Terran Quotes

Celaena Sardothien wasn’t in league with Aelin Ashryver Galathynius. Celaena Sardothien was Aelin Ashryver Galathynius, heir to the throne and rightful Queen of Terranes. Celaena was Aelin Galathynius, the greatest living threat to Adarlan, the one person who could raise an army capable of standing against the king. Now, she was also the one person who knew the secret source of the king’s power—and who sought a way to destroy it. And he had just sent her into the arms of her strongest potential allies: to the homeland of her mother, the kingdom of her cousin, and the domain of her aunt, Queen Maeve of the Fae. Celaena was the lost Queen of Terrasen. Chaol sank to his knees.

The Gethenians do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imaginations to accept. After all, what is the first question we ask about a newborn baby? ....there is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protected/ protective. One is respected and judged only as a human being. You cannot cast a Gethnian in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards 'him' a corresponding role dependant on your expetations of the interactions between persons of the same or oppositve sex. It is an appalling experience for a Terran

Our pride is not in fighting but in farming; In the work of our, hands not our blades. Never have we sought war. We come to the Banner of the white pig because it is the banner of our friend, Terran Wanderer.

Anyways. I heard you made it onto one of the shuttles. So you're Schrödinger's Kady right now. That was this weird old Terran experiment where you put a cat in a box, and since you couldn't actually know if the cat was dead or alive from that point on, the cat was considered simultaneously both alive and dead... and presumably pissed off about being in a box.

Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane.

Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.

Human bipolarity was both the binding force and the driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerate on this point, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.

That, plus the huge traffic jams I could see on the public skyways even at this distance, told me this was no place for sensible people. Hell, it was probably no place for Terrans.

Ai taught me a Terran game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent difficult game.

Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.

The war might be over, but scaring Terrans witless is one of life's little joys.

Gvardiol: “The only thing that matters is power. And you must do all you can whether it be lying or killing to achieve it.” Pep: “You’re wrong! What truly matters is truth. In our actions and in our words. I’ve always known it deep down. That’s why, I seek out the Terrans and their faith. My faith.

But the physical danger was judged to be less important than the psychological stresses. Eight humans, crowded together like monkeys for almost three Terran years, had better get along much better than humans usually did.

We're outnumbered a hundred to one. The GIA has Auri in custody. They have our Longbow locked down. But I've studied Terran space vessels since I was six--I know the layout of a destroyer backward. And though this pack of losers and discipline cases and sociopaths might've been the last picks on anyone's mind during the Draft, turns out none of them are bad at their jobs. If I can hold this together, get us working as a team, we might even make it out of this alive...

A great majority of Terrans were idealists, and they believed fervently in concepts such as truth, justice, mercy, and the like. And not only did they believe, they also let those noble concepts guide their actions—except when it would be inconvenient or unprofitable. When that happened, they acted expediently, but continued to talk moralistically. This meant that they were “hypocrites” —a term which every race has its counterpart of.

Holding Cubbie firmly against his chest, Dargus went to stand by the head of the examination bed. Both he and the rabbisaurus peered down at the unconscious female. Her lids snapped open. Two deep brown eyes stared up at him. Cubbie chirruped excitedly. Dargus’ lips stretched into a tentative smile. The Terran screamed.

Looks like you’ve got a case of misogynitis. The only cure I can offer you is to surgically remove that thumb up your ass and for you to start treating her like a person. Got it?

It’s just ugly, like someone really angry built it. I don’t know what it is with Terrans and their design aesthetic.

Most Terran primates did not understand the multiplex nature of causality. They tended to think everything had a single cause. This simple philosophic error was so widespread on that planet that the primates were all in the habit of giving themselves, and other primates, more credit than was deserved when things went well. This made them all inordinately conceited.

The culture known as “America” had a split personality throughout its history. Its laws were puritanical; its covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were Apollonian; its revivals were almost Dionysian. In the twentieth century (Terran Christian Era) nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed—and nowhere was there such deep interest in it.

Someone comes.” Tyler looks up from the server, elbow-deep in cable. “You sure?” I peer back down the corridor at the approaching Terran. He carries an armload of computer equipment and wears a tool belt full of e-tech. He is three days unshaven, glares at the security personnel around him with an air of undisguised contempt, and looks as though he has not slept in seven years. “He certainly has the appearance of a man who works with computers, yes.

