Sheep and Goats

Tag: Great Courses

  • Live Tweets from Ancient Egypt: Part 1

    How much composition can you do walking the dog while listening to the Great Courses on CD? We will see. I know one thing, attempting this will improve my listening skills, which my wife will tell you are not stellar. It is enough to stop periodically and send a tweet via the phone. There is no way to rewind, and to play the entire track again is just too much—the dog will only tolerate so much inattention. So I have to catch it the first time.

    This is why, in the tweets to follow, I don’t give the Egyptologist’s name. I missed it in the opening remarks. Now that I am home in my chair, I see on the CD jacket that it is Bob Brier. He is all enthused about his topic. The Great Courses professors are never duds. Only one got on my nerves a little bit, a history professor with such a passion for his subject that he seemed to present all characters within as though they were his children, some being naughty and some being nice. But once I adjusted, I was okay even with that. And you should hear the music fellow—alas, I forgot his name, but he has done several courses, showing off Beethoven! Whoa, is it ever contagious. You do come away thinking you know your Beethoven when he is done. (Granted, it didn’t take much, since I knew virtually nothing before.)

    I have had to set aside Bleak House. It is 29 CDs and I was not done with it when the library wanted the set back, for someone else had put it on hold. So I reserved it for when that person was done with it, and it will just have to be a cliffhanger for now. I left off just after Bucket arrested George for the murder of the odious lawyer of whom you thought, it’s about time someone killed him. It might be George. It might be Lady Deadlock. Don’t tell me who it was. If you do, I am going to assume it was the other just to thwart you. Bleak House was another Great Courses suggestion, offered by a professor of literature, who seems to have a preference for —um— “complicated” characters, Bleak House being a “wholesome” exception to most offered fare. He says something about Esther being so nauseatingly nice that even Dickens must have wanted to kill her off a time or two.

    They always spin of the credentials at Great Courses, and Bob’s is that he recently mummified a body in the Egyptian way. He has been on TV, so he probably is somewhat of a showman, and as such, he will have a Twitter account. If I find it, I will tag him once with it. Ah—here it is: #AskBobBrier—I was right. He is not one of those retiring types like the “philologicians” (his word) who love words and thus are whizzes with hieroglyphics. Nor is he a (he had a word for this but I forget) a museum type who loves to collect and study artifacts but has no interest in interacting or retrieving them.

    He is probably like O’Donnell, the Professor of the Gilded Age series, who has shown on the History Channel, and who in real life (I wouldn’t know if this is true of Brier or not, at least, not yet) is intensely partisan and really hates Trump. I could be wrong, but I think historians generally do. I think the reason they do is that they get involved in their story of man ruling the earth—that’s mostly what history is, really—and they come to identify with human efforts, hoping for the noble in them, and highlighting whatever examples exist. The only way their earth will advance is if all nations “come together.” Thus, they like world bodies, they like things like the United Nations. They don’t like it when some figure says “America first,” or whatever his/her country may be. They see nothing but chaos along that road. Brier might not be one of them, for, come to think of it, he said in Lecture One that history is just a series of disasters. Therefore, he may not be so starry-eyed as are his History counterparts, so hopeful that humans will have the answers if you but give them unlimited room to try their stuff.

    Probably Bob is like Ed Barnhart, who taught the Great Course on South American archeology. He was also a doer. He related how, as a boy, his mom had dropped him off to see the Indiana Jones movie, and upon seeing the caption “Somewhere in South America,” said to himself, “There’s a South America?” It began an interest in the continent, and he has discovered his very own ancient Mayan (yes, I know, Central America, but he was just getting started) city.

    What a great gig to be a university professor. You get to talk about your passion all day to people who come to you and pay money for the privilege—you don’t have to go to them. And they have already acquiesced that your topic is interesting enough at least for them to be there. You don’t have to interact with poverty. You don’t see squalor. Unless you play your cards recklessly, money issues are non-existent. You get to hang out with cool people in the heady world of ideas. I like it.

    The only thing that might be an issue is if you get infatuated with your students. Some of them are just awakening to to how sexuality might affect someone other than same-age, some are entirely unaware, and some know it full well and play it for all its worth. Of course, the responsibility for proper conduct will always fall on the older party, but if he is a piece of work himself, if his own life is trending towards trainwreck, and certainly if he is an opportunist, all sorts of things may happen that he will deeply come to regret in a MeToo age.

    Anyhow, here goes with the tweets. It is just things that catch my attention as I am dog-walking, and I must interrupt myself now and then to hurl someone’s misguided golf frisbee back over the fence. It will be sort of like taking notes, and I may do something with it later. I haven’t quite figured out a way to separate my asides from Bob’s own thoughts. Maybe later. Sometimes it is obvious, but sometimes not. Remember that these are dictated into the phone, and then I must quickly correct AI blunders (you should see what it did to Herodotus!) I don’t usually worry much about capitalization. Everything is a bit of a rush. Here goes:

    “The goal of the archaeological writer is to make the dead come alive, not to put the living to sleep.” I love it!

