TIMES SQUARE: You may have seen a rather angry letter in this paper some days ago written by a man from the Hill of Wrath - beg pardon, Hill of Rath, in Co Louth. His complaint was that he had received three Christmas cards from one of his local TDs in the Louth constituency - cards which the receiver himself had in effect paid for: "All three were sent in Oireachtas Éireann envelopes, so in essence I sent three cards to myself", writes Brendan Glacken.
Right, back to business. Even before Christmas Eve, when our editorial defined for once and for all (we hope) "The Meaning of Christmas", much mileage was being derived from the controversy over the views of the Dean of Clonmacnoise regarding the Incarnation.
Just the other day we were treated to the dean's "imagining" of a latter-day Jesus Christ, born in 1970 and a member of the Jewish community: "He has his mobile phone, his computer, his passport, his Visa Card, his driver's licence, his life insurance and perhaps a qualification in theological studies."
Naturally, such a notion is guaranteed to irritate many Christians, though others will only be upset by the wordy "member of (whatever) community" phrase. Why not just say: a Jew? A Traveller? A gay? At any rate, these engagingly eccentric views have drawn out the standing army of philosophers and theologians, both amateur and professional, who normally prowl the sidelines of the letters page, waiting for a rare opening.
One of the contributors asserted that he had no time for religion (himself) - "but I do have an unswerving belief in logic". He went on to say that the dean had "stepped off the rock of faith, failed to reach the rock of rationality, and fallen into the mire between."
This is a bit rich. I am not (at all) sure (in the first instance) that one can "believe" in logic, never mind have an unswerving belief in it. Even then, logic is a deceptive business. One thinks of the famous Dr Joad, a logician and early radio personality, who made his name on the BBC Brains Trust by responding to just about every question with "It depends what you mean by."
Joad once boarded an express train which had made an unscheduled stop at a local station. "I'm afraid you'll have to get off sir", an operative told him, "because this train doesn't stop here."
To which Joad replied: "That's all right then. I'm not on it."
Nor does it look well for a self-styled logician to resort to metaphor (even if he finds himself between a rock and a hard place). Our logical contributor has a strange idea about rocks of faith and rationality being divided by a soggy mire. But if he is right, it seems obvious that is where most of us dwell.
I wonder too if our correspondent has heard of the concept of "fuzzy" logic, a logic first developed over 30 years ago, which is neither Aristotelian nor Lewis Carroll-like, but embraces numerous contradictions. It has applications in computer science, and in Japan today, many household products use fuzzy logic, which sets up mathematical codes to enable computers to try to make sense of imprecise information, such as a "fairly warm" house.
The mathematician Bart Kosko gave the example of an apple. Aristotle, for example, would have said it's either an apple or not an apple. But what happens when we take a bite? And another and another? At some point the apple must change to a non-apple. And in between, it is a fuzzy apple. It is fuzzy logic that most of us use in our day to day lives, and it doesn¹t make the apple taste any better or worse.
Three cards certainly seem excessive, but the notion of sending cards to oneself deserves some consideration. If teenage girls (and boys) can send themselves St Valentine's Day cards to avoid embarrassment among their friends on the day, then surely it must be deemed acceptable to fill out a sparse Christmas mantelpiece with self-sent cards full of warm greetings and self-congratulations on the survival of another year.
We need to rethink entirely this fraught business of seasonal giving and receiving, not least the smug insistence that it is better to give than to receive, though clearly the Louth TD was a lot happier sending the three cards than their recipient was at getting them.
And if you forgot to send yourself cards one year, you would have no-one to blame but yourself.
bglacken@irish-times.ie