New Comedian Charles Haycock

 New to me, anyway.

 

He has a whole channel, unsurprisingly 

English's Closest Relatives

 Test yourself how well you can read a familiar text in Scots, West Frisian, and Low German. Can You Understand English's Closest Relatives? The Lord's Prayer is often used for such examples, as readers are familiar with it. Heh. Used to be, anyway. I would add Old English 

 Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum, si þin nama gehalgod. to becume þin rice, gewurþe ðin willa, on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg, and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum. and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele soþlice.

And Middle English to the quiz for comparison, 

 Oure fadir þat art in heuenes halwid be þi name; þi reume or kyngdom come to be. Be þi wille don in herþe as it is dounin heuene. yeue to us today oure eche dayes bred. And foryeue to us oure dettis þat is oure synnys as we foryeuen to oure dettouris şat is to men þat han synned in us. And lede us not into temptacion but delyuere us from euyl.

For Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Middle English both, it will help if you know that the "þ" is a thorn, "ð" is a eth, and both are pronounced "th," as in thee/thine. For Middle English, "u" is sometimes pronounced v, and "y" is sometimes pronounced hard g.

Three From Lyman Stone

 Are 3-Child Families a Luxury Good? Lyman really doesn't like the Survey of Consumer Finances as a Statistical Source.

Babies Are Not For Cowards  I noticed years ago that people with more optimism about the future had more children.  Apparently this is international

What Census Was Luke Talking About?  If you are a demographer and a Christian you look at different questions than the usual.

Recent links

 Smart People Love New Ideas, Even When They Are Bad.  Rob Henderson. Some people just like novelty too much.  "Sometimes the old solution has been around a long time because it works." 

Smart Therapist  Therapy works best when it is life coaching.

Pink-Washing Patriarchy I do not usually trend much to this topic, but this was interesting.

How Many People Live Paycheck to Paycheck?   One can find all kinds of big numbers for this and its companion that most people cannot afford at $400 or $1000 emergency bill. Guess what? 

Committed Leftists Are Not Just "Very Liberal"

Those Tradwives, eh?

 Fred felt neglected because Wilma spent so much time on TV

 

Education and Prejudice

 Does Education Make Us More Prejudiced? 

It depends. The story is usually that college makes young people more liberal, but it would be more accurate to say that it makes liberals more anti-conservative, and conservatives more anti-liberal.  The effect is stronger depending on the strength of belief. Moderates don't seem to move much at all.

Bible Study Analogies

I have described my dislike of many Bible study guides, especially their questions. "Where have you seen God at work in your life this week? What can you do to notice more of this?"  These are not gripping questions. Analogies and metaphors work better.  You will notice, BTW, that his is how Jesus taught, and he may have known a thing or two.

Psalms 3-7* were part of our sermon series and discussion this week. Our class study guide included the summary of those " Which of the five rooms are you in this season — the flight, the sleepless night, the watched morning, the bottom, the hunt?"

Hebrews comments on that. Our study summarises  "Your kingdom, Dallas Willard said, is the
range of your effective will — the kitchen, the desk, the hospital bed — and it was never meant to compete with God's, only to be joined to it."  It goes on to ask "Which kingdom is yours this month — the cubicle, the kitchen table, the hospital bed?"

Those are better questions. 

 

AI Uses

I am trying to clear space in one cupboard.  "Which will go bad first, fish sauce or oyster sauce?" Fish sauce even after opening will last 3-5 years.  Oyster sauce should be refrigerated after opening (oops) and will last 3-6 months.  

Thank you.

Thank This Engine of Advancement

 Humans Are Flourishing More Than Ever. Washington Post.

 Journalist Matt Ridley wrote that, in the two generations from 1955 to 2005, “the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer.”

The United States, in particular, has experienced strong growth. From 1970 to 2024, inflation-adjusted household income has increased from $59,000 to almost $84,000. Lower-income households have seen gains of roughly 35 percent during that same period, and educational opportunities have expanded.

Quite different from what one sees on social media these days.

Humans have a tendency to remember good times rather than bad, and thus idealise the past. I wonder why?  It seems to make us less happy in the present and more pessimistic about the future. Like the Ukrainian woman who remembered that there was always enough food under Stalin, not like when she was interviewed in the 1950s, we are quite certain life was better in the old days. The food was tastier, the girls were prettier, and kids knew how to apply themselves and understood the value of a dollar.

