Thor's Day: How many folds?

How many times should you fold your toilet paper?

By Morris Dean

[Published originally on February 10 & 11, 2007, in the posts, "How many folds?" and "Should," respectively.]

We humans want answers to the important questions of life. Several years ago a success coach was addressing a large number of young professional women. The audience responded gratefully when she met their need to know how many times to fold their toilet paper, especially before a business meeting. (Twelve layers, she said.^*)

Ask Wednesday: How long does it take to become fluent in Salt Lake City’s street nomenclature?

It depends on who’s trying

By Morris Dean

We were in Salt Lake City, Utah, for four days recently, and though we depended on GPS to get from here to there, a particular fascination of the place was trying to master the street nomenclature. It should be very easy. The original streets were laid out by the compass, the center of town being Temple Square, the seat of church-state government and Brigham Young's homestead and many-wives household. The concept was that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' prophet, Joseph Smith. In 1831 he envisioned the "City of Zion" laid out that way. His plat called for "all streets to be 132 feet wide. These created square blocks of 10 acres measuring 660 feet on each side." [Urban Planning Library, Cornell University]

Thor's Day: What’s wrong with Mormonism?

Or Scientology?

By Paul Clark 
(aka motomynd)

Moristotle recently published an article on Mormonism that was so well written by an obviously devout and well-informed Mormon, that I emailed the link to several people with whom I regularly discuss various views on religion and philosophy. To my surprise, they responded with feedback that was far more strident and negative than I expected.
    When I offered what mild defense I can muster for any “official” religion, one of my friends asked “What next? Are you going to start defending Scientology?”
    Which made me stop to think: Why is Scientology any worse than any of the other religious contrivances?

Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

Limerick for Valentine's Day:

For this special day, will you be our Valentine?
Come on over; we'll have Paul's vegan galantine¹,
    give thanks we're not geriatric,
    wassail our footnote hat-trick²,
and gift the girls their very own ballantine³.

Thor's Day: Are Mormons Christians?

Yes, we are

By Mandy Al-Bjaly

I remember like it was yesterday sitting in my 9th grade history class. We were studying different Christian religions and my teacher brought up Mormons.
    A boy in class, one I happened to have a crush on at the time, shook his head and said, “Mormons aren’t Christians. They wrote their own book.”
    I, a 14-year-old Mormon girl, was too afraid to raise my hand and correct him. I will never forget that day.
    To make up for it now, I would like to write about how Mormons are truly Christian people.

Movie "Religulous" demands new rating category

Since I began posting a rating for each movie I watch (about two years ago), I've twice had to create a new category to accommodate the latest movie. First there was UBOO, for the Unwatchably Bad or Otherwise Offputting movie "Bordertown," then EO for the ExtraOrdinary movie "Lars and the Real Girl." Now, for Bill Maher's 2008 documentary, "Religulous" (directed by Larry Charles), I've had to create MS, or Must See. "Religulous" is, in my opinion, a movie you must see. MS is paired with one of the other, more traditionally "quality" ratings—E (for Excellent) in the case of "Religulous."
    The obvious reason for the MS rating is the film's urgent call to grow up and abandon religion in order that humans might have a better chance of avoiding self-destuction. In this, "Religulous" adds Maher's voice to that of the writer Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Religion and Letter to a Christian Nation, whom Maher interviewed recently. (In that interview, Harris, perhaps jokingly, admitted that he'd probably stolen a few lines from Maher.)
    The movie viewers and book readers who most need to see the movie and read the book of course won't do so, even if ideally they would watch and read and consequently throw off religion. These include primarily (for Maher, I'd say) Muslims, whose militancy and the militancy of their book, the Qur'an, are emphasized in the movie, but also Christians, Mormons, religious (as opposed to merely ethnic) Jews, and, of course, the odd assortment of religious kooks of one sort or another whom Maher encountered for shockingly entertaining effect: self-styled messiahs, hallucinogenized nirvanans, and recipients of messages from gods or extraterrestrials.
    But at least the indifferently irreligious might be willing to watch "Religulous" and (one hopes) become less indifferent to, if not actively critical of religion.
    And everyone already in the know about religion will enjoy Maher, the collage of clips from old movies about the Israelites or the Crucifixion or warring Mohometans, the visit to the Crucifixion theme park in Orlando, and especially his nearly incredible interview subjects. (However, Maher's interview of Francis Collins, famous Christian scientist and President Obama's chosen director of the National Institutes of Health, seemed perfunctory and inconsequential.)
    "Religulous" is funny, informative, and alarming. A Must See movie. Because of the reason for that rating, it is most appropriate that I watched the movie on the eighth anniversary of the Muslim attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and (unsuccessfully) the Capitol or the White House.

