The computer has been unplugged until further notice due to the demands of the ongoing renovation project, so blog posts will likely be shorter, for the most part.
Here's a brief slice of today, in list form:
1. Of the two other people who had contacted me about tutoring, one never replied to the two emails I had sent him. He had initally written that French was "a must" for his job, and that he had "terms" to discuss with me; I said OK to this in my reply and asked whether he wanted to meet on Thursday (i.e., today; the exchange was a few days ago). No reply. Yesterday, I sent a second email attempting to confirm a meeting date/time... no reply to that, either. I guess this has fallen through.
2. I did, however, meet the other person today, a very nice Korean lady. We arranged an inital schedule, and she very kindly paid me for a few lessons.
3. I looked over the many comments to which I need to reply, and am thinking I might make video responses to them. As for the question re: "If everything is holy, does the word 'holy' mean anything?", I might reply with a question: "If everything boils down to energy (in various forms and states), does the word 'energy' mean anything?" What physical phenomenon isn't energy? I feel an unpleasant trip down Postmodernism Lane coming on, but it may become necessary to throw in some much-maligned Derrida to help us see what's going on when we deal with claims like "Everything is X."
4. I'm hating the current heat and humidity. They had record cold out in Chuck's part of the world (NE Oregon) a few days ago; that's what I want here, dammit!
Right-- More later.
_
Marathon
11 years ago
2 comments:
Just a quick thought off the top of my head on sacredness (I'm going to use "sacred" here rather than "holy," as the latter is Old English in origin and may or may not originally have the same sense as the Latin sacer; since people seem to be using "sacred" and "holy" interchangeably, though, I suppose it's just a matter of form). I'm thinking that it is not so much that certain things are inherently sacred, but that our attitudes toward them are holy. In other words, sacredness is an attitude of the subject, not an inherent trait of the object. After all, if "sacred" means "to be set apart," then there needs to be a subjective consciousness doing the setting apart, right?
For the ancient Israelites, the Tabernacle was a sacred place. For an ancient tribe of marauders, though, it would have been a fancy tent with some pretty neat bling inside. Even if YHWH struck them down in his wrath, that still wouldn't make it a sacred place to them--although it might make it cursed.
So maybe it's more accurate to say that "anything can be sacred," depending on the subject, rather than "everything is sacred."
I realize I was being kind of snarky with the link to the Wikipedia article in my last post. Actually, all you need to read is Section 1 of the article, "Why is first-order logic needed?"; it actually is pretty basic.
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