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#parables
lionofchaeronea · 1 month
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The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, William Blake, ca. 1799-1800
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tomicscomics · 5 months
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11/10/2023
Aw...
JOKE-OGRAPHY: The class is drawing pictures of Bible verses.  The girl, Agnes, chooses to draw one of her favorites, but she's misheard the words.  In the actual story, Jesus tells His disciples "parables" (or stories with morals).  She mishears "parables" as "pair of bulls," so she thinks Jesus had two disciples who were male bovine.  She's excited to draw Jesus's animal friends and has a whole headcanon where they're the children of a cow who was in the manger when Jesus was born.  The news that she's misheard the story destroys her, and it takes weeks for her faith to recover.
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a-guy-named-ben · 1 year
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Once upon a time, there was an enormous landmass called Pangea. Millions of years passed. Continents drifted apart. Single-celled life emerged from a biochemical soup. Photosynthesis arrived on the scene, and eventually, the tree of life began branching out. Prokaryotes and eukaryotes pursued different evolutionary paths.
Unfathomably, life began to organize, to become more complex. Multicellular organisms developed, exploited various ecological niches, and evolved. Early hominids descended from the trees, and as endless generations marched onward, one small branch of life became human. Civilizations rose and fell; millions battled, loved, experienced joy and terror.
Today, you sit there reading these words on an electronic screen. Tomorrow, you'll read more words on screens, and so on into the future, until eventually you die somehow.
Life will march on after you're gone. Your boss will hire someone else. Your descendants, if you have any, will gradually forget about you. You, like countless others before you, will be whisked away into the past.
So maybe chill the fuck out a little.
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jessicalprice · 1 year
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adventures in christian opinions about judaism
(reposted from Twitter)
So a while back I started writing a thing on the trio of parables that ends with the prodigal son (which I still need to finish) and like MAN OH MAN do Christian commentators insist that Jews hate shepherds.
Like, I can't even count the number of commentaries that insist that shepherds were "despised figures" for first-century Jews and the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin were designed to insult the Pharisees by comparing them first to a shepherd and then to a woman.
So, as is my wont whenever Christian commentators make a claim about what was normal for first-century Judaism, I decided to try to hunt down their source on this.
As I've said many times, when it comes to Christian parable interpreters' claims about what attitudes/beliefs/etc. were normal for first-century Jews, get used to the phrase "no sources are cited."
I mean, first off, as a 21st-century Jew, the insistence that 1st-century Jews hated shepherds rings odd, given that <checks notes> Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rachel, all of Jacob's kids (the founders of the tribes), David, etc. were all sheep-tenders. The image of God as a shepherd is pretty consistent throughout the Tanakh. That image reappears in the Qumran texts, which as far as I know, are one of the few Jewish sources we have from 1st-century Judaea.
The term "despised" gets used a lot, so I decided to dig into that one.
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When I was able to find citations, I traced them back to an 1882 commentary by a guy named Frederic Farrar.
Farrar cites Heinrich Meyer as a source for this, but when I looked up THAT citation, it's Meyer saying that shepherds were a "lowly but patriarchally consecrated class" -- in other words, poor, but with a distinguished history and status.
So that's why everyone's tossing the term "despised" around--because Farrar just made it up. But what about primary sources? I went back on the hunt.
Surprisingly, in a number of reference works, like glossaries and Jeffers's "Greco-Roman World of the New Testament," I found similar assertions about the common attitude toward shepherds, for which they cited...
<drum roll>
Aristotle. You know, the Greek guy who lived 300 years before Jesus? Definitely a reliable source for Jewish attitudes of the time.
Some people cited Philo's On Agriculture. Okay, Philo was at least Jewish and lived when Jesus would have, although he was a wealthy Hellenized Jew living in Alexandria rather than a Pharisee living in the Galilee. But okay, at least it's the right culture and time period. (The reference in Philo turns out to be talking about the section of Genesis in which Joseph's brothers come visit him in Egypt. It talks about how they were proud to be shepherds, and criticizes (gentile) kings who look down on shepherds.)
