hmmm......

blogger is being a bit strange today (maybe it's my computer)

so my post for the day appears to have published a few posts down. sorry!

<3 jared

response to "dogma"

So, i think as people in general have become more educated, "Dogmas" of other groups have been placed in question, which i think is why the term dogma has lost its value - think of yourself as an atheist college student at a liberal arts university (ie. the opposite existence of the average BYU student). so if you were this person (not you) how would you view the "dogmatic" beliefs that a 14 year old boy saw god, who told him he had to save all the world's souls. how about the "dogmatic" teaching that the eucharist turns into the ACTUAL FLESH of jesus christ inside your body. what about the centrally dogmatic belief that the scientific method is the only way to obtain truth?

while i'm guessing that the first two would be complete poppycock, the third is probably sounding pretty good to you.
but my question is WHY??? why would these essential unquestionable FACTS(according to those that believe them) be questioned?

is it because education enhances skepticism?

is it an us vs them issue?

is it because the mass quantity of information that is available (a lot of it being GARBAGE) forces people to choose what they will and will not believe?

^^^does the above question suggest that the "digital" age has brought about the necessity of new social skills?

^^^does this happen whenever there is a shift in knowledge institutions?

"The Matter of Words"

For my field trip, I decided to visit "The Matter of Words" exhibit by artists Adam Bateman, Harrell Fletcher, and John Fraser in the Museum of Art.  This exhibition uses several pieces of art to portray the importance of the printed word.  The artists state:

"Language shapes the understanding of the world and the nature of our relationships. . .In an age of electronic media, where the printed word is rapidly being dematerialized, as a result of digital forms, 'the matter of words' may soon become an outmoded concept.

The first exhibit I no-ticed was this large stack of books and magazines.  Piled together, these printed materials created a giant block, nearly 30 feet high! It seems to stand as a stark contrast to the now so "simplified" electronic devices that hold as much (and probably more) information. . .all within the palm of your hand.


Then, the artists created this piece through placing a large piece of paper onto the large book sculpture, and then, using a graphite stick, rub the impressions as if writing on a tombstone.  Adam Bateman suggests that this piece is meant to imply the "object-ness" of the books.

Do we view books as mere objects, or do we view them as knowledge?

Another exhibit I found particularly interesting was this collection of highlighted Bibles.  According to Harrell Fletcher, he met Veda Epling, a homeless woman living in the doorway of a church. He enjoyed her colorful way of highlighting her Bibles in some code only she knew.  He says: "Her Bibles exemplify the use of a restricted language code, as she is the only person who can understand her color-coded communications between herself and God."


My questions is:

How is her code of reading the Bible different from keeping the original Bible in Latin, rather than translating it into English or Greek?  Is her code viewed as less important because it seems so simple?

This next exhibit I found rather intriguing, and at first I was a little shocked.  It is a 32-minute looped video of books in a washer! Adam Bateman titles it "Admirals in Collision", also the title of a book in the washer.  The title is a play on linguistic theories and deconstruction, emphasizing that while the books are physically being washed and destroyed, the contents are still there---the pulp and the words are all still there, but they've been washed and abused and used. He says that it has been "reorganized."

In what ways do we use and abuse language?

In what ways do we minimize the importance of books and their ability to preserve language?

Are we replacing the printed word for electronic versions?

Dogma

Today we discussed dogma.

Dogma: noun. That which is fundamental to a system of beliefs; that which cannot be debated.

It was remarked that we don't use the word dogma this way anymore. In general this is true; I'd like to point out a few places this concept is still visible today.

Obviously, the Catholic church still conveys its central teachings as dogma.

Remember in biology, how DNA sequences are copied as RNA strands? Think waaaay back; those RNA strands are then used as a data source for producing proteins. The other direction doesn't work; that'd be silly! Proteins don't produce DNA! This one-directional flow is taught here at BYU to freshman in PDBio 120 as the Central Dogma of Molecular Microbiology.

James, in our post-class discussion, brought up physics. The law of gravity is pretty central and rather irrefutable, right? No. Gravity is one of the last frontier in quantum mechanics, and it's well-known that Newton's model for gravity is wrong in significant but small ways. In physics we find 'dogmatic' teaching in the fundamental assumption that everything in the universe can be modeled with elegant mathematics.

We don't call it such, but the older concept of dogma is still around!