I often think of Garrison Keillor's line that we believe life was simpler then, because we were children, and out lives were looked after by others.  But it wasn't simpler for them.  In fact, it was harder. Why do we find this so impossible to believe? 

Who Knows Where the Time Goes

 

Why Evangelicalism is Winning

 Ross Douthat writing in the Free Press. I think he summarises very well, for me capturing both my admiration and suspicion for a brand of Christianity that I am forever half-in, half out of. One point he captures more accurately than I have before seen, is the defense against the accusation that evangelicalism is theocratic. That has always just plain rung false to me, yet the evidence critics bring forward for that idea has always had much truth in it. I have not countered the charge well. Douthat does.

 Evangelical political engagement is more likely to be defensive than controlling or incipiently theocratic.

Yes, this. Evangelicalism is not theocratic, but it is defensive, the great destroyer of all the other claimants to (theo)cracies that pretend to not be religions. As an overly-flexible, cliche-ridden faith, it knows another religion when it sees one, however many veils those may dance behind. The princess detects the pea under a dozen mattresses. Wokeness, politicised liberal Christianity, Country-Over-God, the Gospel of Nice, the Big Guy Upstairs, the Pale Galilean, All-Faiths-the-Same, the Inherited God, the Good Persons, Somber Churchiness, the God of Funerals - all of these are cut to earth by the Evangelicals more quickly than by other brands. Each of these small gods is bitter against the diagnostic X-Ray that is evangelicalism.

Cross-posted at Substack 

Recent Links

There are so many from The Free Press.  I think you should just check in on them without my prompting at this point. I put in two at the end.

Technology, Decentralization and Recentralization David Foster. Communication decentralised with the internet, but is now recentralising. Probably not good.

Two From Works in Progress  

What caused the end of the Bronze Age? The puzzle has never been the collapse. Collapse of civilizations happen all the time. That level of organisation is a fragile thing.  But why did nothing rise again for centuries? This is a good theory.

Mosquitos are a Choice  I do get suspicious when people say "If we only had the courage." 

I love N3's thinking, even when it is on subjects I care little about. Dinosaurs that evolved ultra-high intelligence. My first thought was "Yeah, compared to other dinosaurs.  Big Whoop." I am not a subscriber and don't have access to the rest of the story.  But even in a few sentences - yeah, that's a good point.

Max Spero of AI-detector Pangram - who awaits the threatened lawsuits eagerly, because he is certain he can hold his ground.

I think the work that we’re doing is really prosocial,” he said. “The future that I’m working toward is a world where people value humanity and we find an inherent value in words or content from humans, even if Claude could have said the same things better.

A follow up to that:  The Last Essay

Late Harvest

 These are always the last harvest of the season.

Not really a cash crop, more like cash transfer.  I suppose not much else grows on such marginal land by the side of the road.

Theo of Golden

Book club is discussing Theo of Golden tonight. I have read a few chapters and fear that my dominant conversational style will push out others who know more - even though the the others are predominantly university professors.* I may not go tonight. I do not think this will hasten or retard the Second Coming.

His name is Theo.  He arrives at Easter. The town is called Golden.  He is clearly a quiet elite who is encouraging to the common people. What I have read is charming. Got it? I think it is likely to be heartwarming, but because it appeals to many moderns it must have some ambiguity and complexity to it. I don't fault that, because that pretty much describes Tolkien and Lewis's heroic fiction, doesn't it?  And they are the foundation of so much of my emotional, cultural, spiritual, and moral outlook that I should hesitate to reject any echo of that...correct?

Yeah, maybe not. Among my wife, my son, and my daughter-in-law I think they will have these things covered.  

*They are generous and affirming, which probably encourages me too much. But my career was largely explaining mental health law to lawyers who thought they could bully me; systems to other agencies; or practical mental health to OneSky psychologists, etc. Even when I'm wrong I can lay down a marker. But that strength is a weakness in book discussions, isn't it?

Color Revolution Updates

Grim has been covering the CIA/USAID (and possibly Soros network?) plots to foment a color revolution.

In America. 

