The Wrong Monkey

5 0 Blitz, I Played White

2012-02-10T16:39:00.000-05:00

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 d5
3. Nxe5 dxe4
4. Bc4 Be6
5. Bxe6 fxe6
6. Qh5+ g6
7. Nxg6 Nh6
8. Nxh8+ Nf7
9. Qxf7#

Debating Whether the Exodus Happened

2012-02-06T10:46:00.000-05:00

A: The story of Moses and Pharaoh is fictional. You might as well debate the historicity of The Lord of the Rings.

ME: Talking to a religious believer lately, you correctly pointed out that the burden of proof lies upon him who makes a positive statement. And yet here you yourself make a positive statement for which evidence is lacking. We don't know how much of the story of Exodus might be true.
Concerning the numbers of Israelites described in the OT as comprising the Exodus, since so many point to that as evidence that the story is fictional: 600,000 men, plus women, children, non-Israelites and livestock. It amazes me that people get so hung up on this number. It would seem that that many people wandering in the desert for 40 years probably would've left some evidence which archaeologists or other scholars, searching for so long, would've come across by now. But often people of other cultures in other eras had nothing resembling our accuracy when counting large numbers of people or other objects. (Cf Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol i,pp 336-341, for a good discussion of how Medieval Europeans tended to use large numbers.) Combine an inexactness in counting to begin with, with the centuries of oral transmission which may have occurred before the story of the Exodus took fixed form, (now THIS would be an example of a game of Elephant) and it's easy to imagine that a migration of 60,000 families, or 6,000, or much fewer still, could've provided the basis for the OT stories.

B: How about six families? Would that be enought to save the story? Maybe God killed every firstborn Egyptian kids and drowned all those soldiesr for the sake of six families.

ME: You can have that argument with someone who believes in God. For me, all theological discussions were over a long time ago. They don't interest me. The same way that what I was talking about, how the story of Exodus actually came to be, doesn't seem to interest you. It's an historical interest for me. In the same way, I'm curious about where the story of the Iliad came from. Both stories come from that era of upheaval in the second half of the second millenium BC which started with a sharp decline of old empires around the eastern Mediterranean, and ended with the emergence of some newly-literate cultures such as those of the Greeks and the Jews. I would reject the flat statement: "the Iliad is fictional," for the same reason I rejected A's statement above.

B: How about the whole damn story is just so much BS made up hundreds of years after the fact by a group of people that had begun to solidify around one religion and needed a myth of where they came from?

ME: Again: I'm not saying the Exodus story is historical. I'm not saying it's fictional. I'm disagreeing with anyone who claims to know, one way or another, how the story arose.

B: Just because a story may have some element of truth in it does not mean that, on a whole, it is not fictional.

ME: Again, I'm interested in finding out which elements might have an historical basis.

A: What's lacking is any evidence it is true. However, we do know the Israelites were not slaves in Egypt. Since there were no people to free there was no need for someone to free them. The Moses depicted in Exodus did not exist.

ME: We don't know that none of them were. That is to say: we don't whether there actually were a people that long ago which could properly be called Israelites -- although the Merneptah stele makes it seem likely that there were -- and if there were we don't know whether some of them were enslaved in Egypt. As to Moses, if you mean that either every detail in Exodus about Moses is true, or Moses didn't exist, well, that's absurd.

A: If anything, the Exodus story is possibly a garbled account of the Hyksos being expelled from Egypt by Ahmose at the beginning of the New Kingdom.

ME: Is the Hyksos-Exodus hypothosis actually supported by any prominent people other than Simcha Jacobovici -- who, of course, is prominent for things like not actually being an archaeologist but pretending to be one on TV, and preferring the Jerusalem antiquities market to legitimate archaeological digs, and denouncing archaeologists en masse -- and vice versa, such as when he claimed that a bunch of archaeologists and epigraphers supported his views on what he -- and very few scholars -- call the Jesus family tomb, prompting them to take the extraordinary step of signing an open letter saying that they all disagreed with him?

C: There is no evidence of a significant number of Israelites being held in bondage in Egypt. There is no evidence of any of the event described in Exodus. Therefore, we have no option but to reject any claim that it's a historical account and it can be safely assumed that it's fiction.

ME: That's a perfect example of a premature "therefore." We have other options. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the entire Sinai peninsula actually hasn't been gone over with a fine-toothed archaeological comb just yet. There's no reason to conclude that there never was an Exodus. It's simply premature. Let me underscore once again, in case it wasn't already obvious from my previous remarks, that I think that if there was an Exodus it would have been much smaller than 600,000 families, and also that it may have consisted of some of the ancestors of the Israelites at a time before there actually were Israelites, and that if it did happen it probably constituted a minority of the Israelites -- or of their ancestors, as the case may be -- and that the majority probably were from the less powerful classes in Canaan.

D: Archaeologists have been looking for evidence of the Exodus for decades, nigh on a hundred years. Nothing's been found. In fact the evidence for the early Israelites points to a local origin.

ME: I know. Mostly likely, many or most Israelites were originally lower-class Canaanites or slaves of Canaanites who, when the Canaanite elite went into decline, took over the region which would eventually form the core of Israel. However, it seems possible to me that in addition to that indigenous core there was another group, maybe Canaanite, maybe not, which was part of the founding of Israel, who had been slaves in Egypt. That story came from somewhere.

D: Origin myths are tricky things. If you look at the "Historia Britonum" for example, it claims that the Brits were descended from Trojans (via Italy) fleeing the fall of that city. When you look at Irish myth in "The Book of Invasions" Greece, Spain, even Egypt etc get a mention. yet apart from Spain there seems no real link of the Irish to any of these places, and even that seems more a coincidence than a remembered truth. The point is that it need not necessarily be true that an origin myth is a reflection of a one time literal truth, not only do stories change over time but real places can become metaphors for something and somewhere else and stories merge together to create something completely new with the actual historical truths "edited out" (or not) over time. It gets even more messy when differing oral versions are frozen into a written form by people with their own biases. Not saying it can't be true, just that after all that archaeology I'd have thought something would have turned up by now if it were. Unless Zawi's sitting on the evidence that is.

ME: A lot of people claim to be descended from the Trojans. Check out whether the stories of Trojan ancestry can be traced back farther in time than the people's first contact with the works of Homer or one of the myriad neo-Homeric authors. Of course Exodus need not necessarily be true. Who's saying that it definitely has an historical core? All I've been saying here is that I think it's premature to rule out any historical basis. The lack of archaeological attestation of the Exodus would indeed be suspicious if it consisted of 600,000 families wandering for 40 years. If 3,000 families crossed the desert in 3 months, and it FELT like 40 years because it was so uncomfortable, and several centuries of oral tradition inflated the numbers before the story took a fixed written form, then it's an entirely different matter, and it's unreasonable to assume that some archaeological trace of the crossing MUST have turned up by now. I'm not claiming that Exodus is as accurate in all its numbers and little details as, say, Robert A Caro.