Then we've got Mishnah Kiddushin, in which a bunch of rabbis are having a debate about which professions make you trustworthy vs untrustworthy, and one rabbi lists everyone from camel-drivers to herders to barbers to shopkeepers as untrustworthy. Another rabbi comes back and is like, nah, all those people are fine upstanding folks; it's doctors and butchers you've gotta watch out for. So they're citing one cranky dude with a LONG list of people he doesn't like, who immediately gets shot down, as evidence of the normative attitude for Jews about a century earlier.
Oh, and we've got a citation of Midrash Tehillim which says that God-as-shepherd doesn't have any of the failings of humans-as-shepherds, which... sure. Also, it was codified in the 1300s?
The most compelling citation is from the Talmud (Sanhedrin 25b), in which the rabbis discuss who's qualified to be a legal witness. They exclude shepherds, because shepherds graze their animals on other people's land, which some of the rabbis see as a type of theft.
The Talmud is a record of debates, but this passage definitely makes it sound like this is a majority opinion. (It should be noted that the passage disqualifies all KINDS of people, from those who lend with interest to those who fly pigeons, as having conflicts of interest.)
But the important thing here is that the Talmud includes records of debates from as late as the 4th or 5th centuries CE (300-400 years after Jesus's time), and the passage makes a point of noting that the disqualification of shepherds as witnesses is a later development.
So in other words, the idea that the Pharisees hated shepherds and would have been insulted by Jesus telling a story in which the protagonist was a shepherd is based either on Greek attitudes that are 300 years too early or Jewish ones that are 300-400 years too late.
But people will twist themselves into citation knots (or just not bother citing a source at all) to insist that this was a common attitude so they can position the Pharisees as hating those charming humble shepherds and their fuzzy little lambs.
As to WHY this idea seems to be so important to them, well, you cannot read about Luke 15 without encountering the word "outcast" roughly 90 times per page.
The framing is Jesus was friend to The Outcasts while the Pharisees despised The Outcasts and the Lost Sheep, Coin, and Sons are all parables about accepting The Outcast.
Never mind that neither the sheep, the coin, nor either of the sons got kicked out of their communities. The sheep wandered off, as sheep are wont to do, the coin was lost by its owner, and the younger son decided to leave to go on a spending spree while the older son declined to attend the welcome back party for him after his dad managed to hire a band and caterers but never thought to let his own son know what was going on and he had to find out from a hired hand.
Moreover, the term "outcasts" gets used as a synonym for "tax collectors and sinners." Tax collectors were usually pretty well-off because they ran a protection racket for the Romans. Outcasts? I mean, I guess? But hardly in the "marginalized and powerless" sense.
As far as "sinners," the NT doesn't usually bother telling us what, exactly, they did to "sin," but on the rare occasions when it does offer that context, it's almost always wealthy people.
But why talk about that when they can present the objection the Pharisees had to Jesus's dining with "tax collectors and sinners" as the Pharisees despising lowly outcasts, and insist that the Pharisees hated the idea of such people repenting and returning, and so Jesus was tweaking their noses by comparing them to shepherds and women.
As if, you know, teshuvah wasn't something the Pharisees were ALL ABOUT. If you want to actually understand, consider that the iconic tax collector in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector shows no inclination to STOP being a tax collector.
The objection wasn't you're having a friendly dinner with poor lowly outcasts for whom we have contempt. It was you're having a friendly dinner with people who are extorting their neighbors on behalf of the invaders who kill us for looking at them funny and have expressed no intention to stop doing that.
Now, there's a good discussion to be had about whether shunning Trump lawyers and Marjorie Taylor-Greene donors or inviting them to dinner and trying to win them over with compassion is more effective, more ethical, more compassionate (to whom?), etc.
But presumably we can see why people of intelligence and goodwill might disagree on which of those approaches is the right thing to do, and why such people might might object to the strategy they don't agree with.
But what really gets me is that Christians have the utter fucking NERVE to paint the Pharisees as inhumanly awful for not wanting to have dinner with tax collectors while viewing Corinthians as Holy Writ:
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I mean, Paul's all YOU MUST SHUN ALCOHOLICS AND PEOPLE WHO ARE GREEDY and Christians are like yes, that makes sense, but if the Pharisees are like, no, I don't want to have dinner with that guy who narced on my cousin and got him crucified, Christians are like, they're monsters.
