Natalie Portman has named her firstborn child after a letter.
Natalie Portman and her fiance Benjamin Millepied welcomed a baby boy last month and have finally revealed the name of the baby to be Aleph.
Aleph, also spelled “Alef” and pronounced “All-Eff,” is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Much like how “alpha” is the first letter in the Greek alphabet. In Judaic Kabbalah, its esoteric meaning in the theological treaty Sefer-ha-Bahir, relates to the origin of the universe, the “primordial one that contains all numbers.”
Why the fuss? People name girls ‘Beth‘ all the time, and no one says anything. And if we’re talking about Roman letters, ‘Bea’ or ‘Jay’. In fact, a letter is a great idea for a baby name.
So for the more adventurous parents, here are some characters from the world’s writing systems that might make good baby names, along with their likely consequences.
Character: Zel Writing system: Ottoman Turkish alphabet Sounds like: [z] Expect the child to be: Extroverted Future Career: Real estate agent, or MLM scammer
Character: Fita Writing system: Early Cyrillic Language that uses it: Russian Sounds like: [f] Expect the child to be: Colicky Future Career: Yoga instructor
Character: Kaunan Writing system: Runic alphabet Language that uses it: Norse Sounds like: [k] Expect the child to be: Needing a search and rescue team at least once Future Career: Artist, cheesemaker, or bikey
Character: Delt Writing system: Phonecian Sounds like: [d] Expect the child to be: Albino Future Career: Personal trainer, or assassin
Character: Yat Writing system: Glagolitic alphabet Languages that use it: Slavic Sounds like: [æ] as in ‘cat’ Expect the child to be: A little slow Future Career: Colour consultant, or unsuccessful real estate agent
Character: Lo Ling Writing system: Thai Sounds like: [l] (initial), [n] (final) Expect the child to be: Mysterious Future Career: Personal assistant to evil genius, or successful call girl
Many times, when I make criticisms of religion (or a religion), various practitioners take it personally and say that I’m attacking them.
My answer is: No, I’m not attacking you; I’m attacking your church. If you can’t tell the difference between your church and yourself, then you have made a serious mistake. What that means is that you are identifying too closely with the organisation. You have conflated your goals, your future, and your identity with those of the group. You need to fix this. It’s not healthy to confuse your own identity with other things that are not you. (It is understandable that high-commitment religions are slow to correct this tendency. It works overwhelmingly to their advantage.)
Many religious folks are able to differentiate, and I quite enjoy talking to them. Many thanks if you’re one of these. I have a harder time with the internalisers. I’ve just had an multi-day online discussion where I started with this notion:
Churches are (among other things) safe places for weak ideas. They’re like shelters for ideas that can’t defend themselves.
I thought this was an interesting idea. I’d always considered that ideas keep religions going, but this was the opposite — the idea that churches exist as social life-support systems for their ideas — and it hinted at a commensal relationship. I was hoping for a bit of discussion on the topic. Oh, that it were possible.
It didn’t take long before a believer insisted that I was just ‘having a go’ at religion and that I was implying that all religious people were ‘weak-minded fools’. I don’t think this, but if someone wanted evidence to the contrary, it was not to be found from his comments. He insisted (without evidence) that angels and demons were real, that science ‘didn’t know everything’, and that his ‘feelings of the Spirit’ were different from ordinary feelings, and ought to be evidence enough for anyone. Moreover, he was unwilling to consider that his subjective feelings might be in error. All of this was couched in the most tormented reasoning; over the course of 200 comments, he committed the bandwagon fallacy, special pleading, and terminal logorrhea. Well, that’s not a fallacy, but ad hominem attacks are; he surmised that I must be a terrible partner if I needed evidence for everything. Not to mention the argument from ignorance — what proof did I have that God didn’t exist? In short, all the devices, defense mechanisms, and poor reasoning that has kept him (and will keep him forever) anchored to his faith. And he managed all this while misreading my initial premise. If he wanted to demonstrate that religious believers were not weak-minded fools, he could have done a better job than he did.
I am not, by nature, a poker of hives. I dissect poor ideas unsparingly, but I try to go easy on actual people (previous paragraph excepted). I don’t expect believers to like it. But there needs to be a way to say “I think you’ve got this wrong”.
So if I criticise a religion, what reaction would I expect its members to have? That depends.
If I’m right, accept it, and move on with a determination to do better.
If I’m wrong, please tell me. But in the process, don’t make me right.
