Monday 22 June 2015

Opposite morality

I do not hold that novels are factual or have to be. If they were, they would not quite be novels. They might be biographies close to novels or they might be monographies close to novels. Or they might be "novel versions" of reality. But to be a novel, a tale does not have to be factual. I do however hold that the connexion to real life should hold in the morality of a novel. A novel hero may exhibit traits which the author does not share, but he should not be admired for things that the author would in real life despise.

Hence the question of morality of any given novel - or shorter story.

Here is a correspondence between me and a writer on that topic. I considered that one tale of his had made bad morality. And that the bad morality was the exact inverse of the good morality of Clive Staples Lewis in The Silver Chair.

Me to Dominic de Souza
On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 7:11 AM
[Dominic de Souza] Silver Bound Serpent
Do I sense a reversal of moral as compared to the Silver Chair, here:

http://catholicauthor.us/blog/the-silver-bound-serpent-a-catechism-tale/

Dominic de Souza to me
18/06/15 à 15h52
Re: [Dominic de Souza] Silver Bound Serpent
Hi Georg, can you please clarify?

Thanks, and have a great day,

Dominic de Souza
Arboriad Design
Your Visual Design Consultant

Me to Dominic de Souza
On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 5:41 AM
Re: [Dominic de Souza] Silver Bound Serpent
In Silver Chair, a human figure was chained, and given the benefit of the doubt and freed - and killed a real serpent (which had not been chained).

In your story, a human figure is killed on blind faith it is a serpent. Even if it is, the killer ought to have had some proof before going on with the killing.

This is of course irrespective of the allegorical meaning of the serpent - but if it was meant as allegory, there should be some indication that what was meant by the thing to be killed was an interior thought ("blessed is he who dashes thy small ones their heads against the wall, oh Babylon" in usual Christian exegesis referring to refusal of first initial temptations to any sin), since as it stands, as an adventure story, it gives too much room for mistreating obviously human looking creatures on blind faith.

That is what I meant./HGL

Dominic de Souza to me
19/06/15 à 12h06
Re: [Dominic de Souza] Silver Bound Serpent
In the Silver Chair, the human figure was never identified as the serpent, and was possessed by it. When freed, he destroyed both the chair and the serpent to free himself from further evil. In the context of my story, the difference is that all know that an incarnation of evil is chained up, capable of mutating form. As an allegory for rooting out evil regardless its face. Obviously we are dealing less with physical evil and more metaphysical.

Still not sure I understand your point. Have a great day.

Thanks, and have a great day,

Dominic de Souza
[etc]

Me to Dominic de Souza
19/06/15 à 13h16
Re: [Dominic de Souza] Silver Bound Serpent
Same to you, but we have a little problem with epistemology:

"all know that an incarnation of evil is chained up, capable of mutating form."

How does "government says" become "all know"?

In the Silver Chair, Rilian says himself (while enchanted and before going to be chained up) that if HE were to be freed, while "the fit" lasts, he would, lamentably, turn into a serpent.

Rilian gave Eustace, Jill and Puddleglum lots more reason to suspect his request for liberation than the hero of your story had./HGL


Yes, when I said that morality has to be the same in a novel as in real life, I do include epistemology. And in my book, relying on particular information on particular persons (or monsters) because "everyone knows" is not quite good epistemology.

That is why I recommend a rereading of:

The Silver Chair (The Chronicles of Narnia, Book 6)
Paperback – 1 Oct 2009 (or earlier versions)
by C. S. Lewis (Author)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Silver-Chair-Chronicles-Narnia-Book/dp/0007323093


rather than reading, unprepared, The Silver Bound Serpent which I linked to above.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
St Paulinus of Nola
22-VI-2015

Tuesday 9 June 2015

Contacting Karoo about superposition of layers and fossils

To give some South African atmosphere, here is the intro to "vi i femman" - the melody is from some Afrikaander folk song (probably the time of the Great Trek):

Vi i femman - Intro (1981)
erikbe99
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNLQSBubosE


As the internet detective I am, it would be ridiculous of me not to be able sooner or later to identify the source for Janne Lucas, namely Bert Kaempfert's A Swingin' Safari. He was German, but inspired by African pop/kwela. Here it is, and much more African than what you may just have heard:

Bert Kaempfert And His Orchestra: A Swingin' Safari
Patricia Rosa Viola
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6bsoyT86LE


Of course the Swedish dialogue after intro is just an extra. Now to the correspondence.

