History « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Sunday, June 16, 2013

◊ The 21st Century: Is Our Constitution Really Up for It?

History ... Politics ...

I am not a Constitutional scholar like President Obama, but I did take a class in Constitutional Law while in law school (many years ago), and I mostly stayed awake in my high school and college American history classes when the Founding Fathers were discussed. Plus I’ve read a few things here and there about early American history, so I have a general sense of what the theory is behind the way that our government is shaped.

In a nutshell, the Founding Fathers liked the established local and state governments, and were quite worried about adding a third layer on top of this. But they knew that a federal government was needed, so they tried to design a system with “checks and balances”, as to avoid the bad, tyrannical things that an un-checked national leadership could do. Democracy was a key feature of this new federal system, as to maintain the buy-in of the common man (and yes, for the Founding Fathers it indeed was man, not woman; and white man, no Native Americans or slaves from Africa or elsewhere).

And yet, the common man could only have so much input. The Founders clearly did NOT want anything approaching pure democracy. They clearly felt that » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:30 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, November 18, 2012

◊ Tilt

History ... Nature ... Photo ...

It looks like Jesus himself has taken a shot to the ribs by Mother Nature.

This is the Iglesia Pentecostal Church, the former Dutch Reformed Church in Belleville NJ, which took some damage from Hurricane Sandy in late October. Interestingly, the original church on this site was built in 1697 and its tower was used as an observation post in the American Revolutionary War. The church is located very near the west bank of the Passaic River; the Brits were holding the east side, so the patriot forces used the tower to keep an eye on them. Also, the church is not a stranger to bad weather. In 1804 a tornado almost destroyed the original church, and in 1854 the present church, which we see here, was constructed. Only to get hit by more raging winds 158 years later!

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:00 pm Read Comments (3) / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

◊ Terry Jones’ Crusade: Taking sides in the Middle Ages

History ...

My latest area of historical interest is the Crusades. I wanted to get up to speed on the Crusades quickly, which rules out reading a book. I’m not aware of any adult education mini-courses in my area on the Crusades (which is a shame; I wish there was a bigger assortment of serious adult education options out there, not limited to adult school night classes regarding spreadsheets, pottery making and starting a business). So, I had to find a DVD series. The Teaching Company is famous for its recorded courses on serious college and grad level topics, and indeed it offers a course on “The Era of the Crusades”. Unfortunately, it lasts 18 hours and doesn’t even get to the first crusade until after 6 hours of background lectures.

So, that narrowed my choices down to the History Channel DVD series. They offer two Crusades shows; one is fairly brief and focuses mainly on the first two crusades, ending after the loss of Jerusalem. The second show is narrated by British comedian Terry Jones and gets thru the fourth crusade and the rise of the Egyptian Mamluks, who overwhelmed the last Crusader strongholds in the 13th Century (ending with the fall of Acre in 1291). OK, it seemed pretty good on the cover, so I bought it and watched it. And yes, I learned a lot about the Crusades from Mr. Jones. But I was also disappointed with his presentation.

Mr. Jones is definitely interested in medieval history and has studied it quite a bit. But he is still a comedian, so his Crusades show mixes in » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 1:43 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Friday, April 20, 2012

◊ Names That Change History

History ...

Many people have pondered the question of whether their lives are shaped by their names. Obviously, movie stars and popular performers believe this, given all the name changes they go through in search of fame. Here’s a list of some real names of famous people. Yea, I probably wouldn’t think the same way about Tom Cruise had he kept his birth name, Tom Mapother IV. And John Denver as John Deutschendorf Jr.? Would anyone care if a Mr. Deutschendorf sang of his Rocky Mountain High?

But one of the most ironic name changes probably occurred in Germany around the turn of the century (the turn of the 20th Century, that is). The father of the man we knew as Adoph Hitler was an illegitimate child; his father did not know his own father’s last name, so he used his mothers’, i.e. “Schicklgruber”. Before the future Nazi tyrant was born, his father’s mother married a man named Heidler. His father did not at first want to adopt that name, but after his mother died he went to live with her brother, who convinced Hitler’s father to take on the family name. But in the process of registering his name change with the officials, an accumulation of bureaucratic errors transmuted Heidler into Hitler. Sometime after that, Hitler’s father married several times; the fourth child of his third wife was Adolph.

