I did it a couple of days back. Also 14 out of 15.
15/15. Most people I know got 14/15, and missed the Jonathan Edwards questions
I got the Edwards one right, and the Job one wrong. Probably because I'd recently been reading a book of religious history/history of ideas and had the other prophet in my mind.
Huh. The headlines said this survey demonstrated that religious people knew less about religion that atheists, with a strong implication that religious people were ignorant of their own faith. That would be interesting, if true, and, skimming the articles, I figured the survey was somehow testing that. But the survey doesn't seem to test much of anything at all other than your knowledge of world trivia -- it's about different religions, two of the questions are about US Supreme Court caselaw and not religion at all, and some of the others -- Johnathan Edwards -- are about historical figures who are now pretty marginal to the practice of anyone's religion. Other than finding out who is well educated or took a comparative religion class, what on earth is this thing supposed to prove? Nice work from the Pew Trust on publicizing the thing, though.
(With that said, 15/15, mofos)
15/15 and Tim Burke is right, except that the 41% of Catholics who think that Communion bread and wine are just symbols of body and blood should be kicked out of the church.
7: You think they're unjust symbols, do you?
(I was joking. But if 7 was meant at all in a serious way, whoa, that's a great way to alienate sympathetic lapsed adherents to the teachings of Cathol.)
But if 7 was meant at all in a serious way, whoa, that's a great way to alienate sympathetic lapsed adherents to the teachings of Cathol
To be fair, the presence of Christ through transubstantiation is central to the doctrine. The sympathy of the lapsed is nice, but still.
it's funny, because that seems both like something catholics are totally supposed to know and the sort of thing anti-catholics like to go on about as evidence catholics are depraved...um...papists or something. but then, episcopalians think the same thing, there's a bell that rings during the actual transubstantiation in case we miss it.
there's a bell that rings during the actual transubstantiation in case we miss it
I am imagining this making the same noise that my mobile phone makes when a text message arrives.
*bing!*
"You've Got Eucharist!"
It is odd though. Doesn't the priest actually say "This is the Body of Christ" during Mass? Do they think he's kidding around or something?
I took the longer one, and got 32/32, because I like trivia. It was fun feeling smart for a moment, though.
Maybe they remember their 7th grade English a little too well. Because the priest doesn't say "like" or "as", it must be a metaphor!
(I always got the sense from those metaphor/simile dichotomies that the teacher obviously thought metaphors were way classier.)
the sextant or someone such as my hs boyfriend is standing at the back and when the priest says "this is my body, which was given for thee blah blah, do this in remembrance of me" he rings the bell 3 times. hmm. looking online I see maybe this is not what all episcopalians/anglicans believe; I guess it's only the high-churchy ones.
0/15 but that was what I was aiming for (and for all who will try to taste Him: He sucks, I had to go and swallow Him enough to know)
18: the sextant or someone such as my hs boyfriend is standing at the back
Ah, there's a sextant involved? Of course, Non Anglicani sed anguli.
18: Yeah, CA the Head Chorister, tells me that Anglicans (and Episcopalians) don't have to believe in literal transubstantiation, but they can if they want to. "Not like you lot."
20 is funny.
Doesn't the priest actually say "This is the Body of Christ" during Mass?
They say this in my Protestant denominated church as well, even though they don't mean it literally.
15/15, but the last one was a lucky guess.
optional literal transubstantiation? kind of lame, yet typical. I had both my daughters baptized in NY partly to please my granddad and partly because, hey, party! chance to shop for vintage christening dresses in florence! the guy at my g-dad's parish is super-old-school, so they got chrism as well as water, and when he puts it on he says rather ominously: "Christ claims you for His Own."
if you are thinking, good excuse to buy a gold chrismatory! you are not alone. this guy is very nice, actually, I don't think he's stealing money from the poor to buy censers or whatever. the censers were just, you know, there when he got there.
oh, wikipedia says there is a special glass cabinet called an "ambry" in which one stores such various chrismaria as one might have lying around. now I want one to put creepy victorian-style taxidermy in! totes want. "this? oh it's an old ambry of mine...funny that you should ask, actually..."
23: He was in our American lit. anthologies in high school.
Semi-related: From my time in text book publishing, I learned that the less secular the state the more they hated, hated, hated any quasi-religious texts being deployed in secular contexts. When we used a bit of the Joseph and his brothers and his coat story in a elementary school anthology, we got a handful of letters from people upset with there being any mention made at all of something that was in the Bible. We got a whole lot of letters from folks who were irate we were "promoting magic" by not mentioning God enough.
I don't think I've ever seen Communion celebrated in a Church of Scotland service, but looking on wiki, they do celebrate it, just infrequently, and since I'm neither a baptised or confirmed member,* I imagine that's why I've never seen it happen. I've no idea what the liturgical practice is around the wafer/wine bit, but it looks [again from google/wiki] that the minister isn't the person who serves it up, but elders.
* despite teh atheism, I had to go to services regularly, because of school.
I shouldn't triple post, but I must note that "mulliner's buck-u-uppo" is the single funniest story of all time. too many orphreys on his chasuble.
26: you should have just made everyone listen to the dolly parton song "coat of many colors." then everyone would just be crying too hard to object.
28: utterly agreed.
There's another Wooster clergyman who bemoans that he's not going to get the parish he wants: "Instead, he's going to give it to his nephew. A fellow," he said bitterly, "who bleats like a sheep and doesn't know an alb from a reredos."
Anglicanism (to caricature) is a body of practice not of faith. The only thing you really -have- to believe to be an Anglican is that you ought go to church.
27: Everyone should read The Towers of Trebizond, but the bit in the beginning about the very high Anglican church in between the Presbyterian (or maybe just super low) church and the Catholic church is hilarious.
24: Vintage christening dresses! That's what I wore and my mom wore and her mom wore.
15/15 too, but the last one was a 50/50 guess between Edwards and Finney. Also the US Supreme Court rulings were hopeful rather than answers I was sure of.
27: I have. It happened about once a month when I was a kid, and it was made clear that it wasn't actually the body and blood, because that was ridiculous. The important point is sharing simple food and drink. Our church used bread - sliced wholemeal - and wine, or Ribena for the kids. And I think it is the elders who took it round. It's been some time.
There was a Church of Scotland padre on Sword Beach who celebrated communion in the field, with oatcakes and a hip flask of whisky... common practice among the Covenanters, I believe.
I've had to take communion since I sobered up, actually; you just notionally dip the bit of wafer in the wine. a common problem, actually.
The Methodists down the road pass around the communion bread and wine themselves.
Also! Some people get really really fucking angry at having to serve Communion wine. I was in a meeting once with a woman who was spitting tacks at her Bishop (Anglican) for telling her church to serve wine (as opposed to grape juice).
Fucking transubstantiation, how does it work?
I took the full survey and got 'em all, like ().
39: Church of Scotland you stay seated, and the elders bring the bread and wine down from the table (no altar) and then you pass it along the pews from hand to hand yourselves.
14/15. I missed one of the ones about US constitutional law. Don't know how those got into a quiz about 'religion.'
15/15. I actually read half a book on Johnathan Edwards. Only half a book, because it turns out Johnathan Edwards is boring.
The one interesting fact about him is he died of a smallpox inoculation gone bad. Guess that was pretty common in those days.
15/15 -- Hey, and his grandson getting to be vice president.
43: "This is our venerated document which tells us how to live our lives. It was written by men centuries ago who were much better and wiser than we can ever be. We maintain a caste of men and women in long black robes who are the only ones allowed to interpret its vague and ambiguous directions into rigorous instructions on every part of our lives. All our politicians claim that it really supports their policies, not their opponents."
15/15 but the last question was more or less a guess and I had seen the Catholic doctrine answer in news reports about the survey. Probably the reason many Catholics don't know the right answer is that it sounds so absurd.
13/15. I'm so embarrassed about getting the Catholic Communion question wrong. Getting the Jonathan Edwards question wrong doesn't particularly embarrass me, though. That question does seem like the odd one out.
I always feel a bit like that when I read about Christological debates, too. Especially when the position that won out seems ... odd.
Probably the reason many Catholics don't know the right answer is that it sounds so absurd.
I always feel a bit like that when I read about Christological debates, too. Especially when the position that won out seems ... odd.
If you listen carefully, you can hear Kierkegaard's legacy dying!
is that it sounds so absurd
No more so than people walking on water, rising from the dead, gathering two of every land animal in existence onto a boat, or about 1/3 of everything else in the Bible. I'd be more interested to know what percentage of the Catholic clergy honestly believes in transubstantiation. I'm guessing it's awfully close to zero.
5, 6, 43, 46
Other than finding out who is well educated or took a comparative religion class, what on earth is this thing supposed to prove?