Jethri had lately formed the theory that this reluctance to offer information was not what a Terran would call spitefulness, but courtesy. It would be—an insult, if his reading of the tapes was right, to assume that another person was ignorant of any particular something.

From this day forward, let no human make war upon any other human. Let no Terran agency conspire against this new beginning. And let no man consort with alien powers. And to all the enemies of humanity, seek not to bar our way, for we shall win through, no matter the cost!

If this place were closer to Terra there’d be empty beer cans and plastic plates strewn around. The trees would be gone. There’d be old jet motors in the water. The beaches would stink to high heaven. Terran Development would have a couple of million little plastic houses set up everywhere.

Touch was a main channel of communication among the forest people. Among Terrans touch is always likely to imply threat, aggression, and so for them there is often nothing between the formal handshake and the sexual caress. All that blank was filled by the Athsheans with varied customs of touch.

CENTURY, AFTER TERRANS DISCOVERED IN THE TWENTIETH THAT IT KILLED YOU!” “It took them two hundred years to stop doing it?” I ask, bewildered. “ISN’T THAT INSANE?” Magellan says. “HONESTLY, DOESN’T THAT SOUND LIKE A SPECIES THAT WOULD BENEFIT FROM SOME KIND OF BENEVOLENT MACHINE OVERLORD?” “Silent mode,” Tyler says.

To be pushed and move beyond our own understanding provides a wonderful learning opportunity.

Gethenians could make their vehicles go faster, but they do not. If asked why not, they answer “Why?” Like asking Terrans why all our vehicles must go so fast; we answer “Why not?” No disputing tastes. Terrans tend to feel they’ve got to get ahead, make progress. The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence.

Madam, let's not be so crass. We're Terrans, after all, forever virtuous, eternally right in all matters of comportment, wise and clever, honest and forthright, inclined to modest errors in judgement while maintaining our heartfelt desire to do good and therefore entirely capable of sweeping under the carpet all the genocidal horrors studding our history in the galaxy.

John Isidore said, “I found a spider.” The three androids glanced up, momentarily moving their attention from the TV screen to him. “Let’s see it,” Pris said. She held out her hand. Roy Baty said, “Don’t talk while Buster is on.” “I’ve never seen a spider,” Pris said. She cupped the medicine bottle in her palms, surveying the creature within. “All those legs. Why’s it need so many legs, J. R.?” “That’s the way spiders are,” Isidore said, his heart pounding; he had difficulty breathing. “Eight legs.” Rising to her feet, Pris said, “You know what I think, J. R.? I think it doesn’t need all those legs.” “Eight?” Irmgard Baty said. “Why couldn’t it get by on four? Cut four off and see.” Impulsively opening her purse, she produced a pair of clean, sharp cuticle scissors, which she passed to Pris. A weird terror struck at J. R. Isidore. Carrying the medicine bottle into the kitchen, Pris seated herself at J. R. Isidore’s breakfast table. She removed the lid from the bottle and dumped the spider out. “It probably won’t be able to run as fast,” she said, “but there’s nothing for it to catch around here anyhow. It’ll die anyway.” She reached for the scissors. “Please,” Isidore said. Pris glanced up inquiringly. “Is it worth something?” “Don’t mutilate it,” he said wheezingly. Imploringly. With the scissors, Pris snipped off one of the spider’s legs. In the living room Buster Friendly on the TV screen said, “Take a look at this enlargement of a section of background. This is the sky you usually see. Wait, I’ll have Earl Parameter, head of my research staff, explain their virtually world-shaking discovery to you.” Pris clipped off another leg, restraining the spider with the edge of her hand. She was smiling. “Blowups of the video pictures,” a new voice from the TV said, “when subjected to rigorous laboratory scrutiny, reveal that the gray backdrop of sky and daytime moon against which Mercer moves is not only not Terran—it is artificial.” “You’re missing it!” Irmgard called anxiously to Pris; she rushed to the kitchen door, saw what Pris had begun doing. “Oh, do that afterward,” she said coaxingly. “This is so important, what they’re saying; it proves that everything we believed—” “Be quiet,” Roy Baty said. “—is true,” Irmgard finished. The TV set continued, “The ‘moon’ is painted; in the enlargements, one of which you see now on your screen, brush strokes show. And there is even some evidence that the scraggly weeds and dismal, sterile soil—perhaps even the stones hurled at Mercer by unseen alleged parties—are equally faked. It is quite possible in fact that the ‘stones’ are made of soft plastic, causing no authentic wounds.” “In other words,” Buster Friendly broke in, “Wilbur Mercer is not suffering at all.” The research chief said, “We at last managed, Mr. Friendly, to track down a former Hollywood special-effects man, a Mr. Wade Cortot, who flatly states, from his years of experience, that the figure of ‘Mercer’ could well be merely some bit player marching across a sound stage. Cortot has gone so far as to declare that he recognizes the stage as one used by a now out-of-business minor moviemaker with whom Cortot had various dealings several decades ago.” “So according to Cortot,” Buster Friendly said, “there can be virtually no doubt.” Pris had now cut three legs from the spider, which crept about miserably on the kitchen table, seeking a way out, a path to freedom. It found none.