I'm very skeptical -- to put mildly -- of British claims of descent from the Trojans, as you seem to be, and like me, you probably wouldn't put much stock in the legends which have some of the 12 Apostles journeying all the way the British Isles, which if true would make the British church about as old as that of Rome or Jerusalem. But let's look at some other myths, the Nibelungenlied and the chanson de Roland. In the case of the former it's quite likely that several of the characters originated as actual leaders of Germanic tribespeople and Huns, and in the case of the latter there's no doubt at all that there was a Charlemagne. The historical interest of the chanson de Roland is greatly mitigated by the amount of historical accounts of Charlemagne written in and soon after his reign. Much less historical writing from late-Classical and Dark Age Europe has survived, and the historical interest of the Nibelungenlied is correspondingly greater. Now imagine that, other than those two poems, there were NO known written accounts of Attila and Charlemagne, just as currently the Pentateuch is the only known account of Moses. How much sense would it make to just say "they're fictional" and dismiss them as having no historical worth?

If I'm Actually Good For Something --

2012-02-05T13:38:00.001-05:00

-- if I serve a purpose, it may be in helping people to un-learn some cliches. There's an old cliche that says that cliches are cliches because they're true. Like many cliches, that sounds good without necessarily making any sense.

The market for cliches is quite crowded; alongside many old and famous glorious-sounding ones, some of which may possibly make some sense some of the time, new pithy phrases constantly crowd in, striving to establish themselves and become cliches. The better ones sound so good that often they persuade us to completely stop thinking about the topics they cover. Lately I've heard quite a few magnificent-sounded phrases of the formula: What defines a person is not A but B. If you come across the right terms for A and B you can come up with phrases which will bring massive amounts of perfectly-useful thinking to a screeching halt all at once. This is where I came in.

Does it make any sense to try to define a human being? Assuming it made sense, could it be done? I'm inclined to say no. Now obviously, the way human society runs at the moment, aspects of people's performance, behavior, rights, responsibilities and so forth are constantly being evaluated by educational, legal and other institutions. In that sense we're constantly defining one another, and no, unfortunately, I don't have any brilliant scheme to suddenly improve upon all of that. Those sorts of definitions, evaluations, judgements are not what I'm talking about. I'm referring to the attempt to sum up a person, or his or her "character." (Whatever the Hell that is.)

It seems we're often encouraged to define ourselves, judging from all of these would-be cliches asserting that what defines you is what you do when no-one else can see, or words to that effect. Don't get me wrong, I agree 100% with these phrasemakers that it's good when people do good for its own sake and not only for reward, and they and I would probably agree almost all of the time about what sorts of things we're trying to encourage: honesty, courage, generosity, trust, kindness, regard for non-human animals species, reducing one's carbon footprint, fighting for freedom of expression and freedom to protest tyranny, etc, etc. Right on. I'm down with all of that.

But not with this business of "defining" a person. And not only oneself: go to a bookstore, browse the biography section and see how many times, on the covers of the books, you see the phrase "the definitive biography" or words to that effect.

So what's my problem? I think people are more complex than that. You're evaluated all the time by institutions in the course of our society functioning the way it does, do you really need to add an overall self-definition to all of that? Why do you need such stress? Couldn't you give yourself a break and try to enjoy and/or accomplish something instead? A "definitive" biography? Really? This famous powerful person whose life touched the lives of so many others for good or ill or sometimes both, you're going to define his or her entire life in one volume, three other biographers of the same person couldn't come up with three or more entire interesting areas you completely neglected? I don't think so!

And that's okay! It's fine! I'm bringing good news here, not bad. It's not that our definitions are weaker or more mistaken than we thought, or that I've spotted anything wrong with the noble craft of biography, but that we are more complex and full of possibilities than we routinely give ourselves and each other credit for. Every moment actually is full of various possibilities and choices, and we ignore and trample that rich complexity when we purport to define, to definitively capture in the few words of catch phrase, or even the few tens of thousands or tens of millions of words in a biography, something as complex as an entire human being.

"Is the History Channel Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?"

2012-02-01T12:08:00.001-05:00

I thought that up. Me. If Comedy Central starts a series with that title I want my props. Although of course I in turn must give South Park props for inspiring me.

An Unexpected Gain

2012-01-28T14:47:00.000-05:00

It happens often that we try strenuously to do one thing, and fail, but without realizing it we have begun to succeed at something else.
There is no evidence that Constantine the Greatever so much as thought of altering a word of the Bible --but of course there are powerful minds among us who will never be slowed down by such puny considerations as evidence. They have arrived at such conclusions as that the Bible as we know it is a product of the council of Nicea in AD 325 -- yes, sometimes they get the date of Nicea right -- and that its present form was decided there by Constantine, or by Constantine and Pope Sylvester,nevermind that Sylvester wasn't at Nicea, there you go with your "facts" and evidence again, they have arrived at such conclusions, and, mighty minds that they are, if I disagree with them they leap with startling speed to further conclusions such as that I am a Christian, perhaps because they assume that anyone who disagrees with them about anything is a Christian, perhaps because they have heard some of the things I assert said by Catholics and they assume that everything every Catholic says is a lie, who can say? who can keep up with such minds?
I have tried and failed to bring evidence into my discussions with these folks, failed miserably to interest them in such things as the primary sources for Niceaand manuscripts of Bible passages copies before and after Niceaand the total lack of evidence for their theories contained in such documents but again, evidence schmevidence.
Okay, so it really looks like I can't talk to some people about the development of the text of the Bible, but without realizing it I had already begun to investigate the development of some paranoid conspiracy theories involving Constantine and the Catholic Church. Yes, it is a bit of an anachronism to speak of a Catholic Church existing distinct from an Orthodox Church as early as Constantine, and yes, it is more than somewhat ridiculous to assume that, if such a distinction had existed, Constantine would have favored the Church in far-off Rome to the one based in the new capital he had founded and named after himself. The absurdities are many and delicious here. Does the theory of Constantine and Sylvester as Biblical authors and/or editors have anything to do with the Donation of Constantine?Perhaps vast numbers of Catholics and now anti-Catholics are still busily drawing conclusions based on not knowing that the Donation is a forgery. Or maybe it's just these anti-Catholic paranoid moronic conspiracy theorists.
How many people think Charlemagne was the guy from the Song of Roland,of superhuman size and strength with extremely long flowing white hair and beard? How many think he was French? How many think the Franks were French right from the beginning, since before Merovich? How many think Charlemagne and King Arthur were pals and the King Philip murdered the Templars for the Grail and that Jesus was an ancestor of the Merovingians who of course were all as French as could be and that Leonardo was a Templar and that that was why he was buds with the King of France and that the entire Bible, Old and New Testament, was originally written in French by Constantine and Pope Sylvester, two Frenchman, alors! and only later translated into Hebrew and Greek?
Maybe these people have horrible paranoid fears of Frenchmen and see them everywhere. Maybe they saw me exercising my very limited skills in French once and that's why they think I've only been pretending for years to be an outspoken atheist, all the better to ensnare them with my horrible French Catholic treachery.
I've actually gained a little bit of sympathy for these kooks. It's fun leaping pell-mell from one conclusion to the next, even if I do have a little bit of evidence on my side.

