If I have to apply a religious label to myself, it's Methodist. Quoth the Wikipedia, "The [Methodist] movement focused on Bible study and a methodical approach to scriptures and Christian living." That is, the Methodist moniker denotes a devotion to examination of the Bible and life to determine religious doctrine. I've heard it called "faith through reason," which is as good of a description of my spiritual beliefs as I've ever heard. It is a bit hard to pigeonhole me: doctrinally, I differ significantly from the traditional Methodist dogma. And in the modern Christian world, it's largely a moot point: the key difference between the Methodist churches and the Presbyterian churches I've attended is whether they say "sins" or "debts" during the Lord's Prayer.
(As an aside, the Lord's Prayer is one of my favorite things from Jesus. Here we have Christ telling people, "Listen, don't stress out so much about prayer. If you're so worried about it, just follow this script and you'll be fine." It is short, simple, and humble. In Matthew 6, when he teaches the Lord's Prayer, Jesus says not to pray boastfully or noticeably or even particularly fervently, and provides the perfect, eternally acceptable prayer. God doesn't need specific requests: simply that you willingly ask for help)
When you read the Bible critically, it is easy to become confused, disillusioned or lost. It is a dangerous and lovely document. It is self-contradictory, it presents God as unnecessarily cruel, it includes stories that seem completely meaningless. Genesis contains two fairly different accounts of creation, a story in which God plays favorites (Cain and Abel), a story in which a supposedly-perfect God has to destroy his own work due to its imperfection (the Great Flood), a story in which a man's entire descendant bloodline is cursed because his father saw his grandfather naked (Noah's son, Ham, sees him in a drunken stupor. Noah curses Canaan, Ham's son. God, apparently, is okay with this. Genesis 9), and, of course, the Tower of Babel. This last is an exceptionally odd story, one of the ones liable to make me close the book in disgust with the God described, who cannot be the God I worship.
To recap the story: mankind begins to make bricks and build a city. They say to each other, "Let us build a tower to the sky," and they set to work. God sees that they are working well together, that they are not fighting, that they are working productively to better their station because they have one tongue. And God says, "Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."
This blew my mind when I first read it critically (that is, as an adult). Here, it seems, God causes strife among his children on purpose, so that they can't work together anymore. It is odd, offensive, running contrary to the image of a loving God held by Christians. But that is not the whole story.
When encountering a story like this, one must consider the quality of the truth it contains. It is clear that the Bible is not entirely and literally true. In Genesis 1, mankind is the last creation on the sixth day, after the beasts and birds and fish. In Genesis 2, the beasts and birds are created to be help meets for Adam, after Adam was created. It is contradictory and thus impossible for mankind to have been created both before and after the other animals.
But stories don't have to be literally true to be true. The purpose of the story of the Tower of Babel is not a historical account: it is a lesson for all of mankind, something that applies to every creed and color and religion or lack thereof. It is the story of what makes work admirable, of the value of effort in our lives.
As the Tower of Babel starts to rise, mankind is working with ease. A great structure is being built through mutual cooperation. Quite literally, mankind is reaching for the sky. It seems impressive.
It's not.
You see, the construction of the Tower was effortless, and nothing easy can be great. Consider the ancient wonders of the world: could we be impressed with the pyramids at Giza if they were built with bulldozers and cranes? The Hanging Gardens would be nothing more than a rather nice building using modern technology. Or consider those whose names we remember so long after their deaths: Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Picasso, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Mozart, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Harriet Tubman, Helen Keller, Emily Bronte and Charlotte Bronte (man, it's hard to think of more women before the 20th century, sorry). They were not people content with a settled and easy life, but who strove to press forward, to expand the bounds of the world through their efforts.
This, I think, is something more than a perception effect. Difficulty really does make an action more worthy, regardless of whether it makes it more memorable. A man who makes $50k a year and donates $10k to charity is more courageous and heroic than someone who makes $100k and donates $10k, even though the effect of their actions is the same.
So the Tower of Babel is the story of an effort doomed to mediocrity because of its ease. What's more, it's a lesson in the destiny of mankind. When God sees the Tower, he says "now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do." This is a supremely sad statement: never will their accomplishments be great, for nothing is out of their reach. God fixes this by artificially making life hard.
Here's the thing: the story probably never happened. Languages evolved in the anthropologically-accepted way: slowly, due to geographic isolation. That has nothing to do with the truth of the story, though. The Tower of Babel is a lesson in our destiny. We are a species who must strive to overcome difficulty, to seek greatness. When God confounds the tongues of man, he does so because without effort, we are nothing. The tale is a parable: for Christians, the lesson is that God wants us to have to work for our goals; for everyone, the lesson is that we do have to work for our goals. And the implicit conclusion is that we should glory in the effort, that the strife we face should be something we take pride in. Without it, we are worthless.
