On "The Devil Did It" in general.

This post was indirectly prompted by Pat Robertson's rather . . . idiotic, ignorant, offensive, heretical, and blasphemous comments about Haiti making a deal with the Devil (which ignores history, AND sets up Satan as a co-equal deity with God, which is the Catharist ditheistic heresy, and, within Christianity, is considered to be blasphemous).

Anyway, setting that aside -- I wanted to think about the idea of an external Devil that acts as a temptation to evil. In THAT mode, one could argue that, while an earthquake itself is an act of God or Nature or random chance, any destruction that was exacerbated by, say, ignoring building codes in order to cut corners in order to pocket a little extra cash (which DIDN'T happen in THIS case, because Haiti doesn't even HAVE building codes) WOULD be an act of the Devil. It would be possible to make a theologically consistent-with-Christianity-as-I-as-an-outsider-understand-it argument that, while any misery that is caused by random chance is just, y'know, random, any misery that is caused or exacerbated by human selfishness, laziness, or greed IS the work of the Devil.

The idea that our mental makeup includes a propensity to want to have things easy, to ignore the needs of others in preference for our own needs, and to want to be proved right regardless of the actual objective facts. Freud's concept of the "id". The Talmudic Jewish concept of the yetzer ha-ra. The Devil. If you step back about ten paces and squint, they all look pretty much the same to me.

Nonetheless, "one of these things is not like the others", to quote the Sesame Street song. The Devil is the only one of those that is extrinsic to the human mind. The other three are inherent components of ourselves (and which, incidentally, can be, in some sense, harnessed for good -- you can use people's baser natures to encourage them to work for noble causes).

The fact that the other three include the idea of being "harnessed for good" is an advantage of those. But is there an advantage to the concept of the Devil?

I think there is.

We all contain impulses to do good -- "the altruistic impulse", "the superego", "the yetzer ha-tov", "the Spark of the Divine", to give four different names for it. And in all theological systems I know of, this impulse to do good is intrinsic. In some cases, it's a gift from God -- it is an aspect of Grace, or Inspiration, or a quality of being part of the Body of Christ -- but nonetheless, after the Gift, it becomes, and remains, an intrinsic part of the soul.

In systems in which we perceive both the impulses to do good and the impulses to do evil as intrinsic parts of ourselves, we see ourselves as beings of the mixture, in which our selfishness is as much a part of who we are as our desire to help others.

But if we perceived our desire for goodness as intrinsic and our desire for badness as extrinsic, then we can identify more with the better parts of ourselves.

Christian theology, of course, recognizes those baser parts, and, in fact, claims that that is the default state of humanity. But being our DEFAULT state doesn't make it our INHERENT state, and Christian theology states that, by becoming Christian, you swap your inherent, intrinsic nature to one that is attuned to Good. Even though you still have impulses to evil -- those impulses become extrinsic. In Christian theology, the process of becoming Christian is one of swapping your intrinsic and extrinsic impulses -- in the default, the impulse to do evil is intrinsic and the impulse to do good is extrinsic -- once you become Christian, they swap.

I can see societal benefits to people believing that they are intrinsically good -- and dangers to people believing that OTHER people aren't.

Anyone up for clam chowder after Arisia?

I was telling paper_crystals about my favorite place for clam chowder, near my house. We're going to meet Sunday at 5 PM at the Hyatt and I'm going to drive her north to Melrose to catch an early supper at Turner's Fisheries -- the one in Melrose, not the one in Boston. They close at 8 PM on Sundays, which is why we're going early.

I'll have another two seatbelts in the car -- or three, if all three people are friendly -- if anyone else wants to come along. Although we're going for clam chowder, and their oyster bar is good, their selection of fish that have fins and scales is also as good as their treyf, if anyone who keeps kosher-ish wants to show up.

Of course, if you have a vehicle of your own, that is also good.

Who wants to come and make it a party? I'm not going to Arisia this year, so this is a chance for me to see friends who will be in town. . . .

I have invented hot gingersnap rum.

Despite, or perhaps because of, not having all the ingredients I wanted, and having to improvise, I made a tasty beverage.

See, yesterday, as I was trying to get stuff done, it Just Wasn't Happening. So I looked at what I HAD done, and what still needed to be done, and decided that I could afford to just declare the day a loss, and slack. The CRITICAL things all got done, so I just punted the rest of the list.

And I felt creative. And I wanted to play with some techniques which I knew about but hadn't played with enough.

One of them is "fat washing". See, most of the esters which are fat-soluble are also alcohol-soluble. So you can get a tasty fat, like butter or bacon grease, melt it, mix it with alcohol, chill it, and then skim the fat off the top, and a good percentage of the flavors will remain behind in the alcohol.

Now, as we keep kosher in the house, the only fat I had to play with was butter. But I didn't want to just do PLAIN butter. I wanted to do some sort of FLAVORFUL butter. I could do an herbes fines butter, and maybe mix that with gin, but I didn't feel like it. I decided I wanted to use mulling spices of some sort. And mix it with dark rum.

But I was also wondering what would happen if I actually made something closer to butterscotch and used THAT.

So I started by melting butter, then mixing in brown sugar. Except I didn't have brown sugar. So I used turbanado sugar instead. I added in some allspice, and that smelled good. And it smelled like it wanted ginger. So I put that in.

I got the whole thing cooking together, and it started smelling like gingersnaps. I decided that that wasn't a bad thing, and just went in that direction. Added some more sugar -- regular white sugar, because I was low on turbanado -- a little vanilla, a couple cloves.

Then, after it was all melted together and kind of gingersnap/butterscotch-y, I added in the dark rum.

And found that we had a lot less dark rum than I'd thought we had. So I still needed to add more. I went downstairs to get some Bacardi. Which we were ALSO out of. I looked at the "rum" section of our liquor cabinet, which is actually "rum and other alcohols made from sugar". I brought up the cachaca and the arrak.

The arrak was too harsh, so I poured a bunch of cachaca in. I stirred it around, and let it cook together a little (and lit it on fire once, just for fun, just for a couple seconds), and then took it off the stove and put it in the fridge.

After a few hours, I skimmed the butter off the top (and I've saved the butter. Not sure what I'm going to do with it, but SOMETHING yummy. Maybe pancakes or something).

When Lis came home, she didn't want alcohol, so I kept it until tonight. And Lis just drank it.

And it was GOOD. (I already had known that, because I'd been tasting it all along.)