Wallace Benn, Bishop of Lewes, really riled some folks in England when he likened the debate over allowing female bishops to the “serious threat” of warfare posed by “someone” months before the beginning of World War II. Lewes was explaining his view of women bishops to a conference of conservative Anglicans when he told his audience: “I’m about to use an analogy, and I use it quite deliberately and carefully. And it slightly frightens me to use it, but I do think it’s where we are at.”
The bishop continued: “I feel very much increasingly that we’re in January of 1939. We need to be aware that there is real serious warfare just round the corner. It’s actually arrived in some places already. And we’re in a challenging and serious situation.”
Gee, I wonder what the bishop could be referring to??? Well, most people thought he had the Nazis/Hitler in mind. Benn attempted to explain his comments:
“I was thinking in… terms of the storm clouds being on the horizon.
“People in January 1939 knew there was war coming, they knew there were some big issues, that unless something amazing happened there would be catastrophe.
“I was thinking in Churchillian terms and not of Hitler at all, except in the sense that Hitler was the problem.”
Benn urged the Reform members who attended the conference to “wake up” their parishes to the fact that their conservative style of ministry could be resigned to history if women are ordained as bishops.
That awful Eve–she started all the trouble! Bishop Benn is wise to the ways of women. Women spoil everything.
Sources:
Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
if you’re pushing 72 (and i have no reason to believe you’re not) and can remember your second grade teacher, then you’re not doing too bad. I’m a retired/disabled auto mechanic and airforce brat and i can barely recall what state i was in for the second grade (new jersey and alabama).
i’ve found computers have limited uses, looking for music now that i have a computer with more memory than my mp3 occupies most of my online time. i can build a computer out of spare parts but i need my daughter to program my phone.
i have other mouses (mice?), sometimes i forget my own rule for online, don’t write anything you won’t say to someones face.
I am so sorry, I simply did not understand, not until now, and plausibly not even now.
The computer I have been using does not have a “mouse.” I was in town some time ago, and, lo and behold, I recall seeing, in a store, a “mouse” with a “scroll wheel.”
Nudging toward age 72, my memory is not what it used to be.
Because I cannot afford to buy a mouse with a scroll wheel for this computer (a very obsolete model I got super-cheap through eBay) and it did not come with one, I use “Page Up” and “Page Down” to get through stuff I choose to not read.
This computer also came without a keyboard, but I found one of the proper brand at a rummage sale for free (some sticky fluid had spilled on it and several keys were stuck; I took it apart and washed the pieces carefully, put it back together, and it works as I think it ought.
Methinks we may need to take the whole of human society apart, wash away the notions that keep us stuck in diverse forms of hatred and its correlate of acted out in violence hatred, put it back together carefully, and we may finally be a species which no longer threatens the existence of the whole of earthly life.
I isn’t the onlie enginere who don’t git et. Henry Petroski, “The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems,” Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010. If’n I cud onlie sphell enginear, I mite kno I doen’t no. Me stupud. Me sorri. Is me gott lot’s uvh companne?
If I had been able to afford to buy a fancy mouse with a scroll wheel, I might have understood how much harm I was causing for those who can afford to have a mouse with scroll wheel.
Those of us who become disabled because of medical difficulties while yet in our forties, and who, in consequence thereof, have poverty-level pension and Social Security income have to do what we can to survive.
Yet I am inwardly content with the life I am able to live, even if I cannot afford to buy a mouse with a scroll wheel and be like those whom society accepts as being worthwhile people. I cannot learn to hate people. I could never learn to hate Miss Josephine Hanson, my second grade teacher or the principal, Mrs. Edith Knudsen, at Marshall School, in Eureka California, even though they taught me to accept shattering abuse in my keeping my inner integrity while they attempted to teach me to tell lies effectively. How could I find fault with them? I knew better and I knew that they didn’t, and that it was not their fault nor mine. Note that public employees (like school teachers) do not have the privacy rights of private employees.
He writes his verse after being water-boarded … clears his mind and cleans his sinuses … he knows what he knows even when he doesn’t know it.
lottakatz,
You’ll find more Rumsfeldian verses here:
From Slate ( April 2, 2003)
The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld
Recent works by the secretary of defense.
By Hart Seely
http://www.slate.com/id/2081042/
Elaine, I recall that briefing. I also recall the next year in an episode of The West Wing when President Bartlet’s Chief of Staff tells him that one of the judges on the SCOTUS is losing his mind and uses the fact the he has written a decision in Cinquain and other decision using other poetic formss as proof. I just knew that particularly wicked bit of business was about Rummy and his briefing.
How many of you remember the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld? Here’s one of his most memorable poetic quotes. It’s one of my favorites.
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Oh, oh, not again.
When I find words that I think may make sense to neurotypical people, the words often make little sense to me.
Such is life as I experience it.
Truthfulness, piled sufficiently higher and deeper may, in the next cycle of existence, become useful.
Severn Darden, at Second City, near the end of his metaphysics lecture skit, was asked, “What is truth?” and Darden answered, “I don’t know, and that’s the truth.”
When we learn that we don’t know, perhaps we will finally understand a thing from Will Rogers (and others); it is what we know that ain’t so…
lottakatz
please don’t get him going, i’m wearing out my mouse scrolling through the Ph.D (Piled higher and Deeper).
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E., Here’s what you wrote:
“What if those whose belief systems contravene mine have useful notions about human adaptation to life which would be of help to me in my living my life?