Cool, cool.
Anyway, this has been your weekly edition of Christians Need To Stop Just Making Shit Up About Jews And Then Citing Each Other Like It's Fact.
And there were a lot of "I've never heard anyone say Jews of Jesus's time hated shepherds..." responses: Maybe you haven't, but that doesn't make it uncommon.
Sources in which I've found it:
Craig Blomberg (Denver Seminary, Society of Biblical Literature, Tyndale House, NIV translation committee)
Jared Wilson (professor at multiple Baptist seminaries)
Stephen Wright (Spurgeon College (British evangelical college))
Arland Hultgren (Luther Seminary (ELCA))
Kenneth Bailey (Presbyterian/Episcopalian)
Joachim Jeremias (Lutheran, cited EVERYWHERE)
Bernard Brandon Scott (Disciples of Christ, the Jesus Seminar)
Klyne Snodgrass (Evangelical Covenant Church)
Barbara Reid (Catholic Biblical Association)
That particular trope spans denominations, decades, etc. It's not a fringe viewpoint.
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hymnsandhearses · 9 months
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You are the opposite of cool
So, you are saying I am hot? I love your clever approach to compliments! You are the opposite of sour!! 🥰
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Extravagant blessing, good news for all
While teaching [the crowd], Jesus said, “Listen to this! A farmer went out to scatter seed…” When they were alone, the people around Jesus, along with the Twelve, asked him about the parables. He said to them, “...The farmer scatters the Word…” - Mark 4:2a - 4, 10-11a, 14
The beauty of parables is that they demand discussion, invite interpretation.
I struggle with the “parable of the sower” because it’s one of the few that the Gospels depict Jesus explaining in detail. Aaaand he waits till only his closest friends are around to do so.
Christians frequently fall into the trap of believing we’re privy to insider information, that we enjoy extra special favor from God. We get smug; we forget that all humanity is made in the Divine image, all Creation overflows with Divine love.
I don’t know why Jesus waits till the crowd leaves before unraveling this parable. Maybe he prefers leaving it open to interpretation, so that they have to puzzle it out together — but he knows the disciples, his “farmers,” need clear instructions.
Regardless, what stands out to me in this parable is that the farmer sows the Word not just on good soil, but everywhere — on the path, on rocky soil, among brambles. There is no scarcity of Word! We aren’t called to be miserly about whom we share it with; we are called into loud, joyous, generous extravagance! 
For it’s often the case that the very people we assume don’t want or “deserve” God’s Word, God’s goodness, God’s liberation, already have it — and are ready to share it with us.
How can you sow God’s liberating Word in your daily life — not arrogantly, not pressuring others to adopt your personal beliefs, but with a joyful invitation into mutual relationship? How can you prepare yourself to receive God’s Word from sources you might not expect? 
- Shared on Daily Ripple on 15 Feb, 2024
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The Good Samaritan
25 And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" 26 He said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read?" 27 And he answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." 28 And he said to him, "You have answered right; do this, and you will live." 29 But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" 30 Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, 34 and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, 'Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.' 36 Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?" 37 He said, "The one who showed mercy on him." And Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise." — Luke 10:25-37 | Revised Standard Version (RSV) Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. All rights reserved. Cross References: Deuteronomy 6:4-5; Deuteronomy 6:24; Leviticus 18:15; Leviticus 19:18; Isaiah 58:7; Matthew 10:5; Matthew 18:28; Matthew 19:16; Matthew 24:34; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:52; Luke 10:38; Luke 16:15; Luke 18:31; Luke 19:28
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The seductive, science fictional power of spreadsheets
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Tomorrow (Apr 30) at 2PM, I’ll be at the San Francisco Public Library with my new book, Red Team Blues, hosted by Annalee Newitz.
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This week, John Scalzi was kind enough to let me write a guest-editorial for his Whatever blog about the themes in my new crime technothriller, Red Team Blues; specifically, about the ways that spreadsheets embody the power and the pitfalls of science fiction at its best and worst:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2023/04/26/the-big-idea-cory-doctorow-2/
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply
Yes, spreadsheets. Marty Hench (the protagonist of Red Team Blues) is a 67-year-old forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding Silicon Valley financial frauds, a field he basically invented 40 years ago, when, as a PC-struck MIT dropout, he moved from Cambridge to San Francisco to recover the stolen millions hidden in spreadsheets.
