Opus 2026-019: Read with Discernment

How are we to deal with authors who seem so set on advancing their left-wing agenda that they either ignore facts, twist them out of recognition, or make up imaginary factoids?  I come across this often.  Most of the time I simply decide not to finish the book.  At the same time, if you do that, there isn’t much you can read.  One of the things I try to do is go to older authors who might be a little more honest and objective.

I’m working through the 11 volume set by Will Durant, The Story of Civilization.  I’m currently in volume three, and I came across something which helps to understand how to read these kind of people.  What gives me the insight is reading how he presents things of which I have a good deal of knowledge, in this case biblical and Jewish history.  As an example, he says this,

Page 541, footnote, “The word Messiah (Hebrew mahsiah) occurs frequently in the Old Testament.  The Jews who made the Septuagint (c.a. 280 B.C.) translated it into the Greek Christos, the Anointed, he upon whom has been poured a chrism or holy oil.”

Having just done some research on the term Messiah for another reason, I’m a little bit up on it. When you look at the use of this Hebrew word in the Old Testament it is somewhat frequent, 39 times, but only twice is it translated “Messiah”, both of them and Daniel and only in the KJV and NASB.  Every other case that I could find refers to anointing a king, a priest, your shield or other types of things.  There might be some double meanings in Psalms but it was not the overwhelming mindset that he claims.  I don’t care what your Sunday School teacher told you.  Look it up yourself.  Do a search.  Much of what we teach as Old Testament truth is borrowed from the Rabbis and Talmud of New Testament times.

I assume he uses the same liberality in interpreting the other religions of the day.  He seems more concerned about finding Christian terminology and applying it to pagan rituals than he is and actually describing what is going on.

I will continue to read, but I will continue to read with discernment and I find myself skimming more and more as I go.  I hope my brain does not rot.

Durant, Will.  The Story of Civilization:  Part 3, Caesar and Christ.  New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1944,1972.

homo unius libri

Opus 2025-323: Plato Channels Buddha

In reading through Durant’s series The Story of Civilization I come across numerous places where I notice ideas that are common in other cultures than the one he’s discussing.  Right now I’m reading his analysis of Plato’s metaphysics and I came across this,

“The soul is the self-moving force in man, that is part of the self-moving Soul of all things.  It is pure vitality, incorporeal and immortal.  It existed before the body, and has brought with it from antecedent incarnations many memories which, when awakened by new life, are mistaken for new knowledge.  All mathematical truths, or example, are innate in this way; teaching merely arouses the recollection of things known by the soul many lives ago.  After death the soul or principle of life passes into other organisms, higher or lower according to the deserts it is earned by its previous avatars.  Perhaps the soul that has sinned goes to a purgatory or hell, and the virtuous soul goes to the Islands of the Blessed. When through various existences the soul has been purified of all wrongdoing, it is freed from reincarnation, and mounts to a paradise of everlasting happiness.” page 517

I don’t know if you are aware of what is taught in Buddhism but this seems to be very close to what they say.  You have Plato referring to reincarnation, karma and Nirvana.  I’m not an expert on Plato or Buddhism but they seem very close.

A couple of thoughts on how this could be.  How do these two people separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years come up with the same ideas?

One is simple logic.  Plato wrote in the fourth century BC, I believe Buddha was in the sixth or seventh century.  There’s plenty of time for the ideas of Buddha to have been passed along by word of mouth or organized missionaries so that Plato in Greece could have actually heard what Buddha was saying in India.

A second idea is that God himself revealed this to both persons.  This doesn’t make a lot of sense because a God who is focused enough to reveal something this detailed to a human being would be teaching them to ignore his existence.  It’s kind of like a saddle maker making a lot of great comments about the new Model T.

The third is one that is discussed by Hugh Ross.  Ross said that one reason he became a believer in the Bible was because the things that he was reading there were beyond the imagination and the conception of human beings.  I would suggest that such ideas as being espoused by Plato and Buddha or just the common ordinary ideas that a philosopher would come up with when he has time on his hands.

