I have successfully created a cake containing rutabaga.
Thank you; that is all.
Seth doesn’t get faith
Seth is right about so many things, but he falls into a modern trap about faith.
It’s very easy to live in an either-or world; even very smart people do it.
You can be either rational or faithful.
You can be either scientific or religious.
You can be either us or them.
Unfortunately faith doesn’t work in an ‘either-or’ fashion with rationality. Faith doesn’t make us ambivalent towards evidence or proof – faith just accepts that we don’t have them.
Accepting a lack of proof is essentially scientific, by the way. The famed scientific process graduates a hypothesis all the way up to the rock solid status of, “Theory”.
The theory of gravity. The theory of relativity.
Sometimes faith is a matter of understanding that things are more complicated than we can measure; of accepting that our knowledge is, and perhaps always will be, incomplete.
To walk by faith and not by sight means saying, “The truth is more than my eye can measure.” This isn’t irrational, just… bold.
Again, this is right up science’s alley – scientific progress is a steady stream of new research telling us that what we thought was going on was really far more complicated than we ever imagined; what we thought we knew was just a drop in the bucket… or totally out to lunch.
Mmm… lunch.
Pitting faith against rationality is like pitting ketchup against mustard. Sure, they’re made of different ingredients, but why let that ruin your hot dog?
The very nature of ketchup is that you don’t (and shouldn’t be) mustardy about it. In fact, you’re entitled to be aghast when anyone confronts you with mustard. Mustard and relish aren’t the point.
Faith doesn’t mean irrational zealotry.
All it means is that mustard isn’t enough to make a decent sandwich.
The last bus
I took my last downtown express bus ride this morning.
Sunday the train comes 
Suspension of disbelief
When my friends and I are walking through the cold dark parking lot of the movie theatre, having just come from watching Hollywood’s latest offering, the first question asked is always, “Well, what did you think?”
Not, “What did you think?” in terms of abstract thought, but “What did you think?” as a reaction. “What did you think?” as the gut, visceral response that highlights the conflict between the world the film offered and the world we live in.
The point of a story is to tell us what did happen, just so that we learn what can happen.
The natural result of a story is that our worldview is either reinforced or restructured.
When we take in a story, we need to trust the storyteller. We need to know with absolute certainty that they have an understanding; that they have something worthwhile to tell us. When they present us with a new thing, a new piece of understanding, which way will things fall? Will we accept it as something to be learned, or reject it as something to be debunked?
The phrase “Suspension of Disbelief” comes up when a storyteller has lost our trust. They’ve introduced a gross lie of some sort – they’ve made a statement about how things work that is so absolutely false that we recoil in unconscious rebellion against them and their story.
It means they’ve failed in some way, and lost our trust.
You’ll notice that we never, ever have issues of Suspension of Disbelief over the mere appearance of green fish-men in a story.
We have issues when green fish-men start acting grossly un-green-fish-man like.
We have issues when green fish-men show up in the middle of the heated discussion between the patent lawyer and the attractive widow who is trying to push her husband’s invention to market in the face of a corporate monopoly which is trying to bury her. We don’t mind that they appeared, but we mind that their appearance… doesn’t make sense.
We have issues when green fish-men turn into blue butterfly-men through some sort of ‘mystical transformation.’ A butterfly is not the natural consummation of the evolution of a fish.
Give us a story where green fish-men behave appropriately and through courage and endurance overcome obstacles and attain the approprate reward, and we’ll be in bliss.
If the storyteller can’t convey a picture of a world that is consistent and truthful… well, what’s the point of listening to an incompetent storyteller?
Tell us what did happen, so that we will know what can happen. But we need to believe that it did.
We need to believe that, in a world where fish men actually live, when Quish-ptsosh did exercise courage and learned to believe in himself and listened to the wise old stingray’s song that he was able to rally the Quareen to defeat the Shark invasion, and that the result was that the kingdom was saved and he became the new king and married the beautiful fishcess.
Then we’ll accept to what you have to say about what can happen in the midst of treachery and betrayal and personal struggle and romance and all that stuff.
But if he turns into a butterfly man, or eats caviar, we’re going to watch the hockey game instead.
Happy April, Naomi Elise
Naomi Elise
Rhymes with, ‘niece’
But the ode of her uncle
Regrettably stunkle.