Another striking feature of "Religulous," especially for those who have seen Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" and "Brüno" (both also directed by Larry Charles; I haven't seen the latter yet but am familiar with it), is the way Maher engages his subjects, so unlike Cohen's. Maher presents himself as himself, skeptical, courteously (if assertively) good-natured, and surprisingly respectful for the most part. Cohen submerges himself in outrageous roles and manipulates his subjects mercilessly.

To see the list of my recently viewed movies (temporarily expanded to the last fifty or so) here's a direct link to the spot on my sidebar.

Early Fall

[The photograph was sent to me by my friend Ina, the first in a set captioned: "When God paints, He uses all His colors." The photo appears to have been retouched by Thomas Kincaid to add a patina of wispy spirituality.]

Tomorrow will only be the autumnal equinox, but already today copious leaf fall heralds that this will be, or is, an early Fall. Fall has long been my favorite season, despite its literal fall into death and decay. I asked my wife on our walk if she thought the season was named because of leaf fall. She thought so. "And Spring for vegetation springing up out of the ground."

I shall have my own leaf fall one day...I started to say that it seems more matter-of-fact to me now that I have made up my mind about afterlife, but that felt false. I made up my mind about afterlife years ago, perhaps at the very beginning. Hell has always seemed too macabre an invention to credit. Perhaps I have never feared either heaven or hell, believing in neither.

Heaven might be where, if there were such a place, I would be set up as reward for having written, talked, and voted for justice and the common good, for valuing goats equally with sheep.

Hell might be where, if there were such a place, I could be cast as punishment for sympathizing as much with creatures of the bush as with high-and-mighty man, for thinking Yahweh's pal Moses imagined that the burning bush spoke to him, for ridiculing the flaming Bush of contemporary political infamy, for disrespecting bush¹-eschewing Bible-thumpers, for judging the golden tablets of the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to have been a hoax motivated in part by his desire for polygamous bush².
_________________

1. As in a man's or a woman's triangle of pubic hair.
2. As in several women's triangles of pubic hair.

Hitting the books early

I woke up very early this morning. Last night, inadvertently, I made our after-dinner coffee with regular beans rather than the usual decaffeinated. While I had no difficulty going to sleep around 11:15, I did at some time in the night think about how Mormons don't as a rule drink coffee or tea, while Muslims of the desert put cardamon in theirs to make it more palatably bitter and...other manifestations of the Tower of Babel that seems to define life on earth. At around 3:30 I got up with the curious idea of looking at random in a book of "sacred literature" and seeing what I hit. I selected Stephen Mitchell's Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry:

            Eternity
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
                        – William Blake

And, on the facing page, also from William Blake, the very lines I shared with Maliha only a couple of weeks ago, when we were discussing innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

I turned to go back to bed, but since that selection from Blake reminded me of Maliha, I decided to "get a hit" from the Qur'an. As I walked back to the bookshelf I imagined opening the book near one end. To ensure that I didn't consciously choose either the front or the back, I rotated the book with my eyes closed before opening it. It was the back, where my thumb covered the opening verse of Surah 58:

            She Who Disputes
...And God hears both your sides in an argument,
for God is all-hearing, all-seeing.
                        – Thomas Cleary translation

Blasted

For several days, my mental state relative to "religious faith" has felt sort of...blasted. All confused. Sort of shut out from itself. Wanting to believe...something. Not believing...yet believing—despite a sense of loss of coherence among what I might call dogmatic propositions or "tenets of faith"—that nevertheless "all will be (or is) well." Maybe it's a feeling rather than a "belief." A sense of being all right, despite all.

