#can't wait for tomorrow to see if this prophecy gets fulfilled

[goat-among-cycads]

what the fuck does this mean

spin this wheel of fanfic tags. this will be the theme of your day tomorrow.

[xdxenon]

Morro Villian Arc

You're a young boy, probably around 11-12, and an old man finds you. He invites you to his monostary in order to train to become a ninja, and he tells you you have a special gift. Excited to see what this special gift he's talking about is, you happily follow him and he gives you a nice home, good food, and a place to rest. He shows you around and tells you to get some rest and you'll start training tomorrow.

For the next couple years, this is your life now. You learn his name is Wu, but you call him Sensei Wu, and he spends all of his time training you to become a ninja. He tells you of a great power within and it turns out, you can control the wind.

After years of training and mastering your element of wind, your Sensei tells you of a profacy. The prophecy of the Green Ninja. He tells you that if all of the golden weapons respond to your energy, you are destined to become the Green Ninja. So you train, and train, and train, doing everything in your power to get stronger, to make your Sensei, who you have grown to love as a father, proud of you. You want to fulfill your destiny that he so greatly believes you have.

The day finally comes. You walk into the room with your sensei already waiting, golden weapons layed out, waiting to receive your energy and help you fulfill your destiny. You stand, and you wait... and wait... and wait... and. Nothing.

"I am sorry. You are not destined to be the Green Ninja." He tells you, almost a bit too easily.

"B-But, you made me believe!" you shout back. "Everything can't of been for nothing!" But he doesn't listen. He goes back to his room with the weapons and shuts the door, giving no response to your devastation. You tell yourself that he has to of made a mistake. The next day you argue with him, and decide to prove him wrong. You set out to find the tomb of the First Spinjitzu Master. But you fail.

You die in the Caves of Despair. But you are not able to rest. You are sent to the departed realm, still cursed with these powers that were once such a blessing. After what only feels like a couple of days, you decide to get revenge on the father figure that made you believe. He lied to you, and then threw you away like nothing!

A hole finally opens up leading to the mortal world, and the first thing you see as you fly out is your old Sensei, the one that took you in just to betray you and, what's this? He already has many other replacements for you, including one that's wearing... WAIT, He's wearing green.

But... But that's your color. YOU'RE THE GREEN NINJA. Not some copycat replacement for you. The feelings of betrayal, anger, and jealousy all wirl around in your ghostly body, memories echoing throughout your head. You decide to devise a plan to take down those new ninja, and become the Green Ninja, which you deserve, as the original pupil

Your name is Morro, Master of Wind, and you... are the Green Ninja.

[solo1y]

A Facebook Convo; 7 Years Ago

Timothy O'Fallon [in a status update about his bible study group]: Let's do this Hemingway style (except badly): Exodus. Tomorrow. We journey The Bible in 1 Year then. And it will be 10AM. Climb the steps to the class above the Cafe at CCC. You might hear something new. You might not. More than likely you will. I would enjoy seeing you there. Well, except for Barry Purcell. Everyone else.

Barry Purcell [me]: You're full of bravado when you have the machinery of Florida's justice system behind you, aren't you? Remember, the restraining order runs out in two weeks. Then I can show up to your bible class any time I like and not a single person in this fine democratic nation you have can stop me.

Stupid joke time - "I had to go to a talk about Exodus, but I managed to get out of it."

Tim: That's the day I will teach the class using the gift of Tongues, Barry. And you can interpret. Ha ha! Er...wait...

Barry: I'd probably translate incorrectly: "And lo he said unto Ezekiel, 'I am shuffling. Yea, verily even unto Israel am I shuffling every day.' And every day he was shuffling."

Tim: But does He stack the deck? That's the controversy you know.

Barry: I guess if he's the one who built the deck in the first place, it would be technically impossible for him to "stack" it.

Tim: I'm telling you, you could teach this class

Barry: I don't think so, Tim. At the end of every class, I'd have to say "Just don't take any of it literally", which is probably anathema to the standards and practices department.

Tim: That would work for everything except for the stuff that was intended to be taken literally

Barry: The further back in time you go, the more likely that it's a more helpful approach to the material, regardless of the intentions of the author.

Tim: Chronological snobbery! Personally, I subscribe to the notion that determining what people mean when they say or write something is critical to understanding what they said or wrote...no matter how far back you go.

Barry: The further back you go, the less literally you have to take what was written in order to understand it. Not only are the earliest documents historically inaccurate, but they don't seem to understand "historical accuracy" even in theory. It's a relatively modern idea which we are imposing on the ancient texts, expecting them to bend to our conception of what "accurate" means. Whose fault is it when they snap under the strain?

A wonderful example is the literature of prophecy, which always, without exception, tells you nothing at all about the future and everything about the people making the predictions. This is true of all predictions made my any people in any culture, ever. But you'll miss that entire layer of reality if you interpret the prophecies literally.

Tim: I see historians (including very good ones) impose modern ideas of history on ancient texts all the time. Finding instances of that sort of thing is one of my most amusing pasttimes (pathetic, I know). But we mustn't mistake that sort of misdeed with the equally false notion that the ancients never intended to relate something that actually happened. That's not a modern idea at all, any more than the embellishment of events is exclusively an ancient habit. There is far less separating you and I from an ancient Chinese calligrapher or an Akkadian scribe than not, a fact that modern historians are at great pains to point out in every area of life except that of writing. Again, I find that amusing. And again, I continue to find it instructive and intellectually fulfilling to try to discern what an ancient writer actually inteded to say. In the case of Scripture, I find it a lot more than intellectually fulfilling. *********** Regarding prophecy, of course prophecy tells you nothing about the future if in fact prophetic prediction of the future is impossible. Ever. But one thing it DOES dell you abou the "people making the predictions" is that they were the sort of people who believed you could make true predictions about future events. And again I find that at least in this way, they aren't much different than me. And this adds a layer of "reality" to me that a skeptic, by definition, cannot attain.

