Collie's Bestiary

Here there be dragons… and plot spoilers! Proceed at your own risk. :) I'm struggling through getting final papers written, and my brain needed a break… so I did a quick review of L. E. Modesitt, Jr.'s The Eternity Artifact to clear my head. Whew! I needed that. Now, back to work! ;) ~ * [...]

Source material that is simply bad To be fair to Armstrong, I would assume much of her previously mentioned double standards arose from her source material. I do not know why she chose to lean so heavily on such dated and inaccurate material for a book written in 2006. I do not refer here to [...]

This darkly pessimistic view on goddesses is most exemplified in Armstrong's version of the myths of Inanna. I've had the pleasure of reading some rather good translations of these myths, translations which scholars themselves laud. Inanna, the Queen of Heaven and Earth, Love and War, is clearly a goddess of life, death, and rebirth, moving [...]

Blatant and inaccurate double standards As I've previously noted, I was not happy with how the second chapter was progressing. To my increasing dismay, things only got worse: we are introduced to the so-called original "High God" or "Sky God" of the "ancient Mesopotamians, Vedic Indians, Greeks and Canaanites," which is a "primitive monotheism" Armstrong [...]

The first book by Karen Armstrong which I read was A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It was absolutely amazing to me — chock-full of new ideas, fascinating religious philosophy, and beautiful writing. Since then I have read a few others as well by Armstrong, and I was delighted [...]

This was a quick one-page paper written for one of my classes, which has a wonderful name: "Tree of Brilliant Fruit: Finding Spiritual Wisdom Through the Arts." I'm sharing the paper here because the book was interesting, I'm open to other folks' interpretations, it's fun, and I like sharing writing. I can probably come up [...]

In effect, those two verses were where the author wrote Truth as she knew it, and that's why those verses shone. Unfortunately, since we've not yet seen the end of this conflict, and she had to describe that 'victory' metaphorically, she couldn't write a truth for that — it hasn't happened yet. Here's the second [...]

Oppression & technology The previously mentioned example is not the only instance of the co-existence of both a lack of, and a distinct awareness of, knowledge regarding a particular object or subject. For example, there's also how technology is treated in these prose tales.

("The Warrior Women") by Monique Wittig translated by David Le Vay (first reviewed April 2005)

I also understand the human psyche or spirit is sometimes baffling in its complexity. I have both read about, and experienced situations, where what seems like a simple and beneficial command to oneself (such as "stop being afraid of riding in elevators" or "lose 30lbs.") can be unwittingly short-circuited by other equally strong internal desires [...]