h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

23! The eye in the triangle! Noooooooo!!!

You know too much, kiddo. Now skidoo before I immanentise the Eschaton on y'.

Fnord!

Some of Mercedes Lackey's books, specifically: Exile's Honor, The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy, The Mage-Storms Trilogy. Also ANYTHING by P. G. Wodehouse.

I hear Wodehouse used to put all his similes and metaphors in a row around his walls, and put the ones that needed improvement low and the good ones high - and he wouldn't give in the book until they were all at ceiling height.
Marvin - Have you ever figured out exactly what Immanentizing the Eschaton *means*?

Has anyone?

Well, frankly, you can't believe Hagbard's description. And everyone uses it in different senses. So the only rational thing to do is to assume that it means "bringing the total dominance of fundamentalist Christianity closer".

Best books.
The Silmarillian-Tolkien
Ishmael-Daniel Quinn
Perelandra-C.S. Lewis

The way I heard it was that Wodehouse would put each page of his manuscript (one has to assume only a few chapters at a time, or it wouldn't fit) up on his wall, really low at first, then work on each page, moving it a little way up the wall each time it got improved. Only when the entire manuscript was uniformly touching the ceiling (or at least as high as he could reach) would he consider publishing. I don't know which version is true; the whole thing could even be false. Who knows? But you can't deny that P. G. Wodehouse is one of the greatest humor writers who ever lived!

You certainly can't! Yours is probably right since I can't exactly remember mine.

The best book i have ever read had to be...... The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. No doubt.

And which of our beloved trilogy of five moved you the most?

i would have to say the last one. It is where it shows the mnore emotiona; side of Aurther Dent, and how others react to him.

Mostly Harmless? I loved all that stuff about Hunt the Wocket!

"Immanentizing the Eschaton"

To make all the computers form one supermind as soon as possible.

Am I right?

Nope.
From what I've gathered...
...nope.
Guess again, Chuck.

What does an Eschaton look like?

There's a great joke in there:-
"Cripes! Eschaton the carpet!"

Hoho, most amusing.
Actually, I *do* know what it means. Literally, I mean. Obviously I don't know *all* of the details yet of the Illuminati's most recent plot and its ramifications, but I'll keep you posted.

Sources (naturally) differ on the meaning.

"...the good professor found reprehensible were in reality Gnostics, engaged in "immanentizing the eschaton" by reconstituting society into a heaven on earth"

Another source (still about the Gnostics) says:

"Since Gnostics did not accept the conventional Christian eschaton of heaven and hell, Voegelin concluded that they must be engaged in a millenarian revolutionizing of earthly existence. At the same time, Voegelin was bound to admit that the Gnostics regarded the earthly realm as generally hopeless and unredeemable. One wonders how the unredeemable earthly kingdom could be turned into the "immanentized eschaton" of an earthly utopia"

Someone else still says:

"The Eschaton necessarily implies a change in human behavior, in fact, it changes the definition of what it means to be human, perhaps into concepts which can not be intuited by us".

A simpler dictionary definition lists it as "The end of the world"; however even this is diluted by a different dictionary claiming that eschatology means "The doctrine of life after death".

In conclusion, I think that the Illuminati's ever-pervasive touch has even reached to online blogs and webopedias. The only thing we can be certain of, in this shifting world, is that "immanentizing" means "bring about" or "bringing closer" or "making imminent" or...

Actually, RAW himself explained it as follows: the Eschaton is the end, and immanent means our universe. What the end means depends on your religion; if you are a Christian, it'd be Heaven, if Buddhist, Nirvana, etc, so for Christians it'd be making Heaven on Earth.