no

yes

life is short
and then you die
fuck the world
let's all get high

higgh high high ihgiih

Now I feel like shit.

One more year.

Shit. I failed this year's exam :(

Looking forward for next year's exam

Let's hope it wasn't an English exam.

If you have something to say about my grammar, feel free to do so ;)

Today I had friends come over to my place.

I'm not sure why, but except for my cousin this hasn't happened in an absolutely platonic context/mindset in a long, long time.

It was a boyfriend/girlfriend couple I've known for some time. I talked to the female for a long time as one of those "romantic pursuit, maybe? someday? perhaps?" things before she got really attached to her boyfriend. I talk to her occasionally online and then they come over together and the boyfriend and I just bullshit for hours about esoteric stuff while she stares at my walls. It's great.

Tonight we were talking about science and technology. When I mentioned that scientists had, years ago, magnetized a spider, he mentioned that it's theoretically possible to permanently magnetize a human body. I pointed out that, despite what you'd think from MRI scans, this would actually kill you because of interference with the ionization principles that keep the heart pumping. But, I offered that a human cadaver could potentially be magnetized.

I then threw out the idea that you could teach kids about magnetic polarity by iron filing demonstrations that show that the corpse's nipple area is in the north pole, then once you cut the body in half, PRESTO! Now the nipple area is the SOUTH pole! Science is magic!

He then called me "a monster".

Sethomas: my myspace friend request thing
Sethomas: has such from people who call themselves "Clovis" and "Jesus"
Sethomas: personally, I think it would be cool if myspace ratified friendships I have with a Merovingian warlord-king AND the messianic ascetic who revolutionized western theodicy
Sethomas: but, the thing is,
Sethomas: both of these accounts have pictures of young women's asses associated with them
Sethomas: that just seems egregiously incongruous

Sethomas, as the forum theologian I have a question I hope you can answer for me:

If Jesus died for/to remove everyone's sins how come you still need to get baptised to remove original sin? It's probably a stupid question but it's been bugging me for a while.

See, that's actually a really fun question and there are amazingly elaborate/bizarre answers (cf. Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo) and and lots and lots of painfully boring ones (cf. anything written by John Calvin).

The convention answers are all centered around the idea that God offered Jesus as a sacrifice (to whom... the GODS??) in order to atone for mankind's falling. Jesus' death was never intended to be taken as a free pass to heaven for all humanity just because it happened, it was taken as like a gesture to legitimize man's quest for salvation in earnest. Simply put, man is so depraved in his natural state--BC or AD--that he can never DESERVE heaven. Jesus' death did not "remove" original sin per se (it's often simplified as saying it that way, so I'm not calling you out on saying it "wrong"), he merely came in to establish that original sin was no longer an end-all conclusion that bars people from eternal salvation. Hence, it's worth noting that the Old Testament Jewish culture sometimes referenced an afterlife, but in general it's clear that Judaism up to Jesus did not believe in an afterlife at all for the most part.

Convention: original sin says that everyone goes to hell. Jesus dying makes it not quite that bad; now you can work really hard and maybe not go to hell.

Okay! So, here's my take on it:
The early Jesus movement, known to us by literature written in the period from 10-70 years after his death, all has this overbearing theme that Jesus dying was a necessity for human salvation. Every age since then has taken it upon themselves explain what the hell that actually means and why.
It was Jesus' responsibility to take a few grains of truth from the classical, pre-Rabbinical Jewish religion and mold them into something that would better suit a more advanced, sociologically adept civilization. Genesis was written for rubes walking around aimlessly in the desert, Revelations was written for a fledgling movement being oppressed by a mighty formal empire.

The historical implausibility of the Jesus movement cannot be overstated and nobody's stating it. The secular camp doesn't say it because it seems to legitimize a historical person as being a theological image, and the religious camp doesn't say it because it calls his divinity into a scrutinized light that makes them uncomfortable. To culminate roughly seventy years of militaristic messianic expectation, to look no further than anti-Roman apocalyptic fervor, with the message "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" and "turn the other cheek" is the most baffling historical fluke possible.

The Gospels were written with the agenda of making the Jewish authorities look bad regarding Jesus' death (to call them anti-Semitic in this historical framework is non sequitur) but his actual death would have been completely nonchalant for the perpetrating Romans and a tipid roll of the eyes for mainstream Judaism. But the fact that Jesus as a historical character literally threw himself to death on a cross just so that people would take him seriously with a message that nobody on earth wanted to hear... that to me is absolutely amazing in a purely historical framework. It was literally the best PR move in history.

To me, you can kind of put that together into this idea that Jesus died senselessly with the goal in mind that people would take his message seriously.

I see, thanks.

The more you know!

Genuine thank-yous to Seth.

I probably have to go back to school in the fall >:

Over the weekend we went to a nature preserve for a hike. It was a prairie trail and there were all of these teeny juvenile toads all over the gravel (probably drawn to the warmth). I picked up and photographed several of them and skipped off in the benevolent afterglow of having communed with nature.

Then I got home and saw that my garage glue trap (intended to catch a very large and elusive spider) had instead trapped a baby toad.

I suck :(

Wow!

Yeah, shut up. Jackass. I've already mentioned that bullshit in here & got shot down by MattJack.

FIEEEEESSTTYY

I got slighty confused, OK?

I thought for a second that there remained a place on the forums for that sort of shit, but of course that is no longer the case, as Tadao so eloquently pointed out. It's all idiocy and emoticons now. >:

What did you think of the Pink Floyd, Danny? :x

:picklehat

I really like pink floyd :x

THAT GOOD? :eek