This is commentary on the DataRepublican expose, including video of what has been said by both retired and active members of government about declaring our government illegitimate, giving reason to ignore constitutional protections. It is as chilling an account about the future of the Republic as I have read. These are people who very much know what they are doing, as they have done it before in other countries.

I don't usually link to an ongoing series.  In fact, I don't think I ever have.  

 Warning Shots

Warning Shots Confirmed 

Charming

 

This is exactly the sort of muscle control that I do not have. I am always impressed.

This is Oleg and Natalya Kiryushin, BTW 

Deer

What do you call a deer with two eyes?

Diir.

What do you call a deer with three eyes? 

Seymour

What do you call a deer with no eyes?

No idear 

New Blogger Content Policy

 It all sounds very fair and reasonable. 

I can already imagine how this policy could be abused. 

Organised Skepticism

This refers to #4 of  Robert K Merton and the Mertonian Norms. I am focusing here only on organised skepticism, which Jerry Z Muller brought up in an Unsupervised Learning podcast.  It is the idea that the academic disciplines, both science and humanities, rely not only on skepticism to move forward, but a whole structure of it.  One learns to think in terms of what the critics might say and begin to defend against it.  A thesis is defended against some who will be unsympathetic. Publishing will be reviewed by your opponents. In this way, one is supposed to do a lot of the intellectual discussing in one's own head before putting it out to the world as a further understanding of the truth. Muller believes this is being lost and in some fields has already vanished.

Evangelising For Theism

The topic is going to eventually be that CS Lewis's fiction evangelises for monotheism, and even for simple theism far more than he evangelises for Christianity in specific.  But I will wander about the meadow telling you how I got here first.

********* 

Where have my Jews gone? They made up a good percentage of my friends at work and before that in school, plus a smattering in town activities and businesses I went to. But I'm not at work, I don't go to town functions, and the volunteer work I do doesn't seem to attract them. A lot of my going out is for church-related functions. I am just noticing it now because of Jews coming back into my life: a recent high school reunion, my new friend Rivka on one of my zoom calls, and a childhood friend I tracked down. You don't know what you've got till it's gone...*

One of the reasons it's important is it's a way of mentally checking your work. For the twenty years of my blog it is an automatic exercise to think What are the women in my generation going to think of that idea?  Will they have a counter? What would a bright, decent Millennial make of that phrasing? I wonder what my grandfather would have thought? Does that sound insulting to people who chose that profession? Until recently, that included "Would Frank or David or Esther challenge that?" especially on religious questions. I keep a lot of religious groups in mind when I write, anticipating both what their intellectual and their emotional reaction might be. It goes by pretty quickly at this point.  It's well-worn territory.

It came to mind because I quoted CS Lewis to one friend and realised I had no idea what her familiarity with him is.  Two things I saw: Even though my motto is "The solution to everything is to read more CS Lewis," I had never given or even recommended one of his books to a Jewish friend; however, I would quote him to them or put quotes in an online context where I knew many Jews would be reading, because in isolation, there was nothing that would offend.  It would be a general spiritual understanding as applicable to Jews as to Christians.

That was a fun puzzle. Noticing such things and asking "Well, why do I do that?" is something I find fascinating, not frightening. I have learned that most others find it intimidating. I mentally ran through the list of the scores of books by Lewis. I remembered also the series on Pints With Jack of Lewis fans who were outside our usual boundaries: an Eastern Orthodox priest relating his fondness for Lewis's writing; a Benedictine monk; an atheist who had a whole site devoted to atheists who loved Lewis; a Jew who who likewise had a site of other Jewish fans of Jack; a Mormon, a Bahai, a spiritualist - which is ironic since Lewis had such cutting things to say about them, having dabbled in the occult himself as a young man.

I remembered also that the serious Humanist and Effective Altruist Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten wrote admiringly and knowledgeably about GK Chesterton, and detailed his intense examination of Lewis's case for Christianity and said "He almost convinced me." Lewis's popularity outside of Western Christian circles has been hiding in plain sight. Tolkien, we knew. Even though LOTR is deeply Catholic, that is disguised, almost subterranean. But Lewis seemed more overt. 

What follows took only a few minutes.  It is not something I have been mulling for weeks or months, nor is what follows. Yet once the lock has been picked, the contents of the room are easy to see.

