Easter Time

It's Easter weekend, or as I was taught in seminary to call it, "Pascal Triduum". Though I'm an atheist today, the observation of Easter is still a ritual touchstone of my year. Winter entices from me a depth of loathing that I cannot fairly articulate, so at the first signs of spring, you will easily notice my impatience with winter's residual chill.  Every walk in the park encourages me to inspect the progress of leaf buds on low-hanging tree limbs.  The earliest blossoms cause rejoicing untold.  The death of winter is over, and I'm glad to be free of it.
This is the cycle of Nature. Life leads to death, but what is dead does not return; it reciprocally nourishes life. Life cannot be without death. You don't need special training to see this.  If you eat food, you experience this truth graphically.  Nature is change culminating in death, and beliefs otherwise are misleading.
The spring festival of Easter is about life, however, that winter has passed and new life is rising out of the coldness of death.  The myth of Jesus serves as a metaphor of Nature's seasonal ritual, and I really don't mind that.  The hymns of resurrection are not, to me, about a God-Man raised from the grave; they are poetic license, imagery that elicits joy at the arrival of spring's new life.
The believers may revel in their hapless naiveté, but I'll gladly dance with them and sing their hymns of life-affirming joy, because the glory of spring is not the misguided and childish notions of religion but rather the childlike pleasures of grass, warm breezes, the scent of magnolias, and the twitter of birds in the trees.
"Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth,
bright with a glorious splendor,
for darkness has been vanquished...."





Quote: Exsultet of the Great Vigil of Easter

Google Has Justified Me

After some hesitation, or more, I have come back to the blog and mated it to my Google account.
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"For one believes with the heart and so is justified."

That's from the Letter to the Romans in the New Testament.  Being justified is a big deal among evangelical and fundamentalist cults of christ, but when I listened to christ cultists talk about it, I experienced a frightening realization.  They see their belief as a sort of magic pill that literally justifies whatever behavior they want.  I grew up hearing about justification by faith and accepting that so long as I have faith in christ, I am in a continual state of forgiveness for my actions.  There is nothing I can do to cause God to condemn me so long as I retain my belief in the philosophical proposition of justification.

"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in christ Jesus."

The attraction of the christ religions is this assurance of complete forgiveness and continual justification no matter what the believer does.  When I was a believer, I attended a wide range of cult assemblies but heard this one consistent message throughout:  A believer's behavior is justified because of the death of christ.  I have sat in churches in many places and heard exclamations from the congregants such as, "Justify me, Lord!"  "I am justified! Amen!"  This is the bedrock of the christ religions, but it is also the most sinister aspect of their cult.

If a person can do whatever he likes and be assured of God's favor, based on faith, what moral foundation can they claim?  Morality is right action.  Of course, there is disagreement about what is "right", but the discussion and debate revolve around the accepted concept that some actions are right and some actions are not right.  If someone dismisses this entire concept, morality becomes an esoteric notion rather than a realistic means of keeping the peace.

"All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial."

The christians have all manner of public caveats to satisfy general society that the cult of christ is not licentious, but it was obviously an important point in the early history of the church.  It was put in the bible, so it must have had value and meaning to them.  Christians viewed (and mostly still do view) themselves as above man-made rules.  (Let's suspend reality for a moment and pretend that the bible isn't a man-made collection of literature.)  If you believe that all your actions are justified because of your faith in christ and that all things are technically permissible, you are, strictly speaking, a sociopath.  If you look at the way the church is attempting to intimidate government into adopting cult principles, how the cults of christ are forcing public compliance with their rituals, the murders of doctors and gay people with the universal praise of the cult communities, the insertion of bogus and deceitful messages into school textbooks, the glorification of war in the Middle East as anticipatory of christ's coming, the vitriol spat out hourly against the President, against free thinkers, against anyone who isn't in the cults.  By faith they claim justification for all these sociopathic actions.

To counter this false philosophy and dangerous cultic dogma, I propose Man stop believing that unright actions are justified.  They are not.  We are called by the uncountable eons of evolution and the goodness within us to live right without caveats and qualifications, without the flippant excuse of faith to justify us.  We are called not to ask a mystical spirit in the sky to forgive us, but to seek forgiveness among ourselves for our human failures.  We are called not to expect some inert divinity to justify our actions, but rather we are to control, discipline and govern ourselves so that our actions are right.  The way of christ is lazy.  No sacrifice is asked or expected, simply the idle assent to a philosophy of unremitting justification.  In the real world, human beings must always sacrifice for the good of all and peace among us all. There is no sweet, easy deal with the gods, or even one of them, to get us out of that.