Working through this book — and its two sequels, which travel back in time to the 1980s and Marty’s first encounters with VisiCalc and Lotus 1–2–3 — I was struck by the similarities between spreadsheets and science fiction.
While many people use spreadsheets as an overgrown calculator, adding up long columns of numbers, the rise and rise of spreadsheets comes from their use in modeling. Using a spreadsheet, a complex process can be expressed as a series of mathematical operations: we put these inputs into the factory and we get these finished goods. Once the model is built, we can easily test out contrafactuals: what if I add a third shift? What if I bargain harder for discounts on a key component? If I give my workers a productivity-increasing raise, will the profits make up for the costs?
These are the questions that anyone managing a complex system asks themselves all the time. Historically, the answers have sprung from intuition, from fingerspitzengefühl — the “fingertip feeling” of how a system’s components work and what their potential and limitations are. But intuition can calcify, become a rigid set of rules that increasingly diverge from the best strategy.
By contrast, spreadsheets yield a set of crisp, instantly tallied answers to any question you put to them. Change the input and watch as that change ripples through the whole system in an eyeblink. If you’re adding three more people to your camping trip, will the amount of additional water require renting another vehicle? No need to guess: just check and see.
This has a lot in common with science fiction, a genre full of thought experiments that ask Heinlein’s famous three questions:
What if?
If only, and
If this goes on…
These contrafactuals are incredibly useful and important. As critical tools, science fiction’s parables about the future are the best chance we have for resisting the inevitabilism that insists that technology must be used in a certain way, or must exist at all. Science fiction doesn’t just interrogate what the gadget does, but who it does it for and who it does it to:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/20/love-the-machine/#hate-the-factory
One of science fiction’s key methods comes from sf grandmaster Theodore Sturgeon: “ask the next question.” Ask a question, then ask “what happens next?” Do it again, and again, and again:
https://christopher-mckitterick.com/Sturgeon-Campbell/Sturgeon-Q.htm
This technique produces excellent, critical ways of interrogating technological narratives — check out this delightful example of the possible pipeline from self-driving cars to ransomware gangs to mutual aid societies to the reinvention of the train:
https://dduane.tumblr.com/post/715940904747352064/you-can-make-your-mercedes-ev-go-faster-for-60-a
The commonalities between sf and spreadsheets don’t stop there — sf and spreadsheets share pitfalls, too. A spreadsheet is a model and a model is not the thing it models. The map is not the territory. Every time a messy, real-world process is converted to a crisp, mathematical operation, some important qualitative element is lost.
Modeling is an intrinsically lossy operation. That’s why “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” There is no process so simple that it can be losslessly converted to a model. Even the actions of the nanoscale transistors in a microchip, which toggle between “0” and “1,” are rarely in a state of “no voltage” and “voltage.” That clean, square-wave line that’s used to describe what happens in a chip is a lie — that is to say, it is a model.
The wave isn’t square, it’s a squiggly line that hovers around zero and around one. Under normal circumstances, “zero” and “zero-ish” is a distinction without a difference. But when computers go wrong, it’s sometimes because a sufficiently ambiguous “zero-ish” acts like a “one.” That’s true all the way up the stack. On engineering diagrams, the nanoscale lines that electrons travel along inside a chip are represented as sharp paths, the kind of thing a Tron-cycle would lay down. But in the real world, we get all kinds of weird effects at that scale — electrons sometimes tunnel through those lines, performing a spooky quantum trick that reminds us that Newtononian physics are also just a model.
Every real-world phenomenon contains qualitative and quantitative elements, but computers can only do math on the quantitative parts. This creates a powerful temptation to incinerate the qualitative and perform operations on whatever dubious quantitative residue is left in the crucible, often with disastrous results.
Remember during lockdown, when a pair of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign physicists produced a model of covid spread that predicted that the campus could safely reopen, predicting no more than 500 cases over the entire semester and no more than 100 cases at any one time? The physicists were openly contemptuous of their epidemiologist peers, saying that this kind of model making lacked the “intellectual thrill” of real science.