I
Me to Johann Neveling
01/06/15 à 11h50
I take it that in Burgersdorp you find some Triassic fauna ...
... have you found Permian fauna straight below it?/HGL

II
Johann Neveling to me
01/06/15 à 15h53
RE: I take it that in Burgersdorp you find some Triassic fauna ...
Hi

Yes, Triassic fossil fauna has been discovered in the Burgersdorp Formation, which outcrops extensively in the Burgersdorp district. But there are no Permian fauna directly below that. The Katberg Formation directly below the Burgersdorp is still considered to be Triassic and to get to the Permian one has to go lower still to the next formation, the Balfour Formation.

Regards

Johann

III
Me to Johann Neveling
02/06/15 à 13h03
RE: I take it that in Burgersdorp you find some Triassic fauna ...
OK, but has anyone tried to look for fossils in the Balfour formation where it is locally below Katberg and Burgersdorp?

I mean, are fossils only searched for and found where a formation outcrops so there is nothing above it, or has anyone tried to dig deeper in a place and found fossils like Triassic ones from Burgersdorp and Katberg formations and Permian ones from Balfour where it lies below them?/HGL

IV
Johann Neveling to me
02/06/15 à 15h04
RE: I take it that in Burgersdorp you find some Triassic fauna ...
Yes. The best chance to find fossils is where you have a bit of relief and erosion – in the Karoo the hills are normally good areas. There are no localities in the Karoo where both the Burgersdorp and Katberg formations are preserved above the Balfour Formation, except in northern half of the basin (where all the formations are much thinner). But there are several localities further south where exposures of the Balfour Formation is overlain by Katberg Formation rocks; and where people looked for and found fossils. These discoveries are reported in the work of (amongst others), James Kitching, Andre Keyser, Roger Smith, Gideon Groenewald, Bruce Rubidge and Jennifer Botha-Brink.

Johann

V
Me to Johann Neveling
02/06/15 à 15h38
RE: I take it that in Burgersdorp you find some Triassic fauna ...
Any of these online?

I'll have a look at any rate!

Wonderful thanks!

VI
Me to Bruce Rubidge and Jennifer Botha-Brink
02/06/15 à 16h12
You have both dug in both Katberg and Balfour formations, right?
Have you ever done this: started digging on top, with clear Katberg/Triassic fauna of fossils and dug down to Balfour levels, same hole, and got Balfour/Permian fauna?

I ask you, because you are on a list given in a reply by Johann Neveling. Here are his words:

"But there are several localities further south where exposures of the Balfour Formation is overlain by Katberg Formation rocks; and where people looked for and found fossils. These discoveries are reported in the work of (amongst others), James Kitching, Andre Keyser, Roger Smith, Gideon Groenewald, Bruce Rubidge and Jennifer Botha-Brink."

I skimmed through parts of what I could find of your workslists, as well as Kitching's, which I somehow lost. Only one work seemed to imply both sides of Permo-Triassic frontier and that was on a beast found on both sides of it.

Feel free to contact the others as well.

Hans Georg Lundahl

VII
Bruce Rubidge to me.
02/06/15 à 18h26
RE: You have both dug in both Katberg and Balfour formations, right?
Dear Hans

I really do not understand your question. To simply dig down from the Katberg into the Balfour in the hopes of finding vertebrate fossils is a senseless exercise as you have to dig through rock and it is hard work. I doubt whether anybody would do that.



Sincerely

Bruce

VIII
Me to Bruce Rubidge
03/06/15 à 09h28
RE: You have both dug in both Katberg and Balfour formations, right?
In other words, when you dig in Balfour, it is where there is no Katberg (or anything else) straight above?

And that is true for the other superposed layers too?/HGL

IX
Bruce Rubidge to me.
03/06/15 à 09h45
RE: You have both dug in both Katberg and Balfour formations, right?
Dear Hans



There are many outcrops of Katberg immediately overlying Balfour Formation so one can trace the entire stratigraphic succession. It is not necessary to dig from the Katberg to the Balfour to expose rocks.



Sincerely

Bruce

X
Me to Bruce Rubidge, cc Jennifer Botha-Brink and Johann Neveling
03/06/15 à 10h52
RE: You have both dug in both Katberg and Balfour formations, right?
That I very much thought was your idea of it.

My point is that with this idea in mind, you haven't ever doublechecked by digging down from Katberg surface into Balfour depths.