"I wouldn't trust the average conservative pundit to be able to point out the sun on a clear day."

2012-01-23T15:14:00.000-05:00

I wrote that. Me. I just thought I better hurry up and post it on my blog before others start stealing it.

"Undercover Pinko Troublemaker Peon"

2012-01-15T14:01:00.001-05:00

I just saw a commercial for the upcoming new season of "Undercover Boss." I don't think I'll be tuning in. I don't have to explain the premise of the show to you either, do I? Good-guy boss spies on peons for the viewer's amusement and to defend American Capitalis -- , um... Freedom.
I'd rather see something more like the exact opposite: have a union rep at a huge corporation pose as a newly-hired top-level exec, have a hidden camera follow him or her to the boardroom, to the executive washroom, to private chin-wags with the CEO, with lobbyists, with legistators -- now THAT would be good TV! That would be new, daring, zesty.
It would also be much much much much harder to do, of course. Somehow it's fine to spy on the peons, but the execs? You better have a warrant, Budro. And 99.99999% of the time the big shots can feel secure in the certainty that you don't. And that you also don't have 547 lawyers like they do, if you somehow do manage, with or without a warrant, to get a hidden camera into the washroom or a lobbyist's office.
I just want people to think about things like that. Especially if they happen to be Republican peons or Democratic board members, but also everyone else.

There Was aTime I Couldn't Imagine a Character On a TV Commercial Who Could Annoy Me More Then That Little Kid Whispering "Zoom Zoom..."

2012-01-13T17:42:00.003-05:00

...But that was so forty-seven seconds sgo. So twelve seconds ago. So mmm meconds ago. Mmmpdh hep heconds ago. Nurp nurp nurpn nurp nurp.

But I love the little pig that goes "WHEEEEE! WHEEEEEEEEEEE!! WHEE-WHEE-WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!" I'm so glad GEICO made another commercial with him. So glad.

But those Allstate commercial about how "nobody protects you from mayhem like Allstate" don't work on me. They make me feel like Allstate is a mafia crew coming into my house and breaking things and saying that it would be a shame if I got hurt so I better pay them. And not in a good way.

I Call BS. Incredible, Obvious BS

2012-01-07T10:22:00.003-05:00

Wow, an article in Christianity Today in 1969 supporting the repeal of sodomy laws, and a press conference called by clergy in San Fransisco in 1965 to protest police harassment of gays and lesbians. Those two things really re-paint the whole 2,000-year Christian history of religiously-motivated persecution of the sexually-unorthodox, not.

This campaign to portray fundamentalism and bigotry as recent developments which have nothing to do with the history of Christianity, a campaign filling up Huffington Post's Religion section lately, is a blatant lie. Before Christianity, in most parts of the Roman Empire, homosexuality was accepted, period. Any real history of the relationship between Christianity and gay rights needs to start with that little fact, embarrassing as it is for present-day liberal Christians.

Beware of People With Lots and Lots of Money Telling You You Don't Need Money

2011-12-27T13:39:00.002-05:00

THEY don't need money. YOU do.

"The More I Learn About People, The More I Like Dogs"

2011-12-12T14:39:00.004-05:00

Who said that? Was it George Carlin? Hunter S Thompson? WC Fields? Arthur Schopenhauer? Napoleon Bonaparte? Tecumseh? Voltaire? Thomas More? Julius Caesar? Aristotle? Confucius?

The answer is: yes. They all said that. As have countless other people, speaking and writing in many languages, all over the world, for thousands of years.

The date of the earliest known specimen of writing keeps being pushed further back, as older specimens are found. You think writing began "shortly before 3,100 BC, either in Egypt or Mesopotamia"? You're a little bit out of date. Right now it's not cettain which artifact of writing is the oldest currently known, because, for one thing, the dating of these artifacts is not always very exact, and for another, there are some things upon which lines were carved before 3,500 BC, which could be the oldest-known writing, if we were sure that the lines are writing, but we're not yet sure about that. Part of the problem is defining what writing is. It developed from pictures, and mankind has been making pictures for tens of thousands of years, and occasionally a picture really does say a thousand words or so.

Anyhoo. One of the oldest known specimens which everyone agrees is writing is located on a cliff in Egypt, a little bit of graffiti scratched into the cliff. It may actually be the oldest piece of writing yet discovered. It's definitely older than 3,200 BC. Most often the oldest heiroglyphs we know have an official character, having to do with kings and religion, but this message is quite informal, as if a court scribe took a break from his official duties to write what he really thought. It's one short line of symbols, among which can clearly be seen a man and a dog. The dog is especially well drawn. He -- it is definitely a he -- looks happy and frisky, with his short tail and triangular ears standing straight up.

The graffiti says, "People stink and dogs are great." That's an attempt to give you the flavor and sense of the message. A much more literal translation would be, "People bring plague. Dogs bring the sun."

PS None of what I said in this post is true, unless I got something right by accident. One or more of the people I listed may actually have written the title phrase. But all of it should be true.

PPS I like dogs an awful lot, but I still like cats even more. And in rare cases, people are actually the best.

BIG Questions? Really?

2011-12-11T12:30:00.003-05:00

Brandon G Withrow, Christian theologist, Assistant Professor of History of Christianity at Winebrenner Theological Seminary and Huffington Post blogger, claims to think that big questions are good. I've got a few for him, we'll see whether he has any answers which inspire more than eyeroll or an irritated sigh. I'll be very surprised if he does, but we'll see:

I have a few questions: do you ever seriously consider that there may be no God, and that religion may be an outmoded system of problem-solving, long since overtaken by things like science, and philosophy which is no longer combined with nor allied with theology? (Please don't avoid answering that question by simply turning the tables and asking whether I, as an atheist, ever seriously wonder whether there might be a God. That would be disappointing and par for the theological course, and by the way, yes, I do.) Do you ever wonder whether religion (/spirituality, po-TAY-to/po-TAH-to) hinders people more than helping them?

