Science catches up to the New Sun

Matthew Keeley · 13 Dec 2008, 04:07 · from 2008-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com (Matthew Keeley)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 23:07:36 -0500
Subject: (urth) Science catches up to the New Sun
In-Reply-To: <cbf55b100812121953y329041e5w38e64b0d5ff85724 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <W2841518901296651229128526@webmail32>
	<49430D6C.3020509 at goosemoon.org>
	<cbf55b100812121953y329041e5w38e64b0d5ff85724 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <44fb53d10812122007y59569982w5e012ce7894d3ea0 at mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 10:53 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> That's true. If you parse the imagery, you don't get anything really
> meaningful. When you take into account further information like the
> Secret Files (Lilith and Adam are organisms created by the 'First
> Ancestral [Alien] Race' as part of a panspermia program, but
> accidentally they both end up on Earth etc.), Evangelion is, if
> anything, profoundly atheistic.
>
> (Personally, I consider the case for a cynical atheistic Evangelion
> infinitely stronger than the one for a cynical atheistic New Sun.
> There's an interesting essay I once saw in this vein -
> http://www.geocities.com/sephkhan/rants/dharma.html )
>
> Random trivia: Kaworu, in the early outlines, was a cat.

> If you want to analyze Eva, it's much more profitable to approach it
> from a Buddhist or Western psychological perspective - both are fields
> that Anno actually does know quite a bit about.
>
>> I mustn't run away...
>
> "It's strange that 'Evangelion' has become such a hit - all the
> characters are so sick!" ?Hideaki Anno
>
> - --
> gwern

We have Eva fans here? And I thought I was the only one.

I'd love to have an involved debate, but I think I agree with
everything you said. I do think Eva is atheistic (or I think I do) but
a Buddhist brand of atheism as opposed to a Death-of-God sort of
atheism. The end of the show harps so damn much on relativism that
it's hard to conclude otherwise.

Video for the initiated: Shinji's voice actor, frustrated at the end
of the show (some language)

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/shinjis-rant-animated/48171386

"'If I were to run away, OK, let's analyze that, where the f--- would I go!?"

-Matt

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net