Dear Candice
----- Original Message -----
From: "Candice Ward" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 26 September 2001 23:07
Subject: Re: Letter to a leftist friend/the real mystics/innocents
| Lawrence: You've been making some excellent points in your series of
| posts, I think, and I very much appreciate your insistence on the need for
| attention to language--rhetoric, political or otherwise, and the
rhetorical
| moves made here on this list, in Washington, and elsewhere--as very much
at
| issue in discussions of/debates over our actions, personal or political.
It's all I can do, so I do that. I haven't got cash to give to charities;
and as to vigils and so on I have lost my faith but not my self-respect so I
look at words.
A great deal of counselling and therapy works to some extent on the belief
that we become what our self-narrative describes. Talk happy and you may be
somewhat content... I'm not sure if that is always true; but if there is
anything to it, and I think there is, then I think it must work in
transpositions - talk angry and you'll become angry - talk stupidly and
you'll be stupid. I am trying to talk logically.
I am also on the watch for intentional and unintentional rabble-rousing...
There's an awful lot of grief-looting going on. Over here the government is
trying to use it to push through further repression; and our Home Secretary,
David (Security) Blunkett is starting his campaign to become Prime Mover on
the back of "doing something"
We need to be fearful of all that - though I am not saying a few more basic
checks would not go amiss in USA...
By tracking the change in diction, it is possible to guage something of the
battle in heaven. It's a pity they didn't do it in private - the way, I
recall, that the old regime in Albania was ended in a gun battle over the
dinner table. That's the way to do it: let the murderers murder each other.
Instead a lot of physical suffering has been caused by bellicose blustering
and the fearful response to it in Afghanistan
Re the change in diction, we used to have the information super highway,
then we got ecommerce, an interesting change of emphasis
It's years since I read the Koran and I have only read it once. I have
little personal sympathy for any religious text. I mean that I try not to
offend people who put faith in their sacred texts - you don't dissuade
people from belief by abusing them. Repress religion and it grows. In UK,
you can largely believe what you want - it's different to USA or parts of
USA - and the churches are largely empty... So the Koran doesn't bother me.
It's what the reader does with it that's the problem
I am, however, saturated with the bible, the King James... That's come from
poetry and just from being brought up in a community where it is or has been
important. Being sent to a catholic school, I got a relatively unenlivening
text; but reading poetry and reading around it is how I got much of my KJ
knowledge, such as it is... It is often such damn good writing,
mechanically... Whatever merit there is in the originals, much of what I get
out of KJ is heavily located in that text itself - I've been told of, and
now can't remember, examples where the original has been mistranslated and
now works on its own terms
But as Alison remarks large parts of it are appalling. Have a look at Joshua
some time. That's my current hobby horse... The gospels mean the most to me
and I have been imagining someone standing before the western warlords,
perhaps just after they have come out of church, and before they start to
talk bollocks, writing in the dirt, and them fading away
I was trying to write something using "dead or alive" using references to
the passion, but my atheistic art wasn't in it and I had to give up
I'm told that the koranic writing is just as brilliant as the bible if you
know the language
I am all for them as literature, but as the believed in word of the creator
they're potentially dangerous. The person who believes or who has persuaded
themselves that they are behaving in accordance with God's word is not open
to logic
I would see both the koran and the bible as potentially as dangerous as each
other. The way to defeat the dangerous tendencies in ourselves is to swamp
each other with respect or as near verisimilitude as we can manage; and the
necessities of life in abundance
Cheers
L
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