By my hand,
~Michael Akerman
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
The Still and Sacred Morning
I wake up early (pre-6) these days to get to work. After a good night's sleep, that first hour casts a stillness over the yet-dark world that settles over my mind in a blanket of peace. I desire, I have to admit, to relish it, to simply let it soak through me. It is the only time I ever want to sit for a while and pray, or meditate, or even slip outside and do some quiet manual labor.
On good mornings, I can see the appeal of the farmer's life: to step out in solitude before the cock crows and smell the quiet scent of morning on the fields. And I understand what is most succinctly called Sabbath: a break, a "sanctuary from time" when the rushing world slips by, felt but unheeded for once. This is where the magic of sunrise comes from for me.
I remember on camping trips in the Scouts that I would get up early on most mornings. Part of this is that I've always been restless in sleeping bags, but it gave me an opportunity for quiet contemplation. As the first few wakers rose (mostly adults), there was very little conversation. I would stoke up a morning fire, maybe make some coffee or start in on breakfast, but mostly I'd sit quietly and think on the world, listening to the stirring of the birds above. The wan light of morning is a gauzy magic.
I think I'm going to start waking early on weekends. Weekdays are, of course, no time for stillness: I'm always running late. I wonder if I can get my fill on those days when I would normally sleep in.
By my hand,
~Michael Akerman
On good mornings, I can see the appeal of the farmer's life: to step out in solitude before the cock crows and smell the quiet scent of morning on the fields. And I understand what is most succinctly called Sabbath: a break, a "sanctuary from time" when the rushing world slips by, felt but unheeded for once. This is where the magic of sunrise comes from for me.
I remember on camping trips in the Scouts that I would get up early on most mornings. Part of this is that I've always been restless in sleeping bags, but it gave me an opportunity for quiet contemplation. As the first few wakers rose (mostly adults), there was very little conversation. I would stoke up a morning fire, maybe make some coffee or start in on breakfast, but mostly I'd sit quietly and think on the world, listening to the stirring of the birds above. The wan light of morning is a gauzy magic.
I think I'm going to start waking early on weekends. Weekdays are, of course, no time for stillness: I'm always running late. I wonder if I can get my fill on those days when I would normally sleep in.
By my hand,
~Michael Akerman
Monday, September 7, 2009
Cycles
I go in weird cycles where I end up revisiting my favorite games of years gone by. I've played through The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past maybe five or six times now, and this is my third time playing Final Fantasy V. Viewtiful Joe, We <3 Katamari, several of the Mario games, and SSX 3. And a couple more (lots more on PC), I guess. DragonRealms, of course.
I don't know what it is: I know the stories, and I've sought ought most of the secrets. The mechanics of these games still linger in my consciousness, examples, I suppose, of what a game should be. They're sort of the archetypes, to me, of genres: epic action-adventure, JRPG, brawler, dunno what to call Katamari, platformer, snowboard game, text-based RPG.
We all have these sort of past joys that we tend to revisit, I think. Rereading the books you loved the first time is fun after a few years; Lolita is infinitely re-readable, for instance, even when one has the tale practically memorized (yo). I recently re-read the Harry Potter series. It was as fun the second time as it was the first. I wonder sometimes if I truly revisit these things because I still like them, or simply because I used to love them. I'm curious as to whether the nostalgia of youth casts a rosy light on otherwise normal things: certainly LoZ:ALTTP is an excellent game, but why do I count it better than Ocarina of Time? Why is Perfect Dark higher on my list than Goldeneye? Why does FFV beat FFVII (actually, VII wasn't that great)?
It doesn't really matter. I still enjoy them again on this go-round, and that's all that counts. Still, I wonder...
By my hand,
~Michael Akerman
I don't know what it is: I know the stories, and I've sought ought most of the secrets. The mechanics of these games still linger in my consciousness, examples, I suppose, of what a game should be. They're sort of the archetypes, to me, of genres: epic action-adventure, JRPG, brawler, dunno what to call Katamari, platformer, snowboard game, text-based RPG.
We all have these sort of past joys that we tend to revisit, I think. Rereading the books you loved the first time is fun after a few years; Lolita is infinitely re-readable, for instance, even when one has the tale practically memorized (yo). I recently re-read the Harry Potter series. It was as fun the second time as it was the first. I wonder sometimes if I truly revisit these things because I still like them, or simply because I used to love them. I'm curious as to whether the nostalgia of youth casts a rosy light on otherwise normal things: certainly LoZ:ALTTP is an excellent game, but why do I count it better than Ocarina of Time? Why is Perfect Dark higher on my list than Goldeneye? Why does FFV beat FFVII (actually, VII wasn't that great)?