Barry: I'm a skeptic and I accept that they were the sort of people who believed you could make true predictions about future events. You get those sorts of people today too, and their predictions are just as accurate at predicting the future.

Also, it's not so much that they never intended to reflect reality, it's that they would have been unaware of the psychological construct of a 'metaphor'. They frequently used metaphors to reflect their reality in a way that we wouldn't, at least not without flagging it down first. It wasn't a question of 'accurate' or 'inaccurate'. They just didn't think of things in those modern terms. However, as you say, once you are made aware of the common symbol database to which all our cultures refer (thanks to the good work of people like Joe Campbell, Carl Jung and James Frazer inter alia), it becomes easier to work out what the authors of these ancient works were getting at.

As far as I know, the Greeks were the first people to understand this, the first people to question their divine myths, the first people to even be aware of the fact that they could be questioned, and hence philosophy.

Tim: The Greeks were not the first people to question their divine myths, though they may have been among the first to misunderstand their own myths, or mythology itself for that matter. Their work in that area has certainly flourished in modern times. And becoming aware of the symbol databases to which all our cultures refer does indeed, in my view, give us some excellent tools to misunderstand the ancients more conveniently. As far as the ancient unawareness of the psychological construct of a metaphor goes, if by that you mean that they used metaphor much more brilliantly than we do today, and that in most cases they had a much greater understanding of how it ought to be used, I would agree with you wholeheartedly. And you missed my point about the skeptic (I am a skeptic too, just about different things). It was a joke. The skeptic can't share the layer of reality in which he identifies with the belief in prophecy. Now that I've explained it, it doesn't seem funny any more.

Barry: Oh well if you're identifying with prophecy in the sense that you think it's true, then yes. That facility will be denied the skeptic. At least until one of them comes true. Then the skeptics will all be on board.

I don't think they used the metaphor more brilliantly than we do. It was just a different way of looking at things. The Greeks may have misunderstood their own myths, but let us not forget that Socrates, the inventor of philosophy (more or less) got sentence to death specifically for the crime of blasphemy.

Timothy: Of course they won't be on board. See, told you I was a skeptic on some things. **** The way the ancients looked at metaphore was infinitely more mature, subtle, and poetic than the modern method. That's what I meant by brilliant. Admittedly, they were less encumbered by psychological theory and the new philology, but I think that's a good thing. And Socrates was sentenced to death in part for blasphemy, but everyone then as now knew very well that is not why he was sentenced to death. You might say he died of metaphor.

Barry: Blasphemy was the charge on the ticket, but of course he was killed for more practical reasons.

Socrates had absolutely no fear of anything; felt like he was on a divine quest to improve the lives of everyone in the world; never wrote anything down himself (so we are forced to rely on the accounts, often written long after his death, of others who make various claims on him); amassed a small gang of followers who delighted in his witty and intellectual take-downs of establishment and authority figures; tried and failed to reject his responsibilities; had his early life (at least the first 30 years) completely shrouded in mystery, relegated to one or two anecdotes; refused to defend himself properly against the charges of blasphemy when called upon to do so; accepted the death sentence even though it was well within his power to avoid it; and ultimately put more value on the truth than his own life.

You might indeed say that he "died of metaphor".

Tim: And we know all this about him because we believe we have ascertained the intent of those ancients who wrote about him. Barry, listen, I just think that when we apply modern theories of interpretation to ancient authors (the "what he REALLY must have meant (even without realizing it)" school of interpretation, we do the author a disservice. And I think we are further from understanding him or her, not closer. For example, I doubt very much I have ever met anyone in my life more misinterpreted than you. I see it happen all the time: you say something clever, it gets interpreted as a personal insult, and a personal insult gets thrown at you in return for your non-insult. But unlike the ancient authors, you are right here to clarify what you intended. Still, the person who originally misinterpreted your intent holds fast to their misinterpretation. It is comic and a little sad. But it shows that people prefer to interpret things based on their perception of things (such as the perception that you are an offensive little snit) rather than the intent of the author. Imagine, if it is that bad for you, how badly our modern perceptions - even ones not formulated by the Jungian school - mangle the intent of the ancients, who aren;t even here to clarify. In my class, I teach (or try to) on the theory that before we can evaluate anything about a text, we first need to do our best to figure out what the original author of that text intended it to mean. Sometimes, as you pointed out, they have a different way of looking at things than we do, and so of course that goes into determining their intent as well. But I do not subscribe to the notion that just because an author is ancient, that he thinks COMPLETELY differently than we do, or that the further back we go the more alien it is when he writes "the emperor made a sacrifice to the gods to cure his toothache" (oracle bones) or "and he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper"(psalm 1). The intent of the author is comprehensible because we are more alike than not; the distance between us in time does little to distance us in basic inference or the conceptions that follow from it.

Barry: Fair enough. My original concern was that not so much that we might think of modern ways of interpreting texts as "better", but that we would subconsciously parse all those ancient texts through our modern filters *before* we even get around to asking what the author meant. We are often unaware of how much damage we can do to an ancient text just by deciding what does or doesn't count as inside the parameters of what the author meant, and we are often unaware that we're even doing it.

Nothing I've said here is peculiar to the bible, by the way. All this would work as well for the Iliad, or any other ancient text. Despite the sterling work of Schliemann, we may never know for sure what went on at Troy, or if it happened at all. But *something* happened to cause some literary masterminds to record it. And that's as good a start as any.

Maybe what I'm saying is that the further back we go, the less likely it is for us to encounter literal, accurate history in the modern sense, because there was no modern sense of literal, accurate history back then. Does that sound better?