Sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia

[melannen]

Ah. Of course I wore my voice out the day before Reformation Sunday, when we sing all the good old traditional hymns.

Anyway, to make me less depressed after listening to Pastor's Reformation Day sermon, which was all about the deeply disappointing way the ELCA is (slowly, politely, quietly) attempting to schism itself over the issue of same-sex partnerships (which our Churchwide Assembly decided they approved of last year), here is an embed of the video our Presiding Bishop posted as part of the It Gets Better project, which beatrice_otter linked to a few days ago:

Transcript:

My name is Mark Hanson, and I'm the presiding bishop of the largest Lutheran church in North America, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and I'm a father of six and a grandfather of four. I've listened with pain and shock to reports of young people taking their lives because they've been bullied and tormented for being different, for being gay or percieved to be gay, for being the people God created them to be.

I can only imagine what it's like to be bullied for being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, but I do know how bullying can destroy someone. One day I came home and found our daughter curled up in the fetal position on the floor, weeping uncontrollably. She was struggling to know who she was as a biracial young woman. She felt bruised by words people had spoken about her, words that ate away at her sense of identity and self-worth. I sat down by her on the floor, holding her in my arms.

Words have the power to harm, and the power to heal. Sometimes the words of my Christian brothers and sisters have hurt you, and I also know that our silence causes you pain. Today I want to speak honestly with you and offer you the hope I have in Christ. You are a beloved child of God. Your life carries the dignity and beauty of God's creation. God has called you by name and claimed you forever. There is a place for you in this world, and in this church.

As a Christian, I trust that God is working in this world for justice and for peace through you and through me. It gets better. For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus Our Lord. May it be so. Amen.

And, wow, I'd never really thought about the fact that Lutheran pastors have a specifically recognizable style, but it is so very painfully obvious what denomination he's from even without the intro. Which is to say: it's not by any means a perfect statement, but I am *so proud* of my Bishop for deciding to join the project, especially given the way his Church is spasming over it right now, and the cultural Lutheran more that you avoid divisiveness at all cost.

***

...oh, is there another holiday on 31 October? Sorry, you know how tunnel-vision us Christians can get about other folks' holidays. :P

I have very specific tastes when it comes to horror, I have come to realize.

The horror I find nicely shivery brings in a few particular factors: the unseen monster and the unknown fate; the incomprehensible but malignant outsider sentience; and the shift of ordinary things and places into sudden objects of fear.

The first horror-y fiction I ever read that I actually both found scary and liked was the classic fantasy novel The Face In The Frost, by John Bellairs. It's a short novel which combines parody/humor, classic quest fantasy with evil wizards, and that sort of deep horror of the mundane and unknowable. It stars two wizards named Prospero (but not the one you're thinking of) and Roger Bacon (also not the one you're thinking of) as they try to stop Melichus (a old schoomate of Prospero's) from evoking a formless, all-encompassing alien evil out of a mysterious book.

The book was clearly inspired by the Voynich manuscript, a deeply creepy Medieval book full of drawings of cyborg women, strangely biological-looking circle diagrams, and alien plants, which is written in a mysterious script that has never been decrypted. Melichus' book from The Face in the Frost is very similar, but it is finally read - by Melichus - after he discovers that, when you study the book obsessively, sleeplessly, compulsively, staring only at the pages of the book until all the rest of the world seems unreal - suddenly it wavers into something readable. Something alive, strange, something that wobbles between not quite real and too real to exist, but readable.

I've always wanted to mock up some pages of the book, properly bespelled, and since I finally found my stylus, I drew them for All Hallows. Here it is, a two-page spread from Melichus's evil book:

And yes, if you figure out how to read it properly, it really does decrypt by itself, one slow letter at a time, alive and wavering but readable, like the evil book in the story: there is proper magic in it.

The plaintext I used was a nonsense poem from later in the book. The marginals are directly inspired by the Voynich manuscript - luckily the artist of the Voynich wasn't a particularly good draftsman either.

If you figure it out or try try and fail, let me know? I've never really tested this method on anyone else, so I'd love to know how well it works. Anybody posting a full decryption within the next few days gets their comment screened, but discussion of methods is strongly encouraged. :D

ETA: If you want to know how this encryption works, siegeofangels worked out the cheating decryption method, and I give the rest of it away in comments to her entry.

Comments

[holyschist]

There's one word jumping out at me, but that's it so far. Hmmm.

[melannen]

Either you have the right method and just haven't stared at it long enough yet, or you (might) have the start of a solution but not all the way yet, or the magic.

...helpful comment is helpful!

[holyschist]

I imagine I could take that word and some of the other letters I'm fairly sure of and "decode." Part of the reason I'm having trouble with it, I suspect, is that it's a nonsense poem, so I can't use meaning to provide context.

That one word (second to last), actually, didn't require any staring, and I can't make it go away. It's just...weirdly obvious, in a way none of the others are.

Just got a couple more.

[melannen]

Going by letters you already know won't work (or, at least, it shouldn't). It's not a simple substitution cipher.