Had Hitler’s father decided not to change his name, » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 10:55 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, March 24, 2012

◊ The Games Must Go On

History ... Politics ... Society ...

I haven’t yet seen The Hunger Games, and to be honest, I probably won’t. But I still keep up with the times, so I generally know what it’s about. There has been plenty of talk about it in the newspapers, radio and TV, and I’ve managed to read a few reviews. What interested me more was the conservative punditry about it. A handful of conservative authors, e.g. John Tamny in Forbes and James Pinkerton on the Fox News site, seized the occasion to claim that Hunger Games ultimately speaks to the evils of big government and big liberal-friendly media. I couldn’t help but note the irony of conservatives latching their ships to Hunger Games.

As you and 99.99% of the American population already know, Hunger Games is about a ruined post-war America of the future, where the government entertains and disciplines its remaining subjects by holding yearly survival games (something like all those “reality TV shows” on today, but with truly fatal consequences). The powers-that-be select a group of male and female teenagers and pit them against each other (and against some additional deadly challenges imposed by the gamemaster) out in the wilds. Only one player is allowed to come back alive.

Most anyone with any interest in the old Roman Empire knows that this is a throwback to » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 4:10 pm Read Comments (3) / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

◊ God, Christmas, Jesus, and CS Lewis

History ... Religion ... Spirituality ...

The Christmas season makes Christians think about Christ. Or should make them so think, anyway. Ah yes, keep Christ in Christmas! Even thought I don’t practice Christianity despite my Catholic upbringing, Christmas still makes me think a bit about Christ, i.e. the idea of interpreting Jesus of Nazareth as the manifestation of God’s true Son. I once believed that Jesus was the Christ. I no longer do. Not because I don’t believe in God, nor because I believe that God would never send humankind a special envoy to convey God’s glory and disperse salvation.

It’s just that I can’t believe that God would make a “once for all”, one-shot appearance in Jesus and relegate everyone who hadn’t heard of Jesus (i.e., those who lived before him and lived in lands that would not hear the Gospels for many centuries after Jesus) to second-class status, unable to attain true salvation. And what about all those people who have heard of Jesus as the Christ and savior, but just couldn’t relate to what was being preached for any variety of reasons . . . which seems to happen quite a lot in modern times. Why should all these people be automatically barred from union with God’s kingdom?

I just can’t see God operating this way. Jesus may well have been a special messenger of God’s word. But that message, as preserved by the Christian church over many centuries, » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:33 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, October 1, 2011

◊ F111/F35: Deadly Misdesigned Beauties in the Skies

History ... Personal Reflections ...

By the time most of us reach our late teenage years, we usually take up some sort of rebellious cause, something to distinguish ourself from the life that our parents and all their friends lived. You want to make it clear that your world is going to be better, that you aren’t going to make the same mistakes and fall into the same traps that they lazily fell into over the course of their lives. I was no different. My cause was pacifism; not exactly a surprise choice for the time, i.e. late 60’s and early 70’s. Me and my generation were going to show the world that you didn’t ever need to kill another human being in order to have a good society where everyone can have a good life.

How did that all turn out for me? I don’t want to talk about it right now. Let’s just say as I proceed through my adult years, I fell into many of the same traps and have made many of the same compromises that my parents and their generation made. Oh well. But I still try to keep the violence and killing to a minimum. In my case, that would be “agentic killing”. I have never directly killed anything larger than a mouse, but I cannot say that I am entirely pure when you ask if anyone has to die in order to maintain the lifestyle that I have become accustomed to. I am a 99% vegetarian (and loving it – just eliminated eggs from my cooking and baking routine). Thus, I don’t take too many animals down to maintain myself, although admittedly I occasionally buy leather shoes or belts (but try to get by as much as possible with faux-leather items from Payless).

