Triangulating Cain

January 13th, 2013   by   Andrew

This is a response to Sabio’s conversation on his post “Pre-Adamites“.

I thought this was too long to just leave on his site as a comment. Since it’s his conversation (and I’m not too active on this site these days), I’d prefer any further comments to be written on his site.

 

Re: The Mark of Cain

Interpretations abound. That’s literature. Genesis stories are particularly difficult because they are so tight and short. You can do anything you want with them. Here’s my fun with it (sorry this is long, but I hope it’s worth it to someone).

The last time you were so mad you yelled at someone, what did your face look like? Cain was so enraged, and so certain about being wronged, he killed his brother to prove he was right.

When you are deeply angry, do people want to look at you? People naturally don’t even want to be around angry people, let alone angry people that are always right. Some angry people feel so certain about how wrong the world is, they have to prove and argue and even willfully, violently demonstrate just how right they are.

Anger disfigures your face.

Let’s look at wikipedia – ” “mark” in Gen. 4:15 is ‘owth, which could mean a sign, an omen, a warning, or a remembrance. In the Torah, the same word is used to describe the stars as signs or omens.”

God (as a character in a story) marks Cain so that no one else will kill him, supposedly. It could also be a prediction – no one’s going to kill Cain, and maybe that’s because Cain is willing to quickly escalate his side of revenge to the point of taking life. He might even go further.

It could also be just a sign to others – don’t do what this guy did; it’ll get us nowhere. And don’t mess with him; it’s not worth it.

In Genesis it doesn’t explicitly say God was thinking about Cain’s best interests, or protecting Cain. He could very well have been thinking about everyone else that would have to deal with this dangerous individual.

When God finds what Cain has done, he first predicts Cain’s fate:

“When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.”

Cain immediately casts himself as the victim in all this. He blames everything else but himself, and fears his vulnerability:

“My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.”

God can’t believe his anthropomorphic ears. Are you kidding me? When you feel wronged, your wrath is not proportionate to what you think has been done against you. Anyone that kills you won’t just equally be killed, which is bad enough. Your line will want to destroy their whole family!

“Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.”

It does not say here the source of the vengeance. It does not say by My anthropomorphic hand. Let’s not put words into God’s anthropomorphic mouth.

Only after this does God “put a mark on Cain so that no one who came upon him would kill him.”

Cain’s anger and (self-)loathing made it almost impossible for anyone to be around him long enough to even want to talk to him, let alone kill him.

They would get the hell away from him as fast as possible. Haven’t you known people like this? Haven’t you avoided people like this?

One of Cain’s descendants is Tubal-Cain, a smith of bronze and iron. Tools. Weapons. Cain’s motivation to hurt others when he doesn’t get his way, and his descendant’s knack for war, create a dangerous cycle of willful and asymmetrical (unequal) revenge.  That leads to society-ending consequences. Even in a semi-nomadic society before legal systems and ‘governing authorities’.

One of Cain’s descendants is Lamech. Lamech tells his wives quite openly:

“I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-seven fold.”

It’s now out of control. Lamech is even more wilful, more vengeful and more dangerous than Cain. Someone slaps him and he wipes out their village!

Some might say God ‘marks’ Cain to stop the cycle of revenge immediately. The forgiveness angle, maybe. I think it’s better to look at this as a prediction. Cain’s attitude and motivation ‘mark’ him. No magic needed.

Cain, supposedly, becomes both city-builder and cast-out wanderer. He just can’t get relationships with work and with other people right. Why’s that?

Well, look back at his sacrifice to God (as a character in a story). Cain puts in a half-ass effort to collect some twigs and berries. And this is to his God, supposedly.

Abel gives the best he had, and he was glad to do it. When measured beside his brother, Cain blames his brother for his own half-ass efforts, and takes out his hurt on his brother. How’s that for a sacrifice, God?

Well, it’s still a pretty bad sacrifice and doesn’t get him anything he really wants.

The signs are in the stars for Cain, supposedly. But he hasn’t set his sights on them. He can only blame them for being so far out of reach. Surprising really, since it’s all written right in the expression on his face.