For me, this seems to call into question the very idea of believing particular "religious propositions." As though I've attained, or ended up in, some sort of detachment—maybe indifference—to "religion."

It seems rather like the way I've come to feel about the novels of John Connolly. I recently read a couple of them and have become overfull with their mayhem and pervasive assumption of Evil. (If you haven't read Every Dead Thing or The Killing Kind, then believe me, the bad guys in Connolly's books are very, very bad.)

I mean, maybe I've "surfeited out" on religious stuff. My most recent read was Garry Wills's What Jesus Meant, and it ended up being a roller coaster ride. A short ride, because the book is barely 140 pages long, but a roller coaster ride nevertheless. The ride started with a steep ascent up the notion that Jesus was indeed a radical figure, much, much different from the nice guy generally portrayed, for example, in the Mormons' Jesus as Brad Pitt-lookalike. Jesus was, according to Wills, in many ways different from the usual conception. Not a bringer of peace, but of a sword, for example. Not a founder of a religion, but out and out anti-religious. Down with priests! Down with priestly functions!

But the ride straightened out. Jesus's essential message really was love. The only thing we have to do, brothers and sisters, is love the high and the low as though they are Jesus.

Then the concluding corkscrew turn around eschatological notions that seemed about as contrived as anything could be, leaving me dizzy and...blasted.

Maybe life's too short to spend one's time like this.

How many folds?

How many times should you fold your toilet paper?

We humans want answers to the important questions of life. Several years ago a success coach was addressing a large number of young professional women. The audience responded gratefully when she met their need to know how many times to fold their toilet paper, especially before a business meeting. (Twelve layers^*, she said.)

Don't doubt that this was an important question. You too have many particularly vivid memories of a parent or a neighbor or a friend imparting some such information to yourself. I can remember clearly a college roommate's telling me what his father had told him about shaving with or against the grain of the beard and, before that, my dad's showing me how to fold...toilet paper. Oh, you don't just wad it up?

And there are other questions that don't seem so mundane. "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" to quote Paul Gauguin's famous painting, "D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?":

We want answers to such questions. And to get them we often look for someone we trust to tell us. A Tony Robbins or a Wayne Dyer or an M. Scott Peck or Norman Vincent Peale. The last two are dead now, but they were big not many years ago. Or someone who claimed to speak for or from God, like Moses or Jesus Christ or Muhammad. Those last ones have stood the "tests" of lots of other people following them and of their having done so for a long, long time. And two 19th century American prophets, the Latter Day Saint Joseph Smith and Jehovah's Witness Charles Taze Russell, have had their respective international followers for a while, too.

Whichever source we accept is almost always one that our friends or our family or the members of our community accept. If it isn't a natural philosopher or Moses or Muhammad, but it is Joseph Smith, then it's likely the Mormons for us too.

It helps if whatever source is near to hand gives answers more or less like the ones we want to believe. In our rebellious stage, if we had one, we were disinclined to believe what our family or our neighbors believed. We left, to return later perhaps as a prodigal child, to look anew at the source familiar to our childhood and adolescence.

If we've traveled or read a bit, we may now be aware that that source isn't the only one. If it had been Jesus, it might now include the possibility of a humanist philosopher or of Gautama or Muhammad. The question may have become whether to choose one of these or...?

[more to be unfolded later]

______________
*How many folds to get twelve layers depends on whether you're using one- or two-ply paper. The speaker didn't cover this, but I've found that an efficient way to get twelve layers with one-ply paper is to

1. Unroll twelve squares (or an equivalent length).
2. Fold in half (lengthwise).
3. Fold in half again.
4. Fold over one third.
5. Fold over the other third.

With two-ply, unroll six squares and skip the third step.