"For passage over the water, there is a bridge"





Our Rosetta Stone was composed of balsa wood, bamboo leaves, brush and india ink, and twine. Our language included English, Sanskrit, and Ogham. It was definitely interesting to see the contrast and difference among these languages and civilizations as they came together, and also somwhat easy to see why each civilization used the medium they did (also factor in what was available to them).

Overall, the process of bringing the factors of each civilization together made for some cool experiences and thought progressions.

The Rosetta Clay

Clay tablet with Sanskrit, Greek, and English translations.

"स नः पितेव सूनवे.अग्ने सूपायनो भव |
सचस्वा नः सवस्तये"

"sa naḥ piteva sūnave.aghne sūpāyano bhava  

sacasvā naḥ svastaye"

"Να είναι εύκολο να μας όσον αφορά την προσέγγιση, έστω και ωςπατέρας στο γιο του: Αγνή, να είναι μαζί μας για ευτυχία μας."

"Be to us easy of approach, even as a father to his son: Agni, be with us for our weal.--"

We received from the "India" group this line from Book One Hymn One of the Rig Veda.  Since I remember Crista talking about the Rig Veda in her reports on India, I figured we should start there.  So, fortunately, versions of the Rig Veda are available online---and luckily the sentence was the last sentence of Book One Hymn One.  We were able to easily match the sanskrit.


English versions of the Rig Veda are also easily available, so all we had to do match Greek to the English as best as possible.


In doing this project, I realized a few interesting traits of working with clay.


First, working with clay is actually pretty easy, for the most part.  Writing in it was fairly easy. . .I mean, have you ever written in clay or Play-doh before? Pretty easy, right?  So was writing in the clay. If you mess up, then all you have to do is rub the mistake out of the clay.  It's like you're writing in pencil on an eraser.


Another thing I noticed is that while clay is easy to write on, once it's burned in a kiln, it's rather definitive.  However, it would seem rather inappropriate to bring clay to, say, a university to take notes on.  About the time that the written tradition started to take over in Greece, papyrus was also popular.  So, bringing clay to class and recording teacher's words would seem maybe out of place.


Which brings me to the point of this blog:  Are some mediums of writing more appropriate for a situation than another?  Today, you can take notes manually with a pen and pencil, or on a computer, or record them, or, I suppose, even videotape the lecture if you felt so inclined.  But then again, I rarely see someone bring their computer to church to take notes.  It wasn't until recent that it seemed appropriate to use the internet version of the scriptures to annotate and highlight.


This project taught me that mediums of writing are more than just materials, but, like the mother tongue and father tongue, there is a paternal implication for every material---in other words, there is an expectation for every writing medium.


So does that mean, for example, chiseling in stone is more manly than writing on papyrus? What do you think?

oops - where'd friday go???

So as we have been talking about the different groups and their experiences writing and translating ancient texts, it has really struck me how interconnected the different aspects of writing are.

First of all, I never realized how much the writing medium influences/is influenced by the subject of the writing. What really surprised me was the realization that I have made medium decisions at several times based on subject. For instance, I take class notes on loose leaf paper with whatever will write, but my personal journal is leather bound, acid-free paper and is only written on with select pens. There’s a reason sticky notes don’t hang around for years at a time – that medium is designed for a very specific kind of information.

Also, not all civilizations had stone tablets, or metal plates, etc. but I feel it is important to note that although the writing medium itself may not fit into this importance-hierarchy theory, I feel like the thousands of man hours of work and the immense amount of resources that go into building the temple to house the less durable mediums still allow us to count that as an effort to preserve the important stuff.

So, If we take this observation – important information is put on a lasting medium – and add that the harder it is to write on the medium, the more important the information has to be in order to be recorded (think of how writing in your personal journal would be different if it were on stone tablets) (mine would probably only include major events and their date, ie – “Marriage to Ashley M, 5-20-11”) I feel like we can make an argument that the texts that endured from ancient civilizations did so because the people of that civilization wanted them to because they are what were most valued by those people. If this is true, we can take a SUPER basic summary of what remains from an ancient civilization and make some pretty powerful inferences about that civilization.

For instance, my assigned civilization, Mesopotamia, has thousands and thousands of artefacts that remained through the years. Most of these are business and law related. So, Mesopotamian society, especially sumeria, we can assume that they were a very business oriented society. I would assume that this means they were probably a capitalist society (to some extent) and that they had relatively good social mobility.

I dunno, do you think I’m overstepping historical interpretation boundaries?