Chickens, meet roost. Georgia passed a stringent anti-immigration law, and now they’re having trouble finding field workers.
Unless the cucumbers come off the vine soon, they will become engorged with seeds, making them unsellable. Mendez’s crew of Mexican and Guatemalan workers will keep harvesting until 6 p.m., maybe longer. Not so for the men participating in a new state-run program aimed at replacing the Latino migrants Georgia farmers say they’ve lost to a new immigration crackdown with unemployed probationers.
Schadenfreude is one thing, but the interesting part for me is this euphemism, said by one of the probationers:
“Those guys out here weren’t out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, ‘Bonk this, I ain’t with this, I can’t do this,'” said Jermond Powell, a 33-year-old probationer. “They just left, took off across the field walking.”
While I’m willing to bet the guy didn’t say those exact words, it is a taboo avoidance I haven’t heard before. I’ve heard ‘screw this’ and ‘blow this’, but not ‘bonk this’.
It’s the new “No Religion” billboards from the Atheist Foundation of Australia.
Australia’s having a census this year, complete with the religion question.
As the next Australian Census approaches (9 August 2011), the Atheist Foundation of Australia (AFA) is preparing for one of its biggest and most important projects. The AFA is campaigning to encourage individuals and families to think about the importance and impact of their answer to this leading Census question: “What is the person’s religion?”
The AFA will be unveiling billboards across the nation in major cities stating “Census 2011: Not religious now? Mark ‘No religion’ and take religion out of politics.”
They’re addressing two distressing tendencies in the census.
One is that people just put ‘Anglican’ or whatever their religion of origin is, even if they’re non-believing. This inflates the religious numbers, and may overestimate the allocation of services to churches, insofar as the government relies on the census to make these decisions.
What is the data on religion used for?
Data on religious affiliation are used for such purposes as planning educational facilities, aged care and other social services provided by religion-based organisations; the location of church buildings; the assigning of chaplains to hospitals, prisons, armed services and universities; the allocation of time on public radio and other media; and sociological research.
The other tendency is to write down some joke religion. Don’t get me wrong; I love the FSM as much as anyone, but I advertise his message on t-shirts, not on serious documents. From the FAQ:
What happens if I write Jedi Knight?
It gets counted as ‘Not Defined’ and is not placed in the ‘No religion’ category. This takes away from the ‘No religion’ numbers and therefore advantages the religion count. It was funny to write Jedi once, now it is a serious mistake to do so.
This year I’m writing ‘Atheist’, which is a legitimate category, and can be taken together with the ‘No Religion’ and ‘Agnostic’ groups.
I’d love to see the number of ‘Nones’ in Australia grow as large as possible this year. If you’re not currently religious, consider the ‘No Religion’ box. It’s more honest and accurate.
Do people still know about ‘Harold and Maude‘? I hope so. It’s a movie that I come back to every once in a while. Let me give you the rundown.
Harold is a dour and lugubrious young man. If he were around today, he’d be a goth or some kind of proto-emo, but in his time his gloom didn’t have the benefit of a social group. He’s obsessed with death. He performs elaborate mock suicides to alarm his domineering mother, and he attends funerals for fun.
At one such funeral he meets Maude, a sprightly and unconventional near-octogenarian, and the two form an unlikely friendship. She loves funerals, too, not because she treasures death, but because death is a part of life, which she also treasures. Yet she doesn’t cling to life — or indeed anything. When Harold gives her a keepsake, she throws it into the river (“So I’ll always know where it is,” she says). She blithely (and somehow innocently) steals cars if she needs a lift, and digs up a public tree to replant in the forest. She ‘replants’ Harold, too, helping him to grow outside of his sterile and affluent home. She’s a nurturer, a revolutionary, an artist at living.
I’ve found that Maude is a barometer for where I am in my life. At times, I’ve thought she’s great — a free spirit who has some wonderful insights about how to live. At other times, her character has grated on me — she’s a silly person who ought to know better. And I’ve noticed that the times when I’ve been least able to tolerate Maude are the times when I’ve been the most uptight, the most ‘churchy’. It’s all very well, I’ve thought, for her to talk about life and death and the cosmic dance, but she doesn’t have a knowledge of the Gospel! Or: She has insights about life, but seems so unserious about living. Or: That’s the kind of thing people get over after their teens. Or even: New age hippy fruit basket. And other such unkind things, depending on how eager I was to conform to adult conventions, which Maude of course isn’t.