Whether there is a God or not: do you ever wonder whether Jesus might never have existed?

Whether Jesus existed or not: do you wonder whether the teachings ascribed to Him might be completely unrealistic? For example, Jesus is said to have said: when someone strikes you, turn the other cheek. Is this good advice? We don't tend to think that it's wrong or sinful for someone to react to being physically assaulted by calling the police and having the assaulter prosecuted, do we? And if they don't do that, or fight back, shouldn't they at least cover up, protect themselves, or run away? Hopefully these questions suggest many other equally pertinent ones regarding the lessons of Jesus which supposedly are followed by billions, but of course rarely if ever actually followed by anyone, and that's a very good thing, I say.

To sum up, do you ever really question the essence of your profession, and whether it makes any sense to do what you do?

So Very, Very Tired

2011-12-04T10:57:00.005-05:00

As Amy-Jill Levine and Douglas Knight point out in a recent article on Huffington Post, and I quote: Such debates over the existence of God are not only tedious, they are also pointless.

Amen. That has been my position for some time. Actually, ever since Nietzsche very helpfully pointed it out to me in Morgenröte, erstes Buch, 95. Among other reasons, because the "familiar claims," of which Levine and Knight list a few in their first paragraph --

"humanity could not control nature, did not understand conception or birth, and feared death, and so we invented a God that brought order to chaos, purpose to life and comfort in death. Next, we developed religion to placate the God we invented to assuage our fears of what we could not understand or control. Then, we wrote the Bible to sanction the religion that placated the God that we invented. Next came clergy, to interpret the Bible"

-- are indeed so familiar, and so eminently sensible and convincing and proven in such ever-greater detail, their truth so obvious, that anyone not already convinced by them has already proven him- or herself to be resistant to argument. One would just get all dirty and the pig would have all the fun, if one failed to respect oneself sufficiently in such a case. I do indeed so fail from time to time, but for the most part I'm really talking to the other atheists and, among other things, trying to persuade them not to get all muddy in a futile effort. Not that there's nothing to discuss with believers. Often they know their medieval and ancient history and prehistory a tad better than those who are going from calling the OT bronze-age to calling it neolithic or older, or denying that it has any originality at all, or pointing out triumphantly that a Harry Potter novel mentioning London doesn't make it nonfictional, or another of their many very tired memes.

Levine and Knight:

"Rather than repeat either the tired positivistic arguments for atheism or the equally tired apologetic pronouncements that study is dangerous to faith"

-- instead let's repeat this no less tired assertion that there is some sort of equivalency between atheism and the most simplistic apologetics. In short, between everyone who disagrees with us moderate types.

Andy Rooney's Gone, So I'm Stepping Into the Breach

2011-11-23T10:14:00.005-05:00

Faux hawks are like the leisure suits of our times: things which, decades from now, will make it easier to identify the idiotic men in photos from now. Not that every single faux hawk has looked bad. David Beckham pulled it off a number of years ago. It probably should have stopped right then, though. Not every man who ever wore a leisure suit was an idiot, although every leisure suit not worn sarcastically looked bad. Some people who might know better just follow fashion while their minds are on other things. I've seen a picture of Stan Getz in a leisure suit. Don't identify Getz, or samba, with just "Girl From Ipanema." That song has been covered badly so many times and been heard so often as muzak that it's very difficult now even for a Getz fan to really hear Astrud Gilberto's record with Getz. (How many Grammy winners for Record of the Year are not a joke?) Listen to Joao Gilberto and Heloisa Buarque deHollanda singing "Waters of March" with Getz backing them up, or listen to Getz playing "The Dolphin." And that's still just samba. Getz did much, much more than just samba, he played just about every kind of jazz there was between the time he joined Jack Teagarden's band at age 16 and when the opiates finally caught up with him and shut down his liver when he was 64. He even did some fusion, although maybe he shouldn't have. I'm not talking about his solo on that Huey Lewis song. I like that solo. I mean some fusion records from the mid-70's. Maybe that was when he was wearing that leisure suit.

Anyway, my point is, if you're sporting a faux hawk, I'm just about dead certain that you look like a jackass. (I'm allowing for the possibility that there is a second David Beckham on the planet.) A mohawk would be just fine with me, no problem whatsoever, but not a faux hawk. And what's the deal with this greasy, unwashed, unshaven, uncombed and unlaundered look? I channel-surfed onto a movie recently, stayed a while because the female lead was quite stunning, very healthy and scrubbed and dressed in primary colors that popped. The young man sitting across the table from her was so gaunt and grey and stubbly and dirty that he almost disappeared from the screen next to her. It took some time to realize that he was not some unfortunate she had just dragged out of a dumpster before the garbage truck could compact him to death and was helping out of the goodness of her sweet heart, but that we viewers were actually expected to take him seriously as the male lead in this film. And to act as if his appearance were not repulsive, but that of a leading man playing a well-off college student, not someone just rescued shortly before starving to death in the desert and rife with lice. Apparently we were expected not to gag when he kissed that pretty girl onscreen, just as he was, just like that, without even showering and changing clothes and having a mint or five. Faux hawks aren't the worst.

11.11.'11

2011-11-11T08:48:00.004-05:00

So, how many people do you suppose are running around yelling, "It's eleven eleven eleven! It's eleven eleven eleven!" ?

PS: Perhaps it's many more than I had imagined: I heard about some nerds going "Oh it's so BINARY!!! The most BINARY date ever!!!" and about Egypt closing their biggest pyramid for fear of "Jewish or Masonic" rituals being performed there because of the date. (Nevermind that this is actually the Hebrew year 5772.)

And I didn't even look for stories about the date.

Syme and Late James: I Just Can't Hack It

2011-10-27T12:13:00.008-04:00

I had considered writing a blog post entitled "Was There Something Wrong With Sir Ronald Syme'sMedulla Oblongata?" Then I asked myself how many people would get the joke. Then I asked myself how many people understand me at all. Then I told myself to stop feeling sorry for myself.

