Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit
Collabora
Productivity a subsidiary of Collabora focusing on LibreOffice support and
services for whom I work.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here.
Failing that, there are all manner of interesting things to read on
the LibreOffice Planet news
feed.
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legacy html
- To work again; read Behdad's
nice preload paper that I'd somehow missed before. Poked Chris wrt. btrfs
directory layout.
- Wrote LXF column; pleased to see Linus giving sensibly qualified
support to Microsoft's recent direction (great, but can go further). Of course,
if Miguel were to say the same things obviously, he would get flamed.
- Interested to see my friend
Christian's interesting confidence & comment on the 10
Commandments (
Exodus 20) (which incidentally I applaud, discussion of such things
is good, albeit time consuming):
- Uraeus: Yet I remember when we where thought the ten
commandments in school I started wondering about how if those where
the direct words of God
Fair enough, and a good question to ask:
the passage says And God spoke all these words:
but can we know that ? and (separately) how can we know anything ?
epistemology
is an
interesting field of course.
Uraeus (emphasis mine): they by their wording seemed to clearly
indicate that women where the property of men since it said you should
not covet your neighbors wife, and putting women on the same level as
oxes and donkeys in that regard.
That would be a substantial accusation of course: this Woman & Man
both
made in the image of God, should one be the property of the other ?
lets read the text:
"You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not
covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or
donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
There are several simple points to make here:
- In contemporary English, it sounds revolting -
the 'house' comes first after all. Well, translation
is not trivial - and worse tends to be hampered by human
conservatism, cf. people preferring unclear & out of date
translations (or those that are similar to them). As I understand
it, the Hebrew word translated House matches this English word
well, but not in all it's senses: the sense of "only bricks
and mortar" is not suitable; in the sense of "household", "his life"
and "everything he owns" it does match: ie. this is an
all-encompasing heading, followed by elaboration.
- Clearly, contrast and enumeration serve to augment the all-encompasing
nature of the command. After the initial "don't want what others have got"
(colloquilized). The verb is then repeated, and we get down to
details, with a spectrum of things you might want to covet: from the
closest to his heart (the wife), to the donkey,
or anything [else].
- The insinuation (cf. Bishop Spong) that this is in some sense a
list of inferior chattels, is not present, but on the other hand, there is clear mutual-possesion
in marriage and simply because she is "my wife", does not mean I am
not "her husband".
- Androcentric language is clearly used in scripture, and the
law is casuistic: the coveting of husbands is clearly not acceptable
either, or of Kangaroos (or whatever). At a minimum, for economy of
language generic terms for humankind (such as 'man') are regularly
used; and context is important.
- There is nothing like this command in other ANE law codes:
prosecution would be somewhat hard; it's a pure moral command
from the God that knows our hearts & minds.
- Far from being sexist, or anachronistic, the 10 commandments
were, (and still are) extremely radical. "You shall not murder"
for other ANE
laws (arguably not informed by the national experience
of slavery in Egypt) - the penalty for killing very much depended on
whom you killed: aristocrats, citizens, slaves, women
(vs. men), the unborn etc. each a different value & hence penalty.
None of that context & baggage dilutes God's radical view of
human worth here (as one example).
In conclusion, there is no clear sexist bias here, and (frankly)
while I hold a rather egalitarian view of women (vs. complementarian incidentally)
there are better passages to develop that sort of argument from.
Uraeus: ... was edited as they didn't include the implicit
endorsement of human slavery that I find the the English version.
Well, of course this is nonsense - and particularly ironic given the
pedigree of
many of those who fought for the abolition of slavery: their faith was what
propelled them. Even more ironically, the 10 commandments - particularly the eighth
commandment was a key text in that struggle: indeed, the only
application of the
death penalty for theft is that of stealing persons
NB. the translation 'kidnap' is of the same verb here 'to steal'. ie. taking
free people, and enslaving them, though of course, there is
a lot more to
be said on the topic.
Personally, I'm a fan of William Cowper's poem from the time of
abolition, still useful today for those of a racist bent; that "Every
reader of Scripture should know":
That souls have no discriminating hue,
Alike important in their Maker's view;
That none are free from blemish since the fall,
And love divine has paid one price for all.
Anyhow, as Christian apparently experienced in childhood, often
children are offered inadaquate and unsatisfying (or even no) explanations,
which is really a great shame; Worship God with your whole ... mind.
Having said that, it's easy to ask more questions in a minute than can ever
be answered in a lifetime, if ever, however interesting they are.
- Lunch. Mail, bug massage. Chat with Radek. Objective and
Competancy(?) Management tool bits - built OO.o in the background:
which will complete first ?
- Finally some hacking, deskice, OO.o unit-test bits, etc.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under
images/ and data/ directories are (usually)
created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under
the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0
license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for
themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes /
improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE,
Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International),
or anyone else.
It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.
Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)