Letter to the Romans 10.10 and 8.1
First Letter to the Corinthians 10.23

  

The one about spring

Winter is a hard time for me.  It gets cold in Korea, not as cold as my hometown in America, but it is still pretty cold.  Riding my motorcycle is one of my favorite activities, but when the temperatures are low, ice often forms on the streets which makes riding dangerous.  Walking in the cold is OK if the day is sunny.  It is not pleasant, however, when the day is overcast and windy.  Though it doesn't snow much where I live, when it does snow, the traffic is a nightmare and everything looks dirty and messy outside.  Of course, heating the house is expensive.  The utility bills in the winter are very high.

When spring finally appears, it is the happiest time of the year.  This week spring is beginning here in Korea.  There is still a tussle between the cold and the warm.  One day is cold, the next warm, cold, then warm again. As the seasons wrestle, signs of new life begin to show on trees and bushes all over the city.  There are little buds that will become leaves and blossoms in a matter of weeks.   Rains caused by the conflict of warm fronts and cold fronts soak the earth to free up grass and flowers.  Insects wriggle from their hiding places to search for food and mates as the promise of long, warm days rises with the sun.

I love spring and summer to the same degree I dislike winter. When winter is past, there is no love lost between us!  Am I alone?  Hardly!  There are a lot of people who also don't like winter, people who rejoice at the longer days of spring and anticipate the coming warmth of summer.  Count me among them.  Good riddance, old man winter!  Welcome, flowering spring! It's time to dust off the motorcycle and time to let the warm breezes buoy my spirits.

The One About Tumbling Walls

I teach English to speakers of other languages.  It isn't the career I had prepared and studied for,  but in many ways it's the career that is best for me.  Maybe that's the way life works; your personality, skills, and circumstances eventually guide you to where you ought to be.

On my own time, when I'm not teaching English at my university, there's a place I go to help other learners with their English language skills.  It's online in the open secret of Second Life, the 3D environment where anyone with an internet connection is loosed from the bonds of location to venture beyond their home, their town, or their nation to a wider and wilder world created from the minds of artists, businesspeople, programmers, and many others, including people like me, teachers.

This is where learners from China and Korea sit side by side with those from Japan and Russia.  A housewife in Estonia and a travel agent in Brasil practice speaking English with each other as though the 11,000 kilometers between them were but across the room.  Teachers from America and Australia work together unfettered by the restrictions of place to help learners meet their goals, goals that include self-improvement,  competence on the job or job advancement, more enjoyable travel opportunities, and more awareness and familiarity with the people and cultures of the broader world.

There's no money in doing this, but it isn't about money; it's about people.  The world will only prosper and humankind will only advance when there is understanding between and among us.  No, learning English is not the true and proper goal in itself.  Learning English is only the walking-stick that supports us along the path up the steep grade of our human progress.  Generations further up that path will not even realize how much language was a barrier to our common advancement but only because of the hard work we have been doing to build bridges, tunnels, and highways in communication now. Learning English, or any language, does not solve the problems between human beings, but it does help us get started.  When the barriers of communication are breached, it will not be long before the walls come tumbling down.

The one about leisure

When Elder Scrolls 3, Morrowind, came out, I remember playing sometimes 15 hours straight.  It was the first game like that I had ever experienced, and it was completely blowing me away.  Before that, all I had ever played really was Age of Empires.

That wasn't exactly good for me, though, playing long stretches at a time, so when Elder Scrolls 4, Oblivion, came out, I promised myself to play only two hours maximum at a time.  

I lied.  

I ended up playing Oblivion hours on end, too, because it was just so cool and so much better than Morrowind, I honestly couldn't get enough of it.  I even bought a new television to make the Oblivion experience all the better.

So now Skyrim has come out, Elder Scrolls 5.  It's compelling just like the others in the series, but for some reason, I have not sat on the XBox hour after hour playing it.  I have played for a couple hours then gone off to do other things, all without threatening myself or setting alarm clocks or anything more extraordinary than simply glancing at the clock and saying, "Hey, I want to go outside now."  Maybe I'm finally growing up?  Unlikely, but maybe.