My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable—but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert…. We survive there, as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do—they never adapt either.

The question has been raised, General Ia, as to whether or not you already know the outcome of this tribunal. Do you?” he asked her. “Is that why you’re trying to avoid being here? To avoid being bored?” “Sirs, I deal in percentages. There are eight possible outcomes to this tribunal which are greater than one percent in their probability, and fifty-two possible outcomes that are less than one percent, most being less than one-tenth of one percent. However small those minor possibilities are, I cannot rule them out as an outcome. I was shot in the shoulder with a handheld laser cannon on a less than three percent probability, which most people would consider to be a highly unlikely outcome. I was also elevated to the rank of a four-star General, never mind that I am now a five-star, on a less than one-hundred-thousandth of a percent, when the largest percentile, forty-seven percent, was that I should have been elevated only to the rank of Rear Admiral. “As for being bored . . . I actually would prefer to be here because that means nobody would be attacking our colonies. But they are, and that means my preferences must take second place to my sense of duty. I will admit I have sat through this tribunal around eight or nine times in the timestreams, examining those eight largest percentiles,” Ia added candidly. “This has left me very familiar with the majority of all evidence the prosecution will be presenting against me . . . but again, the outcome is never one hundred percent certain, until it has actually come to pass. I do take this tribunal seriously, but I also take the ongoing threat to Terran civilians equally seriously, sirs.

In a widely viewed documentary titled Singularity or Bust, Hugo de Garis, a renowned researcher in the field of AI and author of The Artilect War, speaks of this phenomenon. He says: In a sense, we are the problem. We’re creating artificial brains that will get smarter and smarter every year. And you can imagine, say twenty years from now, as that gap closes, millions will be asking questions like ‘Is that a good thing? Is that dangerous?’ I imagine a great debate starting to rage and, though you can’t be certain talking about the future, the scenario I see as the most probable is the worst. This time, we’re not talking about the survival of a country. This time, it’s the survival of us as a species. I see humanity splitting into two major philosophical groups, ideological groups. One group I call the cosmists, who will want to build these godlike, massively intelligent machines that will be immortal. For this group, this will be almost like a religion and that’s potentially very frightening. Now, the other group’s main motive will be fear. I call them the terrans. If you look at the Terminator movies, the essence of that movie is machines versus humans. This sounds like science fiction today but, at least for most of the techies, this idea is getting taken more and more seriously, because we’re getting closer and closer. If there’s a major war, with this kind of weaponry, it’ll be in the billions killed and that’s incredibly depressing. I’m glad I’m alive now. I’ll probably die peacefully in my bed. But I calculate that my grandkids will be caught up in this and I won’t. Thank God, I won’t see it. Each person is going to have to choose. It’s a binary decision, you build them or you don’t build them.

The Kai-lao girls were arrayed in a triangular formation, but they did not hold themselves as any warriors I knew. Each young woman was posed in strange, exaggerated ways, some balancing on one foot with arms raised, others crouched low and back with hands scrunched up in imitation of animal claws… I think. More so, they all dressed in identical uniforms save for the color, a literal rainbow. Each uniform… or maybe the girls themselves?... sported ears like a Terran feline with tails to match. Considering they twitched and moved, I could only guess they were natural. “Andrea Baker,” I said into the comms, “I misunderstand. You said when you spoke of ‘a cat fight,’ that it was a figure of speech? Perhaps you misspoke?” “Oh my God, Aylin,” Andrea laughed into the comms, “I really thought it was a joke, but I guess I was wrong. It really will be a cat fight!