Also, to do real justice to that title, I would have had to re-read some of Syme's work. And Syme's work has irritated me about as much as anyone's in English with which I am familiar. Right up there with Henry James' The American Scene.With late James, and especially with the mentioned work, my difficulty is verbs and adjectives at such a distance from their subjects named more specifically than with pronouns that I despair of ever being able to attatch them properly; Syme irritates me with the over-use of periods. Which unnecessarily breaks up medium- to long-sized sentences. Into smaller ones. Which in turn leads to the above-mentioned conjecture. About the poor man's lower brain stem. A medical speculation not necessarily to be taken seriously. And not the only stylistic affection of Syme's which annoys me. But to find the others, I'd have to read more Syme. Which I really don't want to do. So suffice it for now to say that the turnip would use twelve periods after the last semicolon above. By the time I would use one. If I were not mocking him.

I like the earlier James just fine. And I understand that his later works -- things like The American Scene and, to me, almost as impenetrable, The Golden Bowl-- were often dictated. Which makes me wonder whether, if I had heard James speak them, I wouold've understood them much better. Or whether I would've I would've run about clutching my head in helpless, just as thoroughly uncomprehending anger and misery and screaming alarmingly. If not actually comprehending less.

An Open Letter to Eliot Daley

2011-10-19T11:44:00.002-04:00

Mr Daley, you've told us a thing or two about us, now I'm going to return the favor:

You say you want to understand us better, you say you're motivated by curiosity, and you may well believe what you say, but I don't believe it. I think if you wanted to understand atheism, you would understand it much better than you do. The same goes for several other HP authors who have written articles which they say are friendly attempts to reach out to atheists, but which the atheists tend to find more condescending and insulting than friendly. I think that what you really want, deep down, like any true Christian, is not to understand us but to convert us. The core mission of all Christians has been to go forth and teach the whole world. Teach them to be Christians. The smug intolerance has always been part and parcel of Christianity. I think those in our society who really want to understand religion and atheism become atheists, and have for a few centuries now.

Perhaps you find that incorrect, unfair and insulting. If so, we're about even.

Proof

2011-10-17T11:48:00.007-04:00

The atheist community has grown much more visible and audible in the past few years. I don't know whether it would be accurate to say that it has actually grown considerably. Over and over one hears from people who had been atheist for a long time, but never spoke up about it, and felt alone. Then came Richard Dawkins.I know that it's customary to mention a couple of other famous authors along with Dawkins, but I don't feel like it. I think those other guys are a bit silly, especially the younger one with his warmed-over Utilitarianismand his spirituality, and I also think that the other guys are basically riding in Dawkins' wake, that Dawkins is still the only "new" atheist who is both an intellectual heavyweight, and popular.

As with any group with mass visibility, there are some dopes among the suddenly-visible large mass of atheists. These include a few popular authors and many simple-minded people repeating memes such as that the Old Testament was written by illiterate Bronze Age shepherds, (This meme is morphing from Broze Age to Neolithic and even Paeleolithic.) and, for example, the certainty that Jesus never existed. That last meme even has a couple of very popular websites all to itself.

People on all sides -- not all of them, just the dumb ones, but Lord there are a lot of dumb ones on all sides -- seem to come to conclusions about ancient history based on metaphysical preconceptions. They believe in God, they were raised Christian, and so they believe that Jesus existed. Or they don't believe in God, they were raised atheist, or, very often, they had unhappy Christian childhoods, and so they believe Jesus never existed. Each side repeats its talking points ad nauseum and does not investigate the matter, and also does not examine the soundness of its talking points. I often quarrel with the other atheists just because I feel a sort of duty to try to clean up our side of the street. What's the point of rejecting all that traditional religious dogma only to embrace a whole cartload of equally-unsound, equally-unexamined atheist myth? "If Jesus existed, why didn't any ancient authors write about him?" Well, Sparky, some ancient authors did write about him. The writings of some of them are referred to as the New Testament, those of some others are called New Testament apochrypha. "Okay, but they were all believers. Why don't we have any eyewitness accounts of him from non-Christian authors?" Do you think there were several daily newspapers in Jerusalem back then, and that every day's news is preserved on microfilm? so that we can go through all the records of the crucifixions and palm-frond-covered donkey parades? There was next to no non-Christian historical record of Pontius Pilate, the governor of the whole province, until an inscription was unearthed a few decades ago which makes it seem like that, yeah, Pilate did exist. That's the governor of the whole province. If you think that it's somehow suspicious that there's no surviving official record of the arrest, trial or execution of a convicted traitor who had all of twelve, count 'em twelve followers, you don't know much about the state of our knowledge of things in Judea 2,000 years ago.

"Well, the existence or non-existence of Jesus can never be proven anyway, so why bother to even look into such ancient matters?" Let me take the second part first. Why? Because milk has no bones. That's why. And as to the first part, to assert that it could never be proven that a Jesus of Nazareth was a wandering preacher who was executed for treason on Pilate's orders reveals ignorance of how much our knowledge of the ancient world around the Mediterranean, and east of there, is increasing. I mentioned that inscription they found a few decades ago mentioning Pilate. One example of a huge amount of finds since the late 19th century which continue to expand our knowledge. There are the Dead Sea Scrolls.There is the Nag Hammadi library.There are the Oxyrhynchus Papyri,about 100 volumes of them published so far and still going. Not to mention Menander,the ancient Greek author of comic plays, of whose work before the 20th century we possessed only fragments, brief quotations in the work of other authors, and now, BOOM! chaka-laka-laka we've got several nearly-complete plays. Just a few of the highlights from the list of manymany ancient things archaeologists keep digging up and deciphering between Morocco and Afghanistan. It's not impossible that proof of Jesus' existence could be found. Yes, many phony non-proofs have been foisted, the most recent being the notorious "James ossuary" publicized by that awful man who's not really an archaeologist but makes a jackass of himself on TV. But the fakes are no indication that real proof could never be found.

What would be real proof? Well, for example, a letter by Pilate to a friend could do the trick. "I had a strange day today. The Sanhedrin brought me a man, Jesus, from Nazareth, a village to the north of here in Herod's territory, who seemed as harmless as a newborn puppy, and insisted that he was very dangerous. I spoke to him personally because I gathered that, although from a family of commoners, he was fluent in several languages, an unusual combination in these parts. I greeted him in my rusty Aramaic, he responded in very polished Greek and Latin and offered to converse with me in whatever language I wished. And so we conversed in Greek. As gentle as a lamb, and he spoke no overt treason, just religious tales of symbolic dreams and a world other than the Earth. I was charmed by him and gave him several opportunities to contest the charges against him, of blasphemy against his own people and treason against ours, and yet he refused to say the few words which would have released him from suspicion. I truly think he wanted to be executed, the poor strange fool. To be some sort of sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind. I gave him one more chance: one of the local people's holy days is approaching. Four criminals, including this Jesus, were awaiting execution. I called for the city's people to gather before the prison, had the four condemned men led before them and said that in honor of the upcoming holy day, one of these men, whomever they chose, would be pardoned and freed. The rabble chose a murderer and screamed for the blood of this Jesus. Strange. And so Jesus was nailed to a cross. I gather he's dead already, after just a few hours. Usually men last a day or longer on the cross. A strange and melancholy day."