    That ubiquitous painting of Henry the eighth isn’t anatomically correct. The artist for the braggart deliberately skewed it so as to loom more impressively over anyone who would view it.

    “The Egyptian’s reduced art to paint by numbers,” the great courses professor says. Art doesn’t change for 3000 years. It wasn’t supposed to change. It wasn’t supposed to be creative. It was to reflect the way things were.

    Plato  wasn’t crazy about art, because his was a search for truth, and art distorted truth. But he had nothing bad to say about Egyptian art, for that part attempted to portray truth as it was, and not interpret that.

    If you expect to be spending more time in an afterlife rather than the present one, you will put more energy there. Where have I heard similar thoughts? The Egyptian tombs would be engraved with scenes of whatever the deceased enjoyed doing in the present life.

    If you’re taking a trip to a unfamiliar place. And you’re not just sure what you will need. You take everything that you can. So says the great courses Egypt professor. That’s why Egyptian tombs are so packed with day today possessions.

    Ha! A completely speculative account for how the uneducated people probably screwed up the great Heroditus. An illiterate tour guide probably made a story up about onions being fed to the  workers who built the graat pyramid , and Herodotus recorded it.

    Since the Egyptian’s were huge into war, loved to record their victories, live to fight, would they have recorded that Jehovah cleaned their clocks at the Red Sea? Already I smell a rat.

    As was spun in the book Is the Bible really the word of God? national chroniclers (media) loved to create the attractive version even if it wasn’t entirely true. Emphasized what they want emphasized, deemphasize what they wanted deemphasized. It is exactly the same today.

    The Bishop of Usher worked out the begets and traced down to the year of creation. Watch later a Russian bishop extended it to month,week, day, and time of day! Much later his Russian successor probably agreed & also banned Jehovah’s Witnesses.

    Isaac newton worked out Egyptian chronology in his spare time. As an escape for him. He is the one who predicts the end in 2060. Is he right? Or might it come before?

    Now the great courses professor is slobbering over Darwin as the be all and end all. Darwins OK, discovered some stuff, added to knowledge, but not to the point of being the be-all and end-all.

    He says the Egyptian’s first arrived from the south in Africa. One of Michener’s books said the same, but I don’t remember the title. Michener’s books are grand sagas, following a given family name through centuries, even before they were families.

    If you dressed Neanderthal man up, and put him on a subway, you would not notice him. He would fit right in. So says the Egypt professor, he was not a hulking brute, he did not live in a cave. Dumbing down is not a phenomenon Just of modern times, tho it probably has accelerated.

    What will this Egypt teacher do when he comes to conspiracy views on pyramids? You know, how we today couldn’t build what they built thousands of years ago. Even today human technology is insufficient. How will he handle that?

    And what will he do when he comes to Bible accounts? He will blow them away, of course, but will he do it with respect or ridicule? He seems like a nice guy. But sometimes peoples brains lose it when it comes to spiritual things.

    To be continued:

    See Ancient Tweets Part 2.

    ….Visit Smashwords bookstore.  Also available at Amazon & other ebook retailers

  • Just Who is Saved Come Armageddon?

    Back in 1967, the year of the KM School for Elders held in Pittsburgh, were you to ask an elder “Will only JWs be saved at Armageddon?” he would most likely answer Yes, “but in a way that doesn’t make us look unreasonable.”

    This is because Jehovah’s Witnesses are a “one true religion” faith. There are a lot of those around—not everyone maintains that “all roads lead to heaven”—and one firebrand of the Russian Orthodox Church—isn’t it Audrey Kuraev?—regrets that such a profession should be labeled extremist hate speech because there are factions in his Church that would like to say the same and now don’t dare. Extremist? If you say you are the one true Church and are wrong, just who is hurt? All that happens is you are left with egg on your face. And if you are right, you’ve provided a healthy heads-up.

    Can it really be done—to answer yes “but in a way that doesn’t make us look unreasonable?” I am told (without evidence, as the phrase goes) that Jewish tradition holds as as the ark was lifting off the water and those treading it hollered, “Is it only you and your family that will be saved?” Noah was instructed to answer Yes, “but in a way that doesn’t make us look unreasonable.”

    It is dicey topic, Armageddon is. It’s hard to put a smiley face on it, even if it does come with the caveat that “distress will not rise up a second time.” You should hear Vic Vomodog rail about how it means those of his old religion gleefully contemplate the slaughter of billions of human beings! Well—now that you put it that way…

    But if you are a Bible believer, what are you going to do? There it is in numerous texts, not just in Revelation, but in such places as 2 Thessalonians 1:6-9, about how “you who suffer tribulation will be given relief along with us at the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with his powerful angels  in a flaming fire, as he brings vengeance on those who do not know God and those who do not obey the good news about our Lord Jesus.” It cannot be dismissed euphemistically as “tough love.”