Durant, Will.  The Story of Civilization:  Part 2, The Life of Greece.  New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1939,1966.

homo unius libri

Opus 2025-081: Philosophical Battlegrounds

The philosophical premises of eastern religion have been attacking Western culture for centuries now.  The western culture which fostered the industrial revolution, the technical advances, the thoughts about liberty and prosperity, the scientific revolution?  Yes, that Western culture.  All these came from the Jewish and Christian views of God in the universe.  The view of the Buddhist and Hindus, for example, are totally different.  As I read through the work of Will Durant he continually will make reference to how different philosophers drew their inspiration from the religions of the east. Those philosophers have been working overtime to destroy the mind set that Christianity had brought in.  I am only half way through the first volume and I have already come across connections to David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer.  I am sure there were more but those I remember.

I have tended to have this idea that the ancient world was made up of isolated communities developing in their own ways but in modern times we have all this sharing.  The idea that the ancient philosophers of Greece could be aware of the Hindu gods or Buddha seemed impossible.  I know that I got irritated when people tried to say that the Jews borrowed their ideas from other cultures.  When you think about it though, traders and wandering philosophers have a long history of travel.  I came across this reading about India,

“The foreign trade of India is as old as her history; objects found in Samaria and Egypt indicate the traffic between these countries and India, as far back as 3000 B.C.  Commerce between India and Babylon by the Persian Gulf flourished from 700 to 480 B.C.; and perhaps the ‘ivory, apes, and peacocks’ of Solomon, came by the same route from the same source.”  p. 479

Then when you add the historical proximity of different thinkers.  In the sixth century B.C. you had the return of the Jews from exile and the rebuilding of the temple.  The writing of the Old Testament was drawing to a close.  This was also the time of Buddha and possibly Confucius.

Were ideas passed back and forth between the different civilizations?  Was the Pope once a Catholic?  Of course.  The cross fertilization of ideas is one reason why certain parts of the world are so advanced.  We need to be aware of these influences when they are disseminated.  Such cultural staples as Lion King and Star Wars have pushed eastern religions.  Yoga, Montessori and TM are foundational to eastern religions.  The class system of Europe finds soul brothers in China and India.  Ideas have consequences, just like elections.

Pay attention and decide what your foundation is going to be.

Durant, Will.  The Story of Civilization:  Part 1, Our Oriental Heritage.  New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1954.

homo unius libri

Opus 2025-075: Three Guesses

And the first two don’t count.  I kind of feel that way as I continue reading Will Durant in his history.  He’s so full of speculation and clever writing that you might miss the fact that he often doesn’t have a clue on what he’s talking about.  He gets away with inconsistencies because his book is so long.

I’m currently on the section that deals with ancient Israel and he’s dealing with where Israel came from and it’s rather fascinating.  He seems to embrace any theory that goes against what the Bible actually says.

A thought that came to my mind this morning was all of the different theories he gave about where Yahweh came from.  It seems like every page has a different theory.  At one point he had Yahweh as a local fire God living in a cave.  In had another place he speculated that the Israelites had worship a bull in Egypt, thus you have the golden calf.  At another place he had some other “scholar” saying that one of the early gods of the Hebrews was a pig which explains their ban on pork products.  Another place she talks about Yahweh being a local God, who was battling the other gods, and eventually emerged triumphant.  At no place does he accept the clear statement of the Bible that Yahweh is the only God and the creator of the universe.  He’s having fun.  I find it a bit tedious.

I can’t wait to get past the chapter on Israel when he starts dealing with Persia.  I don’t know as much about the history of Persia as I do about Israel.  I wonder if I will be able to trust what he says there anymore than I find I can’t here.

homo unius libri

Opus 2024-435: Living in denial

I’m wondering if people who deny God and make a big deal of denying God have some basic underlying emotional and psychological problems.  I am currently trying to finish up a book by Will Durant called The Story of Philosophy.  In it he works through what he considers to be the major philosophers of our western culture.  It took me a while to get onto his methods, but what he does is immerse himself in the philosopher he’s writing about, and then write as if he is that philosopher.  I used to think he was expressing his own ideas, but I finally realized that this was his way of getting across what they had to say.

In the current batch that I’m reading after a hiatus of a couple years, he gives a biographical sketch in an attempt to try and help us see where these people are coming from.  The three that are standing out to me now are Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Nietzsche.  All of them have major issues in their life.  As a general rule, they seem to be unable to get along with other people.  Their childhoods were a mess.  They are the kind of people you would not want to leave your children with.  Their only claim to fame is that someone thinks their writings were worth reading.