Well, granted that it's very American-centric, it still looks more useful than you're giving it credit for. The first commenter at Tim Burke's blog post puts it succinctly: "Couldn't you equally ask, is it important for Americans to know who George Washington was? How is that information useful?"
Of course the information tested in the quiz and survey isn't useful in daily life, any more than knowledge of George Washington is. Knowledge of them is still a decent barometer of a broad and/or intellectual understanding of the topic, I think. In theory it's totally possible to be an expert on Constitutional law without knowing one single thing about Washington or other founders of the country, just like in theory it's possible to be a devout observant Christian without knowing who Job was or to be an expert on American foreign policy without knowing the dominant religion in Pakistan... but what are the chances of that?
Of course, I'm biased toward defending anything that confirms my prejudices against churchy types, so take this FWIW.
Surely over the millennia there must have been cases where people vomited after receiving communion, so is there a doctrine of inverse transsubstantiation?
53: I very much doubt that. It's one of the few things they never joke about.
54: It's one thing to believe that all kinds of crazy miraculous things happened a long long time ago before you and or anyone you know was born, and quite another to believe something that odd is happening right in front of you every Sunday.
58 was to 53 -- and there's an extra "and" in there too, if anyone's checking.
53: Yes as far as the purported beliefs of the functionaries of most religions, I'm with Matt Taibbi's characterization of Tea Partiers on this one: But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them.
This reads as being more hostile to religion than I actually am (for instance I have not found any institution that adequately replaces what I see as "Religion, the good parts"* in my parents' lives and community), but that is some crazy shit to be slinging about in 2010.
*31 describes my someone like my father perfectly--he most certainly does not believe the advertised core tenet of his own religion.
53
No more so than people walking on water, rising from the dead, gathering two of every land animal in existence onto a boat, or about 1/3 of everything else in the Bible ...
But Catholics don't believe all of the Bible is literally true. At least according to the Sunday Times. So this is another possible source of confusion.
It's one thing to believe that all kinds of crazy miraculous things happened a long long time ago before you and or anyone you know was born, and quite another to believe something that odd is happening right in front of you every Sunday.
This is a pretty popular theme for Easter sermons, denomination notwithstanding.
58: Eh -- the nature of the belief is similar, really. Sure it happens in front of you (with bells on! as alameida said), but it's a spiritual change, not a material one, so it's not a totally weird and miraculous in terms of one's experience of the phenomenon.
15/15. I thought the Edwards question was too arcane (I only knew it from reading some 19th-c. American cultural history stuff).
63: So there's either a "thing" missing or a superfluous "a."
The more interesting question would be how many people would identify 'if someone hits you, hit them back harder' as a core tenet of Christianity. And, 'if it looks like someone is likely to hit you, hit them first.'
66: Many, many people think that "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is in the Declaration of Independence (or said by a founding father or something).
I guess it's because I'm an elitist snob, but Jonathan Edwards is a more significant figure than Joseph Smith. Maybe I just think more of Princeton than I do of BYU.
67: A surprising number of people think it's in the Constitution, although it's never quite clear where they think that proposition occurs. The Preamble? The Bill of Rights? The secret part where activist judges take away our childrens' handguns?
5: I just read Tim Burke, and yes, definitely agree. Also, his post on the Rutgers students is a must-read.
67: They should have a multiple choice question
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is from
a)the Declaration of Independence
b) the Constitution of the United States
c)the Critique of the Gotha Programme by Karl Mark
d)the Sermon on the Mount
But that would probably mostly just be testing the person's knowledge of how multiple-choice tests work.
72: That kind of thing makes me sick.
There's no business like shoah business!
I neglected to praise ajay in 20 sufficiently. that was awesome! hurrah!
I'm going to sleep now. 'night all.
77: My best friend's family refused to buy Mercedes for Holocaust-related reasons. So they owned three different Volkswagens. OK, then!
76: The need to achieve emptiness before killing explains Steven Segal movies.
I like alameida. She laughs at my jokes. I need that sort of reinforcement.
72: I'd really rather they just said, "We want an American company for this." Apparently, blatant discrimination is against the WTO, but they don't care about half-assed misapplications of history.
The need to achieve emptiness before killing explains Steven Se[a]gal movies explains killing.
Fixed.
80 is funny. I wonder if this loon's hostility extends to Mercedes-Benz - as well as VW, Porsche (designed Panzers), Hugo Boss (designed SS uniforms), Ford, IBM...
82: I laughed first! (Fine . . . fine . . .)
That's how I spell his name. If he wants to spell it differently, he can go ahead.
86: I like oudemia too. In fact, I liked oudemia first.
15 of 15, but Jonathan Edwards was a guess.
except that the 41% of Catholics who think that Communion bread and wine are just symbols of body and blood should be kicked out of the church.
I was really shocked when I learned this at age 12 or so. It's weird enough being a member of a symbolically cannibalistic faith.
Surely over the millennia there must have been cases where people vomited after receiving communion, so is there a doctrine of inverse transsubstantiation?
This happens, not regularly, but not infrequently. (Some people have been known to drink too much on Saturday nights.) There's nothing about inverse transsubstantiation involved--it's still the blood of Christ, no different than if someone just accidentally spilled the chalice. For theological reasons that I don't entirely recall, it's acceptable (though unfortunate) for the host to be spilled on bare earth, but not on non-porous surfaces. (Of course, spills on non-porous surfaces also occur, in which case there's a complex and tedious clean-up procedure that's prescribed somewhere in canon law.) For this reason, most catholic churches have receptacle installed in the sanctuary that drains directly into the ground. That's where you'd supposed to vomit, if you feel sick and you've just had communion.
Surely over the millennia there must have been cases where people vomited after receiving communion
Didn't Frank McCourt recount vomiting up the host in Angela's Ashes, maybe?
91: safe to assume that he was lying, though.
80: "I hate the Germans and you can ask anybody, I have many times shown my contempt for them" (parphrased)--my Holocaust survivor father-in-law in his Shoah project interview. Well yeah, other than running the US office of a German textile firm for 20 years and driving a gray-market BMW that he somehow got shipped over here as "a great deal", and which fittingly turned out to be the most useless pain-in-the ass car in the history of purportedly well-engineered cars.
YOU SAY "ABSURD" LIKE IT'S A BAD THING.
93: Years ago, I had a 1980 Audi 4000 that ruined any chance that I would assume something is well-engineered because it is German.
I always got the sense from those metaphor/simile dichotomies that the teacher obviously thought metaphors were way classier.
Me too.
More important, 15/15.
Re: literal interpretation of transubstantiation, it could be worse. Anyone else remember the plot of Armistead Maupin's More Tales of the City, which involved people eating actual flesh to show their devotion? Nom nom nom.
I've owned a shitload of German cameras over the past 5 or 6 years. Including some made during the war years, and definitely some made in the Weimer and immediate post-war occupation periods. The Germanic engineering thing does kind of ring true when it comes to photography, I think. But even there the supposed gulf between the top German marques and the rest is often exaggerated.
Dionysian ritual is cool, anyway. Eating and drinking the body and blood of your dead god! Excuse me while I go apply my black nail polish, won't you?
15/15, and Jonathan Edwards wasn't a guess.
Yes to 6, and in particular, one of Pew's conclusions was that atheists/agnostics scored highest on knowledge of world religions. Not as schadenfreudig.
I like alameida. She laughs at my jokes. I need that sort of reinforcement.
Your comment the other day on EotW made me laugh out loud, but I was reading in my RSS reader, so I didn't comment. Reprinted here for the delight of all, it was based on this line from the Michigan Asst. AG obsessed with the gay student government president: "morphed into a proponent of the radical homosexual agenda."
Transformers 3: Revenge of the Fabulous.
Is there a link to the 32 question survey? I'm not satisfied with my 15/15 and I want to boost my percentage.
I had the same response as mark f, but I didn't say anything because I figured I'd just be told to google. But now everyone will be nice and give him a link rather than telling him to google because he's only an occasional delurker, right? And I benefit!
Maybe Parenthetical was in the original survey.
The weak-on-transubstantiation wing is a very long-term trend, no? It was a burning theological issue in the first millennium, but one barely hears about the Protestants' striking out on their own re: consubstantiation in popular accounts of the Reformation.
I love the scene on the subject in The Milky Way.
106: Maybe. Someone I saw on facebook referenced the whole thing, though, so I think it's accessible somewhere.
104, 105: 3d'ed! More tests, please!
68: I guess it's because I'm an elitist snob, but Jonathan Edwards is a more significant figure than Joseph Smith. Maybe I just think more of Princeton than I do of BYU.
Yeah, but Princeton (or its equivalent was going to happen one way or another); it took real creative genius to pull off what Smith did.
Sorry, Thorn, but if you google it will be in vain. Or at least it was for me.
