Philosophical randomness
Dec. 12th, 2004 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamer_easyWesley Osam used the wonderful phrase "like asking a priest to transubstantiate a Pop Tart" over on Jade Pagoda. In my philosophical blundering I have compared the concept of transubstantiation to Otherkin in this very LJ. Some more thoughts on the concept of changing the essence of a thing, without changing its external characteristics:
- I think it's incompatible with Buddhist philosophy, in which there would be no essence to be transformed.
- It's a bit like the Polymorph spell in D&D.
- *Could* a priest transubstantiate a Pop Tart? Your answers on the back of a postcard.
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rjanderson_blog: a famous atheist has now become a famous deist. Horribly this appears to be because of his shaky grip on biological science. I was gloating about this until I realised I have my own suspicions about the apparent fine-tuning of the universe's physics to permit Life As We Know It. If you don't understand how genes and evolution and things work, then of course they look miraculous and clever, but when you know a few things about them they look rather the opposite - clumsy, bungling, wasteful, cruel, short-sighted, desperately improvisational. We don't know how universes come about, so I could be suffering from the same illusion. What could be more wasteful, cruel, and short-sighted than a flat universe?
- I think it's incompatible with Buddhist philosophy, in which there would be no essence to be transformed.
- It's a bit like the Polymorph spell in D&D.
- *Could* a priest transubstantiate a Pop Tart? Your answers on the back of a postcard.
Gakked from
rjanderson_blog: a famous atheist has now become a famous deist. Horribly this appears to be because of his shaky grip on biological science. I was gloating about this until I realised I have my own suspicions about the apparent fine-tuning of the universe's physics to permit Life As We Know It. If you don't understand how genes and evolution and things work, then of course they look miraculous and clever, but when you know a few things about them they look rather the opposite - clumsy, bungling, wasteful, cruel, short-sighted, desperately improvisational. We don't know how universes come about, so I could be suffering from the same illusion. What could be more wasteful, cruel, and short-sighted than a flat universe?
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 02:18 am (UTC)I could transubstantiate a pop tart, and I'm an existentialist.
Just stick a couple of razorblades inside it, and it transforms instantly from a tasty if not necessarily healthy snack into a trecherous urban legend you wouldn't bite into if you knew what I'd done.
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Date: 2004-12-12 03:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 03:26 am (UTC)Mists of time -> Passover -> Communion -> Masons -> Wiccans -> Burger King hamburger bun -> space nutrition pills
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Date: 2004-12-12 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 07:06 pm (UTC)"And yet..." (sorry Kate) Did the ritual food get transubstantiated? In the rituals I've been in, the food, where applicable, is either eaten with reverence but is still "just food", or else it's symbolic of something else. No mystical transformations.
I don't know where a Catholic priest would draw the line either, but I seem to recall that leavened bread is disallowed. Anyone know if Pop Tarts are leavened?
no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 07:31 pm (UTC)According to the Catholic Encyclopedia of , a valid host has to be:
- made of wheaten flour,
- mixed with pure natural water,
- baked in an oven, or between two heated iron moulds, and
- they must not be corrupted (Miss. Rom., De Defectibus, III, 1).
The ingredients of an Apple Attack Pop Tart:
Wheat flour, glucose syrup, invert sugar syrup, dextrose, apple (10%), hydrogenated vegetable oil, starch, sugar, salt, raising agent (sodium hydrogen carbonate, diphosphates, calcium phosphate), malic acid, flavouring, cinnamon, stabiliser (xantham gum), milk whey powder.
The type of flour is OK, the Pop Tart is presumably baked before it makes it to your toaster, and with all that sugar and crap it's unlikely to have started to go off. But there's no mention of water in that list! Is this a quirk of ingredient labelling, or is it really absent? And does a non-yeast leavening agent count?
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Date: 2004-12-12 08:27 pm (UTC)That strikes me as a perfect way for the moslem world to get back at America. Start making American style adds and TV shows, with an anti-christian bent... I am positive that some multinationals would love to take advantage of the cultural differences in their advertising campeigns.
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Date: 2004-12-12 09:05 pm (UTC)omfg
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Date: 2004-12-12 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 05:54 pm (UTC)My favourite transubstantiation involves converting humans to pod people...
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Date: 2004-12-12 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-12 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-13 09:20 am (UTC)I brought up circular reasoning at a pagan get-together once, only to hear "We're pagans. We *like* circles."
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Date: 2004-12-13 11:46 am (UTC)That argument is so curved I can actually feel my mind bend as I think about it.
Kudos.
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Date: 2004-12-13 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-13 11:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 04:43 am (UTC)omg tangential argument!
Date: 2004-12-14 10:48 am (UTC)"It's not a Goddess, it's prehistoric Playboy"
I thought too, once (still do, sometimes). But then I read a paper (wish I could remember where) that gave excellent evidence that those venus figurines were neither goddesses nor prehistoric porn. The author seemed to think they were sacrifices.
Evidence being, in part, that they showed almost no wear. As if they'd been made and then buried soon after, rather than being carted about as a seminomadic would likely do with their deities or their porn. Specifically, the author suggested that the figurines were decoy sacrifices, given to whatever gods or spirits or demons like to claim women in childbirth. Instead of a real live woman, the prehistoric people offered up stone representations. And made them extra-curvy and plump and pregnant-looking so they'd be all that much more, er, tasty.
Seems a reasonable hypothesis to me.
desire / hunger
Date: 2004-12-14 11:44 am (UTC)but seriously, interesting hypothesis, with some merit. I kinda like it. In a white wine sauce. ;)
Re: desire / hunger
Date: 2004-12-14 07:49 pm (UTC)I think I'll stick with the sanctified Pop Tarts, thanks.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 07:47 pm (UTC)Innit tho'? Particularly fun is the thought of neo-pagans worshipping what might have been standard obstetric tools of the stone age.
I don't know if this helps, but one of the other bits of evidence cited (to support the "it's not a fertility goddess dammit" hypothesis) is that present-day hunter-gatherer societies don't generally have fertility gods or goddesses. Fertility/fecundity is, for them, a mixed blessing at best, as it results in more mouths to feed. Fertility gods and goddesses seem to have appeared with agriculture, which could feed more people on less land but only if there were enough hands to work the land.
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Date: 2004-12-13 05:17 pm (UTC)I copmpletely do not understand why anybody takes the anthropomorphic principle to be evidence of a creator.
It comes down to this.
"Observers are only possible in a universe of characteristics X."
We observe that the Universe does, in fact, have characteristics X.
How could it be otherwise?
And this tells us NOTHING about the possibility of a Creator.
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Date: 2004-12-13 08:30 pm (UTC)