I have no doubt that some such letters have already been faked. That doesn't mean that a real one will never be found. And of course it wouldn't have to include all the details of my imaginary letter. One fraction of all of that would suffice to turn ancient history all topsy-turvy, if found in a letter proven to be genuine.

And to me such a thing would be great, not because I tie metaphysical preconception to ideas of history, but because I don't. And also because the Jesus-never-existed crowd really annoys me. Such a find would please me greatly out of sheer spite for them. My esprit de corps with other atheists does not outweigh my dislike of stupidity. On the contrary, my atheism is but a subset of my disdain for stupidity. My atheism isn't so fragile that such a thing as a genuine letter from Pilate confirming Jesus' existence would ruffle it in the least.

No History Here, Just Wild Speculation. Plus My Own Thoughts

2011-10-16T10:36:00.004-04:00

Over and over again in the writings of modern and contemporary theologians and Biblical scholars, one reads the assertions that neither Jesus nor his disciples could read or write any Greek, that maybe some of them could read some Hebrew, but that most likely the only language they were really fluent in was Aramaic.

You get this even from the most supposedly enlightened people in these specialties. The ones who freely admit that the chronology of the Gospels is very suspect and that there was no census bringing Joseph and his pregnant bride Mary to Bethlehem, and no Slaughter of the Innocents, that the story of the Slaughter of the Innocents is clearly borrowed from the equally-fictitious story from the infancy of Moses, who himself may never existed. These scholars do not believe in any miracles, neither walking on water nor Resurrection nor healing by laying on of hands, and they will tell you that Jesus probably never said most of the things the New Testament says he said, and even that some of the 12 Apostles may be fictitious. But it's certain, they say, that Jesus existed, and also certain that he couldn't read or speak Greek.

Finally, finally, these days you can be a Christian theologian or a New Testament scholar and say publicly that you're actually not certain that Jesus existed and still keep your job. And so some people in those fields are saying it, more than the few who said it before and were fired, and then, as if that weren't bad enough, ridiculed in unison by their former colleagues. The ridicule is still par for the course. But listen closely to the average theologian or Biblical scholar scornfully dismissing a black sheep who says it's not certain that Jesus existed, and see if the reaction extends beyond dismissal to any actual explanation of why doubt is ridiculous on this point. All I ever see is the peremptory dismissal.

Even from the ones who cast doubt on almost everything the Gospels say, one encounters this certainty that Jesus' existence is well-established historical fact. Uh, excuse me, established how exactly? What sources do we have besides those accounts you just finished trashing when it comes to their historical reliability? That's right -- none. But they -- the current academic mainstream -- don't stop at being certain he existed, they're currently also certain that he was preaching political revolution and socialism, and that he like his father was more of a day laborer than an actual skilled carpenter, and that the whole family was veryvery poor, and that Jesus neither wrote nor spoke Greek, and maybe not even Hebrew either.

Where did they get all this? Mostly from our increasing knowledge of what a typical 1st-century Jewish peasant living in a small town near Jerusalem was like. They've decided to agree that Jesus was a typical peasant. There's no logical reason to make these positive assumptions. There are only contemporary theological reasons. In short: they pulled all of that right out of their butts.

I say: we don't know. We don't know whether Jesus existed, and if he did, we don't know how much of the information in the Gospels is true, much less things not mentioned in the Gospels such as whether or not he could read and speak Greek.

If Jesus existed, then, it seems to me, contemporary theology is wrong. If he existed, then most likely the last thing he was was typical.

There is the story of Jesus' family coming to Jerusalem when he was 12, and Jesus going to the Temple and amazing the elders with his learning. There is no mention in the Gospels of what Jesus did between the ages of 12 and 30. There are mentions of a wealthy friend of his, Joseph of Arimathea. Maybe Jesus could read Hebrew quite well by age 12, and could talk about the Bible like a scholar. That's the sort of thing which would have amazed elders at the Temple. Maybe a rich man, such as Joseph of Aremathea, took an interest in this bright young lad and offered to educate him. That's the sort of thing which has happened to a few lucky bright poor children since long before Jesus' time. Maybe Jesus spent 18 years at Joseph's house, happily burrowing through mountains of codices and scrolls, learning Greeka and Latin as well as Hebrew.

I've often wondered about that conversation between Jesus and Pilate. Did they communicate through an interpreter? Or did Pilate know some Hebrew or Aramaic? Or did Jesus know some Greek or Hebrew?

Only lately I've begun to wonder whether people such as Pilate or Herod would have condescended to speak to a typical peasant or day-laborer at all. It's embarrassing that it took me so long to wonder about that. But if Jesus was not just a typical peon, but a highly-educated young man who for the last few years had returned to the milieu of his early childhood, an articulate fellow who spoke good Greek, and possibly even good Latin, in addition to his native Aramaic -- well, that sort of person would be much more likely to pique the interest of the governor of the entire province, and cause him to take a few minutes out of his busy day of plotting against other politicians and playing in his harem, wouldn't he?

What's that? You say that I'm speculating very freely here, extrapolating from very, very little concrete evidence? Why thank you, that would put me on a par with the leading Jesus scholars of our day. Except that I freely acknowledge that the picture I've just spun is only one of many possible versions of the beginning of Christianity, including the distinct possibility that Jesus never existed at all.

Me & Rupert, Living High on the Hog in Manhattan

2011-10-12T10:34:00.004-04:00

Occupy Wall Street Protests Outside Rupert Murdoch House

That's one thing Rupert and I have in common: homes in roughly the same neighborhood. I spent the night in a house in the 50's in Manhattan once -- that is, a whole stand-alone building which housed a single family, somewhere around the middle of the east 50's. I was homeless and it was the blizzard of '95-96 and this guy said I could spend the night. The house was pretty much gutted. He said it had belonged to his family and was now being sold to the Republic of Kazakhstan. I think he said it was going to be the Kazakhstani consulate. If it was then their consulate has moved at least a couple of times since then. The neighborhood had a distinctly opulent feel, I think many if not actually most of the buildings were still single-family townhouses as they had been when they were built. He showed me to a room that still had a bed in it, went off and found some blankets and a space heater for me, then went off again to sleep elsewhere in the house. In the morning he fixed us some breakfast; then, knowing I was a bookish fellow, he indicated a box of books on the floor destined to be given to charity and told me I could help myself to anything in there I found interesting. I took a slender paperback volume with a yellow cover, slightly taller and wider than mass-market paperback, with its pages sewn in instead of glued: The United States in 1800 by Henry Adams, published by Great Seal Books. Sixth printing, 1961, $1.25. It's the first few chapters of Adams' History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson.It's an interesting book, I still have it. If the entire History is as good as these first chapter then it's very impressive indeed. And I say that as one of no doubt very many who found the style of The Education of Henry Adams quite tedious and set it aside after a few pages, so if you're one of the many you might not want to give up on Adams solely on the basis of the Education.

