The Empire of Raan

I just wrote my religion exam this morning and one of the questions was to compare the attitude towards Jews in one canonical Christian text (from the New Testament) and one non-canonical text. For my answer I chose the Gospel of Matthew (hereinafter referred to simply as Matthew) and Melito's On the Passover (hereinafter referred to as Melito). The differencs are striking.
Matthew writes at a time when Christianity is viewed as the fulfillment of Judaism. The Christians of his time believe that the Jews have made some poor choices in the past and their religon isn't quite right but they are close and we owe them a great deal for getting us started. In Matthew's account of the death of Christ he is killed by the Romans through a corruption of the courts. The ones to blame are Pontius Pilate and the Pharisees. Who the Pharisees are/were is a complex enough question that I'm not willing to go into right now, in this story they represent the Jewish leaders of the time. In the story they are corrupt and desperate to destroy the radical Jesus' threat to their status quo.
Melito writes in a very different time (sometime before his death in 190 CE). Some of the conections with the old religion have faded and Christianity is no longer considered simply a sect of Judaism. In Melito the Romans have been excised completely from the text, the Jews are solely responsible for the death of Christ. Melito further refers only to "The Jews", no mention that in biblical accounts it is only some Jews, Melito makes them all culpable. The even more damning aspect of Melito's work is that he makes a strong case for Jesus as God, not only the son of God but part of him. This means that the Jews not only killed Jesus single-handedly but commited deicide as opposed to murder.

I'm not sure why I wrote this, just on my mind. For all his hatred of Judaism Melito writes beautiful, On the Passover is poetic and very powerful. It is fascinating to read Matthew and follow it up with Melito. I highly recommend it to anyone who can get a hold of both works.

Thanks to Professor Wilson for teaching me all this.

Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I. 7, 1098a16-19; trans. Hardie and Gaye, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 943.)

This is, obviously, from Book I of Aristotle's Ethics. Isn't it beautiful? I absolutely adore that sentence. Pedantic note 1: Happiness = Greek: Eudaimonia, virtue= Greek: Arrete. I wrote an essay about this this morning and I'm still a little burned out. I'll explain it tonight or tomorrow I think. Pedantic note 2: I tried posting this without providing the citation and I couldn't do it. The university has trained me well.

One more exam, anthro, then I am done. As of noon tomorrow I'll be drinking and partying in HUMS-like fashion, which will like involve impromptu music, phallis chickens and random discussions of religion and philosophy while we pass around bottles of wine. Liam's kicking around in my head again demanding attention so that'll probably force me to actually do some writing soon. I want to write about the Legion of the Damned, which is conveniently where Liam ends up within a year of where I left off. I really should study but I'm far more likely to go read webcomics. Bye for now.

P.S. An honest to God post script, actually written after the previous bit had been published. Turns out my computer problem was user stupidity. So, while the problem hasn't been solved the symptoms are gone for now.

Dear Everyone,
I had planned to write a little more of Liam's story, jumping ahead a bit, which would showcase some of the Imunorn and eventually he even starts to learn about them. However I am having quite serious computer trouble. Most of the time the computer functions as if the 'windows key' is depressed, so about half my letters become shortcuts. This makes typing impossible. It's okay right now, but it comes and goes, more coming then going. Dell tech support is convinced that windows is fucked (can I say 'fucked' on a blog? Do they censor these things?) and needs to be reinstalled. Since my windows CD is about 5 hours away that'll have to wait until I get home. Can anyone tell me how much data, if any, is lost when one re-installs Windows XP? Specifically, do I keep things like IE favorites and the "My Documents" folder? Argh, well, this is all for now. I'm going to try and write until the problem comes back. Bye for now.

I'm back! Actually I arrived in Toronto on Sunday and spent some long-overdue time with my family. I arrived back at school about an hour ago. Ireland is a beautiful country with a fascinating, if sad, history. I have pictures but I'm not sure about putting them on the internet, I'll have to ask Kate about that. I arrive back in Toronto for good in 10 days. With any luck there will be much rejoicing.

As to Raan, the land and its Empress are still firmly fixed in my mind, they stick around there quite a lot actually. I'm not sure what writing will come next but hopefuly inspiration will strike. I could write more about the nameless tatooed warrior, continue Liam's story, jump ahead to later in Liam's life (it's a very long and sad saga), or try and come up with story which gives more data about the Imunorn. Exams are coming up so things might be sporadic. Ta ta.



P.S. (Although not really) I might write about Irish things. I'm considering the idea.

In keeping with trying to do this blog thing more often I'm going to start mentioning when I'll be away for large blocks of time. So I'm going to Ireland, be gone for a week. Likely no updates until around the 12th. Bye.

Hello loyal reader (Laura) and possible silent readers. Today/yesterday/tonight marks my one year anniversary with the delightful Kate. It's been a surprising and rocky road, but we've come through it and thrived. She approached me like a cactus, sneaking past my tough, spiny exterior and finding the sweet pulp beneath. I love you Kate, here's to many more years to come.

On another note, I've now used up all of my pre-written Raan stuff. So now I have to actually start writing new things to fill these posts. Can I run some kind of census? How many people are reading this? And to anyone who is reading: What do you want to know about my little (big) Empire?