Here’s a woman who, for close on two decades, has attended this faith community, disfigured and buckled over in pain. The spiritual leader, whose job is to see people in their community as God sees them, does not seem bothered by her dismal condition. It’s only when she stands upright that he takes offence. Jesus then sends further shockwaves through the gathering as he bestows on this woman a title that has never been given before: “[T]his woman [is] a daughter of Abraham.” Sarah Bessey comments on this moment: “People had only ever heard of ‘sons of Abraham’—never daughters. But at the sound of Jesus’ words ‘daughter of Abraham,’ he gave her a place to stand alongside the sons, especially the ones snarling with their sense of ownership and exclusivity over it all.

That’s why, to understand God’s word, we need to put aside the sensibilities and assumptions of our culture, and do our best to enter into the framework of theirs.

That Jesus later rubs their noses in their failure to listen to their sisters,[494] makes undoubtable the lesson he is trying to teach us men, right at the launch of the church in the world: learn to accept God’s word in the mouths of your sisters. That Jesus stitches this crucial insight into history’s most important day, and that the writers of the Gospels record it, means that it is a priority lesson we subsequent communities of Christ-followers must never forget.

Eve, the first to disobey, may have failed in the garden of the first creation when she carried Satan’s enslaving message to Adam. But Eve’s daughter in the garden of the empty tomb and new creation is the first to obey as she carries God’s emancipating message to the sons of Adam. And just like that, Eden’s curse reverses.

The real sign of God’s work in both men and women is that they both pursue Christlikeness. It’s no secret what Jesus is like. Perhaps Revelation 5 best sums up the stereotype-defying nature of Jesus. In it, John is told to look at “the Lion of Judah” who has triumphed, but when he lifts his head to see him, he is surprised to see “a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain.” Jesus is both the undaunted lion, and the slain lamb. He carries a scepter of authority, but he also carries the scars from being nailed to a cross. He is both majestic and meek. He is both king and servant. He stands tall, exalted to the heavens, but also kneels down to scoop us to his chest. He is powerful, yet vulnerable; authoritative, yet approachable; assertive, yet acquiescent; roaring, yet weeping; unbreakable, yet broken.

To be clear, the Bible never commands us to strive for greater levels of masculinity or femininity. Instead, we’re called to greater levels of Christlikeness. We don’t ask, “Am I fulfilling my mandate to become a ‘biblical’ woman or man?” Rather, “Am I imitating Christ?

This is why Paul writes, “When I became a man, I put away childish things,” and not, “I put away feminine things.” Instead of contrasting womanhood with, as we often do, manhood, perhaps we’re meant to contrast both with childhood. Children tend to await instruction, to be self-centered, fearful and extremely dependent on others. In contrast, we know we have matured in womanhood and manhood when we have learnt to serve others, be interdependent, and take more initiative and responsibility.

After all, the biblically defined goal of life is not to become more masculine or more feminine, but to become more like Jesus, who is both Lion and Lamb.

Notice especially that, although males and females may look different and one is capable of birthing and breastfeeding babies and the other is not, this passage does not create two different sets of instructions for men and women. Not just men, but women too, are given authority as God’s vice-regents, which is an aspect of our full humanity.

It takes both men and women together to reflect the full image of God. This is the blessing of an alliance.

God could have created the two sexes simultaneously, but he did not. Why? One answer leads: Adam is formed first and then Eve, because God wants to demonstrate to Adam (and his sons) how desperately alone, incomplete and inadequate he is without Eve (and her daughters)—God’s final creation.

To credit the man as her authority because she was made from some of his body would mean that Adam would need to call the soil his master, for he was made of dust.

What is particularly fascinating, however, is that the word never denotes subordination in the Old Testament. In fact, the word translated “helper” (Hebrew: ezer) is used predominantly in the Bible for God helping his people.

In 18 of the 19 instances, the one being helped is not the leader of the helper.[112] Eight of these uses the “helper” is a “saviour,” “protector,” or “rescuer.” In the remaining occurrences, the nature of the help is an offering of strength, often of a military nature.