Were I to regard with any aspect of disrespect anyone whose life-philosophies I experience subjectively as though of horrible atrocities, how can I learn from those of my peers with whose beliefs I inwardly take absolute exception what I may wisely make an effort to learn to avoid in the process of living my own life?
Sorry, that jumble of words is the best I can do for now. The meaning is clear to me; alas, the words make almost no sense to me.”
*********
Here’s the core information in my reading of it; your words just rearranged and edited:
How can I learn from those of my peers (with whose beliefs I inwardly take absolute exception) what I may wisely make an effort to learn to avoid, in the process of living my own life?
What if those whose belief systems contravene mine have useful notions about human adaptation to life which would be of help to me in my living my life?
****
If my re-writing of your words is correct from mining the primary thoughts your posting conveys to me then you don’t have a writing problem caused by the words not making sense to you (or others), you have an editing problem. I would have to actually add and change words to the rest of that particular posting to convey what I see as another, separate statement: a hesitation to make value judgements (disrespect) even of those that you yourself would consider monsters. That’s how I read the paragraphs.
I’ve noticed that you cram a lot of interesting concepts and lateral thought into your postings and I find that, and them, interesting. Several of your postings on this thread have had thought-provoking statements.
You don’t generally use a linear form to approach a point; your approach appears to often be tangental. I would have to approach various points in that manner when I actually had to write things to get a paycheck so it isn’t that hard to follow even though you claim “the words make almost no sense to me”.
That claim interested me, did you mean words individually, words as descriptive of what you are thinking and/or the written statement when you read it after it is finished?
I hold “Tootie” with the same respect with which I hold “Frank.”
We are each, so I always have observed, people whose understanding of life is derived from the sequence of experiences which comprise the process of living our lives.
Therefore, though I expect to be misunderstood by everyone, including myself, I, personally, cannot accept judgmental “arrows of hate,” no matter how trivial and insignificant the hate my be, when one person flings such arrows at another.
In the hope of fair use copyright notions, from Albert Einstein’s “Out Of My Later Years,” Philosophical Library, New York, 1950, Chapter 2, “Self-Portrait”:
“Of what is significant in one’s own existence one is hardly aware, and it certainly should not bother the other fellow. What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?
The bitter and the sweet come from the outside, the hard from within, from one’s own efforts. For the most part, I do the thing my own nature drives me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much love for it. Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever.
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
I am nothing like Einstein; I have never done anything which would lead anyone to take particular notice of me or of my life.
However, I live in a different solitude than Einstein wrote about, for the autistic solitude in which I have lived all my life has been flawlessly delicious for the whole of my life thus far. My life is always delicious because arrows of hate, no matter how trivially insignificant the hate, belong only to a world which I know is purely delusional and which can never actually exist, except as a form of imagination of what a world which cannot actually exist might be like if it could exist.
In the world in which I do live, it is hurtful to berate a person when the one doing the berating does not understand the person being berated. If the person doing the berating did actually understand the person being berated, methinks that no berating would remain possible.
Projection of self-imago, regardless of sincerity, may endanger authentic community.
I wonder whether I may have stumbled upon one little ditty in the Bible that might withstand intense scientific scrutiny. The ditty is found in Genesis 11:7. Because of the nature of the little ditty, I hoose to cite it in contrasting English language translations.
The King James: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
The Bible: An American Translation: “Come, let us go down, and there make such a babble of their language that they will not understand one another’s speech.”
The New American Bible (comes with the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur): “Let us go down and there confuse their language, so that one will not understand what another says.”
The Jerusalem Bible, “Come, let us go down and confuse their language on the spot so that they can no longer understand one another.”
The New Jerusalem Bible (comes with the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur): “Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they cannot understand one another.”
The Living Bible: “Come, let us go down and give them different languages, so that they won’t understand each other’s words.”
Would that scripture, in any or all of the above translations, not be a good way to start a college course in linguistics? Or a good paradigm for the first course in law school?
If each of us has, as in The Living Bible, a personally private language not shared with anyone else, how does any useful communication ever happen?
Why did Claude Shannon, at Bell Labs, work so hard at communication theory, and the nature of communication errors? Are not both intra-personal communication and inter-personal communication well modeled as using only fading, dispersive, noisy, non-linear, non-stationary, non-isentropic channels?
Were there only one little ditty of truth in “The Bible” would that smidgen of truth not be worth noticing? Show me anyone who really has absolutely-errorless self-understanding. Show me such a person, and then show me that such a person really has absolutely-errorless understanding of someone else.
If “The Bible” unequivocally states that all human language is of confusion and misunderstanding, tell me how anyone can claim truthfully to accurately understand “The Bible,” using “The Bible” as the authority which substantiates its own accuracy.
Out of curiosity, I have read through, cover-to-cover, all of the above Bible translations and more, and have also read through, in English translation, The Holy Koran, the Bhagavad
Gita, The Talmud, and many other religious and Religious texts, in pursuit of a way to live in a society of folks whose lives I experience as profoundly deficient in autism.
Nowhere in any religious or Religious text, or any other text, which I have read hve I found it proclaimed as an accomplished event, any equivalent of, “Let us go down and give humans the practicable ability to understand themselves and/or each other.”
If such text really exists, I would be truly grateful to be told of it, so I can study it for myself.
Absent that text…
To Religious “Christian” authoritarian tyrannical despots (if there are any such), two simple questions from a religious (meaning infinitely ignorant) autistic simpleton…
Hoist to your own petard?
Gotcha?