to leave the shower. I didn't want to go to class, but then I went, but I was comfortable, and I had a lot of homework that night so I didn't want to leave class. Later that night I didn't want to go to bed because I wasn't tired, but I did anyway. Then I realized it was all some stupid circle spinning around everyday, and I was forgetting why I was even doing all this. Then I remembered: it's for a career and money and prestige, but mostly for my own mental stability, because I don't know what I would be doing but this. I had a revelation, an unveiling, a seeing through the "vanity" moment, an Apocalyptic moment, a moment where I realized that I was thinking about thinking.

I would now like to reexamine the Genesis creation myth. The gospel of John tells us, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). God speaks the world into existence. He divides lightness from darkness, "God separated the light from the darkness" (Genesis 1:4), He creates the sky by separating waters, "And God said, 'Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters'" (Genesis 1:6), He creates land, and from the land plants, and He separates the day from the night by creating lights in the heavens, "God said, 'Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separates the day from the night" (Genesis 1:14), He creates animals of all kinds, water creatures, birds, and creatures, and finally He creates dude and dudette in his own image. From the Priestly account, God divides up the universe (divvies it up for the peeps if you want) from nothing to something. He takes an axe and chops up matter, making darkness and lightness (which are one and the same), He makes the universe perceivable to a human mind, and therefore blinds us. Because we see sections of what He created and not the whole picture of what he created, every single one of us tends to get lost in the tinier pieces. We tend to focus too much on the light without focusing on the dark, too much on the ups and not the downs. We look too much on the front side and not on the backside, too much on the uphill and not on the downhill. The world is a series of distractions, because we lose sight of the bigger pictures, and this is ultimately a result of God separating the universe.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and
about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd
by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Part 48

If one is to understand the greatness of God, one must understand that God is not only the good and the beautiful, but also the bad and the wretched. "I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil:I the Lord do all these things" (Isaiah 45:7). The tree of knowledge was the beginning of man's awareness of the division. When man (and woman) ate of the tree they received a revelation. They became aware of themselves and forgot about the "wholeness". They forgot that they were "one". Man and woman realized they were naked and had to clothe themselves. They were banished from the garden and man had to work and die, and woman had to bare the pain of childbirth and die. In this sense the Garden of Eden was not an actual place, but instead a state of mind. After the garden was only distractions ("vanity") which were needed to ease the pain and provide some essence of purpose. In these distractions man and woman forgot who they were. They forgot they were divine themselves.

There are many ways to interpret the Garden of Eden and the fall of man story. One way is to look at it as a metaphor for man's loss of nature as he moved from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic world. Instead of roaming the forest and the fields in search of food, he and she were now shoved inside cities or planted crops. He and she were leaving this "oneness" with nature behind. It reminds me of what Treebeard laments in the Lord of the Rings, "Nobody cares for the woods anymore." Instead, we destroy the nature around us. I will link this back to an ancient epic near the end. Another way to see the fall of man is a metaphor for a man growing out of childhood. Where once the world was innocent--he was protected, he could run naked with out a care, he saw and named things for the first time--now he is corrupted. He is aware of himself and his appearance, he has to work for a living, he realizes that some day he will die. And why does this happen? Because of women, of course! Women force him to grow up and make something of himself. The longing for nature and childhood is the same as longing for innocence and solitude, but it is also another way of longing to die. How is this so?

Everyone longs to die, to return to a non-chaotic state. We can find this in many of the writings of Robert Frost: The man lingers in nature not wanting to return , or the boy tries to climb out to space on the top of a birch tree. I often have a similar feeling, not to die, but to return to a place with as few distractions as possible. Go by myself to some lonely part of the world and sit and just feel the universe sink into me. I read an article recently that said low income families are less likely to be depressed if they have a window that look out on greenery. Another article that explores similar healing properties of nature is this one. The researchers discovered that people, "who watched the nature images scored significantly lower on extrinsic life aspirations, and significantly higher on intrinsic life aspirations, [...] like deep and enduring relationships, or working toward the betterment of society." Any sort of natural setting seems to help stressed minds. Why is this? It is nature's ability to remind us that we can just exist, that some day we will leave this chaotic condition, that we we were once in the Garden of Eden, that we were once whole. It is much easier to be a rock than a human.

Walt Whitman described his affection for animals in his opus, The Song of Myself:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Part 32

Last year when I read The Epic of Gilgamesh, I was surprised how the origin story of Enkidu related to the tale of Eden. Enkidu was a wild boy, he ran with the animals in nature, he ran quick and briskly, he was peaceful and whole and had long hair. Enkidu is the animal that Walt Whitman described. He was happy and blissful. But then Gilgamesh orders him civilized by sending in a prostitute to sleep with him. The prostitute, much like Eve to Adam, corrupts him, and he slows down and no longer wants to be with the animals and nature. Later on, Enkidu kills a Forest Spirit with Gilgamesh without thinking. What has happened to Enkidu? He no longer cares for nature and kills it. He is just as bad as the rash Gilgamesh.