To ezer someone, then, is to make up what is lacking in them by offering one’s strength or intervention.

in Genesis 2, in which the foremost meaning is given: “It is not good for man to be alone, I will make a suitable helper for him.” She helps him by rescuing him from his aloneness. She is his companion.

Compare Jesus’ treatment of women with the first century rabbi Eliezer, who warned, “The words of the Torah should rather be burned than entrusted to a woman. Whoever teaches his daughter the Torah is like one who teaches her lasciviousness.”[142] As moderns, we might think Jesus was merely kind to women, but he was far more than that—he was revolutionary.

The gift of the Spirit is given not only as an aspect of one’s full salvation and inclusion in God’s people, but also on behalf of one’s full participation in the mission of God.

Cynthia Westfall documents the fact that in the Greco-Roman world, female slaves and prostitutes were forbidden from veiling.[180] Married women covered their heads as a symbol of their respectable married status, modesty, and chastity. Their head covering spoke of their honoured status.[181] In Paul’s mind then, when all women covered their heads in a church gathering, it beautifully communicated that all women—whether single or married, slave or free—were honoured in Christ and in church, even those who did not receive honour outside of the church.

Holding Galatians and Philemon side by side, we notice that Paul deals with Jew–Gentile and free–slave tensions in the same way: without denying the social differences, he seeks to dissolve the hierarchy as far as possible, by applying the uniting and equalising power of the gospel.

In all Paul’s letters he is especially concerned with the difference the gospel actually makes to the practical life of the community. The church is not meant to merely believe the gospel. The church exists to work out in and through its community, the best way for people to relate to and function alongside each other. It is the one place in the world where all are meant to participate on an equal footing.

Yet in Paul’s mind, our status before God will shape our concrete relationships and the form the church takes. The gospel of Christ opens up not only a new way of relating to God but also to one another.

Paul’s point is that if God in creation has given Eve and her daughters some kind of authority, it is not for any men (nor biblical translators) to take it from her.

when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

The Christian today is separated from the biblical audience by a “river” of differences (e.g., language, culture, circumstances). This river hinders us from moving straight from meaning in their context to meaning in ours. We are certainly part of the same great story, but our place in the story is often different from that of our spiritual ancestors. Sometimes the river is wide, requiring a long bridge for crossing. At other times, it is a narrow creek, which we can cross easily. We need to know just how wide the river is before we start trying to construct a principalising bridge across it.[367]

We imagine that the married couples present in the Ephesian church were more or less like modern ones. We imagine that Paul “sees” us, our contemporary marriages, and therefore writes this letter to us. But no, the marriages he addresses are those in the first century Greco-Roman world, so different from our own.

Every second word it seems is “Christ” or “Lord.” Paul is artfully attempting to help everyone—wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters—to see their way of relating to the other as an outworking of their relationship with Christ.

he tells him to now lay down his life for his wife, to not exasperate his children, and to not threaten his slaves. This would have been an absolutely groundbreaking challenge in its day. In a culture that gave husbands the power of life and death over their wives, Paul tells husbands to lay down their power, even to die if need be, so their wives can flourish.

Paul helped the early church to attract the powerless in droves. The pagan critic Celsus mocked the church in the second century, saying that “Christianity is a religion for women, children, and slaves.”[372]

As ETs they were about standard, but as men they were a bust, they just hadn't made it. Give 'em another million years, maybe. But the Conquistadors had arrived first. Evolution moved now not at the pace of a random mutation once a millennium, but with the speed of the starships of the Terran Fleet.

You think violence is an instrument you can control, like your tech, using it only for ‘good and sufficient’ reasons. But violence is not an instrument; it’s a cancer. You can’t turn people into killing machines with the power to end life, and then expect them to behave humanely in the rest of their lives. Humane empathy is always the first victim of war, or soldiers couldn’t kill at all. Once violence gets started, it always escalates. It can’t be controlled.

On the west coast of the Isle of Man, near the hamlet of Niarbyl, the cliffs of a small cove have running diagonally across them a thin, greyish-white seam of rock. It is visible for only a hundred metres or so before it disappears into the waters of the Irish Sea but it is a memorial to the making of Scotland. Known as the Iapetus Suture, it marks the precise place where the vast continents of Laurentia and Avalonia collided, having welded the four terranes together.