Now I think she’s great again. She’s successfully carved out a meaning to her life, which is, after all, the big business of one’s life. And while her way of being seems unusual and contradictory, it’s a way that wouldn’t occur to most people, and I respect that. So I guess that means I’m less uptight, and more of a free spirit myself. Having deconverted from a religion (and thereby defying a major convention in my former society), I can now see the value in colouring outside the lines, as Maude does. As the soundtrack says, there’s a million ways to be. You know that there are.
I’m on the docket for a ‘comedy debate‘ tomorrow. It’s about the fictional ‘Modeerf’ religion, and I’m the secular atheist of the group. Here’s the promo:
Where do we draw the line between religious freedom and the law of the land?
Between respecting diversity and double standards?
Between maintaining your culture and becoming Australian?
Come and meet migrants from the little known Modeerf religion.
They know that their practices of men going shirtless, having the holy month off work, annual cannabis burning and feeding children fermented mead are pretty unusual in an Australian context but they want similar legal exemptions and discrimination protection to other Aussie religions.
Here are my thoughts:
I’m against the Modeerf religion, just like I’m against every religion. Religions spread superstition, and we have enough of that already. I do not want to see them getting the okay to break the law for religious reasons. I don’t want to pay their taxes for them. I don’t want them meddling in civil rights issues like gay marriage. If they want to do their religious thing, they can. But the government has no business promoting them. Ideally, the government would be neutral towards religion.
But — and this is a big ‘but’ — we don’t have that kind of government. We live in a country where the government is helping to establish and promote religion, contrary to Section 116 of the Australian Constitution.
And of course, the government allows religions not to pay taxes, which forces us to carry their tax burden.
If we can’t have government neutrality toward religion, then I have a terrible, but still second-best solution: Treat all religions the same. As an atheist, I don’t see that any religion as intrinsically better or worse, more sensible or crazier than any other, so every religion should get the same advantage as every other. How about Modeerf chaplains in schools? Come to think of it, how about Muslim chaplains in schools? (Can you imagine the freak-outs on talk radio?) Should the Modeerf be allowed to fire left-handed people in their charity work, if it’s against their religion?
I think this second-best solution would still be terrible. You’d have more discrimination, and less reason. But it would at least have the advantage of being fair. (And if some religions are unwilling to accord others the privileges that they receive, it shows their paper-thin commitment to equality.) The Modeerf example doesn’t show why it’s important that every religion get the same perks. It shows why no religion should.
In doing research for this event, I ran across this statement on a web page from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade:
People are free to practise any religion as long as they obey the law.
Isn’t that a great ideal? I hope one day we get there.
Have corporate logos ever raised tremors for you? You’ll know what I mean if your sedate suburban childhood was marred by them. There we were, innocently watching afternoon television, and then at the end of a show, there would be a seven-second bumper clip showing the name of the production company. They were often done on a Scanimate, which was kind of a precursor to modern CG animation.
And these clips freaked a lot of kids out. Here’s the most infamous — the Screen Gems logo, also known as ‘The S from Hell’.
The Viacom ‘V of Doom’ clip has stained its share of sheets (even getting sent up in Family Guy).
Look out — here it comes!
And the Paramount clip. This one was known as the ‘Closet Killer’ version because of the music.
Seriously, what sort of maniac would unleash this evil so indiscriminately upon an uncomprehending television audience?
Inevitably, in online discussions about scary logos, someone will say “I don’t get it! Why do people find these scary? I don’t find these even mildly creepy!” Well, no, you don’t, you thirty-plus well-adjusted adult. But perhaps if you were instead a person of a certain age and a certain disposition, things would be different. So, as a formerly timorous child, I am going to try and explain why scary logos can be scary.
I should point out that my childhood was for the most part happy and secure, and I was not overly neurotic. But there were some parts of my house, especially one part of the downstairs hallway which, in the dark of night, would require a little steeling of the will before hurriedly passing by.
My house had a garage, with a back door that opened to the outside. To get in, I would have to open the door, reach into the musty blackness, and turn on the light. I could never reach for the light switch without imagining someone with a large axe chopping my hand off. For some irrational reason, I associated this image with the song “Judy in Disguise With Glasses”, which my sister used to listen to. It’s a great song, but it has a sickly sitar ending that seemed, to a child about to go into a dark garage, to be highly suggestive of the stump of a wrist, dripping blood.
