EclecticLip

I was reading a book of Viking wisdom yesterday.  It included the memorable line ‘no lamb for the lazy wolf‘ (a corollary for ‘the early bird gets the worm’) but peculiarly, no tips on plundering villages.  Personally, I prefer ‘the second worm doesn’t get eaten’, but that’s just me.

Banking and fairies below the fold! 

Margaret Atwood’s doing the 2008 Massey Lectures; the title is Payback.  It’s about debt — how it’s been viewed over societies and history.

Now, apparently, in Aramaic, the word for debt and sin is the same.  This may be why in Christianity, the Lord’s Prayer in the book of Matthew goes “…forgive us our debts…” whereas in the book of Luke, it goes “…forgive us our sins…”

Even more charmingly, in Aramaic, the Lord’s Prayer rhymes. Jesus as rapper: unconventional, but timely!

(In preliterate societies, religious teachings almost always incorporate mnemonic devices, to help the audiences remember.  So the rhyming makes sense.  A lot of early Buddhist texts, for example, use numbers: the three jewels, four noble truths, eightfold path, twelve causes, etc.)
Now for the fairy content:

At UBC on Wednesday, Atwood noted that at the end of Peter Pan, the kids are told that if they stop believing in fairies, they [the fairies] will die.  She added, “so it is with the banking system…”