    Still, it is nowhere near as nasty as what churches have historically embraced down through the centuries—the doctrine of hellfire, which holds that for a few decades of wrongdoing a person will be punished forever! I’ll take a quick death at Armageddon any day over that gruesome fate. One knockout punch and you sleep forever.

    Bart Ehrman, the Bible thumper who became the anti-Bible-thumper, but you can still see the Bible thumper in the anti-Bible thumper—comes from this “theology,” so that you can see why he might consider escaping it as having opened his eyes. If fact, in one of his lectures for the Great Courses (what were they thinking when they chose him?) he explains the really bizarre resurrection-of-the-dead notion that prevails among his former co-religionists—that the ungodly are raised so that God can rub their noses in the condemned course that they chose, after which they will be cast into hell forever and ever! How did it escape him (then or now) that “he who has died has been acquitted for their sin?” (Romans 6:7) God doesn’t do a “double jeopardy” on them. It is the course they choose upon their resurection that matters, not what they did in their prior life. Ronald Curzan of the JW organization explains it here:

    As for Great Courses, they wouldn’t know a scripture if one bit them in the rear end. They just scan the roster of university professors, pick an esteemed one, and figure he must know what he is talking about. It is not their fault if it turns out that he doesn’t. Or rather, he does, but only according to the inadequate method of biblical examination he has chosen—that of historical scientific analysis. He is like a mechanic come to the job, his toolbox stuffed only with wrenches, when what is needed is a screwdriver. Rather than regret he doesn’t have the correct tools, he declares that if a wrench can’t fix it it is not a problem. To be sure, Great Courses somewhat redeems itself by selecting Luke Timothy Johnson for their series ‘The Story of the Bible,’ who examines it from a traditional approach and does not adopt the default position that it is human myth making.

    The current answer to “Will only Jehovah’s Witnesses be saved?” is no longer ‘Yes—but to be explained so that it doesn’t make us look unreasonable.” It is “No,” followed by how to say such would be presumptuous, since only Jehovah can judge those who might be mentally disabled, children too young to make up their minds, etc. This is essentially the same answer, isn’t it, with caveats that can be greatly expanded. Last I heard, one out of everything three Americans are on some form of antidepressants or other psych medicine. Research has come to light that a child’s brain formation is incomplete even into their early 20’s. I remember how Ray Hartman the circuit overseer would come up on the platform with a stack of material to choose from, and toward the end of whatever talk he was giving he would comment on various items, seemingly choosing them as he went, and that this business of brain development into the 20’s was among them, or maybe he just told it to me in private, but it does come from him.

    Well, the Witness organization can’t wiggle much, can it? What can it do but abide to the “one faith, one Lord, one baptism” of Ephesians 4:5? Don’t other faiths baptize? Yes, they do, but the ones who aren’t raising the ungodly dead just to say “Told ya so!” before tossing them into hellfire, Bart Ehrman’s former cohorts, are blasting infants with squirt guns these days on account of Covid-19. (as seen  on  India.com)9899BD98-22C2-4350-9685-8A990B4E5FC4

    My daughter answers that question with: “Well—I’m not Jesus and I don’t know.” I suppose she picked up the spirit from me, but not the exact words. I recall saying in one talk: “Just how far removed can one be? A certain distance or not one millimeter?” adding that I did not know but I would operate myself according to the principle of James 4:17 that if one knew what was right and did not do it, it was a sin for him.

    Probably a lot of brothers take solace that, as Jehovah spared Nineveh at the last minute with: “Wow—look how stupid there are! They don’t know their right from their left!” he will somehow cut many some slack in ways we can’t foresee. (Jonah 4:11) But the Watchtower can hardly say this, for that would be clearly speculative. What can they say other than “One faith, One Lord, One baptism?” So that is what they say, in the main.

    I don’t lose sleep over it. It is enough for me to be occupied with holding up my end. I don’t concern myself with God holding up his. What happens happens—and of course, I will adjust to it. As Anthony Morris said when he was trying to sell a house—it was critically important for him to quickly have the cash for some reason I forget—and the deal came at virtually the last second, and he related how he would look up in prayer and say “Um—it’s getting a little tight here,” but then qualify his duress with “He’s God—He can do what he wants.” 

    “The spirit of the Sovereign Lord Jehovah is upon me, because Jehovah anointed me to declare good news to the meek. He sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the wide opening of the eyes to the prisoners, to proclaim the year of Jehovah’s goodwill and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn…”  (Isaiah 61:1-3)