Carthago delenda est. How many humans would know what those words meant? How many Terrans, whose world had birthed them, and how many on the thousands of newly populated and rediscovered orbs, all frantically developing and building and reaching upwards to a dimly understood but fantastically powerful future? Just a handful, maybe, who had access to lost books written in dead languages. History had a penchant for repeating itself, though, for rehearsing old patterns in ever grander circuits even if the participants had forgotten their origins.

They looked surprisingly humanlike, despite having black skin

the PanTerran people might not be able to pick up

Stars, Sam. We mucked it. I mean, I mucked it. And not just for us. Yet I recall pure joy: your bike hot between my legs, your arms locked ’round my waist. I recall poor Second’s chiding before I blinked it off. I recall laughter and all of those soldiers from someone else’s war standing on that terrace singing yet another Terran victory rag. You told me later that you didn’t know I’d make a run at the canyon wall ’til I torqued it, thumbing your bike’s twin throttles hard enough to singe our legs as the acceleration turned into an increasing roar. By the time we hit fifty, I couldn’t even hear you yelling at me to stop over the wind. I didn’t think you were serious. We’d climbed that mesa in daylight when we were younger, smaller, bendier. We’d done it with safety rails and belts, with hoverbikes that floated back down like carnival balloons when we failed; we’d done it with our parents cheering and a Grass Priest standing watch in case we needed healing. That run should’ve been a lark, Sam. But the night was dark as space, and our planet has no moon. You grabbed hard as I pulled the yoke. The engines screamed. I meant to pull up, climb that mesa vertically—see if we could rocket to the top before I gunned again like we’d done a hundred times as kids. But I timed it too late. I saw the mesa wall in our headlamps, and then everything went black. The next thing I recall is waking up on the Unity ship Ascendant with Ken’ri Mureen of Glos smiling down at me. Those big round eyes in her lovely, lying face. I thought I’d surely killed you, Sam, but Mureen swore you were fine. Mureen swore removing my Second was only temporary—swore surgery would fix the soup the crash had made of my brain. She made me sign forms, and then Ma came in with pastries. I still didn’t believe you’d made it out, but Ma swore it too. You know the gist after that—mostly—but there’s a lot I never told—

I hated the people offering stupid prayers to a creature that wouldn't even notice when it stepped on them. Do you think ants pray to terrans? Do you think they worship the boot that squashes them? No. They're smarter than that, than us. Ants know the inexorable truth of the situation: big thing from sky means danger, get the fuck out of the way.

I love you as only a man with a whole hide can love the woman who saved it for him

first rule of tropical weather—don’t fight against it; go with it.

Just having a little fun," Crusher said, putting his knives away. "Fun?" Burke asked. "You stabbed this man in the ass!" "His buddy did that." Crusher pointed at Murph. "No idea why. Seemed weird to me, too." "Not to be a whiner about this, but I'm pretty sure I need medical attention," MG said.

Did you know you can bruise your balls by falling onto your back hard enough?

cuffs

Celaena Sardothien wasn’t in league with Aelin Ashryver Galathynius. Celaena Sardothien was Aelin Ashryver Galathynius, heir to the throne and rightful Queen of Terranes. Celaena was Aelin Galathynius, the greatest living threat to Adarlan, the one person who could raise an army capable of standing against the king. Now, she was also the one person who knew the secret source of the king’s power—and who sought a way to destroy it. And he had just sent her into the arms of her strongest potential allies: to the homeland of her mother, the kingdom of her cousin, and the domain of her aunt, Queen Maeve of the Fae.

The church’s position had historically been that women could not lead in church, home or work because they were inferior. In every century preceding the 20th and 21st ones, the patriarchal culture had been in agreement with the church about this. Now, a new culture had arrived to defy these assumptions.

What Christians seemed to have forgotten at the time is that in earlier Christian cultures, the father mostly stayed home too: the household itself was an economic unit in which the entire family was the labour force, which cared for animals and fields, and did small-scale industry such as spinning, weaving, and joinery.

Until the 1960s, says complementarian scholar Daniel Doriani, theologians assumed female “ontological inferiority.”[44] Theologians, clergy and everyone else until this time, generally saw women as “inferior” and men as “superior.” They argued that the Bible said as much.