What Durrant has to say reinforces a thought that I had about what is considered classical literature.  I find that just because people tell me something is an awesome reading that will change my view of the world, it doesn’t mean a lot.  I feel that there are certain elites, who get so impressed with their eliteness that they forget that their thoughts are not necessarily significant or coherent.  I think of a joke that I once heard that tells of a polar bear sitting on a block of ice as it floats across the ocean and going to the edge and yelling “Radio”.  Now, the joke is on the people listening.  There is no joke.  There is no humor.  There’s nothing there, but an attempt to manipulate you into laughing at something that has no point.  The joke is on you.  I often think that much of the important classical literature falls into that category.

Read with your mind, turned on.  Assume that your mind is working.  If what you read seems like nonsense then consider the idea of the possibility that it is nonsense.  The only question is, does the person who wrote it realize that it is meaningless or are they as much in the dark as you are.  Have sympathy for those who read this kind of thing and then go, “Oh wow!”

Durant, Will.  The Story of Philosophy.  Garden City, New York:  Garden City Publishing Co., Inc.,  1926.

homo unius libri

Opus 2024-433: Why Be Consistent?

As I read Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization my gestalt keeps kicking in.  Not only do I have my total remembered knowledge, but also the gestalt of the actual book I’m reading.  I am now, as I write, in his chapter dealing with Israel.  By this time I’m seeing some real arrogance based on ignorance in his writing.

Ignorance and lack of data don’t stop a creative secular historian.  The first section of the book talks about prehistoric man.  We really know very little but that doesn’t stop him from putting together a total culture.  One point that I was thinking about this morning was how one of the early forms of man was credited with using tools.  Those tools were obviously stone, but what was interesting was that the archaeologist claim that the stone was not really worked.  It was not chipped like the later Stone Age artifacts.  All they did was find rocks that seem to fit a certain purpose and use them as tools.  At least that is the story of the archaeologists, and they are sticking with it.

He attributes the use of tools by these early “humans” as something they learn from watching animals.  I think we’ve all seen videos of otters laying on their back with some kind of shell creature on their belly and pounding on it with a rock.  There are birds that use sticks for prying bugs out of cracks.  In modern times, we have beavers that build houses and dams.  Evidently the early man was supposed to have learned this from watching the animals.

This brings up two questions.  First, where do the animals learn to use tools?  OK, Mr. Dr. PhD, answer the question.  Who taught animals to use tools?  Could it be that your willingness to define tools in such a broad description makes it possible for anything to be a tool in the case of animals?  Could it be your desire to discredit the idea of God himself teaching them some of these things makes it necessary for you to plug in your imagination instead of turn on your intellect?  There’s no question that all of these scholars are intelligent.  There’s no question they have incredible imaginations.  What they’re missing is the basics assumptions.

Second, and this is not my original observation, how come the animals untold millions of years later are not advance beyond using a stone to break an oyster or a stick to dig a bettle out of a hole?  How come the nests are no more complex today than they were amazing years ago?  Animals have not progressed.  Yet man has.

I will continue reading for the entertainment value and in case my blood pressure gets so low I need something to fume about.  I also hope that there will be something valid enough to say I have learned.

Durant, Will.  The Story of Civilization:  Part 1, Our Oriental Heritage.  New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1954.

homo unius libri

Opus 2024-408: The Proliferation of Heathens

Have you ever wondered why there are so many heathens around?  Have you ever wondered why they seem to be so prosperous and live such long lives?  The thought came to mind today that it might be because they resemble kittens who never grow up.  Or perhaps it’s like having a perpetual supply of grandchildren.  One of the great joys of kittens is the stupid things they do.  Of all the cats we’ve had we only had a kitten once, and I remember how it would just suddenly, for no known reason, do a couple of flips in the air.  I remember how vigorously it would chase red dots.  There was something about kittens that generated a spontaneous joy in everything around them.  Of course they were also very destructive.  Their energy not only knew no bounds it seemed without awareness of consequences.  They would climb your expensive curtains just as readily as an old piece of canvas thrown over a board.  In fact, they might be more drawn to your expensive curtains simply because something in them knew it would generate problems.