He was a nice guy, that townhouse owner, that night and morning were more pleasant and less difficult than many for me that winter. I'm sorry that I don't remember his name.

In Praise of Bad Manners

2011-09-29T14:01:00.009-04:00

Now stay with me here, this is a bit nuanced: impoliteness can be wielded to good effect in good causes by people who also know how to be very polite. Not entirely unlike the way that dissonance and noise can add extra flavor to music by musicians who can tune their instruments well and know all the chords and changes and modes. A great part of Mark Twain's genius, for example, of his great gift to the world, consists of nothing but rudeness, impiety, unfair exaggerations of others' faults for comic effect, of taking the low road and delighting quite unabashadly in it and so forth. But it's all done with the style, warmth and friendly earnestness -- the earnestness about friendliness -- which are the heart of good manners.

Lorraine Devon Wilke has just posted a very rude piece on Huffington Post calling for good manners. I've decided to take it personally because the title contains a phrase I use often: "I know you are but what am I?" As if that weren't enough, there is a cartoon on the webpage in which a crudely-drawn girl asks a crudely-drawn boy the very question. That's the whole cartoon. No context. No inkling of a hint what prompted the remark. Groenig, Schultz, Steig or the person who created the immortal "Someone is WRONG on the INTERNET!"-cartoon it ain't. As if no-one ever had reason to say such a thing. Yeah, I say it now and then. When someone has demonstrated that they are determined to be unreasonable and resist any spirit of give-and-take, and nothing remains to be done but to ignore them or mock them, sometimes I mock. I don't apologize. The world needs laughter. Readers of articles like this one by Ms Wilke or Ms Devon Wilke as it may happen to be, need laughter especially badly. She purports to be there in the cause of good manners, and all she does is complain and find fault. That ain't how it's done, girlfriend! Check out Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners. The way to encourage good manners is always, always to accentuate the positive.

And there's always a place for that. But that's not why I'm here today. My first comment on Lorraine Devon Wilke's denunciation of snark was eloquent, well-reasoned and to the point. I quote: "Oh shut up!" It has not yet been posted. I fear the moderation may not have laughed as heartily when they read it as I did when they wrote it. Or maybe they did, and regretted that they felt they had to delete it, bowing to pressure from higher up the HP food chain. So far 7 comments have been posted and another 7 are pending. If some have already been deleted before posting, then only a minority of the comments are getting through. All of them, so far, bursting with praise. I wrote a second comment: "To sum up: you yourself have nothing to say, and so you're going to complain about the way others say what they say. You can't take a joke. The very thought that someone somewhere may be mocking you fills you with a towering moral rage. Got it." I'm not particularly optimistic about that one getting through either. Sadly, some public figures are not interested in a dialogue with their public, no matter how constructive. It's fawn or go home.

As I intimated with my reference to Miss Manners, the way to encourage good manners is to lead by example. To praise, not to complain. And as you may have gotten already from my reference to Mark Twain, there is a place for bad manners. Some people deserve them. Namely, tyrants, big and small. People who have risen to levels of authority incommensurate with their modest talents to lead, and who do not inspire and cultivate those in their charge, but bully and oppress them. Dixit Ms Wilke or Devon Wilke:

"If I were running schools my curriculum would include such mandatory subjects as "How to Become a Good Conversationalist," "How to Intelligently and Respectfully Debate," and "Learn How and When To Shut Your Pie-Hole" (I'm big on that one!)"

Yeah. She's big on YOU shutting YOUR pie-hole. Sadly, very sadly for the hole world, many people of her ilk actually are schoolteachers. Like her they hate the larger world because they can't control it the way they control their unfortunate students.

Here's to teachers who actually like kids, who encourage and channel that wild energy, inspire it to grow stronger and wilder and do great things, rather than punish it. Here's to pundits with a freakin' sense of humor. Here's to impoliteness properly used, to pop the balloons of the buffoons who shouldn't be running the show.

Last Night's Dream

2011-09-17T08:21:00.004-04:00

This dream was in two parts: first I was in Western Canada. I didn't know my location more specifically than that. A kind young local Western Canadian man had offered to lead me to Eastern Canada, which was closer to my home here in the Eastern US. We were traveling on foot, but it didn't seem to occur to me that it would take a long time to walk from Western Canada to Eastern Canada.

At first we were walking along a scenic sandy trail along a mountain ridge lined with tall pines. Then we walked through a huge railway depot with many tracks. I looked up at a huge concrete rail overpass and it began to dawn on me, very faintly, that there were more effecient ways to get to Eatern Canada than walking. Rail travel, for example.

Then we were on a narrow twisting street lined with small houses. Then we were inside one of those houses, but this house was very large, with many, many small to medium-sized rooms, arranged in a pattern so labyrinthene that I couldn't find my way out of the house, which was all I wanted to do anymore. I no longer completely trusted my young guide. I wasn't even sure whether he had broken into this house, which would mean we were trespassing and that he was just getting me into trouble and only pretending to help me. Then the owner of the house appeared, an older, somewhat heavy gentleman, and although he too was acting friendly, I didn't know whether he was being sincere either. I also had no idea whether he and my young guide knew each other and were involved in one and the same charade.

Then the dream morphed into the second part, which was all about white powder in clear zip-lock plastic bags, a couple of cups of powder in each bag, making them about a third full. One of these bags each had been given to several different people, and they had been told only to handle the situation. The only difference I could see between the bags was that the zip-lock seal was a different color on each one. The people who had been given responsibility for the bags each seemed to assume that the powder might be dangerous. They all put on latex gloves. Each bag was in a different room. It didn't seem to be the older gentleman's house anymore: these rooms were furnished sparsely and looked like they were in a commercial building. Everybody was scared about the powder in the bags. Nobody really seemed to know exactly how to find out what the the powder was. Then we were told that the powder was harmless, and I woke up.