God, I suck.

 

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Sources:

Genesis 4 - http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+4&version=NIV

Mark of Cain - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_and_mark_of_Cain

Some ideas from J. Peterson’s discussions of Genesis

- Redemption talk - http://ww3.tvo.org/video/185862/jordan-peterson-redemption-and-psychology-christianity

- the nature of evil – http://ww3.tvo.org/video/163167/big-ideas-jordan-peterson

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Disillusionment, Adjustment, and Fish

June 28th, 2012   by   Andrew

I want say that I’m sorry I haven’t been getting out to many other people’s sites lately.

I miss the conversations, and the influence others have on me.

A couple of things have come up.

A new job.
A new house.

I was hoping to wrap up the series God: From Magic to Motivation. There are still a few posts I am hoping to get to, but I don’t know when I will get to them. I have very little skill when it comes to seeing into the future. Things like ‘personal writing time’ look terribly bleak.

Priorities invade.

Life invades.

I’m going to post a conclusion to the series I drafted up early on. It contains two short ‘stories’ that I think reveal how to deal with:

The disillusionment of religious beliefs, experienced by more and more people, and
The adjustments in motivations being experienced in workplaces, communities, hierarchies

We seem to be moving to a more connected and more inter-dependent, trusting world-community. How will that work?

This title sounded important to me:

The Last Idols of God

 

Maybe in a month’s time I will find my way back, finish the series, get to some other posts. Here are some titles I was working on:

WLC Confirms My God – It’s not what you think…

Is Being Rational a Virtue? – Looking at Rationalism as an Emotional-Aesthetic Commitment

Ultimate Complexity, Cultural Regeneration – is there such a thing as Ultimate Complexity? Can we survive a fragile world-culture?

Improvisation’s Lesson for Religionists and Overly-Materialistic Rational Academics

A New Ataraxia – Redefining what ‘Authority’ is, how it is treated, how it is used, Building Trust and Responsibility Despite Living in Uncertainty

 

I’d also like to work on a new series about how to actually read literature (and sacred texts), evaluate what’s being said without getting bogged down into too literal or too authoritative of a mindset.

I haven’t got all the workings figured out. I’m thinking a little about Northrop Frye, science fiction’s role in the new mythos, creativity as a team-driven exercise vs. an individualistic process,  and how we react towards new information.

My head’s a mess. Maybe one of these days I’ll organize my thoughts into something coherent…

Salut, mes amis, et merci pour tous les poissons!

À bientôt!

 

 

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Hierarchy in the City – Continued

June 10th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

A local minister I know called me a “religious sniper” some time ago. He was referring to my style of picking off religious topics from the vantage point of my website  - never really know where I am or where the fire is coming from, or what the target may be.

His comment was meant in light-hearted jest, I believe. Although I appreciate it and take it as a compliment, I don’t think I have the accuracy or precision to be a sniper. Snipers do tend to play a part in urban warfare, but that’s not how I see things right now. War is not a solution. It’s a marketing strategy.

And war is getting really old and making things really fragile. City life depends on trust, enormous amounts of trust. Our entire foundation can still be upturned by a few confident authorities with silver tongues, or individuals motivated by the merest whims.

I think of myself more as waving a shotgun around, hoping I might hit the broad side of some ancient barn. I’m worried about those mischievous, ephemeral spirits of the night, and I’m intent on, metaphorically, keeping them away from my daughter’s bedroom.

However, I’ve come to realize that either choice of weaponry, sniper rifle or shotgun, is actually pretty poor. I have my criticisms of religion but I have to realize that whatever its faults, it’s part of the world’s inheritance right now. It is a part of the house we live in. It may not be the foundation of the house that’s the problem. The problem is (almost always) people’s motivations, or the things that people think should be worshipped.

My intention was never to bring down the pyramid anyway, and any kind of personal firearm would only jeopardize the safety of the people within the building. Regardless of what you shoot at it, a pyramid continues. A pyramid isn’t that fragile and not so easy to deconstruct. Time fears the pyramids more than any god.