However, I do depend upon a car powered by gasoline to get to work, to buy food and clothing, and to maintain my social life. I also » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 10:11 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

◊ Our Anachronistic Constitution?

Current Affairs ... History ...

I just started watching another DVD “Great Course” from The Teaching Company, “Chaos” by Prof. Steven Strogatz. Pretty good so far, although I’m only half way into lecture 3 (of 24). However, Prof. Strogatz said something in lecture 2 that kind-of worries me. He was speaking about Sir Isaac Newton and how Newton’s laws once implied an entirely rational, predictable, understandable world. I.e., an orderly “block universe” where the past, present and future are all just aspects of an already-determined “block”; i.e. where everything has always been pre-determined. Of course, Newton’s ideas eventually developed into and were superseded by scientific concepts allowing for, even requiring randomness, contingency and unpredictability; i.e., “chaos”.

However, back when Newton was very popular amidst the educated class, the United States of America declared their independence, and a few years later wrote a Constitution. Thomas Jefferson was one of the key authors of those documents. And as it turns out, Jefferson was a big fan of Newton. So big that he used some Newtonian concepts in the Declaration of Independence. Strogatz gives a few examples of wording reflecting the notion of an orderly, rationally acting world; e.g. “truths” that are “self-evident” (akin to Euclidian geometric proofs), and “causes” that “impel” separation from previous governments.

OK, the Constitution is a bit more “nuts and bolts”. Still, the D of I states the philosophy behind it. The Constitution is a blueprint » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:02 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

◊ Space Race Nostalgia

History ... Outer Space ... Personal Reflections ...

There was a BBC show the other nite on the local PBS channel about the early days of the American manned spaceflight program. I.e., the Mercury and Gemini programs. It made me nostalgic for those days, the 1960s, when the USA established its presence in space and proved it was ready to go to the moon. I was growing up in the suburbs, and my father worked for an aerospace company that provided some pieces of the guidance systems for those rockets. Watching those launches on TV, hosted as always by the unsinkable Walter Cronkite, was always a thrill. America just seemed back then like a place that did things right and got the job done.

Versus today. Ah, what happened? What changed? Well, perhaps it is as much a case of me changing as well as America. There are hundreds of reasons, many of them good reasons, to lament the decline of our nation in recent years. I have discussed some of these things here from time to time. But it occurred to me that perhaps America is still doing some great things, despite all the not so great things going on in and around it.

Like what? Well, we elected a man from an ethnic minority group as our President not long ago; that would have been unthinkable in the space-race days. » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:44 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, March 6, 2011

◊ Bubbles, Jesus and Wall Street

History ... Religion ...

I’m still a fan of the modern academic / historical approach to Jesus of Nazareth. I’ve sampled a bit of the various schools of modern-day thought on the life of Jesus, and I’ve come down on the side of the eschatological / apocalyptic approach. Under this paradigm, Jesus was trying to save Israel from Roman subjugation by preparing the people for direct intervention by God. Jesus did not have in mind some future heavenly realm; he felt that God was coming down to earth very soon. God would land in Jerusalem, and would orchestrate a series of marvelous events that would push the Romans out, cast out the bad Jews, and leave the good ones to live very long lives in a land of peace and righteousness. Again, not in some heavenly realm, but right on the dusty soil of Palestine.

One of the big controversies among the professors is whether Jesus saw himself as having a direct role in the big event and the administration of the “Kingdom of God”, once in place. A number of Historical Jesus researchers conclude that Jesus did NOT claim such a role, what could be termed a “messiah” role, despite various notes in the New Testament saying that he did. A handful of others come to the opposite conclusion, saying that the “son of man” and “messiah” lines and stories (e.g., entering Jerusalem riding a donkey, hearkening back to Hebrew Scripture stories of kings riding on donkeys) were original, if somewhat trumped up over the years by the Christian biblical redactors. But most seem afraid that if they accept this notion, they will be helping the “snake handlers”, those academicians who support a Christian proselytizing agenda.

I come down on the side of the snake handlers. But not because » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 10:36 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

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