Idiots

Ran into someone saying that ethics and morality are much older than religion. I pointed out that fertility goddesses more than 30,000 years old have been found, and asked him how old he thought religion was.

Someone else in the same place said that the amount of materials up to 2000 years old in the Vatican archives are vast and that no-one is allowed to see anything in them. I asked him, if nobody's allowed to see these materials, how does he know how vast the amount of materials is? I pointed out that, although the Vatican does indeed have secret archives, the vast majority of their manuscript collection is available to scholars.

I didn't mention that some written artifacts owned by the Vatican are well over 2000 years old. I get tired sometimes. I also didn't mention that the collection of manuscripts in the Vatican library, the above-mentioned part available to scholars, is well-known, famous to scholars, even, and that the Vatican has begun putting images of those manuscripts online for one and all to see. See for yourself.

I'm not at all optimistic about getting an intelligent answer, or even a coherent answer, from either of these gentlemen. But I felt I had to do something.

Vatican Manuscripts Going Online

I'm not sure how extensive the Vatican Library's holdings are in other areas, but when it comes to old and important manuscripts of Classical Latin authors, they are second to none in the world. And now they're starting to put images of some of their manuscripts online. Their digitalization process is far from perfect -- for example, the viewer doesn't keep track of which page you're on, as many pdf viewers and other such things do. And for another example, there's an annoying copyright announcement superimposed over the image of each and every manuscript page, not the ideal place for such a thing by any means -- but I'm still not complaining, because this online collection is still stunning. And hopefully they're just getting started.

The manuscripts so far digitalized and put online for free public view so far include, to take just one example out of hundreds, Vatican Latin manuscript 3225, also known as vat lat 3225, a celebrated Latin manuscript made in the 4th or 5th century containing fragments of the works of Vergil as well as some interesting illustrations like this:

If you're into Latin manuscripts, this digitalization project of the Vatican is really something.

And far all I know it may be just as exciting for people interested in other sorts of manuscripts -- Bible manuscripts, Mayan manuscripts, what have you. You'll have to ask them.

Dream Log: Old Friends, Large Building

Often I dream I am in buildings which are unrealistically large,

and last night was no exception: I was in a university dormitory whose ground plan was a snake made of right angles, and it was about half a mile long and 40 stories high. This building was a bit more luxurious than the utilitarian rust Belt public structures which often occupy my thoughts and inhabit my dreams more than any other building type. It's the only dorm I can recall seeing, in real life or in a dream, which had communal lounges on other than the ground floor. Some old friends and I were in one of these lounges about 20 stories up. One wall of this lounge was the building's exterior wall, all glass, solid-looking and very clean. The floor was un-scuffed. The furniture was several cuts above 1950's airport.



These friends were a group of women I haven't seen in 25 years. One of them was holding a puppy which was hairless and embryonic-looking and too small, as if it were actually something like a baby squirrel. I asked if I could hold it, and as soon as my friend passed it to me, it was much larger, an actual small-breed puppy with fur.

I was mostly interested in attempting to charm these charming women, just as I had been 25 years ago, but another friend, a man, wanted me to join him in another part of the lounge, and I felt that politeness left me no choice but to go and see what he wanted. It's not as if he was particularly annoying or unpleasant. In the other part of the lounge where he was, there was a TV with a very large screen, and he wanted my help choosing a DVD to watch. I recommended a video about Vatican City I've seen on the AWE network, made for the UNESCO World Heritage Center with assistance from Sony, not a bad video in my opinion, with good cinematography and interesting music.

It turned out that this video had footage which was not included in the hour-long program on AWE. In fact, the two of us watched for quite a while before I woke up, and during that long while I didn't notice a single shot which was included in AWE's version.

"Do you need mansions and gold hats to worship god?" -- An Open Letter To Someone I Don't Know

Yes. Yes I do. I need mansions and gold hats in order to worship God. (And Maseratis too! And luxurious chaise lounges and finely-made intricate mechanical pocket watches -- bushels of 'em!) Which is kind of ironic because I don't even believe in God, and I'm not even convinced Jeebus ever existed. And if he did I don't much care what he would do.