UI was so swayed by the crisp, precise model that they invited students back to campus — only to shut down again in a matter of weeks, with 780 active cases on campus and more rolling in every day.
The model reduced qualitative factors — like the propensity of undergrads to get drunk, take off their masks, and lick each others’ eyeballs — to a quantitative probability, using the highly precise, scientific technique of taking a wild-ass guess. That guess was wrong. The campus reopening was a super-spreader event.
Any model runs the risk of hiding the irreducible complexity of qualitative factors behind a formula, turning uncertainty into certainty and humility into arrogance.
Think of how we replaced contact tracing with exposure notification. Contact tracing has a qualitative foundation: public health workers establish rapport with infected people, win their trust, and get them to fully enumerate the places they’ve been and the activities they participated in.
By contrast, exposure notification measures whether two Bluetooth radios were within range of each other for a predetermined interval. It substitutes signal strength for a person’s own understanding of their experience. Now, people can be wrong about their own experience — we lose track of time, we misremember emotionally charged events, and so on — but that doesn’t mean we can substitute Bluetooth measurements for personal experience.
That’s why, despite all the clever privacy-preserving math and interesting analysis, exposure notification was a bust, something between a distraction and a false-confidence-generating disaster. Contact tracing ended the 2014 ebola outbreak. Exposure notification just wasted a lot of time:
https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/
It’s just too easy to forget which parts of a model are based on guesses and which parts are based on ground truth. And even if you can keep track of those differences, it’s even harder to re-check the model’s ground truth to determine whether the underlying factors have changed. That’s how we got into so much trouble with collateralized debt obligations, which were supposed to be “risk-free” mortgage derivatives that could be safely insured and invested in.
The formulas behind CDO hedging were designed by some of the world’s smartest mathematicians and physicists, who simply assumed that market actors — from loan-originating bank officers to insurance underwriters — would act in reliable, predictable ways. They were so very wrong that they brought the world economy to the brink of ruin:
https://www.wired.com/2009/02/wp-quant/
This is also science fiction’s failure-mode: any science fictional “ask-the-next-question” exercise represents a series of guesses or speculations or maybe possibilities — but when you combine that guesswork with the deceptive certainty that comes from inhabiting a cracking story, it’s easy to mistake “guessing” for “prediction.”
Prediction is hard, especially about the future. The assumptions that go into a prediction are always incomplete, not least because human beings have free will and agency and can change the circumstances that go into the assumptions. The very best science fiction embodies this principle. I’m thinking here of the likes of Ada Palmer, an historian and sf writer whose deep historical knowledge informs her sf and her pedagogy at the University of Chicago:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#terra-ignota
Palmer is famous — even notorious — for her annual four-week undergraduate LARP in which students re-enact the election of the Medicis’ Pope. It’s four weeks of alliances, betrayal and skullduggery by the students, each of whom is enacting the agenda of a real-world Cardinal or other power-broker.
The final investiture is done in full costume at the university’s massive faux-gothic cathedral, and going into that climax, of the four candidates, two are always the same, because the great forces of history are bearing down on that moment to ensure that the champions of the two dominant power-blocs are in the running. But the other two? They’re never the same — because the agency of the actors jockeying for power change the outcome, every single time, in absolutely unpredictable ways.
Like any other model, sf is wrong, but sometimes useful. Thinking about jetpacks and flying cars is “useful” insofar as it gets us to interrogate how we think about cities, about mobility, about privilege and geography. But it’s not a prediction. Worse, the endless tales in which flying cars are presented a fait accompli is a gift to grifters raising money for the objectively stupid idea of flying cars. After all, we all know flying cars are inevitable, so it’s basically a risk-free investment, right? With flying cars just around the corner, wouldn’t it be irresponsible to build a city with mass-transit instead of helipads?
There’s a whole range of thought-experiments that got transformed into predictions and then certainties: self-driving cars, “general artificial intelligence,” infinite life-extension, space colonization, faster-than-light travel, cryptocurrency, etc etc.
