thread: 2007-02-26 : Exorcism followthrough
On 2007-03-01, NinJ wrote:
Christopher,
My grandmother was 96 when she died a couple of weeks ago. She held on exactly long enough to see my marry my wife, to see my cousin buy a house with his longtime girlfriend (we need a better word), and, a week after my new niece was named, my gramma died.
It was very clear to me that she was holding on to make sure that we were all OK. Clearly, a sense of purpose aids in survival.
Matt, I don't understand the difference in the "hard" problems. I take a fairly cybernetic view of the mind: inputs, outputs, and processing/dynamic storage in the middle. (Matt, did we go to Hampshire together?)
Sydney, many cultural anthropologists feel that the first unifying act of Judaism, historically speaking, was the Exodus; that the slaves of Egypt identified themselves as Jews, perhaps picking up the self-importance of a particular group from within the slaves. There's a particular interesting bit of liguistic midrash that I like that comes, of all things, from reading E.A. Wallace Budge's Egyptian Hieroglyphics: "Rameses" is a Greekification of Ra mes su, or Ra, reed child. Moses, "Mes su", receives his name because "I drew him out of the reeds." What this looks like to me is a slave revolt fomented by one of the royal family, who's on the outs, and takes the slaves away to be his people. There's an ambivalent relationship in Egyptian history with monotheism and this seems to have been one of those times. So, in that sense, Mes Su, if he's who I'm implying he is, used a persecuted people, gave them an identity, and started something new. This also explains Judaism's ambivalent relationship with authority, at least in a mythological way.
Also, "Maybe dying for your principles is good, but asking others do die for your principles is evil," is a good principle.