It looks like the Christian Science Monitor has the whole thing here. In a shitty format, but looks like all 32 (I did not go all the way through it).
Apparently Turgid Jacobian took the whole thing too. Surely if two people here had been in the original survey group, they'd have given us the Maimonides spoiler alert ages ago. And I will trust mark f and not google!
re: 99
Someone take the nerdy photo bait?
This is some bullshit!
"30. Do you happen to know which of these is the king of gods in ancient Greek mythology?" That's a yes/no question, not one with multiple choices. And since "don't know" is one of the options, that should probably be the only acceptable one.
77: especially amusing given that VW was not just a German company, but a German company set up by the Nazi government as a nationalised industry explicitly as a massive prestige project, which ended up producing enormous numbers of military vehicles by using slaves.
Of course, Mr Klein(D-Shameless Pre-Election Grandstanding) is unlikely to change much here because SNCF doesn't build trains. That would be Alsthom.
OK, got 32, but with an informed guess on 21.
Anyhow, I got them all correct but I'm even more annoyed about the stupidness than I was before taking the quiz. Also annoyed about the headline The Christian Science Monitor gave it. Am I smarter than an atheist? By definition, I'm exactly as smart as the atheist I am, fuckers. Angry angry angry!
(Is rage another symptom I should tell my doctor about when he calls back? I don't know or care! And now I'll go eat lunch.)
112: The headline is "Are you smarter than an atheist? A religious quiz"
I guess they are certain that none of their readers are atheists.
re: question 11 in the longer list.
I've been peripherally involved with a project working with the autograph copy of M /a i monide s. It's still amazing to me that such a thing exists.
"Oh yes, it's the original ..."
118: Hey! I'm the one that should be angry!
118: But I think it's my first experience pwning anyone here, so congratulate yourself for being part of that. I guess I lied about going straight to lunch, too, but since I'd finished checking email I figured I might as well reload unfogged, of course.
And of course I meant 119, not 118. Now it's time to leave for real!
118, 119: The Christian Science Monitor means it. I remember applying for an internship there (in, approximately, the year of the flood) and being sent a very nice letter explaining that, for internships, they only hired Christian Scientists.
You two are smarter than an atheist.
Thanks, JP Stormcrow. I also got all 32 but guessed on 13 (I wasn't even sure who he was, but a certain people got short shrift up to that point so I went with them) and 8 (was just hoping). I had to do some thinking it over for 21, which I think could've been worded more clearly.
And I'll fess up to guessing on the Edwards question the first time through.
15, took about a minute.
The only one I wasn't positive about was "nirvana". It's a Sanskrit word, right? Which I associate with Hinduism.
Never knew Jonathan Edwards was a president of Princeton. (for the last 1 month of his life apparently)
the survey doesn't seem to test much of anything at all other than your knowledge of world trivia
That's why I scored 15/15. In the course of my life, winning at Trivial Pursuit is one of the things I've done best.
I loved the bells at Mass. Until I was seven or eight, I believed that if you watched closely enough, you could actually see the transubstantiation take place. Of course, I also used to wonder if invisible angels attended the Mass, too, flitting around us. I was endlessly gullible willing to believe as a child. Fortunately, I wasn't raised in a zealously religious family, or, you know, I might be wasting my time commenting at RedState right now.
I thought the Edwards question was too arcane (I only knew it from reading some 19th-c. American cultural history stuff).
We read "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in my (public!) high school. American literature!
130: Us too. (See comment way up there somewhere.) It's in many, many Am. Lit. anthologies. Like, all of them. But MC is not so much with the Am.
In the course of my life, winning at Trivial Pursuit is one of the things I've done best.
Heh, one of my teenage stories is of being at a party, drunk, playing Trivial Pursuit with me as a team on my own, against everyone else in the room split into, I think, 3 teams of 6. I won. It's unfortunate that there isn't money and fame in having the sort of mind that remembers trivia.
90: So I must not understand what is meant by transubstantiation. When presented with something that is clearly not anything I would think of as godmeat, do believing Catholics just look away? Or do they mean something essential but unobservable has changed in the wafer? Or do they think Jesus was kind of bready?
31/32. I guessed at the 4 Gospels, only got John & Luke, which is as good an illustration as any that almost all my knowledge of religion comes from knowing history and pop culture and some literary references. I also had to guess about Maimonides, for which failing I feel chagrin.
We read "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in my (public!) high school. American literature!
We, three.
Edwards is 18th-century, yo. Early 18th, even.
I just taught his testimony in my Early American Lit class. It did not go over well. People who call themselves Christians seem to be the least curious about Christian history; my Muslim and Jewish students are really fascinated by it. I guess not eating sausage means you're OK with learning how the sausage gets made?
133: Its spiritual, but not its material, essence. (I think? Haven't read any Aquinas in a long time.)
re: 136
I had this conversation with an ex-Muslim friend of mine the other day. She remains endlessly fascinated by Christianity and Judaism, despite not being a believer any more.
132: I've always wanted to go on one of those TV quiz shows. Certainly more remunerative than most of my work history to date.
137: If it's spiritual, not material, then Catholics confusion between "symbolic" and "literal" (if my memory of the question is correct) becomes more understandable, no?
re: 140
Part of the point though is that 'spiritual' doesn't mean 'symbolic' in this case.
134: makes me sad.
133: I think the substance transcends physical reality because when Jesus said "this is my flesh" at the Last Supper the disciples didn't cut him up and eat him, they just ate bread. But Jesus doesn't lie, or even fib, so the bread became flesh even though it tasted like bread and didn't give you mad cow. Or something like that.
only got John & Luke
The others are Paul and Ringo.
Or do they mean something essential but unobservable has changed in the wafer?
This. What's changed is the substance, what's remained the same are the accidents. Luckily, everything perceptible by the senses is an accident.
What's really unnerving for me is that my Christian students couldn't even explain salvation when a Muslim student asked about it. ALL YOU HAVE TO KNOW to be a Protestant is that Jesus Christ died on the cross, bearing all our sins, and was raised on the third day, triumphing over sin and death in our name, and all one has to do is repent of sin and ask for the gift of the holy spirit and ta-da, we are buried with Jesus, in baptism until death, and raised to walk in newness of life. Ten kids sitting in front of me who are bragging about how they're Christians, so this is pretty much about them, but they can't explain protestant salvation?
134: makes me sad.
It was the other Mark I forgot, not you. (Or did you actually have a serious point?)
but they can't explain protestant salvation?
Because it makes so little sense that if you suddenly realize that the techniques used on you - being bullied into not questioning it - won't work on the other person, then you get totally tongue-tied. Who can explain protestant salvation?
141: But when forced to choose between "actually become" and "are symbols of", I can imagine a Catholic interpreting a "symbol" as an "object with a deeper spiritual essence".
Not that I want to discourage mockery of the religious.
144: Yes. Sort of similar to Plato's thinking on the forms. The real is unobservable and the observable a distorted reflection of what is real.
148 in no way conforms with my experience of Christians (or any other believers).
If you're evangelical at all, you're supposed to be able to form the words with your mouth, if nothing else. And I sure as hell get plenty of written responses all about how great it is that Christ's blood covers all! Hooray! But yeah, maybe saying it out loud, in class, to a guy who just said he's a Muslim, makes you realize that the idea of being covered in blood doesn't sound like such a treat.
145 - God wants them to be rich.
This is the right thread for this fine recent quote from Powerline (Time Magazine's Blog of the Year for 2004!), questioning (but oh so tastefully) Obama's Christian bonafides: But Obama's answer causes one to suspect that he would be among those who, as in the Pew poll that is also in the news today, would have trouble answering basic questions about his own religion. The Golden Rule is a fine idea, but it is not a principle of Christianity. God wants Powerline to be rich, too.
The Golden Rule is a fine idea, but it is not a principle of Christianity
Huh?
They should have had some questions in there like "Is 'Jabez' a book in the Bible?"
The Golden Rule is a fine idea, but it is not a principle of Christianity.
Jesus seemed to disagree, on the Mount.
153: WTF? Shouldn't there be a flurry of letters from Christian readers pointing that one out?
Who can explain protestant salvation?
AWB.
160: It's since been silently changed to, "The Golden Rule in not a principle unique to Christianity." In your face, Luke 6:31! But Obama's a secret Muslim, so who knows what weird socialist Bibles he's been reading.
He might have a literalist argument, right? I thought the Golden Rule verbatim is a relatively recent creation, though of course it parallels parts of the NT extremely closely.
Oh, never mind. I didn't know Luke 6:31.
Shouldn't there be a flurry of letters from Christian readers pointing that one out?
IME, right-wing Christians tend to have a very poor familiarity with actual scripture*. You'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) at the number of quotes ascribed to the Bible that actually come from, say, Shakespeare.
*Offer void as applied to the Jehovah's Witnesses that pass through our neighborhood every so often. They know their Bibles.