Here’s the key point: both views were brand new in the history of the church. Patriarchalists swapped out the previous doctrine that “women are inferior and thus subordinate to men” with “women are equal yet nonetheless subordinate to men,” while mutualists opted instead for “women are equal and thus not subordinate to men.

We cannot be part of constructing a system then sit at our desks oblivious of what multiple people are doing in its name. If you helped build something that turned into a Frankenstein, go get your lasso Victor, and pull that monster

As the economist J.K. Galbraith says, “Faced with a choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof.”[

Leo Tolstoy once wrote: “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

Julia Galef, in a Ted Talk, argues that we should also learn to live and think in scout mode: “The scout’s job is not to attack or defend. The scout’s job is to understand. The scout wants to know what's really there, as accurately as possible. And in a real, actual army, both the soldier and the scout are essential.

says Galef, whereas, Scouts are curious. They’re more likely to say they feel pleasure when they learn new information or feel an itch to solve a puzzle. They’re more likely to feel intrigued when they encounter something that contradicts their expectations, [and] more likely to say they think it’s virtuous to test your own beliefs, and they’re less likely to say that someone who changes his mind seems weak.

In other words, scouting is an anti-bias strategy. At its core, it is the humble belief that our prior conclusions might be wrong, and that we might be missing something—this may be what Peter calls having a “humble mind.

Missiologist, Alan Hirsch, explains this well: An increasing sense of anomaly develops from within the paradigm, a feeling that something is wrong. Or, at least, the prevailing mode of thought cannot resolve all the problems the paradigm itself faces. Paradoxically, it is those who have mastered the prevailing paradigm who are most often the first ones to break from the consensus—for example, Einstein and Heisenberg in science, or Calvin and Barth in theology. The real experts are the ones most able and likely to perceive when things are wrong! Thus begins what Kuhn calls “a roaming of the mind,” a new sense of freedom to engage anomalies without recourse to the preconceived assumptions and set of solutions.

John Goldingay warns against treating the Bible as a defence-document to undergird our existing beliefs: “A test whether this is so is to ask when was the last time one changed one’s mind (or better, one’s behaviour) because of something one read in Scripture. In general, we all use Scripture to confirm rather than to confront [our beliefs], merely to ‘replicate ourselves.

As the nineteenth century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer posited: “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is resisted. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.

Jose ben Johanan of Jerusalem had taught, “He who talks much with a woman brings evil upon himself and will at last inherit Hell.”[154] But Jesus shocks his followers by allowing Mary to “sit at his feet,” a technical term for being someone’s disciple.

In contrast with the rabbis, who avoided even mentioning women, Jesus populates his sermons with female characters. Scandalously, he likens God’s joy at our salvation to that of a widow who finds her lost coin.

book as large and complex as the Bible can, roughly speaking, be made to support any foregone conclusions one makes about reality. As a white South African Christian, I should know. In my country, just a few decades ago, some of our most learned “biblical” theologians read their racism into the Bible, instead of letting the Bible call out their racism.

The reason I must labour this point is to highlight that complementarianism, with its teaching of “equal but different roles” is every bit as much a departure from the historical position of the church as male–female mutualism is.[12] Both positions did not exist just 60 years ago! They are mere infants in the history of biblical interpretation, and thus, complementarianism has no more claim to pre-existence than male–female mutualism.

One of the most common errors the church continues to make is to read Scripture through the lens of culture rather than to read culture through the lens of Scripture.

Lost in the desert wilderness, with a broken heart, a hopeless spirit and a violated body, God sees Hagar and calls out a future greatness through her that prevailing social conditions should have made near impossible. She responds to God’s affirmation by being the only person in all of Scripture to name her Maker as, “The God who sees me.

The thought that I was happy with our theology for so long because it benefited me while bruising so many others, grieves me now.

Yet what most fail to appreciate is that up until the 1960s, the historical teaching of the church was that women are subordinate to men because they are inferior to men.

In conversations between mutualists and complementarians, I propose that the better way of talking about our differences is to first agree that God made males and females purposely, equally, and in a complementary fashion.

The real disagreement lies in defining what exactly these God-intended differences between men and women are, and what implications they therefore lead to.