*******

Here we go then. People outside of Christian circles have likely heard of Lewis in either of two ways: his fiction or his literary work. For the latter, it is mostly late collegiate or even graduate students who are most familiar with "An Introduction to Paradise Lost," "An Experiment in Criticism," Vol 5 of the Oxford History of English Literature,**  The Discarded Image, "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem," and many others. His secular audience seldom sees that much of his advantage here is not only that he believes and understands the theology, but that he is Medieval and Renaissance in spirit himself, and thus a native of these lands, seeing no boundary between them. It is worth noting that he was one of, if not the authority on that period in his and his influence lasts even until now, while most of the others have vanished beneath the waves.

The general audience knows him more from his fiction, especially the Narnia Chronicles or their movies. The biggest specifically Christian hurdle is from The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe, the first and most famous of the series in which death and resurrection are central to the plot, and that alone may keep Jews or the generally unsympathetic from exploring further. In the rest of the series, the position of Aslan as the second person of the Trinity is more backgrounded. It is there in full color of orthodoxy, but it it is explanatory and descriptive, central to the full understanding but not the plot.  I learned this from the atheist guest on the podcast who noted that the stories are simply good stories in the Western Tradition, and he would skim the Jesus-ness to keep riding the story. (Which Lewis would consider a victory.) Last Battle owes a good deal to Daniel and other prophets, not just the Revelation to John.  It was the Israelites who were first informed that the whole of creation is coming to an end some day and reoriented their thinking around that. Everyone else on the planet remained in seasonal or circular time. The Jews made the cycles helical. Dawn Treader has acres of Christian symbolism in it, but even most Christians miss that. The Horse and His Boy owes much to Joseph in Egypt; The Magician's Nephew is a reworking of Adam and the Fall; The Silver Chair is the OT histories in mythic form. 

In the Ransom Trilogy it is the unfallen nature of Mars versus fallen Earth, the Silent Planet, followed by Perelandra's fall hanging in the balance. The last book is about the origins of good and evil power. It is deeply Christian, but not to the exclusion of Judaism. Similarly, Screwtape has some starkly Christian declarations, but contextualised to 20th C Anglican England.  It could be recast in Israel without much trouble.  The Great Divorce uses imagined Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory which are not central to Jewish theology, but the spiritual battles are all monotheistic: will you surrender to God or not? Till We Have Faces uses polytheistic, almost animist elements to tell its Christian lessons, and as in Tolkien, no Jesus appears.

I thought I would spend time on his philosophical works, in which his Christian belief is not directly present, except by intuition, but I think I will leave those alone. The Abolition of Man, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and even The Pilgrim's Regress make the case for monotheism and specifically Judaism long before Christianity is even mentioned. This reflects his own long conversion, from teenage atheism to indeterminate theism by 1929, to monotheism in 1930 and only at the end of 1931 “When we [Warnie and Jack] set out [by motorcycle to the Whipsnade Zoo] I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”  But however widely applicable they could be, they are mostly read only by Christians these days. One would think that Mere Christianity would be more overt, but here again he is very methodical, pointing out to the reader at the end of a chapter that we have only dismantled materialism thus far, and said nothing about any religion...then we have only established a somethingism here...then we have eliminated dualism and weakened polytheism...and well along in the text before we are left with a God of some definite Personality, not a life-force or a repeated cycle... It is Jewish long before it is Christian.

Most Western Jews are already used to living in a world where their POV is an influence but not a controlling one.  They seem to navigate around that and understand the culture anyway.  Lewis, for all his Christ-specific theology, can travel on the road with them much longer than Shakespeare, Voltaire, and nearly every 19th and 20th C intellectual.

I never saw it. 

Enjoy. Reading more CS Lewis is the solution to everything.

I will cross post this on Substack 

 

*  I went on medication for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in the 1980s, yet did not notice that one of the things that stopped was my automatic imagining of spoonerisms (which fortunately, I did not say aloud).  Only when I stopped the medication a few years later did I notice I was again reflexively thinking "keys and parrots" for "peas and carrots" or looking at the Market Basket sign and thinking Barket Masket. Every damn time.

** This took twenty years.  He referred to it by pronouncing its initials, OHEL.