I had thought it was a parallel of Mark 12:31 or something.
163: No, the traditional formation of the Golden Rule is directly from the Gospel of Luke's depiction of the Sermon on the Mount.
More succint 149: Catholic's poor score on this question may not reflect a confusion about doctrine, but instead a confusion over how best to say "spiritual, but not actually tasty with A1".
163: Writing it in cross stitch and putting it on the kitchen wall is probably a fairly recent development.
168: I think that counts as confusion about doctrine: it's a serious doctrinal issue that the change in substance really happens, rather than being symbolic or metaphorical.
32/32, bitchez. (I was briefly stumped by "When was the Mormon religion founded?" because I wasn't sure if "according to the Book of Mormon" was implied or not.)
It's unfortunate that there isn't money and fame in having the sort of mind that remembers trivia.
And how! I look back on my collegiate Trivial Pursuit reputation like the star player cherishes his winning touchdown.
167: Sure, but it's not really clear like all of the places in the Bible which directly prohibit abortion.
The Golden Rule is a fine idea, but it is not a principle of Christianity
Maybe he is referring to the True Golden Rule -- "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Obama is extremely familiar with that rule.
It's since been silently changed to, "The Golden Rule in not a principle unique to Christianity."
The other day, in a post titled Where Are People Stoned to Death?, Hinderaker silently changed the first sentence to "In Iran, of course; in that case the victims are mostly women." Originally it had read "but the victims are mostly women."
You can hide a lot of unattractive things about yourself if you're an unethical editor.
15 of 15, but Jonathan Edwards was a guess.
Ditto, I assume. Took it two days ago and can't remember what the Jonathan Edwards question was, but things about Jonathan Edwards are usually not things I know, and I still got 15/15. I mean we did read "Sinner in the hands of etc" but that was twenty years ago.
This is fun for me because I didn't know the diff between Catholic and Protestant until I was in college. I'm pretty sure I thought words like "Methodist" and "Presbyterian" were sorta....brand names? It was all just one big lump of not-Jew.
I didn't know the diff between Catholic and Protestant until I was in college. I'm pretty sure I thought words like "Methodist" and "Presbyterian" were sorta....brand names? It was all just one big lump of not-Jew.
Same here, with the added bonus of having been brought up Catholic. For some reason they don't spend a lot of time talking about Martin Luther in CCD.
A lot of Christians in my classes read Bunyan and are shocked to learn that The Pilgrim's Progress is not from the Bible, nor is the poem "Footprints in the Sand."
(And of course I had no doctrinal understanding of what Judaism was about and still don't, which is to say: I was raised Reform. A Jew was a person who might one day live in New York, I think, or else it was just synonymous with "Democrat"...I like the part in Angels in America about the afterlife because I still don't really know what Jews are supposed to think about that.)
I still don't really know what Jews are supposed to think about that
I thought Jews basically don't believe in an afterlife, or at least believe that it is an unimportant question, but that they're becoming increasingly Christian-esque in the US over the last few decades and developing a pearly gates kind of vision.
14/15 but 32/32 (I got better). I never saw any biographical details to go along with 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God'.
max
['Does the Golden Rule apply during transubstantiation? Will an angry Jesus consume my flesh?']
What on earth could go wrong when Apostropher tags a link with "unnattractive things"?
The best post ever on this topic, helpfully saved from oblivion by the Wayback Machine: Kaye Is Lord.
A Jew was a person who might one day live in New York, I think, or else it was just synonymous with "Democrat"...
I thought it had something to do with not paying retail.......but then my family went to a Conservative synagogue (on the rare occassions that we went).
Arg, I hate thinking about this. The whole argument of right-wing Christian fundamentalists is that the Bible is self-evident and needs no exegesis. You could give the Bible to a random person and they'd read it and they'd immediately get from it that you should actively punish sexuality in all forms other than heterosexual marital rape, and that social Darwinism is why God created human beings, but evolutionary Darwinism is impossible, and that pretty much any day now Jesus is going to whisk his favorite white people into the sky and punish everyone else with nuclear bombs (the star called Wormwood) and helicopters of death (giant locusts). Clearly. Yup, that's a pretty transparent reading of a transparent text.
On the principle that everyone has the ability to read such an easy book, I read through it by the time I was eight, and all I got from it is that God has his favorites, and they're all the people who randomly break laws and disobey, but are super-enthusiastic about stuff and enjoy life quite a lot (with the exception of Solomon, about whom I think God was sort of lukewarm). Enjoy the creation, take pleasure in your body, seek wisdom whenever possible, but don't retreat into your mind or give in to political bullshit. Develop an ethical system of some kind and try to be consistent. Love as many people as you can, and don't get hung up on people who hate you. Haters gonna hate.
According to the fundamentalists, I guess I read the wrong book.
32/32, though I might not have gotten Maimonides without the spoiler.
Would you tell me if [religious figure] was...
[list of religions]
No, I wouldn't tell you, motherfucker! You don't deserve to know! Suffer in ignorance!
187: I noticed that too, and wondered if it was some kind of pick-up line.
What's really unnerving for me is that my Christian students couldn't even explain salvation when a Muslim student asked about it. ALL YOU HAVE TO KNOW to be a Protestant is that Jesus Christ died on the cross, bearing all our sins, and was raised on the third day, triumphing over sin and death in our name, and all one has to do is repent of sin and ask for the gift of the holy spirit and ta-da, we are buried with Jesus, in baptism until death, and raised to walk in newness of life. Ten kids sitting in front of me who are bragging about how they're Christians, so this is pretty much about them, but they can't explain protestant salvation?
I was in Sunday school in a liberal denomination for ten years and I never knew that saying and/or believing those things was related to being saved in some way. Our church entirely focused on whether someone was a good person or not as the factor that determined whether God loved them. The various details about the Holy Spirit and the resurrection of Jesus was basically to convince us that God was in fact God and could do miracles and answer prayers.
Kind of odd how in the US the Calvinist religions are now all made up of liberals and the Baptist religions based on very vague and inclusive theology are now made up of judgmental people who spend all their time looking for technicalities about how people can be damned to hell despite thinking they're doing everything right.
I have an ongoing interest in frozen canons. On the one hand, the idea of a frozen and eternal divinely inspired text. On the other hand, footprints in the sand, new miracles where convenient not interpreted as blasphemy (in Ben-Hur for instance).
People have been faithful for millenia. The human responses of schism and accretion of contradictory commentaries happens again and again, predictably. I don't think that it matters much what exactly is believed, and that believers (though of course not their leaders) recognize this.
188: "How do you feel about wallabies?"
Baptists don't think sin makes you go to hell if you're saved, but an unrepentant attitude toward sin shows that you're not saved. It's a sign, but not a cause. whether someone was a good person or not cracked me up because this was the topic of nearly every sermon I ever heard. "Over at that Yoo-nit-tar-ee-un 'Church' over there, they say all you have to do to go to heaven is [mocking voice] 'be a good person!' They're actually afraid of the blood of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior!"
re: 189
I think in some ways it's somewhat similar in Europe, too. The Scottish church is fairly liberal on some issues , certainly, and would certainly skew left on social justice issues. Although it remains doctrinally a fairly strict Presbyterian church, I think.
They're actually afraid of the blood of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior!"
I have to say that if I were confronted by it, I'd probably be at least a little creeped out. I mean, human blood. It's a biohazard.
181: Jews have been arguing about the afterlife for a very long time. Back in the time of the Roman Empire, the Pharisees believed in the Resurrection of the Dead, but the Sadducees rejected it.
188: It looked like they say "Would you tell me if X is" for a living person, and "Would you tell me if X was" for a dead person. Unfortunately the latter sounds like a conditional phrase.
"Hey, bro, can I... ask you something? If you ever found out that the Pope is secretly, like, Jewish or something, you'd tell me, right?"
"Dude. You don't even have to ask." [fist bump]
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I have to say the final punchline in today's nukees comic made me laugh. A little bit ham-handed, but funny.
(actually it's probably on-topic)
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195: Which can be seen in the Gospels. Sadducees and Pharisees are shown debating Jesus over different things.
186.1: Somewhere I have the outlines of a few ireverent re-tellings of Bible stories that I started, my favorite being Samson. Especially, Then the woman went to her husband and told him, "A man of God came to me. He looked like an angel of God, very awesome. I didn't ask him where he came from, and he didn't tell me his name. But he said to me, 'You will conceive and give birth to a son. Now then, drink no wine or other fermented drink and do not eat anything unclean, because the boy will be a Nazirite of God from birth until the day of his death.'" You don't even really have to re-write it.
I have an ongoing interest in frozen canons.
I read that as "frozen canoes" and have to admit I was kind of let down by the rest of the comment, which is still good.
