Curse of the Day:
¤ May your explanations try everyone's patience.

Word of the Moment:
¤ Word: Janky (adj)
¤ Usage: "That movie sucked.  It was hella-janky."
¤ Synonyms: Crappy, inadequate, lame, or to a lesser degree, just different than how you want something.
¤ Deviations: Jankalicious, jankitude. Frequently paired with "hella".
¤ Origin: Unknown/pop culture.  Malaya was using it regularly when I moved up here in mid-July and I'd heard it before, but hadn't really incorporated it into my vocabulary until hearing her use it frequently.
¤ Notes: Currently in heavy rotation, frequently used for comedic effect. Can be made to fit virtually all situations. -- August 5, 2003

Plus my two scoops of ice cream (strawberry/butter pecan) in a big waffle cone was tasty, and we had about two meals worth of leftovers from lunch.  Phase three: profit!

Now for a bit of news, and then a boring pet photo, before I discuss something relatively irreligious.  Again.

¤ Article today discussing the apparently-imminent demise of Penthouse magazine.  The article also makes much about Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, and the fact that he's about to lose his penthouse apartment in NYC.

Guccione, who is originally from Bergenfield, N.J., bought his 45-room, 20,000-square-foot mansion back in Penthouse’s 1970s heyday. Located on East 67th Street between Central Park and Madison Avenue, its décor includes a swimming pool modeled on a Roman bath and a collection of paintings by the likes of Picasso and Matisse. Guccione studied art before taking up porn publishing in London  in the late '60s.

As the buzz goes, and I've blogged about in the past, print porn seems to be dead or dying. The Internet is a far better porn-delivery system, with thousands of sites offering stuff as good or better than any magazine, for free.  I assume there are even more "good" pay porn sites, but I've never looked on any of them, so I really couldn't tell you.  In fact I've hardly glanced at any porn at all during the past month, but I'm assuming nothing has really changed during my absence.  Damn my actual sex life for ruining my surfing experience!

One more photo of the new rodent enclosure today, though I might actually have posted this one previously.  It's all pretty much a blur for me at this point, and I'm sure most of you agree, at least when it comes to yet another photo of something on our back deck.

This uninspired photo shows... rats.  In an aquarium.  Janky is eating, as usual, and Bo is lurking on top of the cage by the pipe up to heaven. As usual.  You can even see the state of the art cage lid fastening system in action, as the two 2.5lbs weights sit prominently atop the cage in all their slightly-rusted splendor.

Now let us never speak of this again.

That effort occasioned an email from a site reader by the name of Charlie, which goes as follows:

Refering to any major religion as mythology is liable to offend someone. I would argue that labelling any religion as a mythology is taking an inherently-biased, athesist viewpoint.

It would have probably been better if you had simpy used "Christianity" instead of "Christian mythology", this would have probably been taking the most objective POV:

"The first article on this page is by An'yee and in it she talks about which elements of Diablo II actually correspond to Christianity as presented in the Bible."

Christianity would have simply been the name of the religion and not implied it is the truth nor would it refute it as "mythology". 

He has a point, of course.  And I'd probably do it his way, if I didn't mind humoring what I see as delusions.

No wait, that's not what I mean.

Well it is, but it's not what I want to talk about today.

What I do want to talk about is what I thought about once spurred by this email to give it some thought.

In my email to the "in Christ" guy yesterday, and also in the blog comment I made about it here, I started to say something like "ancient Christian mythology" or "old beliefs" but scratched it both times when I realized that it didn't really make any sense.  Not to me, and not to the reader.

What I mean by "old beliefs," or "Christian mythology," or whatever I was going to say, is that it's part of the "religion" but an old part, or an unimportant part, or something like that.  If an article were about how Jesus is lord, or whatever, I wouldn't call it "christian mythology."  I'm not entirely sure why not, I mean I don't think that is true or makes any sense in the modern world, but I mean that that's a current, relevant belief for those of that faith, and therefore isn't "mythology."  What I think of as mythology, of any religion or culture, is the old stuff, the formative myths and such, 99.9% of which are just laughably pointless in this day and age of scientific knowledge.

My conception of most religions, at least as practiced in the modern Western world, is that very few of the practitioners really believe or have any use for the old "mythology" aspects, the stuff about world creation or how the first man came about, or the other stuff that's obviously silly about how demons and spirits fly through the air and cause the weather and anyone who is sick is possessed or demonic, and so on. The sort of stuff that conveniently gets dropped from the Bible in modern translations, and the sort of stuff that's in all the other religions, since it represents the current state of the art beliefs of people thousands of years ago, when 1) they didn't know any better, and 2) they wrote those "holy" books.

In theory, if you don't believe any part of the holy book of your faith of choice, you are a heretic or infidel or backslider or something.  But in practice, most sensible people (especially if they've ever seen a skeleton or chest X-ray) can't swallow stuff about how men have an uneven number of ribs since God made Eve from one, or that the entire earth was covered by 4 miles of water with no survivors but one boat full of two of every species of the several million types of animals on earth, or how men built a tower that reached almost all the way to heaven (outer space?), or whatever.  I'd term that stuff "mythology", since it's just obviously (to me, anyway) fiction of the creation-story type, and the vast majority of modern people, even people who would describe themselves as "religious," don't believe any of it.

People take a buffet line view of religion, and pick and choose the parts that they like and that they want to believe in, and just denial away the rest.  I mean look at the facts: One of the principle tenants of Catholicism is that the Pope is the direct conduit to and from God. The Pope constantly says that life is holy so there can be no birth control, abortion, or capital punishment.  Most Catholics in modern countries support birth control, legalized abortion, and capital punishment.

That's not the best example ever, but religions, like all belief systems, must modernize over time or become utterly obsolete and hypocritical. That doesn't stop them all; look at some of the horrible stuff going on in theocracies in parts of Africa, or how Afghanistan was under the Taliban. But for the most part, in the modern world, people don't pay much attention to the parts of their religion that are of no use to or inconvenient to them.  And sure, they'll all be burning in the hell of their own design come judgment day, but that's not today's point.

The point is that when I say "Christian mythology" in a news post on the D2 site, and it's in relation to an article on all the "old" stuff in the Bible, like demons and witches and the (New Testament only) fall of Lucifer and all of that, I'm not meaning it as a snide remark about how no religions have any magical truths to them (even though I feel that way personally).  I am meaning it as a shorthand way to refer to the old creation myths and stories that are not a part of modern religious worship.

Or something like that.

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