Did I get this correctly?

By the way, sorry for an impertinence, but you do take it with some sense of humour to share the name with this fellow*? Was it your father who codiscovered it with Broom**?

No, reason I ask is - to get serious - that if you never did, that is exactly what my hypothesis predicted. Namely that all land vertebrate fossils ever found and classified (as opposed to fossils still firmly hidden in the ground) are from what in a particular sense amounts to "one layer" - the one layer "near surface" where you do dig.

In other words, if all are from the Flood, the areas where you mark out "limits" between Permian and Triassic are exactly speaking limits between Permian biotopes and Triassic ones from before the Flood.

This is the interest I have in asking, and this is also where I find it interesting that one hasn't dug down from Katberg into Balfour lower in ground because it "isn't necessary".

Here is what I have hypothesised, and some discussions I have had on it:

Three Meanings of Chronological Labels

In detail:1) How do Fossils Superpose?, 2) Searching for the Cretaceous Fauna (with appendix on Karoo, Beaufort), 3) What I think I have refuted, 4) Glenn Morton caught abusing words other people were taught as very small children

In debate or otherwise on Assorted Retorts: 1) ... on How Fossils Matter , 2) ... on Steno and Lifespan and Fossil Finds, 3) Geological Column NOT Palaeontolical [Censored by CMI-Creation-Station? Or just by the Library I am in?], 4) Same Debate Uncensored, One Step Further, 5) Continuing debate with Howard F on Geology / Palaeontology, 6) Howard F tries twice again ... , 7) Is Howard F getting tired? Because up to now, he has failed.

Howard F was just contradicted*** by you, Bruce, and I think you other guys, Johann and Jennifer, should get this answer too.

Hans Georg Lundahl

* Back up to Rubidgea atrox: http://www.webcitation.org/6Z9nyDDY8

** It could of course have been grandfather or uncle or ... here is backup to Broomicephalus: http://www.webcitation.org/6Z9o8TUjK

*** Insofar as he wasn't just once again "lowering the rib" for my criteria. That is.


Update after correspondence:

For readers beyond those I wrote to, or for these if they consult the blog, there is a part 8) Resuming Debate with Howard F.

At Cross Purposes with Academia

Chuck Missler, whom you may have heard of, considers Hebrew has a somewhat "magic" or supernatural property. Aleph (by virtue of being an ox-head, but also of letter heading the alphabet) means head. Beth means house. Aleph Beth spells Ab, which means father, and the father is the head of the house. Add H into a word, and you get the spirit of it. So, for exemple, insert an H into Ab, you should get sth which is the spirit of fatherhood. And Ahab, meaning love, has that quality.

I am not at all certain the rabbis from whom Chuck Missler have this could keep this principle going through a longer wordlist. Even as long as a Swadesh list. If they could, it would at least be very helpful for Hebrew students, as memory help for words. I am surprised that I can even make some headway with two words I happen to know. Dabar means word, apparently. Daleth-Beth-Resh. The pauper of the house that is a head? Well, words do tend to get thrown out of the heads like paupers out of houses! Tell means hill. Tau-Lamed-Lamed or Tau-Lamed plus gemination sign. Sign of ... and let Lamed stand for Lamek, mourning or despair, not sure which, we get ... sign of mourning. Some hills are that. They are grave hills. In some pagan cults these grave hills were really signs of despair. When a chieftain gets a grave hill where he is buried with favourite wife (whose throat is cut so she can be sacrificed in a grave offering), his favourite servants (dito) and favourite horse (dito), that kind of grave hill is a sign of despair. Some less evil ones are at least signs of mourning, like the tumulus after Hector or Beowulf.

I am surprised I could even make headway with "dabar" and "tell". But I am essentially not a Hebraist. However, I would merely on general linguistic probabilities not bet this goes through the language, if it does it is a marvellous thing, I am too little versed in Hebrew to judge this. Even if it went all through the nouns without touching the verbs, or even if for each verb only one of the forms (sometimes a passive or a causative) would fit, it would be a very marvellous thing, but I am not in a position to know that.

However, there is an application of this to Christian prophecy in Old Testament. This is where I came to debate with one Academic friend, and, asking Heiser, got a little lesson in linguistics, how languages work, which me being a linguist, I found a bit on cross purposes with what I had actually asked. These applications are that crucifixion is thus prefigured in the letter hieroglyphics of the Tetragrammaton and of the word Bereshit (excepting that Beth Resh are not taken hieroglyphically, they are taking as the word Bar, Aramaic for Son).