I've also recently been mulling over how Catholics don't talk about Jesus's blood the way (some) Protestants do and yet those same sorts of Protestants tend to be creeped out by bloody Catholic crucifixes and iconography. I haven't really bothered to make a theory beyond that, but stuff like this is how I keep myself entertained during church services.
I noticed that too, and wondered if it was some kind of pick-up line.
If I told you this cracker turns into the flesh of our savior, would you hold it against me?
Pickup-line FAIL.
I totally have to go, but here's a great video of an adult Christian convert's understanding of what the Bible says will happen in the future. Yes, we're all going to drown in the piss and shit of 40-foot giants who are not sexy.
"How do you feel about wallabies?"
This may not be a great pickup line, but it's definitely something you should find out early on in the relationship.
203: How is that not a great pickup line?
Well, it might be a great pickup line too. I'm not a very good judge of these things.
15/15. Take that, you Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Unfogged!
202: I saw a Christian "Punk'd" or "XFactor" or what have you and they faked a poor young woman out wrt the Rapture. She was in the dining hall of her college, left to take a phone call, and came back to find no people but little piles of their clothes all around. Once she thought about it, she was in racking sobs.
Regarding wallabies:
We have wallabies and monkeys. They are great pick up tools.
Who doesnt respond positively to "do you want to come touch my monkey?"?
That's a very stupid quiz that measures I'm not sure what.
209: Let ari be the first to say.
207: That's really awful -- tricking someone who cares and believes in that stuff into believing that they're not Rapture-qualified? (I realize, come to think, that I'm not sure of the status of the non-Rapture-qualified. They can't all be damned, or the Left Behind books wouldn't make sense. But at least not currently worthy of salvation.) I could see that as a funny prank if you were mocking someone for believing in that shit at all, but if it's a prank from someone within the same belief system, it's horrible.
I mean horrible. 207 is horrible. I totally didn't just laugh.
I just found the original link I followed to the video and it seems it's been removed by the user. Oh wait -- but here it is elsewhere. Ahaha. It is called Prank 3:16.
210: I just meant that any quiz about religion that I can ace is a stupid quiz. Also, those of you who didn't know the Jonathan Edwards question should be deeply ashamed.
215: Oh. Oh, wow. They really shouldn't have done that.
Hah- 15 out of 15, bitches!
Of course there were a few swags, but hey.
There's no way that large a percentage of people get raptured. That should have clued her in.
220: Ha! I was looking for a link to the Situationist Michel Mourre Easter Mass hijacking -- and site linked to by Wikipedia is our very own snarkout. (The link is dead though.) So here is wiki's own link.
This was broadcast on live TV, mind you.
Today, Easter day of the Holy Year,
Here, under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris,
I accuse the universal Catholic Church of the lethal diversion of our living strength toward an empty heaven,
I accuse the Catholic Church of swindling,
I accuse the Catholic Church of infecting the world with its funereal morality,
Of being the running sore on the decomposed body of the West.
Verily I say unto you: God is dead,
We vomit the agonizing insipidity of your prayers,
For your prayers have been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe.
Go forth then into the tragic and exalting desert of a world where God is dead,
And till this earth anew with your bare hands,
With your PROUD hands,
With your unpraying hands.
Today Easter day of the Holy Year,
Here under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris,
We proclaim the death of the Christ-god, so that Man may live at last.
There's no way that large a percentage of people get raptured. That should have clued her in.
Also, there should have been the sounds of cars careening out of control when their drivers dematerialized, leaving only their bumper stickers behind.
Just throwing this out there because I'm bored:
John Hinderaker is previously on record as not believing that Obama is a Christian . . . because the Rev. Wright is not a Christian. Of course, he also thinks his own Lutheran church was "taken over by the Left", along with the rest of the Protestant denominations, so I guess by his logic he's not a Christian either.
223: The snark will provide. Even better.
I am still chuckling over 178: nor is the poem "Footprints in the Sand."
31/32, though to be honest, I wouldn't have known Edwards, making it actually 30/32. I thought of the Jewish Sabbath as a Saturday thing, forgot it started Friday. I'm sorry, ari! I promise never to ride a train and throw away my creepy Krupps coffeemaker!
...throw away my creepy Krupps coffeemaker!
Get a Braun. So much better.
or the Left Behind books wouldn't make sense.
I know what you mean but this cluase still made me laugh.
Joseph Smith was a piker. Without Brigham Young he would be remembered as a two-bit con man. You can't just make a religion and have people believe. There has to be charismatic leadership at some point.
I thought of the Jewish Sabbath as a Saturday thing, forgot it started Friday.
I'm glad you said this. I was afraid I'd be banned if I admitted this was what brought me down to 14/15.
I did know the Edwards question, though, even though I have no idea who Finney is.
Coincidentally to all this, I'm reading a novel about John Wycliffe, of whom I had never heard, and just finished another about Lollards in Bohemia. Not great, but perfectly good reading and I learned quite a lot.
It's okay, so long as you're comfortable being both ignorant and an antisemite.
I have no idea who Finney is
The architect of Finney Chapel, of course.
God, why can't they just hold it on Sunday, like normal people.
232: Past president of DFH college and wild-eyed religious fanatic.
Another Finney anecdote has been told in several variations, the most likely coming from Emeritus Professor George T. Jones '20, who died last March at the age of 100. A young widow left on a farm to care for a household of children was separated from downtown Oberlin by a muddy and difficult road. She decided to don a pair of men's trousers and ride into town. Finney saw the young woman and reproved her for riding her horse astride. Sometime later, when he saw her riding again in the same way, he called out to her, "Good morning, daughter of the Devil," whereupon she answered sweetly, "Good morning, Father."
I like to hope the rapture will be less like Left Behind, Book I, and more like a less canonical gospel: Blondie's "Rapture." To wit: men from Mars eating cars and the most embarrassingly inept rap imaginable.
234: What could be more comfortable than that?
From the link at 235:
One midnight a month the student-organized midnight Organ Pump takes over the building...
235: Not so much designed by as named for. It's a great performance space; I don't know when was the last time it was used for religious observance.
32. I've always wanted to deliver a sermon entitled "Sinners in the Hands of a Hungry God."
237: Staunch abolitionist though. Started out as a lawyer:
So on October 10, 1821, he headed out into the woods near his Adams, New York, home to find God. "I will give my heart to God, or I never will come down from there," he said. After several hours, he returned to his office, where he experienced such forceful emotion that he questioned those who could not testify to a similar encounter....
The next morning, Finney returned to his law office to meet with a client whose case he was about to argue. "I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause," he told the man, "and cannot plead yours."
242: I was kidding, my dear. But yes, it's a fantastic place to enjoy a performance. I saw, among others, the Violent Femmes (as I bring the whole thread together) there when they were still a baby band -- and I was still a baby. Someone in the crowd shouted out, "Are you feminists?" To which Gorden Gano responded, without missing a beat, "We're female separatists." It was a great, great show.
245: My top shows there were semi-Grateful Dead (billed as Jerry Garcia and Friends--I forget the exact lineup, I'm not the biggest fan, but it was great), Pearls Before Swine and Geoff Muldaur
245: I saw the Violent Femmes just 2 years ago. They still put on a great show.
238: I love this concept, but it reminds me of something I'm better off asking here than elsewhere.
My (black) partner has often had white friends of hers say something about Blondie's "Rapture" being the first rap song to get airplay or the first rap song or various other things. She was finally getting so annoyed I checked Wikipedia and was able to tell her it's only the first song with rap in it to be played as a video on MTV (though the article also now says it's "the first rap-influenced single" to top the Billboard charts). Basically the question both of us have is whether this is the kind of thing white people of a certain age mention among themselves or if it's simply some weird racial thing and wanting to claim they've been hip since the mid-80s or I don't even know what, even though that's my assumption. Also, this is not a very good question. Sorry.
Blondie's "Rapture" being the first rap song to get airplay
Rapture was the first song with rap in it to reach #1 on the Billboard charts. Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight got a fair amount of airplay and made it into the Top 40 the previous year.
249: Yeah, I didn't write my version very well. Basically stupid people keep claiming that Blondie basically invented rap and it's frustrating and annoying. If they were willing to accept something like what you said (especially since it's true) that would be fine, but instead there seems to be some weird belief about Blondie being majorly influential in the development of rap in the black community. On second thought, forget that I brought this up!
"Rapper's Delight" got airplay, didn't it? (Of course Debra Harry figures in the history of the Sugar Hill Gang.)
Does "Double Dutch Bus" count as rap? It's kinda rappish, in the same way that "Rapture" is, and I remember it being all over the radio before the Blondie song, but Wikipedia tells me they both came out in 1981.
I would say that it's "one of the first" songs with rapping in it to be a hit of any great size. I don't know if I've I've ever said that sentence to someone, but I am not sure why that would be terrible of me if I did.
