Jim Taylor's Columns - 'Soft Edges' and 'Sharp Edges'

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31

Oct

2018

The comfort of familiar ways

Author: Jim Taylor

Tonight is Halloween. Or Hallowe’en, if you’re a pedant about spelling. Or even All Hallows’ Eve, if you’re obsessive about religious history. 

            Traditionally, All Hallows’ Eve was the night preceding All Saints’ Day, the dark night when the ghosts of the dead – the “hallowed” ones – returned to earth. All Saints was a time to honour the dead; All Hallows Eve was, in a sense, their time to take revenge on us still-living souls by scaring the bejabbers out of us. 

            I don’t know anyone who still believes that the souls of the dead flit among us on Halloween night. But we still enjoy the dressing up, the parading door to door, the make-believe world of ghosties and goblins. 

            It’s a comforting kind of ritual, a dip into a warm bath of familiarity. These emotions cling, long after reason takes over.

 

 

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Categories: Soft Edges

Tags: Rituals, Habits

28

Oct

2018

Hondurans are fleeing, not invading

Author: Jim Taylor

Last year, we saw endless lines of thousands of Rohinga refugees filing out of Myanmar into Bangladesh. This year, it’s similarly endless columns of 7,000 refugees marching ten abreast up a highway towards the U.S. 

            Trump, without so much as a shred of evidence, denounced the Honduran exodus as a “National Emergy” – apparently he can’t be bothered to spell “emergency” correctly – filled with criminals and agitators from the Middle East.

            I wonder how he would have described the biblical Exodus. Certainly there were fugitives from justice in that migration. Moses himself was considered a criminal. So was any person fleeing from slavery. And they were all – all -- Middle Eastern malcontents.

            “We’re not migrating, we are fleeing,” a man called Timothy from the city of El Progreso told a reporter.


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24

Oct

2018

What did you say?

Author: Jim Taylor

Sometimes I hear people insist that Jesus was the Son of God, or God fully embodied as a human. And because God, to be God, must know everything, therefore Jesus must also have known everything. About everything. Including his own forthcoming death and resurrection.

            Let’s play with that idea. Let’s imagine that we have a time machine. And we can go back 20 centuries, and listen to Jesus talking to the crowds that have come out to hear him.

            He’s standing on a hilltop. 

            “You think that this rock I am standing on is solid,” he tells the crowd. “I tell you, this rock consists of billions of electrons and protons -- far tinier than a mustard seed -- which are not things at all, just positive and negative electrical charges, which you don’t know about yet, which can only be defined as probabilities. In fact, there is nothing under my feet, and nothing under you, except what you imagine is there.”

            Fast forward a few decades. (Our time machine has split-screen capabilities.) The disciples are trying to reconstruct what Jesus taught them. 


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Categories: Soft Edges

Tags: Jesus, time machine

21

Oct

2018

The revenge motive for imprisonment

Author: Jim Taylor

Recreational cannabis is now legal in Canada. Whoopee. I’m already sick of listening to the endless pros and cons about what cannabis will do to the fabric of our society. Cave dwellers probably had the same debates about how fermented grape juice would change history, if and when anyone got around to writing it.

            Instead, let’s talk about recreational killing.

            That’s what I said -- recreational killing.

            In hindsight, that seems to be the only adequate description for the actions of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homulka, 26 years ago. The two of them abducted, drugged, tortured, repeatedly raped, and murdered four girls, one of them Karla’s own sister.

            They did it for fun.


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20

Oct

2018

Ahriman wins

Author: Jim Taylor

Like many of the Psalms of lament in the Bible, this poem combines disillusionment and hope. Rather than the psalm format, though, I have chosen  to locate it in the pre-Jewish myths of Zoroastrianism. 

 

Ahura Mazda kneels in the sand

Patiently building a castle. 

Grain by grain it rises. 

Towers of trust.

Gates of welcome. 

Living spaces lit with laughter. 

Banquet halls full of sharing. 

 

Ahriman knows 

that a single stomp 

can reduce the castle to rubble. 


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Categories: Poetry

Tags: Ahura Mazda, Ahriman, good, evil

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