1.d4 d5 2.Qd3 Nc6 3.c4 Nb4 4.Qb3 e6 5.a3 Nc6 6.h4 Nxd4 7.Qg3 Nc2+ 8.Kd1 Nxa1 9.Nf3 dxc4+ 10.Ke1 Nc2#

2011-09-16T14:21:00.004-04:00

That may be old news to some of you, but to the best of my recollection it was new to me. (I played Black.)

Seriously, What's the Deal With Spinoza?

2011-09-08T11:16:00.004-04:00

There appears to be no edition of his works in print except for a very small (in number of copies) and expensive one published in Holland which you can't get except directly from the publisher. I'm not talking about translations. By "edition" I mean a publication of the original untranslated works. So in Spinoza's case that means a few odds and ends written in Dutch and the rest in Latin. Even in this age when accelerating publishing technology is allowing reprints of pre-copyright books to crop up everywhere like dandelions, you can't even find a reprint of untranslated Spinoza on Amazon except for a volume of posthumous odds and ends of little interest to many folks other than hardcore Spinoza specialists, which the big dumb machines of the reprinting publishers obviously found only by chance. Apparently no editions of his works ever were widely distributed. Yes, translations of Spinoza's works are everywhere. But what on Earth are the translators working from? Are they organized into large groups, each one passing around a single copy of the Ethica or the Tractatus? (Yes, that image is a paraphrased theft from Gaddis. Always steal from the best.)

I myself finally found a copy of each of those works, the Ethica and the Tractatus, on Google Books, which the local university library was able to make into conventional books for me using their Espresso Book Machine. But even those editions on Google Books were poorly printed, so my copies are full of electronically-reproduced smudges and illegibilities.

I went to the philosophy section of that University library, and found, as one would expect, several, nay dozens of square yards of shelf space each of critical editions of Kant, Leibniz, Descartes, Nietzsche. That's the shelf space occupied by the editions, before we get to the voluminous, and I'm sure mostly tedious, I wouldn't know and I won't, life's too short and there's too much actual philosophy, commentary. Schopenhauer is somewhat fucked over in comparison, as he and the rest of us probably would expect -- but would we really expect this to be the extent of the library's holdings of editions, of untranslated works of Spinoza, a philosopher who holds a central place in the work of Leibnitz, Kant and Nietzsche and is even grudgingly granted a central place by the nastily antisemetic Schopenhauer?

Yes, we would, if we had spent as much time as I have looking for such editions in all corners of the Earth. Otherwise we would be shocked. Perhaps even slightly outraged. Seriously. That's it. Eight small-to-medium-sized volumes, the four green ones to the left in the photo, the gray and black one in the middle and the three black ones to the right. All eight volumes old, the newest ones almost a century old, all printed on cheap acidic paper which has long since started to crumble. Because I'd been looking so long everywhere, that was about exactly what I'd expected to find. That's par for the course.

Credit Where Credit is Due?

2011-09-02T11:52:00.007-04:00

Reading Nietzsche is... Well. Is there a proper English translation of umwerfend? I have some differences with him: as I've said several times on theis blog and repeatedly elsewhere, I think that everything he says in his philosophical works about women is wrong. Plain wrong. (And most of what he says about war. Keep in mind when reading a passage about war by Nietzsche that he was never in one. Closest he ever came was working in a military hospital during the Franco-Prussian War.) He almost always refers to them as one group. He addresses individual male human beings from various places and times, individual ancient Greeks, individual Frenchman and Jews and Englishmen of his own times and a century or two earlier, individual Germans, and his comments about various countries and cultures are clearly based upon his assessment of these individuals.

With the wimmins, it's the other way around: he speaks of the entire gender at once, and on the rare, very rare occasions when he takes an individual woman to task, usually one of the famous Georges contemporary with him, Eliot or Sand, his condemnation is clearly based on his strange notions about the entire gender, such as, they've got no real business being creative artists and are treacherous and primitive and sooooo mean and will just mess everything up.

I'm referring only to Nietzsche's philosophical works. In his letters he's often completely, startlingly different, because there he's often talking about and even to individual human beings who happen to be wimmins, and talks about and to them in a reasonable way for which the philosophical works have left the reader entirely unprepared.

And so the Foreword to Nietzsche's Jenseits Von Gut Und Boesestarts off with remarks about women -- about truth actually, but saying "Imagine the truth were a woman" -- which just make me groan and wince. Put it this way, between Nietzsche and me, at least one of us is disastrously wrong about women. At least. But the Foreword winds up talking about what the book, in my opinion, is actually more about: the Western philosophical tradition, in its entirety, from the ancient Greeks down to 1885 when Nietzsche was finishing this book:

"Aber der Kampf gegen Plato, oder, um es verständlicher und für's 'Volk' zu sagen, der Kampf gegen den christlich-kirchlichen Druck von Jahrtausenden —- denn Christenthum ist Platonismus für's 'Volk' -— hat in Europa eine prachtvolle Spannung des Geistes geschaffen, wie sie auf Erden noch nicht da war: mit einem so gespannten Bogen kann man nunmehr nach den fernsten Zielen schiessen."

("But the fight against Plato, or, to say it more plainly and for the 'people,' the fight against thousands of years of pressure from Christianity and the Church -- because Christianity is Platonic philosophy for the 'people' -- has produced in Europe a magnificent tautness of the mind, the likes of which never before existed on Earth. With a bow drawn so tightly, one can now shoot at the farthest targets.")

There are things Nietzsche wrote which I just completely reject, which I don't bother even considering any more, such as the accusation that the womenfolk only screw up art when they participate in it, and then there are passages like the one I just cited, which astound me and make me stop and clutch my munkee head and ask myself, Now what if that's true? First, what if it's really true that, from a philosophical perspective, Christianity is basically a dumbed-down, Readers' Digest version of Plato? And further, what if it's true that certain achievements made in traditionally-Christian parts of the Earth -- such as space exploration, talk about "shooting at the farthest targets" -- were not accomplished in spite of the stifling effects of Christianity, but actually because of them? Because people had to fight so hard for so long against Christianity just to maintain any sort of tolerable life, and the fight made some people's minds so strong, as if their spirits had had to fight a giant from the WWF all day every day from AD 380 until now, that this and that industrial and scientific revolution was just an incidental by-product of all that intensive, non-stop training, as if Christianity had inadvertently, unintentionally created among its opponents Navy Seals or Army Rangers of the mind?

They say that centuries' worth of strict censorship in Russia helped to create the concentrated prose of Turgenevand Dostoyevsky.An Internet forum which allows no more than 250 words per post does train one in pithiness of style. Could Nietzsche be right here? Is gratitude due here, in one the strangest, least-expected places?