Here’s the lesson I’ve been thinking about when it comes to pyramids. It comes in part from Uxmal in Mexico. The lesson is about constructive persistence.

Uxmal is a city of the ancient Maya. The name can be translated as “Built-three-times”. The most dominant architectural part of the city is The House of the Magician, a temple at the top of a pyramid, the newest built on top of the old. The leader of the city built on what he had inherited, just as the last leader did. The leaders come and go. The pyramid lingers.

One intriguing feature of many of the Mayan pyramids is that even though each generation of builders wanted to add something, the older temples often enough remained visible and accessible. The builders rarely destroyed the old pyramid; they built around them and on top of them to make the structure bigger, often with a wider base and higher top.

When we reach new heights, we don’t destroy the old pyramids we’re standing on. We build bigger ones on top.

It doesn’t mean the new temple has to look like the old one, or that it even does the same job as the old one. But the past won’t go away just because someone finds a flaw in the engineering. Those old pyramids of power made it through the past despite being inconsistent, fragile, downright wrong in some places, or in bad need of repair.

We can borrow from all the cultures and aesthetics of the world now, but by doing so we are confirming the pyramids of the past and building on old foundations, making the whole thing more complicated. Whatever steps it takes to build the new and better pyramids, we’ll need to take into account all the new information that is available too.

New pyramids can’t be built from magic, but they can’t be built by firing bullets at them either.

If our future is to remain in the city, then our personal motivations have to be laid bare all the more.  The things that have implications for our behaviour will make such strange bedfellows. We can’t let the ancient motivations rule us with authority anymore. The view from those old temples is too low, too limited. Our motivations demand an even higher point of view.

One thing that does help me sleep easier at night is the thought that pyramids were often enough built as tombs. Pyramids, like cities, are places where gods go to die.

If the whole world is to embrace one big culture, and if everyone is adding to one big pyramid, it might be big enough to lay to rest the most sanctified of our motivations.

[I'll let you have fun with what that might be.]

What do you think?

 

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Some Sources:

Uxmal – Wikipedia

Pyramid of the Magician – Wikipedia. A short retelling of the myth on how the pyramid was built (coincidentally, it has some striking similarities to the myth of Horus, and other hero tales)

Some great photos of Uxmal Ruins

History of Religious Criticism – from rationalevolution.net, a thorough, sometimes thick, outline that starts with the Protestant Reformation and ending with a neat graphic of the 50 most non-religious countries in the world today.

 

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Sunday TED: Hans Rosling on Religions and Babies

May 27th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

The world is having less babies?

Hans Rosling is fascinated by statistics and information. He has studied trends in the birth rates of countries around the world. He has put together a kind of story of the last 50 years that suggests we can have a healthy, robust world without buying into the belief that we need bigger and bigger families.

The love of statistics is a form of emerging aesthetics. Rosling uses a program that animates statistical trends. Rosling also sees statistics as a way to wade through the “river of myths” in which we live.

So, what does he have to say about Religions and Babies?

Women are having fewer and fewer babies. Why?

You don’t have to get rich to have fewer children. It looks like you need some social stability (less war) and some education.

Some Key Points:

High mortality rates = fast population growth

Stable lifestyles with less overall poverty = slower population growth

Births decrease when:

1. Children survive
2. Many children are not needed for labour
3. Women get education and join the labour force
4. Family planning is accessible

The world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion, but it may not grow much higher after that.

“The number of children is not growing any longer in the world. We are still debating peak oil, but we have definitely reached peak child.”

Religion has very little to do with the number of children in a family. We may believe religions are a cause, but something else is clearly going on as well. Economics and education say more than belief.

 

Earlier in this series I brought up the Myth of Growth. We often think of good economics or finances as growth in terms of percentages. We often assume that growth in families should just be expected. And yet all across the world, we are responding to a more stable, educated, and global lifestyle by having smaller families.

What do you think?

What do we desire more? – growth or balance?