Stupid Fresh Prince leaving DJ Jazzy Jeff behind. Ruined rap, it did.
251: Given that Debbie Harry namechecks Fab 5 Freddy and Grandmaster Flash, they'd have to be awfully stupid. Which I guess is your point!
245: I figured you knew that, but what about everyone else? Do you want them to lose at Trivial Pursuit? It's the only thing they have.
Which I somehow missed in your original comment.
I like snarkout's answer best, because it lets me keep being annoyed that I know more about the history of music I don't actually listen to from the year I turned one than do people who lived through and listened to the stuff. But yes, basically I wanted people to tell me that I wasn't being ridiculous. I'd be fine with oudemia's version and it's often what I've used to smooth over the conversation (and once this happened more than twice with me around, I went ahead and looked at Wikipedia so that I could say something more definitive if it happened again, which it hasn't yet) so that Lee stops being mad and her stupid friends stop arguing with her and everyone can be happy and quiet and leave me the hell alone. Old people, get off my lawn!
instead there seems to be some weird belief about Blondie being majorly influential in the development of rap in the black community.
Debra Harry didn't develop rap even a little, but she was a fixture in hip hop clubs from like the mid-70s on, and once she became a big star, started taking fancy industry people with her. This resulted in good things happening to various hip-hop artists.
I watched a sort of oral history of rap on PBS or something a while ago, and what was interesting to me was all of the super, duper early, early dudes talking about all the Kraftwerk they were listening to. So some white dude influence is definitely admitted to/spoken of.
260: That I believe, too, and I'm not arguing that rap was a black-only thing and I'd love to see that oral history! I'm just arguing that people shouldn't say that just because they heard Blondie in their podunk towns before they heard any other rap that thus all rap evolved from Blondie.
256: people who don't always already know about Charles Grandison Finney's mad preaching and social reforming skillz are stupid and ignorant and thus deserve to lose at trivial pursuit. I mean, they deserve to burn in a fire hotter than a thousand suns. Eh, six of one, half dozen of the other, I guess.
Blondie basically invented rap
The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron would like a word with your cracker buddies.
246: Sonny Rollins was probably the second best show I saw there. I had and still have a fair bit of Oberlin envy.
250: Vintage unfogged! I didn't even know Be//e Wa///g ever commented here!
261: That was a great song. Nothing to be ashamed of. It's on my iPod.
260.last: Somewhere in the archives we've chatted about that.
The night in 1977 when Kraftwerk played the Ritz and helped ignite hip-hop has to be one of the great moments in the history of globalization. As Afrika Bambaataa put it: "Kraftwerk--I don't think they even knew how big they were among the black masses back in '77, when they came out with 'Trans-Europe Express.' When that came out I thought that was one of the best and weirdest records I ever heard in my life. I said, 'scuse the expression, this is some weird shit! Everybody just went crazy off of that. I guess they found out when they came over and did a performance at the Ritz how big they was. They had four encores, and people would not let them leave."-- From David Toop's Rap Attack, p. 130.
264: Ari? Why were all Ohio liberal arts colleges so good on social justicey things long before anyone else?
I'm listening to "Adventures of Grandmaster Flash and the Wheels of Steel" right now -- I had forgotten that he plays Debbie Harry saying "Flash is cool" right at the beginning of the song.
Worse yet, around the same time, my favorite song EVAR was Blondie's "Call Me".
Why is this bad? I remember roller skating to it.
272, con't: And I bet Kraab roller skated in the very same place.
To the extent I did, yeah. I sucked at roller skating. But I loved that song!
Finney Chapel, like a few other buildings at DFHC, was designed by Cass Gilbert (designer of the Woolworth building and the U.S. Supreme Court).
My favorite experience in Finney (other than concerts) was the summer I worked on building a pit for the hydraulic lift for the stage.
272: Any song oudemia roller skated to has to be cool, because oudemia is one of the supercool exceptions that both went to a prom and was on a jury.
I feel that I am gradually developing a complete and rigorous philosophy of life.
267: Still does, only now her toes are rosy. (Mods, delete if I've Said Too Much.)
261: It's a fun song and they're a deeply enjoyable band. It's just..."And out comes a man from Mars
And you try to run but he's got a gun. And he shoots you dead and he eats your head." I am about the furthest thing from a rap afficionado, but that is Not Good.
279: Early Carnegie Tech students were expected to shovel coal in the boiler room.
280: I have a lot of old-school rap here on this hard drive, and in the early days there were some pretty blindingly silly rhymes deployed.
Also, "Rapture" is a freakin' awesome song. And Blondie definitely created the genre of oddly arryhthmic white girl rap, which, while it hasn't set the world afire exactly, has been deployed many times in the decades since, with much success.
260.last: well, sorta. Afrika Bambaataa was definitely super duper early (Kool Herc was the first person to cut breaks together; Kool Herc, Flash, and Bambaataa were sort of the big three early hip hop DJs) but he was also pretty much the only one who was into Kraftwerk until he went into the studio with Arthur Baker (who was already into similar stuff but was primarily a disco producer) in '81.
The truth is that all of this stuff was jumbled up together in NYC by the time any rap was on the radio; Grandmaster Flash was going to parties at Warhol's factory, Malcolm McLaren was going to parties in the Bronx. And in any case, the musical genre that most directly influenced hip hop was disco, which was absolutely huge and crossed all kinds of racial and gender and sexual boundaries all over the place, and had been doing so in New York since 1970.
In other "you can't really untangle the web of musical influence" news, Kraftwerk (despite being pretty clearly Can-style krautrock on their first couple of albums (that they refuse to release)) have been known to describe themselves as most heavily influenced by James Brown.
I'll cop to really liking Blondie's "Rapture" when it was hot.
Who didn't? I spent evenings in the winter of '81 playing ping-pong with friends in my basement and listening to "Rapture" over and over and over.
And in any case, the musical genre that most directly influenced hip hop was disco...
The BeeGees created rap.
in the early days there were some pretty blindingly silly rhymes deployed
A whooooole lot of the really early rap sounds incredibly clunky in 2010. Then there was Kool Moe Dee.
I love this story about the Fab Five Freddy and members of Sugarhill Gang jumping up on stage to freestyle over "Good Times" at a show featuring Chic, Blondie, and The Clash. What? I want to be at that show.
285: Melle Mel was pretty damn good from very early.
Kool Moe Dee
The poontang was dope; You know that I rocked her
But three days later . . . go see the doctor . . .
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AWB, could you recommend any contemporaneous novels about the enclosures, or indeed management of common environmental resources? I would like to point some of my undergraduates to something earlier than Hardin.
Then I can go back to teaching them to apply calculus. "We work together", I tell heebie from the heart, "whether we work together or apart."
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282 gets it right. Once you get into the pre-history of hip-hop -- all the Jamaican music and calypso, which was clearly an influence on Herc, plus the prison toasts, plus all the other performative influences like street-corner doo-wop groups and spasm bands -- you're at a point where you just have to say "West Africa" and be done with it. Except that that doesn't account for the Spanish and Arabic and English and Irish influences.
This is one of those things that makes me cry when I think about it too much, because it's all so amazing and beautiful and revolutionary.
Also for literature people: What meter is Young MC's "Bust A Move" in?
291: I dunno, but he's from my high school. Played school dances as DJ Marvin.
Haven't read all the comments yet, but on transubstantiation and Anglicanism: The doctrine was explicitly rejected in the Thirty Nine Articles and isn't at all a part of the tradition. It's true that it's now optional to believe in -- no one will kick you out of church, and some hardcore anglocatholics do -- in the same way that a lot of doctrinal issues are left as non-mandatory in Anglicanism -- but the basic point of the ritual in even most high church Anglicanism is the spiritual benefit of participation ritual itself, not the literal transformation of substances.
290: It makes me cry to think how old and racist I must be to have so little appreciation for it.
Just go join the Tea Party already, peep.
290.last: Which is why the local rock station oh so cleverly played a parody of "Dance to the Music" called "Rap isn't Music".
On preview: They were catering to peep and his peeps.
294: One of the beautiful things about being indifferent to music generally is that I don't need to feel bad about being out of date or culturally closedminded. I'm not racist for not being interested in rap: I'm equally bored by country, rock, metal, pop... I don't even know enough to comprehensively list genres of music I don't pay attention to.
(Now, this is an independently bad thing, of course -- I have no soul, or so I understand. But my musical tastes aren't out of date or racist.)
295: I feel guilty about not liking it! What could be more liberal than that!
This is one of those things that makes me cry when I think about it too much, because it's all so amazing and beautiful and revolutionary.
Without it, the world would be a much poorer place in terms of music and misogyny that rhymes.
