To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
8
Aug
2018
You’ve probably seen pictures of cuneiform writing – little wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay tablets. They go back to the Mesopotamian cultures of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, many millennia ago.
In school, I was told, cuneiform was a primitive form of accounting. Lacking pen and paper – let alone computers and spreadsheets – the ancient tribes of what is now called Iraq used soft clay tablets to record the number of sheep or bags of wheat someone had bought or sold. It was just a numbering system, I understood.
Of course, I didn’t bother thinking that those ancient traders also needed symbols for sheep and wheat they were trading.
Most of those clay tablets eventually returned to the mud from whence they came. But a few were baked, to preserve them longer. And some got baked, unintentionally, when marauding tribes burned houses and granaries.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Bible, cuneiform, Ugaritic, Phonetic alphabet, Phoenician, creation
5
Stanley Park in Vancouver may soon disappear. No, not because developers want to replace its towering Douglas firs with condo towers – though I’m sure the notion has them salivating like Pavlov’s dogs – but because the park’s name may be changed.
Not that Lord Stanley himself did anything wrong, other than donating a silver cup to the National Hockey League. He’s simply a representative of his time that saw the original inhabitants of North America as “sauvages,” savages with no rights.
So the Vancouver Parks Board has started a “colonial audit” to identity the ways in which earlier generations of later arrivals wronged the Indigenous peoples who once occupied the shores of Burrard Inlet.
All this is part of a movement to rewrite history the way it should have been. And in case there’s any doubt, I’m against it.
That probably puts me into a group that the Prince George Citizen’seditor Neil Godbout derided as “historically-illiterate, culturally-entitled white people.” So be it.
What we have is what we have. To deny it is to deny what makes us, us.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: history, Stanley Park, Cornwallis, Macdonald, Amherst, Voldemort
1
Every Christian church I know reads a text from the Bible, every Sunday. Yes, even the radically and sometimes profanely feminist/LGBT Church of the Apostles in Seattle -- and then rips the Bible’s patriarchy apart.
But maybe we should be looking at other sources of wisdom. Like Dr. Seuss, for example.
Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, never claimed any divine inspiration for his writing. But The Grinch offers more inspiration about Christmas than many sermons. Horton Hears a Who takes the side of overlooked people. Green Eggs and Ham illustrates conversion, a change of heart.
Most of Seuss’s books, in fact, are parables. They tell a story, but inside that story is a greater story, and inside that -- if you’re willing to dig for it -- a profound message.
Tags: parables, Dr. Seuss, Grinch, Lorax, Horton, Green Eggs
29
Jul
At the end of a press conference, right after the shootings on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue, a reporter tossed a final question at Police Chief Mark Saunders. Saunders was already heading off-camera. I didn’t catch the question, but I’m fairly sure I heard Saunders say, “There is no magic bullet.”
And if he didn’t say it, he should have.
Because although it was a singularly inappropriate cliché – after all, 15 people had just been shot with bullets – it was also exactly the right answer.
Because a magic bullet is what everyone wants.
Tags: shooting, guns, Saunders, Danforth, bullets, mental illness. Toronto
25
Some arrived by sea, some by land. Wherever they arrived, they established footholds among the local population. They settled in. They built networks.
As time passed, they began to impose the values and standards of their culture on the existing population. Eventually, they became the dominant group. Their values, their standards, became the law of the land.
Like a giant vacuum cleaner, they sucked up other religions, other faiths, and other cultures, and homogenized them in their own image.
You thought I was describing the European settlement of the Americas, didn’t you?
Nope. I was talking about the colonization of the Mediterranean basin by the followers of Jesus.
Tags: Jesus, Christian, Mediterranean, colonies, laws