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Hans Rosling is a medical doctor, disease researcher, statistician and took part in the television documentary The Joy of Stats. Here is his wikipedia page, and here is another one of his TED talks (kind of similar to the one above, but more about life expectancies).

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Algebra Confirms the Hero’s Journey

April 30th, 2012   by   Andrew

Some psychologists in B.C. asked a group of students a series of questions. Apparently, the study even caught the attention of Scientific American. The psychologists doing the study reported that there was some relationship between the intuitive mind and the religious mind. One question in particular was a short math question.

A bat and a ball cost $110. The bat costs $100 more than the ball. How much does the bat cost and how much does the ball cost? (note – I’ve changed the wording slightly)

Answer if you wish. The answer is not my point. It’s the process.

There were two common answers given by the students.

The more intuitive minded tend to say the bat is $100 and the ball is $10.

The more analytically minded tend to say the bat is $105.

Of the students involved, the ones that reported being religious also tended to answer the questions with an intuitive mind, mostly. The analytical students tended to report being not all that religious.

This may be important to the psychologists but it’s not my point, for now. Again, it’s the process.

When we read things, or when we are in situations that need our comprehension, or even when we don’t know what to do, we tend to first latch onto things we can already understand. We scan for what is coherent or makes sense to us. Otherwise, we don’t follow the ideas.

When I first read the math problem, my mind went immediately to thinking the bat was $100. But I knew there was a problem with this thinking. I went back through the question and figured it out, but it bothered me that I thought I knew the answer immediately. I didn’t trust the answer I came up with and so went back to the question. What’s the problem with the intuitive answer and what’s the difficulty with the analytical answer?

If we read the math question again, it says right in it:

…The bat costs $100…

When seeking information to latch onto, this looks like a trustworthy anchor. How can we know the bat is $100? Well, it says so right in the question. We might even stop reading right there.

But that’s not what the sentence is actually telling us.

The bat costs $100 more than the ball.

We know even less about the ball than we know about the bat. And what we know of the bat is only in relation to what we don’t know about the ball.

I saw this difference stumble up many of my students when I was teaching math years ago. In math it’s good to list the things you know and the things you don’t know. What you don’t know actually becomes more important than what you do know. 

We don’t always want to think this way. It takes more effort. We have built up very convincing and efficient mental blockers that tell us not to bother. We can get along fine not facing what we don’t know. That is, until it doesn’t work.

Math is an aesthetic. It’s a language onto itself. Not everyone shares an appreciation for the beauty of math, and initiation into the group can be tough. The power of math comes in part from being able to work with an unknown. In the question above, we know nothing about the ball, really, but we can still give it a symbolic name and a place in our work – ‘X’.

With some of my students, I had to teach reading comprehension as much as math. We would talk a lot about what was meant by phrases like “more than” or “less than”, and how they could be written in math.

In some cases we rewrote the English sentences into math, step by step. We even talked about grammar – the subject of a sentence and the object of a sentence. I tried everything I could think of.

Maybe I should have taught them the Hero’s Journey.

I didn’t realize until this B.C study that I was teaching them one of the most important lessons of the Hero’s Journey. I was using a more modern, analytical framework, but still:

Face up to what you don’t know. What you don’t know is more important than what you do know. It may mean more effort, and it may mean you have to change your thinking about things, but it’s worth it.

The one thing that seemed to work best with my students? Repetition. I would put them through a model, then lead them through examples, and then test them with some similar practice questions. If they got stuck and needed my help, we would go through a problem together, but then I’d tell them to do the very same question again by themselves.

“Why? It’s done. I have the answer,” the students would say.

“You don’t have the process. It’s about the process.”

What else worked? A primed and structured environment, where they could be challenged by things they didn’t already know, but at their individual levels. Step by step. It was a real joy to see what my students were capable of when they trusted the process and adopted an attitude of first finding their unknowns.

The Hero’s Journey is usually represented by a circle – initiation, trials, then finally return. The process repeats itself; there is always something you don’t know.