Perhaps you can tell that I'm having a hard time taking you seriously. The other day I saw an episode of "Family Guy" in which Peter led a radical libertarian-anarchist movement which succeeded in eliminating all government in Quahog. "And now that we're FREE," Peter said in triumph once the hated shackles of government were gone -- he said: why don't we get organized here in order to optimize out living experience and protect one another and maintain our infrastructure and discourage crime, codifying what we do and do not deem to be acceptable behavior, confining criminals in enclosed places if need be, and collect refuse and so forth, and we can elect representatives to oversee all of these important duties, and we can repeat these elections at regular intervals, so that if the people we elected the first time aren't pleasing us with their job performance, they can be replaced. And we could chip in some money to pay for time and effort of those representatives and that of all of the other people needed to keep it all humming -- little or no money from the poorer folks and more from those who are well-off. And we'll do all of this without government, yaaay!! And all of his anarchist friends cheered wildly at these brilliant suggestions.

Sort of reminds me of all you people insisting that a charitable institution be broken up and sold and the proceeds given to charity. The constant calls for a Vatican art sale are absurd. (I know, you yourself didn't call for a Vatican art sale, you called for some of the Church's "trillions of dollars' worth" of real estate to be sold off. I don't think mentioning you in the same breath is horribly farfetched.) A few wealthy art collectors would get some bargains, the public would have less art, and what would the Vatican do next week? Sell all those manuscripts from the Vatican Library, maybe? Why give any thought to any of us Classicists who benefits from those manuscripts being accessible to the public? History, schmistory! It's a brave new world, what with the RCC being downsized at last! And as far as the art is concerned, the most valuable Vatican artworks are frescos, painted onto the walls -- so they'd literally have to sell the buildings themselves, or bust them up. "Next up for auction we have the chunk of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel containing Michelangelo's beautiful painting of the Delphic Sibyl. What am I bid?"

Gold hats? Silk slippers? Small potatoes! Some of you guys are fixated on teeny-tiny stuff. And unfortunately, Francis is one of you, paying his hotel bills and dressing simply. Well, maybe there's symbolic value to that. Still, I'd rather he outdid Benedict XVI with the bling and always traveled by limousine and private jet and excommunicated a few of the most egregious credit-default-swapping, Malaysian-sweatshop-owning, air-and-water-and-soil-polluting Catholic CEO's. And/or advocated birth control or stem-cell research, or said that being LGBT is as good as being anything else, or that religion is silly ooga-booga from thousands of years ago. Oh well, nobody's perfect. I do like that he's speaking up against corporate greed and sweatshops and mass starvation.

The (Real) Universe

Regarding "The Purpose of the Universe" by Rabbi David Wolpe on Huffington Post, and also in reply to these silly, silly statements by so many contemporary Christian theologians claiming that fundamentalism and the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture are no more than two centuries old:

I recently obtained a reprint copy of the 1617 edition of Copernicus' De revolutionisbus. Here is the same edition on Google Books. It's very science-y, with a lot of diagrams and a lot of tables of astronomical observations, which is not usually my thing in reading material. But this book caused such a furor for so long and was at the heart of so much conflict between science and religion that I wanted to get back to the source of the ruckus and see what caused so many people to flip out, in both positive and negative reactions. I wanted to study the original untranslated text.

It knocks me out, the extremely painstaking, methodical way in which Copernicus -- a priest -- lays out his case and turns the mental world of his day upside-down -- or right-side-up, if you will.

And the response to all this careful observation of the movements of the objects in the sky and careful reading of thousands of years' worth of other scholars' observations on the subject? Luther's response, and Melanchthon's response, and the Holy See's response -- for once the Lutherans and the Vatican were in perfect agreement -- was: this contradicts Holy Scripture, therefore it is false and wicked and must be suppressed. As one reads Copernicus -- even a lay reader like myself -- one's admiration for him and one's anger against his dull-witted, all-powerful opponents grows and grows.