But you probably did get the second-to-last word right! Yeah, it was too obvious; I was clearly getting tired by that point. :D

[holyschist]

Welllll, it sort of would, I think, in places. Probably enough to get most of it. Anyway, I read the solution and I suspect the old-fashioned way would not work for me, at least on a computer screen. I just can't get my eyes to do it.

[siegeofangels]

I've got it, but I think I cheated, so I'll put my process in my dw so as not to spoil the fun.

[melannen]

There is a cheat-y method possible to get the original text. Which would probably involve downloading or printing the image and hacking at it.

The proper method you can do right at your web browser using a biological hack and get the wavery unreal result.

[siegeofangels]

OH THAT WOULD WORK TOO

Although sometimes that works for me and sometimes not, so I would probably still be staring.

[melannen]

Yeah, it won't work for everyone, unfortunately, although you can get apparati that help. (But, then, wandless magic won't work for everyone, either.)

[ibowieh3.livejournal.com]

I think i get it it is not that much of a code. just an optical illusion.

[melannen]

Illusions can still be cryptography!

[theletterfour]

I figured out the trick, but my eyes didn't want to co-operate so I did what seigeofangels did and then tried again after I knew what the text was. It... sort of worked once I knew what letters I was supposed to be seeing.

Which is weird, because usually I have no trouble with that specific sort of bio-hack.

[melannen]

The magic method isn't as clear as I would have liked - I think part of the problem is the specific ciphertext (and font) I used. I did test runs with much shorter ciphertext that came out a lot more clearly.

The problem is that the easier it is to read when you've got the magic working, the more obvious it is while encrypted too, especially with a ciphertext of any length. I might've erred on the wrong side with this one; since I knew the text well by the time I was done, it was hard for me to test. I may play with it more at some point to try to find the happiest medium.

ETA: Also, it really helps to go letter-by-letter: trying to read the whole thing fluently doesn't work for me either, but I can decrypt essentially the whole thing (enough to get the missing letters by context even with a nonsense text) if I concentrate on one letter at a time.

[amadi]

Code sort of things aren't my speed but I wanted to comment -- Lutheran ministers have a style, specifically their own, as do Presbyterians. (Think Mr. Rogers.) Even outside the realm of Christendom I recognize both upon hearing, which is weird. But massive high fives to your presiding bishop for that comment. He may, in fact, be the man.

[melannen]

Oh, yes, especially since I'm been spending more time around non-Lutheran clergy, I can definitely tell an AME Methodist and a UMC Methodist and an Episcopalian and a Unitarian Universalist and several different types of Baptist; I'd just never quite encountered a Lutheran pastor out-of-context enough before to realize yeah, of *course* the Lutheran style is just as distinctive as the others.

[whatistigerbalm]

I think what's throwing me off is that I can read Cyrillic, but I like the idea.

[zanzando]

*nods*
I kept seeing Greek characters myself.

[zanzando]

I really find the different denominations both fascinating and confusing.
In Germany, if you're Christian*, you're pretty much Catholic or Protestant (we use the words "protestantisch" and "evangelisch" for the latter). As far as I can tell I'd have been raised Evangelical Lutheran, but it's frankly a bit of a mystery** to me.

Kudos to your Bishop though.


* = obviously there are minority groups such as Mormons (mostly USian missionaries though), but no branches of the mainline Protestantism

** = Heh, I totally wrote "book of seven seals" first, then "Bohemian villages", and then I realised that *not* translating German expressions directly into English would probably be a good idea.

[melannen]

And I find the idea of denominations being simple really difficult to get my head around. ^_^ I mean, here in the US, not only are there a bunch of different denominations, some of them aren't really separate any more because they've been trying to recombine (only not really, because they're still autonomous), except that there are groups within the semi-merged groups who don't like the merging, and different levels of combining, and then then are churches who are sort of part of a denominations but not really--- (Although glancing at wikipedia, the German situation isn't quite that simple either.)

It's hard to imagine a world where there's two kinds of Christian and that's all that matters. But yes, the ELCA is the American church that tends to correspond to the "established" European Lutheran churches. At least for now. :D

[zanzando]

In theory it is a little complicated, yes, but in practice it really is as simple as saying you're Protestant/Catholic. Usually anyway.

I'm more familiar with the way things are done in East Germany, and admittedly the prosecution of the church and of church members and religious practitioners helped a lot to bring different branches together over time under the GDR regime. Similarly the really small number of active church members influences the relative non-existence of intra-faith disputes.

[elf]

Eeeeeeee shifty twisty wordses!

Can't quite get it all. I can't tell if that's because of (in order to avoid spoilers) artistic flaws (I suspect not, and "flaws" is not the right word), or that the words, being a nonsense poem, don't offer enough context to fill in the bits that don't click on first thought.

But eeeee this is glorious! This is one of my favoritest things in the whole world, and eep eeep eep is like a *present*.

[melannen]

No, I think it is at least partly due to methodological flaws in my process (I talked about that a bit more in siegeofangels' post), and also the font I used, which has lots of teeny thin lines and similar strokes. If I did a lot more of these, I think I could improve readability a lot with practice (and maybe with systematizing some more.)

But I am glad you enjoyed it! Yay twisty wordses.

[starlady]

This post is completely awesome on both counts.

[melannen]

Thank you!