It works. It’s costly. It means changing your attitude towards things. It means knowing how to deal with what you don’t know.

Couldn’t that sort of process, or that environment, be useful in a world that’s discovering new information at an exponential pace?

All right. Enough of my soapbox.

What do you think?

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Who Gets to Define?

April 26th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

Atheists shouldn’t even use that word. They don’t know what it really means!*

The word atheist has meant a lot of things through history. To list a few:

A person ungrateful for being ‘created’
A non-Catholic
A non-Orthodox
A person with an idea of God that wasn’t going to survive an impending change in power
A person with an aesthetic that does not include magic

Now it is used for a movement. I mention this word movement because I have heard Christianity, in some of its loosest definitions, referred to as a social movement. The badge of atheism is now to be worn with pride and anger. It has become a symbol of the desire for change. The atheists are motivated to make reality into how they think it should be. And I dare say maybe even righteously so. They have rallied around the word and defined it for themselves.

In part, the movement has been modelled after the LBGT movement (or so the story goes). The gay label was practically a social death sentence. Unfortunately, in some situations, it was a literal one. Better to hide in shame in the closet and let the majority have their way.

But at some moment the people of the LBGT movement collectively couldn’t handle that burden of being defined by someone else anymore. Coming out was recast, redefined. Instead of having a light exposing your shameful hidden secret, coming out became a matter of proudly stepping into the light. The desire to participate in the world as an identified person was more powerful than the shame of hiding in a shadowed cave.

February is Black History Month in the US. I meant to publish this post in February. Keeping to a chronological timeline in my writing drafts is not my strong point. I’ll blame being a Canadian – supposedly we’re always behind the US on trends…

There was a time in North American history when it was quite commonplace for a black male to respond to the call, “Boy!” It became a kind of leash or a lash upon a group of people, a way of keeping them in their place. Eventually, they got tired of it, and got tired of carrying around that identity put on them by someone else.

I was once told the slang use of man came about from the desire to change this identity. They were men, not boys, and saw each other as men. It was a way of taking control of their identity, and refusing to be defined by someone else. There are other words that white folk once used, but black culture has appropriated them for their own.

The use of the word man in slang was adopted and adapted and mangled so much that even a cartoon boy like Bart Simpson has made it part of one of his own catch-phrases. For example, he might say to his friend Millhouse,  ”Don’t have a cow, man.”

I use this line from Bart because it has become so far removed from any literal interpretation, any original sense of the words involved. In a way, he made it all his own.

So, who gets to define?

There is almost never a what that makes a definition. Definitions depend on who, not on what. They depend on use more often than matter.

I use these examples to suggest an underlying pattern – the minority often takes the power of definition away from the majority in order to create a desired identity, construct who they are. In doing this, they can either become part of a more complicated population, or they can also segregate. Whenever a minority defines itself, the majority either becomes more fragile because of it, or becomes less fragile. A lot of it depends on how the majority faces up to the new information available and how they face the impending change in power.

Of course, this is an oversimplified history for each of these examples. There can be an incredible amount of struggle and confusion when this power to identify or define people passes from one group to another. It can mean a dramatic re-evaluation of reality for some people.

I’ve been thinking about my use of the word God. I deliberately use it in ways that are valid but some people might find things confusing or overly abstract or unhelpful. I do this because I don’t think the word and what we refer to is immune to the pattern of changes in definitions. And, I don’t think the past definitions or the people that defined it need to be given any authority on the word. It’s my word when I use it.

If one of the loosest definitions of a god is something that at bottom must have implication for your behaviour and how you see things, then the most righteous attitude a person can adopt is letting others find their own identities. Let them define themselves, let them find how they will participate in and add to the world. After all, it’s likely that when you deal with someone else, they will have implications for your behaviour and how you see things. They may just redefine something about you.

Namaste.**

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* Not really a specific quote, but just a sentiment I’ve heard a few times. I couldn’t find a satisfying quote to start this post and so just went with this.

** I had a bizarre meeting with a spiritual lawyer recently. I didn’t even know such a thing existed!

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