I rea that Jeff Chang book in hip hop a few years ago -- Cant Stop, Won't Stop -- and the first few chapters, on early NYC hip hop, are fascinating. IIRC, he argues that hip hop, which was pretty much a Bronx thing started by Herc to make money through street parties, was starting to fade out as a trend by 1979-81 and was revived because downtown new wave hipsters/Blondie types picked it up and started to create a market for recordings, performance, etc.
That book kinda falls apart at the end, but its well worth reading.
299: And there's nothing misogynist about, you know, Mick Jagger or Axl Rose or Johnny Cash, for instance. Except that they sing! Conclusion: When you sing misogyny, it is okay.
And in any case, the musical genre that most directly influenced hip hop was disco, which was absolutely huge and crossed all kinds of racial and gender and sexual boundaries all over the place, and had been doing so in New York since 1970.
You can certainly see the Village People influence in this Flash performance.
Look, I'm not defending Jay-Z or those guys on the misogyny front. There's a lot of hip-hop artists who've recorded some really fucked up lyrics. But this whole idea that, prior to "Rapper's Delight", nobody had ever turned on a radio and heard a song that denigrated women is just absurd. And that's not a straw man, that's exactly how many people present it. 99% of the pop music ever recorded has really shitty politics. If it's not blatantly misogynist or racist, its homophobic or heterosexist or pro-capitalist or it advances the whole "if I can't have him/her, no one can" view of monogamy that is at the root of half the violence in this society. If you want to listen to good pop music, and it is out there, you have to sift through a lot of dreck. Furthermore, in pop music, as in other spheres of human endeavor, it is usually the case that someone with really fucked up politics in one area has something worthwhile to say in another area.
I love me some old school hip hop, and this thread is reminding me that I have Spotify and some time on my hands now. Maybe I can get back in breaking.
303: You took 299 a bit more seriously than I intended.
303: I mostly agree with this.
Anyway, I don't usually understand what's being said well enough to object to the message.
It makes me understand my mother who refers to all rock music as "boom-boom" and claims that it all sounds the same to her and she can't understand any of the words.
305: Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were someone else.
304: You might appreciate The Rub's History of Hip-Hop series.
(I mentioned this at the Austin meetup: listening to their mixes for the mid-'80s reminded me that goddamn, old-skool rap could be really painfully *slow*.)
Speaking of music, the other day on the radio I heard somebody sing, "Now I'm feelin so fly like a G6." A G6 is what, $20/hour. Not bad, but hardly "feeling fly" money.
306: refers to all rock music as "boom-boom" and claims that it all sounds the same to her and she can't understand any of the words.
One of the kids I know who grew up in an anarchist household (she's 10 now), had a precocious interest in the music of CRASS. Apparently, when she was very small, she'd get fussy during car trips if other music was playing and scream "CWASS, mommy! CWASS!" So cute.
I gather that she is being suborned by the more mainstream tastes of her friends at this point in her life. But there's always hope.
Her brother, who is 13, is practicing his rebellion against his DFH/punk anarchist parents by refusing to be enthusiastic about anything besides chess and video games. Which could be worse, I guess.
A G6. (Perhaps should be posted at the SB blog).
309: However, many consider the name to refer to the Gulfstream G650, a twin-engine aircraft under development by Gulfstream Aerospace
From wikipedia.
Yeah, I knew that would happen.
311, 312: Thanks. I was pretty sure it wasn't the Pontiac.
186: The whole argument of right-wing Christian fundamentalists is that the Bible is self-evident and needs no exegesis.
There are two things going on here, IMO: First there is the conservative stance that their opinions aren't opinions they are just the way things are and if liberals weren't so disoriented and confused by their willful delusions they'd see it too. Second there is very selective reading of passages: I only encountered the good bits of the Old Testament* after I started taking that whole "priesthood of the believer" thing seriously. There's a good reason that phrase means nothing to evangelicals in practice. There's all manner of raping, pillaging, murder, seduction, genocide, torture, and general horror, most of it endorsed by god.
Needless to say, I didn't get the same message from it that you did (further evidence of your hypothesis). What I got was "Yahweh, what an asshole." Christ, too. The Holy Spirit is mostly benign when it's not raping virgins.
their opinions aren't opinions they are just the way things are
Huh, I've heard this also.
re: 285
Yeah, and then you hear tunes like Tanya Winley, and her flow still sounds pretty good to me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5hl1xaWQRQ
It makes me understand my mother who refers to all rock music as "boom-boom" and claims that it all sounds the same to her
There's always a decade or two between the time my mother first hears a song and hates it and when she says to me "You know, I didn't like [artist] when [artist] was popular, but now I think I like [artist]." Over the last few years, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and U2 have all made it on to this list. One day I expect to hear "I've been listening to The Chronic a lot lately and that Dre is the shit."
This sounds like mockery, I suppose, but I think it's kind of adorable.
315: There's all manner of raping, pillaging, murder, seduction, genocide, torture, and general horror, most of it endorsed by god.
Probably why they don't like The Brick Testament and R. Crumb's illustrated Genesis too much.
This sounds like mockery, I suppose, but I think it's kind of adorable.
I agree! Adorable!
goddamn, old-skool rap could be really painfully *slow*
And long! Dude, you're not a good enough rapper that I want to hear eight and a half minutes of it over the same beat.
When it comes to singing for too long, I think it would be hard to top Meatloaf.
When it comes to singing for too long, I think it would be hard to top Meatloaf.
Paradise by the Dashboard Light is three songs, plus a lovely narrative interlude by Phil Rizzuto.
There's always a decade or two between the time my mother first hears a song and hates it and when she says to me "You know, I didn't like [artist] when [artist] was popular, but now I think I like [artist]."
FWIW (not much), I've never had much of a taste for rap/hip hop but a while back I to the point where there were some tracks that I appreciated, but I didn't know where to go from there to develop a taste for the genre.
The virtues that make good hip hop good are different enough from the virtues of good pop that my ear/taste didn't translate very well. I knew that I had to learn to listen for different things.
Following that realization I decided that it would be helpful to go back and listen to some of the acknowledged early classics. I didn't get very far, and I didn't get past that, but I did make a short collection of tracks that I enjoyed.
Paradise by the Dashboard Light
Thanks to digital displays, paradise is too often green these days.
I think it was bucket seats, not digitial displays, that killed off sex in cars.
There's always a decade or two between the time my mother first hears a song and hates it and when she says to me "You know, I didn't like [artist] when [artist] was popular, but now I think I like [artist]."
My mom has done this several times with things she thought were too racy when they came out. The depravity that was the first season of Friends became her favorite show by the last season. And despite my not having been allowed to see Dirty Dancing when it came out ("Dirty dancing? That's all that movie is!"), my mom bought the DVD a few years ago and now watches it semi-often.
Also not worth much, but I feel extremely old because I don't like/ can't appreciate the music my kids listen to. And they hate my 80's rock.
My own parents weren't into "50's" music. they liked folk singers (A Mighty Wind types) and looooved Harry Belafonte. Plus Simon and Garfunkle. Bonus family moment: Paul Simon's Rhythm of the Saint's tour with three generations of the family at the Irvine Ampitheater, and watching my mom cry when Paul sings "Bridge Over Troubled Water".
No, Sifu, that's why I said "plus".
328: I notice the same thing with my parents, occasionally, although they usually come to a new interest sort of directly through an old one.
Of course, the bulk of my music collection consists of songs that are more than 20 years old. A large plurality are over 40 years old. Not that I don't listen to contemporary pop music, but I rarely seek it out, and even more rarely less rarely rarer do I buy it.
I also said "right" when I meant "write". I'm having some trouble with homonyms recently. Just can't stop obsessing over them.
329: I'm with your parents. "A Mighty Wind" was time travel for me.
14/15 on the quiz. I slept through all of the Great Awakenings.
Hey Bio- do you know the full story on Creeque Alley ?
For those of you not familiar with hip hop, a primer.
N.B. Links do not imply endorsement.
334: You could start a blog obsessively tracking the malign pervasiveness of homonyms sullying our language. You could call it "HomonymWash".
I am very much on a bus right now with Smearcase, going to visit Bave. We are going to be on this bus until we die. Whee!
(we are starting a new bus line with pianos on the buses and showtune sing-alongs) (and yes we are maybe going to die of old age before we hit even Bridgeport)
342: Ooooh! "Everything has a season! Everything has a time! Show me a reason and I'll soon show you a rhyme!"
My Dad liked punk -- although Tom Waits is his real favourite -- and my Mum used to occasionally go to rock gigs with me in the 80s, so I'm not really familiar with those big generational gaps in music taste. I suspect, within the family, the person more likely to listen to very old (and very new) music is me.
I am very much on a bus right now
After all, it won't do to be only somewhat on a bus.
What if you were in a box with a radioactive sample and if that sample emitted a beta particle, you'd be put on a bus.