Enkidu has forgotten.

Alan Watts describes myth as stories that try to describe this dilemma.

"Myth doesn't mean something untrue, but it means an image. In terms of which make sense of life and the world. Supposing for example you don't understand the technicalities of electricity, and somebody wants to explain them to you, he wants to explain about the flow of currents, well to do that he compares electricity to water, and because you understand water you get some idea about the behavior of electricity. Or if an astronomer wants to explain to you what he means by expanding space, he'll use the metaphor of a balloon, a black balloon with white spots on it. The white spots represent the galaxies, and if you blow up the balloon they all get further away from each other at the same speed as the balloon blows up. In neither case are we saying that electricity is water or that the universe is a balloon with white spots on it, we are saying it's something like it. So in the same way the human being has always used images to represent his deepest of ideas about how the universe works and what man's place in it is." - Alan Watts

I know this doesn't seem to relate, but it does. The tale of Adam and Eve and Enkidu tell us something deeper than they appear to at first. They tell us that we have forgotten something important. We have eaten from the tree of knowledge and lost something in the process.

Richard Dawkins is lame

edit - Most of this post comes from a conversation (if you want to call it that) in the youtube comments. Sorry for the very Staccato sentence structure.

I was confronted with a terrible Richard Dawkins video the other day. It makes me sick looking at him. His face is vile like a reptile, and his teeth are yellow hiding what surely is a flickering lizard tongue. He spews hate, venom, and all the things he claims to stand against. He is most importantly a hypocrite, showering the world with black and white images. It's pathetic and the product of a shallow mind. The bible was written thousands of years of go. It's a primitive text, of course there is going to be bizarre stuff in there. But there is also beautiful stories, yes stories. The bible is not a history book, no matter how much you want it to be. Would anybody call Gilgamesh disgusting? No. Gilgamesh and much of the Old Testament comes from a similar time period. Many of the stories in the bible are similar to the Epic of Gilgamesh. And yes, the gods try to wipe out man with a flood. Women are generally marginalized. Gilgamesh is a terrible king. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill an old forest spirit. And the Gods are all around mean, evil things. The bible is a story book laying out law for an ancient people. Yes, you can find echoes of today in there, but read it to gain knowledge, not to mock it for its primitiveness. Almost all of our great artists were inspired by the power of the bible's words. Is Richard Dawkins the one too primitive, too backward to understand it? Yes. Grow up, and get out of your black and white fantasy world. For me, it's not about the truth of the history, it's about the truth of the story. The truth will set you free. Do I believe that Jesus lived? Does it matter? Sure, history is against whether it even happened, but is it insane to find solace in the bible's words? Is it insane to say everybody who is a Christian is "silly"? Yes. I'll say that. It is foolish to call the bible disgusting. It is as bad as right wing evangelicals.

The bible is disgusting in the sense of Deliverance, the Saw movies maybe, Hostel, Jaws, like all horror stories, um... what ever gruesome things you can think of. Yeah, it's gross, there's definitely some weird stuff in there. It's also almost three thousand years old. But it's a story. Look at as a story, a literary critic, not as if God wrote it. Yeah, that's silly, I agree with that. But you cannot say their isn't also beautiful stuff in it. That's plain idiotic. There is some absolutely disgusting things in the bible, and children should maybe be sheltered from certain sections. However, my overall point is that the bible in itself is not evil. Some of the people who follow it are crazy people, but the book itself is old, old, old. Judge it, I guess, research it, it's an artifact from the past with some amazing words, and some terrible words. It would be stupid to follow it's words to a 'T' for most modern people. Mostly it just makes me angry to see so many ignoramuses on the youtube comments being black and white and agreeing with everything your God Richard Dawkins says, and not thinking for yourself. There is hardly anything black and white in this world. No group of people are completely evil. The bible should not be judged as evil, it's old, and sections are quite beautiful. It's just plain old tiring to see all these idiots stuck in some fantasy world. I used to be like them, most adults will grow out of it.

I agree that there is many that blindly follow the bible. Blindly following anything is wrong. However, people who openly say the bible is disgusting and taunt the material inside are just baiting their Christian adversaries. Yes, some terrible things came from the bible, some terrible things came from a lot of books. And people have been openly criticizing the bible for centuries before Richard Dawkins. It's not a new phenomenon. The book of Job criticizes God, and it's in the bible! Same with the Book of Ecclesiastes (and if you want an atheist rallying cry, look no further than this book in the bible!) And if you really think questioning God is a recent thing you aren't very familiar with literature or philosophy. Just look at your friend "God is Dead" Nietzsche. Dawkins just pisses me off. Let him be an atheist and stop making books called the God Delusion. He's just as bad as the people he hates.

