FTB: As well now as later.

[Merlin Athrawes]

Yeah, I'm still new here but I figured, like the thread title says, as well now as later. I'd also like to get to know you all better. Ask away.

 

[Supernaut]

What do you like to do for fun?

 

[Tinker Grey]

I ask an obvious question, what is the source of your handle "Merlin Athrawes". I'm guessing it has something to do with Arthurian legend, but I don't recognize the second part.

 

[AzA]

Your faith icon says that you are Unitarian.
How did you get to connect with the Unitarian/UUA community? Maybe you could also share the top 3 things that bond you most to the Unitarian way?

 

[Merlin Athrawes]

What do you like to do for fun?

Hi Supernaut, and good to meet you.

Mostly I like reading. I like good books in most any genre, but mainly I gravitate towards history, science fiction, fantasy, and religious-oriented literature. I write occasionally but not professionally.

I also like good music of any genre, though I gravitate mostly towards 80s pop and rock, jazz, smooth jazz, and folk. I also like some CCM but I'm picky and of course understand it differently sometimes than the singers maybe intended.

I surf the internet a lot; as it's also a source of reading material and I learn a lot from it. I'm a bit of a computer hobbyist and have a Xubuntu Linux partition on my box, though mostly I use the GUI to run it and am not anywhere near proficient in the command line.

I'm not a big TV watcher, mostly auto racing (see below) and some other sports on occasion. I do like to watch thoughtful, meaningful programs when the come up. For example, the local public TV station runs Korean historical dramas produced by KBS which are well-produced and acted. The current show is "Age of Warriors," a sad story about the aftermath of a coup that occurred in Korea circa 1070, where several military buddies ousted the emperor and put in their puppet emperor in an effort to rectify the country from corruption, but got greedy for power themselves and basically wound up killing each other off. (I don't have any other connection to Korea other than a deceased uncle who served in the Korean War in the early 1950s.)

I'm also a pretty avid motorsports fan; in that vein I'm mainly into Indycar (the people who run the Indianapolis 500) and F1. I follow NASCAR enough to like some drivers and know most of what's going on, but my wife is the much larger fan between us of that series. I used to like NASCAR more; I grew up in Tennessee and Richard Petty and Cale Yarborough were my favorite drivers then. To a lesser degree Darrell Waltrip. But over the years I don't like of the directions NASCAR has taken in terms of (IMO) unfair race officiating on the track and the courting of right-wing sensibilities in their core fanbase.

 

[Merlin Athrawes]

I ask an obvious question, what is the source of your handle "Merlin Athrawes". I'm guessing it has something to do with Arthurian legend, but I don't recognize the second part.

"Merlin Athrawes" is the name of a primary character in a science fiction series called "Safehold" written by David Weber. I'm reading the latest book in the series, "A Mighty Fortress," currently.

Without providing too many spoilers (because I'd highly recommend this series), Merlin Athrawes' origins lie in a human starship naval officer named Nimue Alban. Nimue is very dedicated to her duty and unusually brave. After an alien race has all but exterminated humanity, Nimue dies in a space battle to cover the escape of a remnant. Before this last battle, however, a beloved superior officer who is escaping with this remnant, copies her memories and personality to an advanced android and takes it with him so something of Nimue will survive.

After many years, Nimue wakes up inside her new android body and discovers that the remnant did escape to a suitable refuge world, called Safehold. However, she also finds out some more disturbing things. For starters, the leaders of the escape wiped the memories of the escapees in transit, without their permission. Then when organizing the Safehold colony they literally set themselves up as gods. On pain of death these "gods" restricted common people to medieval technology and reserved the advanced tech they were accustomed to for themselves. Ostensibly they did this to keep the aliens from tracking them down via radio emissions, but mostly it was about (or in any case eventually became about) the pure exercise of power and tyranny.

Moreover, early on they utterly destroyed a dissident base with an orbital bombardment satellite they had thoughtfully set up, in the process killing Nimue's superior officer's wife, who has become basically Safehold's equivalent of Satan. The officer avenged himself by detonating a pocket-nuke in the "gods'" HQ, killing most of them.