Regarding the German boycott thing upthread, we recorded on some purportedly legendary Telefunken microphone. It was to have been designed for Nazi wartime radio broadcasts or something. We were sort of uneasy with this fact, even after having it clarified that, no, this particular microphone was not used by the Nazis in during WWII.
Regarding parents and music tastes and religion, when I got really into Bad Religion in 7th grade, my dad once confessed to me something like, "I really like that Bad Religion band you play, but don't tell your mother."
Oh, and yep: I missed the Edwards question, amusingly after a thought process something like, "Edwards? Wasn't he that guy who wrote that sermon with the spider imagery, the guy we read in eleventh grade? And wasn't the Great Awakening the big tent revival surge that happened in the 1800s? So it couldn't be him."
14/15 on the shorter quiz: missed the beginning of Sabbath on Friday rather than Saturday. Test-taking skillz pretty much broadcast that it should be Friday (i.e. "on what day does Sabbath begin"), but I thought I'd answer the question as intended, i.e. Do you know that Jewish Sabbath begins on Friday? No, I did not.
On the longer quiz, not so good. I don't know much about Mormonism (Jesus visited the Americas? Really?), wasn't sure about the dominant religion in Indonesia, and drew more or less a blank on the first four gospels. Um, John. Uh.
I was honestly afraid that these quizzes would be a lot more difficult than they were, however. I feared to be asked what the doctrinal differences between various brands of Protestantism are. And I'm pretty clueless there.
I feared to be asked what the doctrinal differences between various brands of Protestantism are.
If the phrase "premillennial dispensationalism" comes up, run.
I had the amusing experience of visiting the cathedral at Cologne and Notre Dame in Paris with a colleague who studied the Bible pretty intensely as a young immigrant to the US, because the main social group that took him in at the time were Chinese evangelical Christians. He's not religious, but he had all these evangelically-tinted reactions to what I guess was his first encounter with Catholicism. "Why is this altar dedicated to a saint? Are they worshipping him? But he's just a man, not god!" Or "why so much emphasis on Mary?" I found myself struggling to explain the complicated history of Christian worship practices and beliefs, things like the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and kept getting these reactions like "but that's not in the Bible! Don't these people know their own religion?" It was hard to get across that the viewpoint from which people had tried to indoctrinate him was a relatively recent innovation, historically. (Not that his sort of appalled attitude toward learning about Catholicism is rare, of course, among evangelicals in America, but it was entertaining to find it coming from an atheist who had never really encountered Christianity until his 20s.)
352: Reminds me that if they had had, "What does the Immaculate Conception refer to?" on there they would have probably tripped up more Catholics than they did with the transubstantiation one. And also of the awkward reaction I got to bringing it up at work as an interesting bit of "trivia".
Oh, and on the blood/wine thing, when I was like five or so, I had this terribly vivid image of what must be in the Communion cup. In my head, it was something akin to chum, all thick and viscous with floaty parts and bones and stuff. I was deeply anxious about having to take Communion.
John Edwards had wrote a sermon called "Sinners in the hands of an angry National Enquirer."
(That's the kind of joke that would have been good to make several hundred comments ago.)
جان ادواردز نوشت خطبه به نام "گناهکاران در دست عصبانی ملی Enquirer".
337: Not the full story, not even part of the story.
re: 348
A U-47? [Obligatory Zappa reference]
German camera stuff from that period with a Nazi or military connection commands a premium, which I find pretty distasteful.
As it happens, Leica apparently did pretty well for a German company during the period:
http://nemeng.com/leica/005eb.shtml
so I don't think there's any special need for guilty about using or owning something from that particular company.* I don't know about the history of Zeiss, or Franke and Heidecke, though.
* although at the moment I think everything I have is from the 50s.
There's a great couplets in Benjamin Britten's "st nicholas" cantata, which I sang in several times as a child*:
"He sat among the bishops/when they gathered at Nicaea/and rising with the wrath of God/boxed Arius's ear!"
The Nicene Creed hammered out the doctrine of consubstantiality (viz that God and Jeebus are of One Body), which eventually led to the split between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches (I think). HOWEVER, in the Church of England, consubstantiality vs transubstantiality denotes the differences between CoE and Catholic beliefs re the nature of the Eucharist.
15/15. Jonathan Edwards not a guess.
*Sadly I only sang the the solo of the pickled boys** who spring back to life once, in rehearsal: I read music better than some of my fellow choristers, but my voice was always a bit nasal and I had poor breath control.
**St Nicholas is great. It has pirates, pickled boys, boxing of ears, father christmas (sort of) and a tremendously emo tenor solo where the not-yet-saint has to leave home when his parents die.
The Nicene Creed hammered out the doctrine of consubstantiality (viz that God and Jeebus are of One Body), which eventually led to the split between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches (I think).
No. Both Catholic and Orthodox hold the same views of the nature of Jesus, which is that He is both all God and all human. Both also hold the same view of the Trinity, which may also be what you are thinking about.
32/32, didn't know who Edwards was. Question 21 is pure rot.
353: They should ask if Jack Tatum touched the ball before Franco Harris caught it. That way we can find out the religious beliefs of John Madden!
366: I was just thinking that if it were a serious quiz about religion, it would include a question about Maradona's Hand of God.
32/32
The Nicene Creed hammered out the doctrine of consubstantiality (viz that God and Jeebus are of One Body), which eventually led to the split between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches (I think).
No. Both Catholic and Orthodox hold the same views of the nature of Jesus, which is that He is both all God and all human. Both also hold the same view of the Trinity, which may also be what you are thinking about.
This gets insanely complicated. What the Nicene Creed says is that the Father and the Son are of one substance (hence consubstantiality), and both the Catholic and Orthodox churches agree with that. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are supposed to be three different persons, with the Son begotten by the Father and, originally, the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father. The doctrinal rationale for the schism was that the Orthodox disagreed with the Catholic addition of the words 'Filioque' ('and the son') to the formula dealing with the question of from whom the Holy Spirit proceeds.
The standard view about the nature or natures of the single person of the Son is a separate question from the above questions about the relationships between the persons of the Trinity, and, as Moby Hick says, it involves the full humanity and divinity of Christ. But it doesn't end there! Both the Catholic and Orthodox churches require that this be a matter of two natures - one human and one divine - in the one person (dyophysitism) rather than a single divine/human nature in that one person (miaphysitism). Miaphysitism is usually considered a form of monophysitism, and we wouldn't want to fall into that error. Wars have been fought over it. And even if you are a good dyophysite, you can still fall into the heresy of monothelitism...
I used to worship Chinese food, until I learned that monosodium glutamate was potentially harmful.
I used to worship Chinese food, until I learned that monosodium glutamate was potentially harmful.
Good - there's nothing worse than a monosodomite. Particularly where glutes are involved.
Wars have been fought over it.
That can't be the whole story. There had to have been other economic factors or ethnic rivalries, or something that makes some form of sense. Right?
Not just glutes - mating with glutes. Er... I'd better stop now.
Surely all this doctrine crap is just a twenty-sided die away from D&D. Just get a room, some hex-paper, and get it on, you splitters.
371:
I don't know the history very well, but yes. Monophysitism was big in Syria and Egypt (think Copts), while the Latin West was dead against it. So Byzantine rulers around the 6th century were in a pickle because they wanted trouble neither from orthodox Chalcedonians nor from their monophysite provinces, where I gather monophysitism often functioned as a proxy for opposition to Byzantium. For example, there was trouble under Anastasius I, who favoured monophysitism, so later Justinian moved in the opposite direction, despite his wife Theodora's monophysite sympathies. Etc.
371 - It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.
374 -- yes, plus (bonus fun fact) the widespread adherence in Syria, Egypt and the East to the Monophysite heresy was (arguably) what made it possible for the Muslim conquest to succeed so brilliantly in those regions in the 8th century, and thus is directly responsible for the rise of Islam.
So, basically, the debate over the fully human or fully divine nature of Jesus caused 9/11.
What the fuck is a "nature", and how does one know how many one has?
378: Look at the label printed on the bottom of your left foot. It should have your serial number, care instructions, and the model numbers of each of your natures.
379: Huh. I didn't know I could be machine-washed inside-out.
Plus, wash with like colors? Racist.
the widespread adherence in Syria, Egypt and the East to the Monophysite heresy
EASY ON THE "HERESY" TALK OR WE MIGHT HAVE TO GET ARK-OF-THE-COVENANT ON YOUR ASS
Is being divine easy for me? Why, it's second nature!
It's amazing the amount of blood spilled in Christianity history over the difference between "divine/human," "divine-human," and "divine+human."
So was Jesus fully male, fully Jewish, and fully a carpenter, or was he a male Jewish carpenter?
384: I don't know if that just came to you, or if you've been saving it for the right occasion for years. Either way, bravo.