Theology (the Prince of the Sciences): Eschatos: Revelation 13:1-10 revisited

The file wasn't available when I posted about it on Jan. 20th, 2009 (q.v.) but here is the sermon that I mentioned in that blog. I made a hyperlink under the word "text" for the text of the sermon, but I thought I would link the MP3 of the sermon here (at least until our church's website's space runs out).

W: LP: LG: VH: LM: part 3a

The next book in the part of Victor Hugo's novel called "Fantine" introduces the character, Fantine. The year is 1817, the scene is Paris. Fantine is a working girl who has gone to the big city to make her fortune or maybe just do a little better than she could have done in her small village. She is friends with three other girls of her class and the four of them came to be acquainted because they were the girl-friends of four young men who were friends together at the university. These men came from a slightly higher social class and enjoyed a life of profligacy in the city of lights. Victor Hugo describes in poetic terms a day of leisure on a Sunday (the only day off for the girls) for these four couples. There is description of the enjoyment of a summer's day, much like when many of us were young, going to the county fair, having a great dinner at the end of a long day that one wished would last forever.
The other girls are a little more experienced than Fantine and have had other boy-friends and they look at romance in this young stage of life as merely a fling. Fantine is a bit younger and this is her first love. This day of leisure together captures in a tableau a larger time of months of relationship and frivolity. The men have promised a surprise to the girls at the end of this great day, and at the end of supper they leave to provide the surprise and the surprise turns out to be their departure. They give lame excuses about how their families will be concerned about their choices of women and they must grow up and chose someone to fit their lives. The 'book' ends with Fantine broken-hearted and with a small child, a daughter. This is the introduction of Cosette.
Fantine is in a quandary, she loses her so-called friends and there is no family in Paris to help her. She decides to go back to her village, but she is concerned that being an unwed mother might give her some trouble. As she is on her way back to her village, she happens across a small inn where the innkeeper's wife is sitting out front with her two daughters at play. She thinks this woman looks like a good mother and she strikes up a conversation and it eventually comes about that Fantine negotiates with the innkeeper and his wife to take care of her daughter until she can get established in her home town. Presumably she would send for the girl when she were able.
Fantine returns to her village and no one remembers her and a new factory has been built by Jean Valjean who is living under another name. Fantine gets a good job even thought she is not very skilled and JV is a generous employer, taking good care of his employees. But more about him later. Unfortunately the people she has left her daughter with are the Thénardiers who are unscrupulous money grubbing wastrels who will not be taking very good care of her daughter. Her is a perfect description of these cretins from the book:

They belonged to that bastard class composed of rough people who have risen and intelligent people who have fallen, which lies between the so-called middle and lower classes and unites some of the faults of the latter with nearly all the vices of the former, without possessing the generous impulses of the worker or the respectability of the bourgeois.
They were among those dwarfish natures, which, if they happen to be heated by some sullen fire, easily become monstrous. The woman was at heart a brute, the man a blackguard, both in the highest degree capable of that hideous sort of progression that can be made toward evil. There are souls that, crablike, crawl continually toward darkness, going backward in life rather than advancing, using their experience to increase their deformity, growing continually worse, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying viciousness. That was the case with this man and this woman.

VH goes on in great form and at the end you just despise these characters. The Thénardiers keep increasing the amount of money they are extorting from Fantine.
In the next book, Fantine falls on hard times by first losing her job due to the jealousy of the woman in charge of the women workers at the factory. Jean Valjean does not know that Fantine is let go unjustly and Fantine's reputation is ruined because the gossipers find out that she has a bastard child being cared for by the Thénardiers. Fantine does the best she can but the Thénardiers keep raising the amount she must send and her business of selling shirts suffers because prison labor used to make shirts drops the wages of everyone else. The Thénardiers finally lie about Cosette being ill to try to get more money out of Fantine. Fantine finally descends to selling her beautiful front teeth, lovely hair and finally her body to keep the money coming in.

In another book, the character, Javert is introduced. This man is an inspector of police and is the personification of all that is vicious in the law without mercy. Javert attempts to have Fantine thrown in prison after she attacks some young "gentleman" who had shoved some snow down her dress and made fun of her in public where she was trying to ply her last trade. Jean Valjean intercedes as he discovers that Fantine had been unjustly let go from his factory. Fantine's health declines and JV ends up caring for her at the hospital that he finances; she eventually dies and he agrees to care for Cosette.
Javert is the major antagonist of this story and VH has provided a perfect description (which I will quote in the next entry--stay tuned).

Cosmos: The new daguerreotype: Deus Ex Machina

Personal Update: Misc., computers, ORP, etc.

In addition to my internet surfing, blog reading, and various desultory entertainments (among which is a semi-obsession with Battlestar Galactica), I am continuing to read Les Misérables to Janie (I will posting a few more entries later), engaging in some Other Reading Projects (I am currently reading Philip K. Dick's & Roger Zelazny's "Deus Irae".), and playing unpaid IT support to family & friends.

