Edwin Wise

Friday!

I wonder how many entries labelled "Friday!" I can rack up in one year?

Well, this week I've written a bunch of code ... now I have to figure out how to test it! My current compile is giving me an internal compiler error, which is never good.

I'm testing up to Red Sash next week... so I'll be spending this weekend making sure I have the knowledge bits down. Tom keeps adapting and adjusting his curriculum, so we tend to get tested on things that we actually haven't learned. Keeps us on our toes!

More people should keep journals like this... for the (very) few postings that Marla has made, I found them interesting reading. It doesn't matter that the log is full of banal daily life. Its a way to keep in touch, to know that the person is still alive.

I have some friends who keep "Live Journal" accounts. I suppose I should visit those!

Lots of journals or blogs try to be political or artsy or guides to the 'web... and actually, I don't like those. Mostly it is interesting to read about people you know, see what they are up to.

Strangers reading this would probably be bored to tears (and heck, for all I know, so is my family!)... sometimes I wonder why even do this?

I've tried off and on over my whole life to keep some kind of journal... I don't know why, maybe just to have a record of my thoughts and what has happened to me over my life. You know, so my heirs can sit down and have a good chuckle over what an idiot I was...

During the Boris project, the Journal was there to keep me on track, and to make the project public enough so that I would have external pressure to finish it. And it worked!

Hmmm... actually, I'm ending this book and will be ramping up my work for Haunted Trails. Maybe I should hook up pictures and discussion of the job of creating the special effects and directing trails this year. That could be fun.

I also need to update my Halloween pages, to put last year's trail into them! I'm way behind on my web page content.

I'm _also_ going to be working on my Zombie story this fall (does the excitement never end?)... and I've been thinking about developing it online, so I could poke at it from work or as I travel, or whatever. But fiction never reads right until it has gone through a few passes of editing, so I'm not sure about that.

I *am* working on some book ideas with my father, online, about religion. I've had the sense that religions, damned near all of the organized ones and certainly all of the visible churches, are doing it wrong. Seriously wrong, with serious and dangerous results for the path of humanity. But this project stays under wraps, because it is so rough, and I really don't want random people poking through it.

Of course, how can any book change the course of humanity? Even really good books, with really good ideas, with websites and communities to back them up -- like Ishmael, for example -- seem to barely make a dent.

And people aren't going to want to hear that their beloved rituals are useless. That it's not what you do or what you eat or don't eat that count, it's who you are, how you interact with the world and the people around you. It's not the many rules of conduct, followed under threat of punishment, but who you choose to be in life on the inside, where it counts.

Reading the Cahill books, the story of Christianity (which is really just a continuation of Judaism, which itself is...well, whatever) is a story of humanity changing and adapting, growing up even.

At first, people were in a loop. Everything that was, was always, and anything that was to be had already been. The great cycle of life, a circle. Isn't this like the perception of infants and the young child? Everything has always been this way, and it always will!

But that passes. Then the child grows up some, but doesn't know how to behave in the world. They have wild instincts and lots of energy... and need firm, definite rules. Mom's usual response -- Because I Said So. No explanation.

As the child grows up they are able to understand more. Then the rules relax and you get that explanation... in the hopes that , once you have the reasons, you can extrapolate the rules to new situations. That the youth will be able to guide their own life better, with flexibility. But still, the parent is there for advice and to help.

But one day the parent dies. The youth is an adult, and must make their own way in the world, take responsibility for their actions.

It seems to me that people are still trying to be the youth, following the rules and guidance of the parent. But the parent has died! Two thousand years ago, we were supposed to have graduated to adulthood... but for the most part haven't.

The churches try to be the parent, the people still want to be children. But the child doesn't take responsibility, doesn't guide himself, is not _free_. And Jesus' message was about freedom. But freedom is scary, it is freedom to fail, to make mistakes. It is safer, less scary to follow the simple rules, to be guided by the parent. But is that what we really want to be? Is that how we want to live our lives?

Posted by Edwin at June 11, 2004 08:34 AM