Spreadsheets don’t just lead their users astray — they also trick their creators. The very same people who transform wild-assed guesses about hairy, unknowable outcomes into neat mathematical relationships are perfectly capable of acting as if those relationships are based on fact, rather than supposition. The Great Financial Crisis wasn’t just about people who didn’t understand the uncertainty in the hedging algorithm going all-in — the people who made those models were also fooled by them.
It’s very easy to get high on your own supply. I’ll never forget the sf convention panel I was on with Robert Silverberg about sf’s supposed predictive value, where the subject of Robert A Heinlein came up, and Silverberg sniffed, and, in that trademark bone-dry way of his, said, “Ah yes, ‘Robert A Timeline.’”
Sf isn’t just full of writers who mistake their suppositions for predictions — the canon is full of tales in which brilliant people can and do predict the future, with near-perfection. Think of Hari Seldon, the hero of Asimov’s Foundation series, who is able to forecast the future several millennia out. Or Heinlein’s first-ever story, “Life-Line,” in which a genius inventor destroys the insurance industry by creating a computer that can predict your exact date of death using statistical methods.
There’s something wild about this phenomenon, in which writers make stuff up and then assume that anything that cool must also be accurate. One tantalizing explanation for this comes from EL Doctorow’s (no relation) essay “Genesis,” from his 2007 collection “The Creationists”:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41520/creationists-by-e-l-doctorow/
Doctorow tells the history of the Genesis story, which the Hebrews plagiarized from the Babylonians. In Doctorow’s telling, the Babylonian mystics who made up the Genesis story assumed that it had to be true, because they considered themselves to be nowhere near imaginative enough to have come up with something as great as Genesis. An idea that amazing had to be divinely inspired.
I like this because it’s a story of being led astray by humility, rather than hubris.
Imaginative exercises — whether or not they are assisted by mathematical models and self-updating digital spreadsheets — are powerful tools for thinking about the future we want, and to guide our attempts to make that future come true. All models are wrong but some models are useful, of course!
I’m on tour with Red Team Blues right now — I’m writing this post while waiting for my flight to San Francisco, where I’m appearing at the public library with Annalee Newitz tomorrow (4/30) at 2PM:
https://sfpl.org/events/2023/04/30/author-cory-doctorow-and-annalee-newitz-conversation-red-team-blues
One especially fun stop on this tour will be on May 5, at the Books, Inc in Mountain View, where I’ll be talking about the book with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus 1–2–3, who knows a thing or two about spreadsheets:
https://www.booksinc.net/event/cory-doctorow-books-inc-mountain-view
The tour is bringing me to Berkeley, Vancouver, Calgary, DC, Gaithersburg, Toronto, PDX, Nottingham, Hay, London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Berlin — I hope to see you!
https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2023/04/26/the-red-team-blues-tour-burbank-sf-pdx-berkeley-yvr-edmonton-gaithersburg-dc-toronto-hay-oxford-nottingham-manchester-london-edinburgh-london-berlin/
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Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Mountain View, Berkeley, San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!
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[Image ID: A Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet with green-on-black, low-res type; its center has an irregular vignette revealing a space station.]
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thebeautifulbook · 9 months
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PARABLES AND TALES by Thomas Gordon Hake. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1872) Cover design by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
source [later edition]
source
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lordmogatron · 1 year
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You, a pleb: The parable of the scorpion and the frog.
Lil' Wayne, a scholar:
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The Parable of the Wandering Sheep
“See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.
“What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.
via Verse of the Day - Matthew 18:12
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lionofchaeronea · 1 year
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The Good Samaritan, Théodule Ribot, 1870
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bonefall · 1 year
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besides the thistle and honeysuckle parables, any other neat stories/parables the clans or tribe have? i find this stuff some of the most fun :]
Parables are one of my favorite things to write and it's the reason why the field guides are sooooo underrated
List of parables I have so far:
Salmon Mother's Lullaby
This one is actually a song and I'm working with @spottyistired on a couple of other ones, but this one specifically is an actual narrative as opposed to the others. It comes from RiverClan, who has a salmon run every leaf-fall
It's about the devotion of salmon and the lives they spend in a faraway land before returning home to have their children, detailing their, "final wishes to their little fishes". Like many other lullabies, it has a hidden message imparted to kittens; that they should be loyal to their homes and that the continuation of the Clan is true immortality
Moonmane's Days
If you went back in time to the very beginning of the ancient society, before the Tribe and before the Clans, you would still find this story being told. It's a truly ancient tale, and secretly about the deity that now goes by Rock.