Over the years since, the "church" of Safehold has become a worldwide theocracy, whose leadership has become greedy and power grasping and in some cases outright sadistic. Not to mention if the aliens find the human remnant on Safehold anyway, despite the tech restrictions, spears and swords won't do the humans much good. So basically Nimue takes it upon herself to help Safehold's dissidents as they fight against the theocracy and try to learn and teach the Safehold's true history. Because Safehold's theocracy is also patriarchal to the core, she alters her appearance to that of a male to be less of a stumbling block, assumes the role of a martial artist, and renames herself Merlin Athrawes.

Nimue is originally from Britain, on old Earth, and there are doubtless some Arthurian connections in both her first incarnation and her second as Merlin. However, I'm not really clear on these and they're not as yet really developed in the series, and Weber would doubtless know them better than I.

 

[Merlin Athrawes]

Your faith icon says that you are Unitarian.
How did you get to connect with the Unitarian/UUA community? Maybe you could also share the top 3 things that bond you most to the Unitarian way?

Basically it was a search by wife and I to find a common church home, one that could accommodate both our spiritual paths, which have diverged somewhat. About 10 years ago, she and I got really, really badly burned by a church experience, which I'd rather not relate here. I may discuss it in PM later as I get to know some of you better. She eventually lost her Christian faith entirely; it was that devastating to her. My own pain was comparatively less extreme, in that I still tended to refer to Jesus' teachings to articulate my own core spiritual values. At the same, though I totally lost faith in most of the metaphysical claims of historic Christianity. I just couldn't see God working in the ways "normal" Christians claim He works, try as I might. In retrospect, I'd probably had troubles with this even in my years as a "normal" Christian, but this experience was the last straw. My wife and I afterwards occasionally tried Christian churches, even liberal ones, and we just never got past the trust issues enough to settle in a common church.

As for how I've bonded with UUA, well, it's difficult to say I have actually bonded since we don't attend Sunday worship a lot even here (my wife is active in a women's group here so she's probably bonded better). I can though speak of why I support her in being active there and why I think of myself as a Unitarian nowadays.

1) Unitarianism, at least in America,** has evolved into an interfaith movement, where it's okay to be what you really are as long as you respect others' rights to do the same, and treat them with dignity. At our church, for example, besides liberal Christians there are also agnostics, liberal Jews, and Wiccans, and that's what I know about without knowing everybody there.

2) At the same time, there's a core value of honest and rigorous rational inquiry into matters of faith. While I don't think we can solve all religious and spiritual issues with pure science and rationalism, I think honest inquiry into who God is starts from there (and I do believe in a personal God). Thomas Paine, the guy who wrote "Common Sense" during the American Revolution and who is a Unitarian hero, said it best IMO when he said that Creation is the best Scripture. This goes to how UUA Christians have historically looked at Christianity as well. The original Unitarian movement in Renaissance Europe happened when a group of scholars did their Bible study one day, and concluded that they didn't find the Doctrine of the Trinity as clearly taught in Scripture as they had hitherto thought it was. So thereafter they taught a theology where God was One and only One Being, where Jesus was "only" Christianity's central prophet and teacher, and where the Holy Spirit was "only" an outpouring from the one God and not a separate person thereof. And a lot of them, like Michael Servetus, paid a great price and occasionally with their lives for it, but they felt that both reason and fidelity to Christianity demanded they stay true to their convictions.

3) Finally, it's simply easier for me to be a liberal Christian in a UUA church than elsewhere, and I can assume that wherever I go, the local UUA church will be supportive. (If anything, on some issues I'm actually comparatively the resident conservative, and there's a weird sort of refreshment in that.) For most Christian groups, not so much. In the town where we live, for example, even the local United Church of Christ congregation is fundamentalist, and the UCC is not well known for it's fundamentalism.

**(It may still be more strictly a liberal Christian movement in Europe; European Unitarians please feel free to comment.)

 

[AzA]

Merlin --
I so appreciate you taking the time to respond. I enjoyed reading about the things that are most meaningful for you right now.
I also know what you mean about suddenly becoming the resident conservative, lol. That gives me a big chuckle when it happens to me. But you know what? Wouldn't change it: it helps me see the Other in myself. And that's training I need at the moment.

I admire people who are able to hold that "honest rigor" thing. It speaks to strength. Even if others might criticize it as faithlessness.

 

[Merlin Athrawes]

Hi Aza, and thanks for your kind words. I'm not sure I always satisfactorily live up to these meaningful things, but it is my journey and my aspiration, and I thank you for affirming that.