Sam managed to infect his computer with some variation of the Conficker computer worm. Then a barely computer literate friend experienced the same thing and definitely didn't know what to do. In both cases I had to "wipe & reload"; anyone who uses MS Winblows will know what I mean. The problem with reformatting and a clean install is the enormous time (unless one has ghosted a clean install) that it requires to get the OS on the drive, load the drivers, configure, update, load the software, reload data, etc. etc. And I have the opportunity to do a new build for a guy at work but it drains more time, etc. I am still a computer hobbiest, but I am starting to reach the point in my life that I just want the darn thing to work. My whole family is convinced to convert to Apple; we just have to wait and save our shekels and then some day...

The novel, "Deus Irae", is another mind bender in the tradition of PKD's other novels. The story reminds me of PKD's novel, "Dr. Bloodmoney", in that it is a post-apocalyptic story, but in this case with strong religious overtones. I like that though the plot is simple and story is straight forward in a trippy way, there are other little incidental cultural fragments and philosophical ruminations that bring interest to the tale. I hope that I can some day write stories like this that entertain yet allow me to explore all sorts of ideas of human science, psychology, and culture.

There are some great moments of the sublime in Victor Hugo, but I'll reserve my comments for another entry.

Religious study continues apace as I get great spiritual steak dinners from Pastor Rayburn's sermons, and BSF forces me to stay in the bible some of the day. There is so much to learn in every area of human and divine knowledge that if I could somehow collect my paycheck without having to go to work, I would never be bored and I could study a thousand years. As the song from "Fiddler On The Roof" goes, "If I were a rich man..."
But there are spiritual riches to be had if only one had time.

I've been enjoying listening to Franz Schubert's Mass #2 in G and some of his other works, yet I still think that William Byrd has something "outer-space-like" (for want of a better word or phrase) about some of the Masses that he has written. But music seems to be like tools or books--you can never have enough. If only I had had an opportunity to study a musical instrument or had the almost infinite time to learn to sing properly... Sometimes I listen to a piece of music and it almost hurts in the enjoyment.

Ah the curse of having a brain barely alive and aware, and to not be able to do anything about it.

Social Philosophy: Obamanation: misc. 4

I spent far too many hours yesterday watching the historic inauguration of the One, and one of the refrains that I kept hearing over and over was, "I never thought that I would see it in my lifetime..." (This was in reference to a person of color ascending to the Presidency.)

I for one did expect to see this happen in my lifetime, I just didn't think it would have been a Democrat. I say this because historically, it was the Democrat Party that in the nineteenth century pushed for the continuance of slavery and when they finally could no longer get their way, especially in the South, forced the issue (co-mingling this institution with States' Rights) by seceding from the Union. After the Civil War (or War between the States) the South (mostly Democrat Party members, but others as well) eventually put into place our own system of Apartheid with Jim Crow laws and various other segregationist policies. And earlier in the nineteenth century, Andrew Jackson, a Democrat, whom I admire for his stance against the national bank (and its international banking string pullers), accelerated the genocide against Native Americans. Meanwhile back in the early twentieth century, the Wilson administration (Democrat Party) brought segregation to the National government after the previous administration (Teddy Roosevelt's, a republican) became the first to invite a black man to the White house as a guest rather than a servant. It was another Democrat administration (FDR's) that introduced the concentration camp to America via the internment of Japanese Americans, all while the blacks serving the nation in the military in World War II still had to endure Apartheid in the military. During the Civil Rights movement when the Civil Rights Act came before congress, many Democrats (mostly from the South, mind you) voted against this bill. During the Democrat administration of Johnson we had development of social engineering, the welfare state, brought into being which had the evil effect of undermining the family among the black community (not to mention, from a conspiracy p.o.v., the introduction of many debilitating drugs into the Black communities in America). So I am surprised that our first Black President came out of the Democrat Party.

Now, to be fair, the Republicans have had their black marks also. TR had the Brownsville incident and adventures in the Philippines, etc. The reconstructionism in the South after Lincoln was assassinated, the co-option of the Republican Party starting in the late nineteenth century by big business etc were all additional ways that the Republicans were derailed from their original ideals. And I won't even go into the insane "war on drugs" with all its concomitant civil liberties violations, started by Ronnie Reagan, or the largest growth in the Federal Government since FDR and Johnson brought about by George Bush 43.

One Chinese curse reads, "May you live in interesting times." Change for change's sake is not always desirable. My "hope" is that God so orders the heart of our new emperor that the change is to the good, but I have my doubts. As the Who sang, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss," and even though I am willing to give this new regime a chance, I fear this euphoria is misplaced and our government will continue to live up to its symbolization as The Beast (see last entry).