The graphics and scripting and character interactions are the best ever in Skyrim.  For the first few days of play, I really didn't do much except wander around the game world enjoying how beautiful it was, how the butterflies flew, how the grass waved in the breeze, how people chopped wood and smithed blades, as well as how the occasional sabertooth cat could slice me in two with one swipe.  Fascinating.

But now I'm down to business and getting into the actual meat of gameplay.  I got married in the game world so I could have a steady and daily flow of income from my spouse.  That was never possible before.  There are children in the game, too.  Elder Scrolls games never had children characters before.  A lot of the grooviest stuff must have come from the game makers' experience with Fallout 3, because there are aspects of Skyrim that remind me of Fallout, and some of the voice actors were also in Fallout.  

Games like this are little escapes from reality, and that's not a bad thing.  It's a hell of a lot better than watching television.  TV as entertainment is a total waste of time. Everyone needs to have and enjoy meaningful leisure on a regular basis.  My job affords me the time and opportunity to engage in several different leisure activities; Skyrim is just one. 

I hope that you, too, have something fulfilling and fun and challenging to do when you are not working to make a living, be it reading great books, building things, fixing things, playing games, hiking, biking, or whatever.  Make sure you create leisure for yourself regularly.  It's what helps us stay sane in this crazy world.

All the photos here are swiped from the Internet because I cannot find my Morrowind screen shots, and I never played Oblivion or Skyrim on anything other than the XBox where you can't take screenshots.

The one about improvement and attitude

Before I came to Korea I had used chopsticks on and off and could at least get the food to my mouth without dropping it, well, most of the time anyway.  Over the years I have lived here, my proficiency with chopsticks has improved off the scale, yet I noticed something a few years ago.  I don't hold chopsticks the same way Koreans do, yet I can use chopsticks just as well as they can.  In that little observation, a whole philosophy of learning appeared before my eyes.  Proficiency lies not in technical imitation, but in the extent of usage.  Tell someone to reach a goal, give him a pointer or two, and let him go.  Given the opportunity to practice the skill, they will arrive at the goal, though maybe not the same way you had intended nor with the same style you expected.

Learning English (or any language) works the same way.  However, here in Korea, many are obsessed with technical imitation which ultimately defeats most of them long before they gain suitable proficiency in the language.  My observation isn't some novel approach to the whole English learning endeavor, because I have heard experienced English teachers say over and over that improvement comes with usage.  Speak more, write more, listen more, read more, and your language skills will improve.  However, instead of creating an abundance of opportunities for real and genuine use of English, many universities and communities in Korea discourage such things in favor of classroom rote and mimicry.  For example, I have online conversation classes in the 3D virtual world of Second Life.  Many of my learners appreciate that this environment compels them to use English extensively whether in my class setting or elsewhere in the online environment.  The virtual reality allows a much more realistic use of the language than they find in a brick & mortar classroom.  They can not only meet native English speakers as well as people from any number of other countries who use the English language within the virtual world, they can also exchange real and personal ideas and opinions in the common language and receive back the same from others. Usage improves skill.  It's true with a hedge trimmer, it's true with pastry, it's true with language.  However, our school is closing its presence in Second Life and enforcing the rule that language education must take place as though it were no different than a math, science, or history class. English is data to be learned, not a language to be used.

Another hindrance to learning, at our school anyway, is that the English speaking teaching staff are crowded into mass offices with many teachers per office.  My students find it uncomfortable to come to my office, because there are eleven other teachers sitting there listening to them, and I am in the least populated office.  It's intimidating, to the low level learner especially, to visit a teacher in this environment.  The university thinks it's the teachers who just want private or semi-private offices for our own comfort, but the reality is, it's the students who suffer from this secretarial pool setting where they are too nervous to come see their teacher because it's like stepping on a stage in front of an audience.  Nobody likes their problems or academic difficulties on display like that, especially if their language skills are minimal.  It's like seeing your priest or rabbi for a personal problem while a dozen strangers are listening in.  The university is discouraging student-English teacher interaction by denying the student-teacher privacy all other teachers at the university are favored with.  If I were a student, I would not come see my teacher in a room full of strangers unless I absolutely had to, but that's what we see not just here but all across the realm of the Korean English education system.  Our students don't come by our offices to talk; they come for incidental reasons.  They come to take make-up tests. They come to turn in a late homework.  They come to ask a quick question about when their midterm exam is.  They come to bring a can of Pocari Sweat as a gift. They do not come to consult with the teacher to help them speak English better, because in a room of many other teachers, you cannot speak freely, you have to lower your voice, you are distracted.  The Korean education system once again rallies to assert its time-tested recipe for failure.

There are thousands and thousands of native English speakers living in Korea, yet the schools and universities ignore us as a resource.  We are just foreigners and workers who need to be controlled and constricted.  Many of us have degrees in subjects that allow us to teach those subjects either in high schools or universities, yet the Koreans opt to use us only in "conversation" classes which meet once a week, if there isn't one of their innumerable holidays in the way of that.  Unless we have fluency in Korean language, we are not allowed to teach our subjects which defeats the whole reason we are supposedly here in Korea in the first place, to provide opportunities for them to use English in real-life situations.  The Koreans started this 'learn English' venture and invited the thousands and thousands of us here to help them fulfill it while at the same time tying our hands behind our backs, gagging us, and generally ensuring that we will not get too comfortable in their country.  Some teachers stick it out because there are no jobs back home worth taking.  Some stick it out because they believe there is no problem, that people like me are simply exaggerating Korean ineptitude.  Some, though, just get sick of the hypocrisy and lip service to education and go where their contributions will be appreciated.

Koreans amaze me in many ways.  They are obviously a long-established homogenous people.  Their nation is so old that no language has survived that is related to Korean. That's pretty cool.  Their general outlook on life and society can be thought-provoking and even admirable.  It's their inflexibility that also amazes me, however.  Their reticence to create or to innovate is holding them back too much.  I love Korea, and I don't say that flippantly.  Sure, I get irritated with the nuisances of daily life here, but so do native Koreans; when all is said and done, though, and I'm sitting at home with my cat on my lap and warm cup of tea in my hands, I can reflect and honestly say that I do love Korea.  It's not from any malice that I bring up the serious inadequacies of the Korean approach to language education. It's because I know they can do better.  It's because I know English is crucial to success in the modern world and I want every Korean to succeed.  If Koreans don't come to grips with how language is learned and implement changes necessary to ensure the common language takes root in their country, they will not be nearly as successful as they could be.  Korea, we are here for you, but if you don't change your attitude, we might not stay.

The one about garbage bins

Back in the States, I always just dumped my food waste in with my regular household waste, but here in Korea, they use these little buckets for food waste.  The lining is slatted to allow liquid waste to pass through so you can dispose of it in the waste water system and the solid food waste you can... well, I really don't know what to do with the solid food waste.  Some apartment houses have special containers out near the trash collection area just for food waste, but our apartment house doesn't have that, so I end up draining my food waste and simply tossing it in with the regular trash much as I have always done my whole life.

The other day the old lady who, with her elderly husband, kind of acts as the overseer of the building came ringing my doorbell at 8:30 in the morning.  I usually don't answer the door at 8:30 since I'm more than likely still in my underwear.  Each apartment has a video camera on the doorbell; I looked at the monitor and saw it was the old lady, so I slipped on some pants and answered the door.  She stood there telling me about these garbage buckets and something something "go bring you one" something something.  I couldn't really understand what she was saying, but I think the gist was "if you need one of these buckets [she was holding one up for me to see] I'll go and get you one."  She can hardly get up and down the stairs here, so I might have gotten mixed up on that bit.  She might have been telling me to go get one.  However, I already have one, but I don't know what more to do with it. There is a special truck that comes by and empties these garbage containers at buildings that have them, but since our building doesn't have one, I'm not sure what to do.  Should I just take my little bin out there and hope nobody steals it?  Who would steal a garbage bin? You never know, but these 2-dollar bins are small enough to walk off with unnoticed.

It's a good idea to separate food garbage from regular trash.  It keeps down vermin and the collected material can be used for composting.  I'm sure the collectors earn money from farmers for most if not all of it.  Maybe I'll start investigating this more, though not sure anyone in my building will understand me. I can order food in a restaurant and go shopping, use taxis, and read most posted signs around town, but my Korean language skills are abysmal for getting spoken information.  Maybe I need to try anyway, just because it's the right thing to do.  Isn't it funny how something as mundane as garbage can compel us to change the way we think?