And thanks particularly for your sympathy re: my being a resident conservative. Comparatively few things bug me about the UUA, but one of them is that there are circles where even merely being a Theist is considered something of a fundamentalist threat. They are to my knowledge a minority and I've not encountered these personally at my church. But I do read our church magazine when I'm visiting there and they do exist. I don't like the prospect of being shoved into a totally Godless box any more than I did a fundamentalist box.

Merlin --
I so appreciate you taking the time to respond. I enjoyed reading about the things that are most meaningful for you right now.
I also know what you mean about suddenly becoming the resident conservative, lol. That gives me a big chuckle when it happens to me. But you know what? Wouldn't change it: it helps me see the Other in myself. And that's training I need at the moment.

I admire people who are able to hold that "honest rigor" thing. It speaks to strength. Even if others might criticize it as faithlessness.

 

[AzA]

Comparatively few things bug me about the UUA, but one of them is that there are circles where even merely being a Theist is considered something of a fundamentalist threat. They are to my knowledge a minority and I've not encountered these personally at my church. But I do read our church magazine when I'm visiting there and they do exist. I don't like the prospect of being shoved into a totally Godless box any more than I did a fundamentalist box.

Yes, I get this because I see it in a lot of minority communities: they define themselves as against whichever group they've just escaped from, which only extends the exclusion cycle. And alienates people like you who bridge the gap.

 

[AngelusSax]

What's your favorite junk food?

 

[Merlin Athrawes]

Pizza.

What's your favorite junk food?

 

[AngelusSax]

If you could travel in time and space, and go absolutely anywhere and anywhen, where and when would you go?

 

[Merlin Athrawes]

If you could travel in time and space, and go absolutely anywhere and anywhen, where and when would you go?

Actually, if I could go absolutely anywhere with a guarantee that I'd somehow miraculously fit in culturally, I'd probably go to Anatolia (Turkey).

Besides Turkey's historic role as the leading state of the Islamic world, many people don't realize the role Anatolia played in early Christian development. IIRC many, many of the places Paul visited in his missionary journeys were in Anatolia; I just can't remember the names offhand. Maybe Ephesus, but I'm confused as to whether it's there or in Greece. IIRC certainly Antioch. And of course after the Roman Empire split and the Western part fell, the Byzantines (who were based in Anatolia) maintained for both good and bad a high Christian civilization for so many years when the West basically (well, IMO) degenerated into barbarism. There are so many ruins and sites pertinent to Christian history in Anatolia, and the modern Republic of Turkey has a secular social compact with some similarities to America's, and amongst other things they've been pretty good about preserving Christian (and other religious) sites, not just Islamic ones. (Certainly the government isn't into blowing up Buddhas like the Taliban seem to be in Afghanistan.)

And while since I'm married I couldn't really pursue this angle (I'd want to take my wife with me on this journey)....my goodness, the WOMEN. While IMO there are prettier individual American women here and there, I swear Turkey has the deepest pool of babes in the whole world, maybe excepting Russia, Greece and Texas. And the women mostly seem to be nice, sweet people but at the same time brave and assertive.

(On Edit 7:24 PM local time: I know, I'm sorry, I descended into "looksism" but even liberal guys do notice these things.)

 

[AzA]

Lol, Merlin, that was cute.

If you ended up in Turkey --- which time period, and what profession would you take up?

(If around AD 476 was implicit in your comments about the fall of Rome, don't mind me. But tell me about your profession...)

 

[Merlin Athrawes]

Lol, Merlin, that was cute.

If you ended up in Turkey --- which time period, and what profession would you take up?

(If around AD 476 was implicit in your comments about the fall of Rome, don't mind me. But tell me about your profession...)

Pretty much any time between the fall of Rome and the fall of Constantinople would be okay with me. I'd probably be a scholar. My ideal job as such would be as a research assistant for Ana Comnena, the early 12th-century Byzantine princess and scholar. Even above a university post. (And yes, I know, she did the bulk of her scholarly output while imprisoned in a convent for treason, grrr.) Not necessarily the best Christian by any standards, but a smart, brave and formidable woman. By all accounts cute too. I would declare an old-style vow of "courtly love" for her in an heartbeat.