Me to Michael Heiser
07/06/15 à 14h52
this is not about Zitchins*
It is about the Tetragrammaton and Bereshit.

Can the tetragrammaton be read as "hand - praise - nail - praise"? If you like to see it as "hand praises so much the nail praises too" (which is good Catholic Theology about instruments of the Passion, by the way)?

Can bereshit be read as ber - eshit, ber = bar (aramaic for son) and the rest "[of] first - destroyed/consumed - by hand - on cross"?

Reason I ask you is I asked a fb friend of mine, and a colleague of you, he considered it moonshine.

He considered I could just as well have taken a phrase [not recalling it but hwere each initial of each word was a letter in bereshit]. "in Rome I shall keep the law".

I retorted to him we ware talking of two different procedures : in the one case of pictogrammatic treatment of the Hebrew letters, in the other case of treating Bible text as an acrostic to get words filled in according to fancy of interpreter.

Plus that in his chosen case, this phrase would acknowledge the fact (he's also a Roman Catholic) that Christ HAS kept the Law in Rome, through the papacy (not meaning He's doing so through Bergoglio, that's another story).

In other words, these interpretations which are profusely given by Chuck Missler and Trey Smith, is there some kind of kabbalistic procedure which is often acknowledged going on, or is it their own very personal fancy?

Note that by "kabbalistic procedure" I mean a procedure in use among kabbalists, like gematria (a very obvious one, and which NT specifically endorses for one purpose in 13:18 of Apocalypse), and do not mean "based on the doctrine of [e. g.] Lurian kabbalah" (I consider the latter a very false metaphysic).

Hans Georg Lundahl

M. Heiser to me
08/06/15 à 19h59
Re: this is not about Zitchins
It is about the Tetragrammaton and Bereshit.

Can the tetragrammaton be read as "hand - praise - nail - praise"?


** absolutely not; this is utter nonsense. It comes from trying to take the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, asking what original *Egyptian* sign they derive from was, and then taking that *object* (or something like it in function or appearance), and then using that object for the "meaning" of the letter. No language in the history of human speech works that way (spoken or written). The Hebrew Bible (not to mention thousands of lines of epigraphic Hebrew) utterly incomprehensible. It's another failed (and stupid) attempt at a Bible code (encrypted knowledge). It's garbage.

** Hope that's clear enough, And yes, you can quote me.

If you like to see it as "hand praises so much the nail praises too" (which is good Catholic Theology about instruments of the Passion, by the way)?

Can bereshit be read as ber - eshit, ber = bar (aramaic for son) and the rest "[of] first - destroyed/consumed - by hand - on cross"?


** ditto the above - more nonsense.

Reason I ask you is I asked a fb friend of mine, and a colleague of you, he considered it moonshine.

** it is.

Mike

Me to Michael Heiser
08/06/15 à 20h21
Re: this is not about Zitchins
The question was not whether the language** worked that way, but thanks anyway, and thanks for the clarification.

Language also does not work by gematria, as far as we know***, and yet it is for one specific purpose clearly enjoined./HGL

Note that I was not at all asking whether this reading of bereshit or of the name of God was a normal grammatical procedure, as a normal way of grasping the meaning of the text. I was totally aware it was a question of encrypted knowledge or Bible code. His considering these in general failed is nothing to my point. And yet an academic seems to think it is his duty to really take distance from that. Which was not so back in the days of Athanasius Kircher, obviously. Not that I mean his readings of Egyptian texts are better than Champollions - as basic grammatical readings, as extraction of immediate linguistic content.

* I meant Z. Sitchin, Zecharia Sitchin ... of course. I somehow trip up on his name.

** See part of my original letter: In other words, these interpretations which are profusely given by Chuck Missler and Trey Smith, is there some kind of kabbalistic procedure which is often acknowledged going on, or is it their own very personal fancy?

OK, profusely is an unnecessary word. I should have said they were very sparing about the theme, giving basically only what

*** It is for instance certain that a subject and a predicate make sense as language because of the concepts they are, not because of having a same or product of number value. And yet a gematrist will test the truth value of subject and predicate by seeing if they have same number value, or, if not, number values one of which is double the other and things. Still, for one thing (Apocalypse 13:18) we are asked to use gematria.