Such is the nature of kittens.

The same could be said of grandchildren, except that there is a much greater long-term potential for good or evil and the grandchildren.  Keep in mind that the great satanic names that we’d like to throw around, like Hitler or Soros, belong to people who are once grandchildren.  They may have had a doting grandparents, allowing them to get away with all kinds of nefarious things not knowing that they were building the foundation for destructive personalities.

So why does God allow the heathens of the world to prosper so much?  Well, on one side, he knows that they are destined for an eternity in hell so they might as well get much as much joy as possible in this life.  While He is making that generous allowance, I think He also enjoys some of the nonsense they come up with.  He enjoys seeing how they don’t seem to be able to think or reason.  Maybe God has a streak of slapstick in His nature.

This comes to mind from a quote that I got from reading Durant’s book on the development of civilization.  He quotes a scholar who has the audacity to actually offer dates for the exodus from Egypt that would match with the Bible seems to be saying.  And notice his logic,

“He believes that the material found in these tombs confirms the story of the fall of Jericho (Joshua, vi); he dates this fall ca. 1400 B.C., and the Exodus ca. 1447 B.C.  As this chronology rest upon the precarious dating of scarabs and pottery, it must be received with respectful skepticism.” p. 302, footnote

Now I ask you, just what kind of data do archaeologists use to date things if it’s not obscure markings and figurines?  I don’t know about the sculpture, but I know that they will date things based on the shape and style of pottery.

Here is a heathen writer who is very talented except for the fact that he didn’t do much homework.  He makes a pontifical announcement about some thing and acts like it’s great wisdom when actually, it’s kind of foolish.

Somehow I think God finds it entertaining.  Again, I may be on the border of heresy, but the idea came to me.

Durant, Will.  The Story of Civilization:  Part 1, Our Oriental Heritage.  New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1954.

homo unius libri

Opus 2024-328: Beginning a Pilgrimage

I recently began a pilgrimage of reading my way through a series of books, called The Story of Civilization written by Will Durant, who later was joined by his wife Ariel.  It will be a long slog because there are eleven volumes and they are very thick.  I plan on using it as something to read in the late afternoons and early evenings, when my ability to create or concentrate gets a little bit weak.  I am about 90 pages in.  Durant writes well and communicates well.  That being said, I am curious to know how reliable his history is going to be.

The reason for my skepticism is that in the first 90 pages I am seeing a lot of empty headed fantasy about where history comes from and how human beings developed.  It is pure speculation, and at times he admits that, but it’s presented in a scholarly way, as if it really is documented and researched.  At one point he quoted as a source Marco Polo.  I don’t know how much you know about Marco Polo and his writings but they are full of all kinds of fancy ideas and fantasies about what his trip to China was like.  There was some valuable information but also a lot of nonsense.  To quote him as an authoritative source is very dubious.

He does have some catchy phrases and some interesting ways of saying things.

“To these simple people disease seem to be possession of the body by an alien power, or spirit - a conception not essentially different from the germ theory which pervades medicine today.”, p. 80

By page 90 I have already picked up that he is not a big fan of the Christian religion and is pretty skeptical of anything religious.

His writing and his attitude towards primitive people reminds me of what I’ve heard about Margaret Mead.  I have never read anything by Margaret Mead, but I have heard that her great theories about primitive society have had so many holes punched into them that you could drain your spaghetti with it.  She was someone who had her own social hangups and personal twists, and she allowed them to totally modify what she wrote.  That is pure theory based on not reading her, but just listening to others talk about her.

Durant seems to approach ancient culture is the same way that Margaret Mead does.  Of course, we are still in that section of pre-history that has very little hard evidence to use.  He’s also writing very early where there’s a lot of archaeological evidence still to be found.  He begins writing around 1935.  That might make him a predecessor of Margaret Mead.  Maybe she was a fan of his.  I don’t know.

My hope is I will finish the series.  I’m also hoping that as I get into the more specific civilizations that I will find a bit more accuracy and information based on research.  It will be a fun ride.  I hope I find enough to write about.

Durant, Will.  The Story of Civilization:  Part 1, Our Oriental Heritage.  New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1954.

homo unius libri