And how would Christians ever tell their kids what Dawkins' wants? You really think it's in their best interest to bend little Billy or Sally on their knee and tell them God is evil. That's laughable. How bout you bend your little kid on your knee and tell them the evil of American and Nazi eugenics in the name of Social Darwinism or about justified racism proven by "science"? That would be a laugh. Many characterize all Christians as planned parenthood bombers. How would you like it if I characterized all evolutionists (which I count myself as one) as eugenicists? Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was indeed both a eugenicist and a racist. She founded Planned Parenthood as a way to get rid of undesirable races. If you don't believe me, look it up. Forced sterilizations weren't that uncommon in early 1900's America either. And Hitler, can't forget about him. One of my favorite episodes of South Park is the two parter Go God Go. The episode perfectly spells out what I feel about Richard Dawkins. After religion was annihilated by Dawkins and Garrison, the future is just as bleak. Now humanity just rages war over what they should call themselves. Humans do bad things with or without religion. And Bob's your uncle, that's it.

freethinking

Asking a person to read a book is a very cruel thing. Tragic story after tragic story, despair, humiliation, disaster after disaster, disease, suffering, I have to carry poor Jacob and Wanda around with me for the rest of my life! And one could argue that by reading The Slave you are making the characters real. Yes, those sad people are now stuck in at least 20 more people's heads. And they never get to die and rest in peace either, no, they will be alive for... wait, the Apocalypse is just around the corner right? Who cares then. But seriously? You do know the world will end in 2012? The Mayan calendar will end, the nephilim will return to earth, the reptoids will make themselves visible, the antichrist will be strolling around, and the stargates will be opened up. Oh yes, enjoy what little time you have left.

But, cough, all serious aside, cough, cough, cough, I have been getting a kick out of reading Tom Horn's Apollyon Rising 2012. If you want a real zany look at end of times, 2012, and America as the new Atlantis, look no further. What he writes is completely off the wall, but who doesn't love that? Giants, aliens, crop circles, free masons, sign me up! I don't pretend to be completely above the material, I do love complaining about the banking elite as much as the next conspiracy theorist, but read for laugh, hate, analysis, all of it.

I haven't really thought about what I want to do with my paper. Hate, hate, hate, comparing two texts together. It's exhausting, opposite of fun, and I suppose that's why teachers like it. I can already picture myself scanning through text I read a month ago trying to find something that's related to the bible. It's all over the place, that's a given, but I hate over-analysis of anything. It ruins it for me. Take a great movie like Zombieland. You know what would kill it? Analysis. Enjoy it, don't spend hours thinking about why it was great or not, if something meant this or that, because honestly the author probably didn't know when he or she wrote it. So, might do the second option. How I am going to stretch that into a full paper... God knows. Seriously, He does in a biblical lit class. Most classes He doesn't care about.

I have learned a lot, but nothing I could conceivably write a paper on, in less you like hearing about how much I liked David. I could do a paper comparing Samson with Brock Samson, or the South Park Job episode, or any other inane thing about the bible. I could write about how much I piss off my religious roommate now (I memorized the first part of psalm 23, and I can tell it makes him angry that an unbeliever would just enjoy the bible for the stories). Sounds like a lot of fun, but somewhat lacking in a concept. I could tell how much I despise politicians (well, most) with their idiotic reverence for the holy scripture without having read it (among many other things). I could tell you how much I hate men like Richard Dawkins. I could tell you what I feel about God now. I went from a self-imposed unbeliever (in a Walt Whitman, Alan Watts-sense), a heretic, a gentile, to a believer in the power of God's Word. A believer in how stories can shape our world for the better, and the power of faith can have on a man. If I was going to relate The Slave with the bible, I would stay on that topic. The power of Jacob's faith and how faith can affect us. That is all for now.

A Magician Named GOB

Now to ramble on about something. I finally finished Job, which really shouldn't be done in one sitting. It's really a drag to read straight through. One guy is bitching about this and that, and all the three other dudes can do is look at each other and shrug. "Hey, this guy just might be right". They're the Larry, Curly, and Moe from the biblical world. In fact, this whole event was probably just an interlude from throwing pies at each other and hyucking. When the three defuses do get the cojones to speak, all they can really say is, "You're wrong, God is good, you're lame Job, what do you know anyway?"

Finally God answers Job, saying he can't understand how awesome He is. Don't even try silly mortal, you are nothing to me! Job replies he has seen the errors of his ways, hallelujah, amen. Then to top this rather large boring cake with more nonsense, God says Job was right all along and gives him his stuff back.

I know that last paragraph is basically nonsense, but I'm tired.

I also finished The Slave this weekend. It's a pretty great book. I can't conjure up any real analysis right now. Maybe tomorrow.

Now for the real Gob: