Color Me Unorthodox

Well it's Good Friday, and you know what that means. This is the happy time of year when zombie Jebus rises from the grave and rides o'er the land on his fanged, winged, slavering Dark Mount, the Easter Bunny, and delivers chocolate eggs and marshmallow peeps (a traditional Etruscan delicacy) to all the good Christian boys and girls. Then a month from now he'll do it all again, only this time in a funny hat, for the Orthodox Christians.

For Jews, today is Purim, sort of a cross between Mardi Gras (without the beads and public nudity), and Halloween (without the obvious satanic overtones). I'm not completely versed in the storied legacy of Purim, but I'm sure it has something to do with oppressed Jews overcoming tremendous odds, probably against a cruel (or incompetent) despot. I'm told that, in the grand narrative of the Jewish people's journey, it's something of a recurring theme.

A friend of mine at work has a four-year-old son who's dressing up for Purim as Indiana Jones, crusader for the preservation of Old Testament artifacts, and professional Nazi killer. I've never met this kid, but I know he rocks the clocks.

I guess my point is that we all do silly things in the name of the Invisible Sky Wizard, but what other religious holiday can you think of where drunkenness is required? Catholics may get chocolate bunnies, but Jews get liquor. That's just plain awesome.

Mathemetaphor

There are a number of interesting (to me) opportunities for parallel between the pure abstract world of Mathematics, and the messy, sensual worlds of philosophy, art and thought. Like all parallels, they tend to converge toward infinity. Of course we can't just jump right into this feast of parallax without building up to it with a little digestif. So, by way of a cheese platter (and there may be some olives in there as well):

A Sierpinski Gasket is a type of ternary Cantor set, or self-similar set. It is constructed by taking a triangle, removing a triangle-shaped piece out of the middle, then doing the same for the remaining pieces, and so on and so forth, like so:



The result – if an infinite series can be said to have a result – is a pattern of infinite boundary, and zero area. This totally counter-intuitive concept is poetry in itself. To imagine that by recursive Swiss-cheesing, we can arrive at the Infinite, not by adding to the whole, in the gluttonous, possessive fashion of current North American consumerism, but by taking away, after the fashion of Francis of Assisi, Buddha, the Jain Dharmists:

"Trees renounce fruit and keep us alive. The mountains cast away stones and pebbles, which we use for our works and art. One should renounce worldly possessions devotedly within one's power (shaktistyaga)."

Hey. I'm not saying I'm ready to give up my iPod. This is all merely by way of illustrating that the path to enlightenment is multifold. There are many trail heads (We'll talk about Pi next time), and some of these lie outside the province of our personal expertise.

If you're catching what I'm pitching, throw it back in the comments.

What Do You Know?

Behind the curve as usual, I took a whack at the belief-o-matic, you know, because it takes a website to tell me my place in the cosmos, to tell me what I believe. I was raised Roman Catholic (sort of), got first-communioned and confirmed, went to Sunday school, learned my stations of the cross and all that. So I kind of expected that to be reflected in the results.

What actually happened is that Roman Catholicism came in dead last, even after Jehovah's Witness. So I don't know, is this yet another manifestation of my problems with authority? Am I rebelling against my childhood religious educational experience? Am I denying my cultural history? Chowing down on the flavorless pabulum of white, male, middle-class non identity? Are Catholics just plain nuts?

Results:

1.	Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2.	Liberal Quakers (96%)
3.	Theravada Buddhism (93%)
4.	Neo-Pagan (90%)
5.	Secular Humanism (90%)
6.	Mahayana Buddhism (86%)
7.	Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (79%)
8.	New Age (76%)
9.	Taoism (75%)
10.	Orthodox Quaker (70%)
11.	Jainism (66%)
12.	Reform Judaism (65%)
13.	Nontheist (61%)
14.	Bahá'í Faith (57%)
15.	Sikhism (48%)
16.	Hinduism (46%)
17.	New Thought (45%)
18.	Scientology (43%)
19.	Orthodox Judaism (38%)
20.	Seventh Day Adventist (36%)
21.	Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (35%)
22.	Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (31%)
23.	Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (30%)
24.	Islam (29%)
25.	Jehovah's Witness (18%)
26.	Eastern Orthodox (17%)
27.	Roman Catholic (17%)

Unitarian Universalism? What the hell is that? Turns out, it's a fancy way of saying "None of the above".

Story of my life.