It's a parable about a father-lion who hunts down the moon and rips it into pieces to feed to his cubs, portioning time into digestible chunks. He kept the full moon for himself as the lion's share.
Rock HATES this story and insists he just wanted to know what day it was, and he is NO ONE'S father, and also he tells you to leave him alone
Deadly Nightshade
It is said that there was once a medicine cat who was incompetent. She would confuse her meadowsweet and her hemlock, and she would poison the cats under her care. She was exiled and died alone, and StarClan would not let her hunt with them... but all of her actions were only accidents.
So they turned her into a poison plant, and she lives on as a warning. It's customary for medicine cats to uproot deadly nightshade whenever they see a young sprout, as a territory choked with the stuff is a sign they haven't been foraging very much.
The Parable of the Thistle & The Parable of the Honeysuckle
There's also, of course, for the sake of completion, the political parables of the Thistle for Thistle Law and the Honeysuckle for Traditionalism.
Aaand there you have it, the parables I have so far. I think I mentioned Nightshade offhand once but never officially included it, it was an old headcannon of mine.
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ryukisgod · 1 month
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jsyk, americans statistically would love universal healthcare. the trouble is that our democracy is broken and we don't typically get what we want. id advise against blaming victims in general, personally.
The tale of the scorpion and the frog: a scorpion wishing to cross a river asks a frog “can I ride on your back to the other side?”
The frog says “no you’ll sting me and I’ll die.”
The scorpion replies “if I did that I would drown too.”
The frog thinks about it and agrees. Halfway across the river the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the poison and knows it’s dying. “Why did you sting me? You’re going to drown.”
The scorpion tells the frog “it’s just my nature to sting animals.”
The scorpion and the frog both die.
The surveyer asks the American “do you want a government healthcare system?”
The American replies “yes.”
The surveyer presses, “you would be happy to have your taxes pay for other peoples healthcare?”
The American replies “that’s fine.”
The surveyer continues “you would be comfortable going to a public hospital?”
The American becomes a little annoyed by all the questions “yes I’m comfortable going to a public hospital and any other Public Health Service.”
The surveyer asks the most important question “so you’ll do whatever it takes to achieve this political goal, no matter how long it takes?”
“Whatever it takes” replies the American.
An election comes around and the Republican candidate wins.
“Why didn’t you vote for the other person?” The world cries.
“I couldn’t,” replies the American “my moral purity is more important than making incremental steps towards the goal of universal healthcare. It’s just in my nature not to vote.”
The American dies from a treatable illness because they can’t afford medicine.
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capricorn-0mnikorn · 7 months
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A thought on Monarchs, and royal heirs, in Fairy Tales™
(and in Fairy Tale-inspired sword & sorcery fantasies)
In real life, monarchies are bad. And if fairy tales are viewed through the lens of being a model of the world, they can come off as pro-monarchy propaganda.
But I see fairy tales as parables of personal growth and maturity, where "The Kingdom" is a metaphor for your own life, as it exists over time.
You start out as the youngest child, or the peasant, orphan, or discharged soldier at the end of the war -- in other words, someone with very little autonomy in your own life.
But, through the events of the story, the choices you make, and how you treat the strangers you meet, you mature until you are king (or queen) of your own life. That is, someone who has matured into a position where you have all the rights and responsibilities of adulthood.
Just a thought.
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random-xpressions · 10 months
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What happens when two comets traveling in opposite directions collide at a certain point, that's what happens when two souls encounter each other at a certain point of time. Two great forces of energy collapsing into each other because that's all that's possible. One of them should have reduced their velocity which is not what happens, they continue at their own pace because the encounter was imminent. But what a beautiful collision it is, each one dissolving its individual identities into the other. The one who studies the stars will never understand what happens after this collision - there's nothing but absolute mayhem and confusion, a total chaos in the heavens. Will their individual journeys continue hereafter as before or are their courses going to change once and forever...
Random Xpressions
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