These memories are among the most vivid of my childhood, even as I’m aware they make no sense to others — people who have never felt nightfear, or who had actual scary things to cope with in their childhood without making up silly things to frighten themselves with.
Childhood is a frightening and vulnerable time. The line between the real and the imaginary, the threatening and the comforting, is not fixed. Big people are kind and solicitous mostly, but they can shout or act unpredictably, and they are very big and complicated. Knowledge is power, and a child, having naturally less knowledge, is powerless even in a home where they are provided and cared for. And as memory and cognition develops, we experience an emerging consciousness. Maybe in the process of turning the cascade of input we get into the knowledge we’re going to have, some information gets processed the wrong way, like swallowing some water the wrong way, and it turns into a coil of tentacle instead of a flower in a garden. A shirt draped over a chair in a dark room takes on the appearance of lurking. You are awakened by dreams that turn on you.
And sometimes in bed, in the dark of night, the desire to get up for a drink would be subdued by the possibility that something would grab an ankle, if an ankle were to venture out. Or not even that specific — that under the blankets, one was safe, but that by projecting an arm out from under the covers, one was venturing into some unknown, and it would be best to stay covered. And in this suggestible state, the soundtrack in one’s mind is all the tumult of noise from the day before, including — possibly — a thunderous seven-second fanfare from earlier in the afternoon.
For me, this is the one that kept me pinned in bed.
If you’ve forgotten the vulnerability of childhood, you may not understand how these attention-catching production clips can miss, and catch the breath instead. But if you’re someone who still closes the closet doors tightly at night to make sure the things inside stay inside, then you will understand, and perhaps even nurture, this liminal territory of childish anxiety.
What’s with the state of Victoria? They’re modifying their decades-old anti-profanity law so you can be fined on the spot.
The Victorian Government plans to introduce laws this week that will give police permanent power to issue on-the-spot fines to people who swear.
If I were fined for public swearing, I’d be fined twice, because the next thing I’d say is “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Under the proposed legislation, people could be fined close to $240 for language that is considered indecent or offensive.
Considered offensive by who? The local constable? The organist at church? Are ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ swearing? Is ‘bullshit’ on the shit list? What about racial terms of abuse that are offensive, but not actually profane? This opens up some tricky issues of definition, and more worryingly, controlling the language behaviour of the public.
And how are they going to enforce it? Oh, right. Ad hoc.
The Attorney-General, Robert Clark, confessed to a bit of colourful language himself yesterday. “Occasionally I mutter things under my breath, as probably everyone does,” he told ABC radio. “But this law is not targeted at that. It’s targeted at the sort of obnoxious, offensive behaviour in public that makes life unpleasant for everybody else.”
Well, swearing in public can be unpleasant, to be sure, but so can a lot of public activities, like farting or shirtlessness. Will they be illegal, too?
I’d say there’s an opportunity for some civil disobedience here. Could they fine everyone in a mass swear-in? What if we form a huge choir and sing Tim Minchin’s Pope Song? Or, if we don’t want to spend the money, we could taunt police by saying ‘Bloody crap! It’s hot today!’ The possibilities are many.
May 20th was ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day’, part 2. It went nearly unnoticed, what with all the excitement over God’s latest mistake.
I didn’t draw Mohammed this year. For one thing, I did it last year, and I didn’t think I could improve on it. But the main reason is that the conditions are a little different this year.
I don’t have a problem with blasphemy, mockery, or confrontation. I think these tools can be valid and justifiable responses in cases where believers are making threats of violence or unreasonable demands for complicity or respect. But I do make decisions as to when I’m going to use such tools.
Last year, Muslims were making unreasonable demands that non-Muslims obey the rules of their religion, and some individuals were making specific threats of violence against Molly Norris (originator of ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day’) and against the creators of South Park. Under these circumstances, I decided that it was appropriate to join a concerted effort in direct confrontation to these demands.
This year, though, the issue hasn’t been on my radar. If there have been any credible threats made, I haven’t heard of them. Good. That’s how I like it.
Maybe not much has changed since last year. Many Muslims are still hypersensitive to criticism — witness their attempts to influence the UN to outlaw criticism of Islam — and this needs to be addressed until they learn that their religious views are no more entitled to respect than anyone else’s. However, I’m content to let the cartoon issue rest until such time as believers — Muslim or otherwise — try to use coercion or threats to curtail freedom of expression. When they do, it will once again be time to protest with pen or keyboard.
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