It doesn't really matter. I still enjoy them again on this go-round, and that's all that counts. Still, I wonder...
By my hand,
~Michael Akerman
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Cultural Infidel
I've been trying (again) to learn Japanese. I have some wonderful audiobook language tapes (Pimsleur) that are really effective. It's hard to keep at it sometimes, so I'm trying to set aside a time every weekday to practice, a bit like how I've decided to post something every Saturday.
My worst retention is for the pair of kana writing systems used in Japanese. Like David Sedaris once said, the hiragana alphabet isn't something you just sort of pick up: you have to sit down and cram it in your brain. I learned them all at one point (using a My Japanese Coach for the DS, which is much better at teaching writing than the Pimsleur audiobooks are), but when I started back on the whole learning thing, I discovered that they'd completely slipped away.
Oh, well. Time to cram it back in again.
I think I started wanting to learn Japanese because I was thinking last year about the effect Japanese culture has had on me. Anime, video games, manga, sushi and otaku culture in general all swirl about my personal cultural heritage, touching on the ways I view the world and what I choose to experience in my free time. I would like to be able to watch anime and play import games in the native tongue, eventually.
It stands to reason, I think, that Japan should be so important to me. I am a gamer: have been since I was five or so, always will be. It's hard to deny that the nature of modern video gaming is predominantly a result of Japanese efforts and has been profoundly shaped by Japanese culture. Until a few years ago, when Microsoft released the XBox, all of the important consoles were Japanese. It was simply a Japanese industry until very recently.
It's neat to learn a language known by so few people in America. My friend Schuyler is learning Japanese as well, which gives the language almost a secret vibe for me, granting a sort of retreat that is gibberish to almost everyone that might be listening, even though nothing we talk about needs hiding anyway, and neither of us is fluent enough to carry on a serious conversation anyway.
There is one sticking point: it's hard to practice. If one is learning Spanish, one may pepper his language with Spanish words, and a lot of people will understand it, because a lot of people have taken at least one Spanish class. I think this keeps the language in the forefront of your mind, which makes it easier to learn, because you end up reflecting on it all day. Not so, in general, with Japanese.
It's kind of funny watching anime now. Random words pop up (choto, konban, tabemasu, osake, etc.) that I know, but I don't know enough to put them in context. At least I manage to hear them, I guess.
Anyway, until next time, さようなら (sayounara).
By my hand,
~Michael Akerman
My worst retention is for the pair of kana writing systems used in Japanese. Like David Sedaris once said, the hiragana alphabet isn't something you just sort of pick up: you have to sit down and cram it in your brain. I learned them all at one point (using a My Japanese Coach for the DS, which is much better at teaching writing than the Pimsleur audiobooks are), but when I started back on the whole learning thing, I discovered that they'd completely slipped away.
Oh, well. Time to cram it back in again.
I think I started wanting to learn Japanese because I was thinking last year about the effect Japanese culture has had on me. Anime, video games, manga, sushi and otaku culture in general all swirl about my personal cultural heritage, touching on the ways I view the world and what I choose to experience in my free time. I would like to be able to watch anime and play import games in the native tongue, eventually.
It stands to reason, I think, that Japan should be so important to me. I am a gamer: have been since I was five or so, always will be. It's hard to deny that the nature of modern video gaming is predominantly a result of Japanese efforts and has been profoundly shaped by Japanese culture. Until a few years ago, when Microsoft released the XBox, all of the important consoles were Japanese. It was simply a Japanese industry until very recently.
It's neat to learn a language known by so few people in America. My friend Schuyler is learning Japanese as well, which gives the language almost a secret vibe for me, granting a sort of retreat that is gibberish to almost everyone that might be listening, even though nothing we talk about needs hiding anyway, and neither of us is fluent enough to carry on a serious conversation anyway.
There is one sticking point: it's hard to practice. If one is learning Spanish, one may pepper his language with Spanish words, and a lot of people will understand it, because a lot of people have taken at least one Spanish class. I think this keeps the language in the forefront of your mind, which makes it easier to learn, because you end up reflecting on it all day. Not so, in general, with Japanese.
It's kind of funny watching anime now. Random words pop up (choto, konban, tabemasu, osake, etc.) that I know, but I don't know enough to put them in context. At least I manage to hear them, I guess.
Anyway, until next time, さようなら (sayounara).
By my hand,
~Michael Akerman
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