Why Are Religious Services Unintelligible?

(4) The Church will expect you to attend at least one of its services regularly, every Sunday, and with very, very few exceptions these are universally abominable. In the first place they consist almost exclusively of talk. We tell God what to do and what not to do, and give him information about things which, if he is omniscient, he already knows. We attempt to celebrate his glory with doggerels and religious nursery rhymes called hymns, mostly set to military or sentimental tunes. And then ...

 Medieval Thought and "Monstrous Races"

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that: “any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.”3 Fear of racial difference has been embodied through monsters for centuries, and the idea of “monstrous races” stretches back to the Classical Era. Medieval thought “created strong links between physical and non-physical characteristics among different human gro...

 Race in Tolkien is Reality Rather Than Socially Constructed

In Middle Earth, unlike reality, race is objectively real rather than socially constructed. There are species (elves, men, dwarves, etc.), but within those species there are races that conform to 19th-century race theory, in that their physical attributes (hair color, etc.) are associated with non-physical attributes that are both personal and cultural. There is also an explicit racial hierarchy which is, again, real in the world of the story. Middle Earth is literally a racist’s fantasy la...

 Post-Literate Society

The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones. And where the old European monarchies had to (often ineptly) try to censor dangerously critical material, the big tech companies ensure our ignorance much mor...

 Medieval Book Curse

Steal not this book my honest friend For fear the gallows should be your end, And when you die the Lord will say And where's the book you stole away?

 19756 Gary Gygax Quote on Women in Wargaming

“I have been accused of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female role, more non-gendered names, and so forth. I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in the ‘Raping and Pillaging[’] section, in the ‘Whores and Tavern Wenches’ chapter, the special magical part dealing with ‘Hags and Crones’, and thought perhaps of adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Ha...

 Dead Internet Theory is True

Of the platforms where we know flesh and blood humans do spend enough time, 92% of all content is created by 10% of all users, and engagement with different posts can vary from 0.03% to 0.1% of all viewers. In other words, of the 52.6% of internet traffic which is human-driven, about 9 in 10 users stuck to messaging friends and family and just passively consume contents mostly meant to sell them stuff, or see if they would be interested in propaganda campaigns ran by governments, both theirs ...

 Developing Child's Understanding of Games

During the first stage, beginning around age 5, the child does not yet understand there are fixed rules to the game. Children of this age will play Marbles in an improvisational way, possessing a vague notion of rules but not yet understanding the idea of fixed rules. In the second stage, around ages 8 to 10, the child comes to know that there are rules, and will regard these rules with a near religious reverence. The rules are felt to have their own implicit authority, which cannot be quest...

 Measuring Progress by the Cost of Light

Time is not the only life-enriching resource granted to us by technology. Another is light. Light is so empowering that it serves as the metaphor of choice for a superior intellectual and spiritual state: enlightenment. In the natural world we are plunged into darkness for half of our existence, but human-made light allows us to take back the night for reading, moving about, seeing people’s faces, and otherwise engaging with our surroundings. The economist William Nordhaus has cited the plu...

 Health Concerns Spark Adult Interest in Science

Beginning in middle age and continuing through later adulthood, individuals are often motivated by events in their own lives or the lives of significant others to obtain health-related information.^^ Health-related concerns draw many adults into a new domain of science learning. At the same time, with retirement, older adults have more time to devote to personal interests. Their science learnmg addresses long-standing scientific interests as well as new areas of interest.^^ Adults differ fr...