Christianity and Animals

It’s an old Christian idea that humans have souls and animals don’t. I sometimes think it’s because our religions arose in a desert environment in which there were no primates, so you have people who lived with camels, goats, snakes, and scorpions. Of course, you then conclude that we are totally different from the rest of the animal kingdom because we don’t have primates with whom to compare ourselves. When the first great apes arrived in Western Europe—to the zoos in London and Paris—people were absolutely flabbergasted. Queen Victoria even expressed her disgust at seeing these animals. Why would an ape be disgusting unless you feel a threat from it? You would never call a giraffe disgusting, but she was disgusted by chimpanzees and orangutans because people had no concept that there could be animals so similar to us in every possible way. We come from a religion that’s not used to that kind of comparison.

-- Frans de Waal

e-life

I come in from my walk, and after a refreshing shower, I sit in front of the laptop, and how nice it is to see a half-dozen messages. Even if it is all PolitiCartoons. Oh, there was one from Google+, offering up their top three posts, evidently trying to entice us to get involved with the service. But, my god, how pathetic! If those were the best three posts on Google+, then people are not exaggerating about how dead the place is. Facebook need not fear them.

YouTube

I see YouTube is going to start charging for some of its channels. The days of dot.communism really are fading fast. I think I'd rather pay for NetFlix than YouTube.

"Really? There might be better programming at NetFlix, but you use YouTube for your blogging."

True. If it required a fee to be able to view and embed their content, I suppose that would be more meaningful to me. Fortunately, they are not going that far. They are only talking about some channels. If they were doing it the other way, I might have to consider paying, but who knows how that would affect what is being offered on YouTube, and then I'd be in a trap of having to pay every year to be able to embed and show their content. I don't know. I think I'd learn to do without. But make no mistake: it's a great convenience what we have been enjoying these years.

[ONTD]

Internet Truth

Sylvia

It's the 50th anniversary of Sylvia's suicide, and in the media buzz I come across this.

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Sarah-Louise Smith, a 22-year-old Londoner, appeared to have tapped into that reservoir in 2011 when she founded the Twitter feed @itssylviaplath, posting one or two Plath quotations every day. She now has more than 75,000 followers.

-- New York Times

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Bah, I do that and it's nothing. Of course, it really is nothing, but it is irritating to see a little fame touch on someone that is even duller than you.

Kierkegaard

“The majority of men ... live and die under the impression that life is simply a matter of understanding more and more, and that if it were granted to them to live longer, that life would continue to be one long continuous growth in understanding. How many of them ever experience the maturity of discovering that there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood.”

-- Soren Kierkegaard

The reason for the spike in media buzz over the man is the celebration of his 200th birthday. We'll get down one little biographical note.

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In his youth, Kierkegaard earned the nickname “gaflen,” or “the fork,” for his ability to discern the weaknesses in other people and to stick it to them. All his writing life, Kierkegaard wielded his red-hot stylus to stick it to bourgeois Christendom. His life was a meditation on what it means to have faith.

-- Gordon Marino at The New York Times

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Daily Fun

nftimofeeva2011

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