The Great Courses

That’s fine. But to announce that it’s only partially a myth and that the truth is that some small band of people was the more likely the truth is revisionism. The written story (which could be a complete fabrication) says something else. We might have an interesting discussion on the veracity of religious texts. But the lecturer, at least as first, is arguing from the point of view as the Torah as established fact, if only for sake of argument. This is not stated explicitly but is obvious.

But then it changes, here and there. This is a Jew talking about Judaism. Fine. And she makes what are some probably good distinctions….one being that Judaism is about practices while Christianity is about more esoteric things as faith. If only because the Christian sect was not required to obey the fine-grained Mosaic laws, this is self-evidently true. Which is not to say (as this lecturer notes) that there aren’t belief or faith elements in Judaism.

And the lecturer proceeded in a somewhat neutral, scholarly way, until she hurled what seemed a few back-handed shots at Judaism by, one presumes, a left wing non-believing Jew, although I can’t be sure of the lecturer’s beliefs.

And I have little trouble with the idea that many Jews themselves believed in a Pantheon of Gods with Jehovah at the head. After all, the first Commandment says “You shall have no other gods before Me” not “I am the only God.” This is consistent with what the lecturer was saying, that “god most high” was often the appellation because the assumption was it was a normal and widespread belief amongst Jews, and the world at large, that there were many gods. In this case, Jehovah was (according the the lecturer) considered the national god (as other states had) even while acknowledging other gods — with some of these other gods quite possibly being the “most high” in some other region or faith.

Fine again. But I would naively submit the rather obvious: Judaism was God’s attempt to pull people away from paganism and the plethora of false gods and bring mankind to the one and only true God. One can agree or disagree with this characterization. But that is my understanding. I would not at all be surprised that the people who built the golden calf still couldn’t get it through their heads what God, Moses, and other prophets were trying to make plain.

I just thought her scholarly outlook was slipshod.

I watched another episode of the The Black Death series of lectures. The lecturer is engaging in her style. But the actual content is a bit like watching paint dry. And it’s not because the topic isn’t interesting. It’s that she seems to have the trait that must be endemic to academia. And that is to take five pounds of sand and parcel it out as if it were twenty. I mean, I understand that a really thorough coverage of the topic might delve into a level of detail that I’m not interested in. But it appears that several episodes (I’ve watch part of the one on Florence) are going to detail the response to, and effect of, the black death in various cities or regions.

Goodness gracious. When even the more generic, summary-style content seems to be stretched out three times longer than it should be, I can’t imagine sitting through all this more detailed description.

If you are looking for evidence of the sort, "Moses was here" carved on a rock in the desert than yes there its no hard evidence. And if your looking for evidence either in Egypt or Israel of an 11th century BCE prophet named Moses or Moseh than scripture is about all you have. However, we have been celebrating Passover for 3,000 years. The story is well known from the youngest to the eldest and the first question is the most important, "why is this night different from other nights?" 

Liberal, so-called scholars, refuse to accept the traditions of 3000 years as proof of exodus. They willingly accept oral tradition from almost any other people yet, given the Jewish story they doubt, dissect and discuss. There is less proof of the life and times of the carpenter from Bethlehem outside of scripture yet the church is very willing to accept even the most fantastic stories. 

There is evidence of ancient Hebrews in the Nile delta area, called in scripture Goshen, there are cities built by them and archeologists have found tombs of regional elite who were not Egyption from the time of Joseph. The exodus most likely did not happen in the manner of Charleton Heston but there most certainly was an exodus of a large number of people from Egypt probably before the reign of Ramases. 

I believe the Jews became Jews during the Babylonian Captivity.  It was during this period that the Babylonian Talmud was composed. This is still the touchstone of observant Jews today.  I think rabbinical Judaism pretty much developed out of this.

I won’t go on too much about this because, A) I’m no biblical scholar and, B) A dishonest academic is hardly news. But this lecturer does feel a bit slippery regarding her series “Jesus and His Jewish Influences,” if only because (as I mentioned above) there is almost no talk of Jesus up to this point. There is only a somewhat slipshod history of the Jews being given.

A lecture series titled as this one is you’d think would be relating this Jewish history to Jesus and later events as the series goes along. But it’s as if she has picked that title out of a hat.

I sampled a couple other of The Great Courses. One was on Quantum Mechanics as offered by what I would call the first normal guy I’ve seen, Professor Benjamin Schumacher, Ph.D.

The subject of quantum physics fascinates me even though I have little hope of understanding even the most basic mathematics. But this fellow (from the 3 episodes I’ve watched) does a fair job of getting to the point. The first three lectures on The Black Death are pretty good and to the point as well. But this lecture series on quantum mechanics seems like a tighter and more focused presentation. But it’s still going to be mostly over my head.

At the end of the day one can say this: The theory (the mathematics, that is) of quantum mechanics works extremely well. But interpreting what the world really “is” via quantum mechanics, at least to my mind, hits the hard edge of the limits of materialism. There are plenty of interpretations of quantum mechanics. But nowhere have I read what to me is the most obvious thing: Why did the universe have to be designed in this way in order to work? To take the universe as a “natural phenomenon” and expecting pure chance and randomness to hold any deep meaning is always going to be a fool’s errand. But that very outlook does comfortably mesh with an atheist point of view.

Without a doubt, the universe does work and marvelously so. I think it’s obvious that there is no deep meaning to be found in the nature of quantum mechanics other than “It sure as heck does work.” But we have nothing else to compare it to. Einstein was doggedly committed to a deterministic universe. But we can reasonably surmise that a deterministic universe would not work, that all the strange phenomenon on the micro level of quantum physics is required for things as the macro level to exist — at least for the type of universe we live in.

No one knows why. And the tendency of all “scientific” interpretations, of course, is to validate radical materialism. That is, quantum mechanics pretty much says we can’t say anything about anything at the deepest level, so Einstein’s intuition toward “God does not play dice” was about his demand to find meaning, not ultimate nihilism — which I would argue is behind most interpretations of what quantum physics really means.

Einstein was, of course, reasonable in his outlook even if the particulars of quantum mechanics were consistent mathematically and observationally. The main metaphysical point missed by all (at least from what I’ve ever read) is that if you take the universe as a constructed or created system, there is no more “deep meaning” you can find from quantum indeterminacy (or other strange aspects of quantum physics) than you can find in the hand crank of a Model T. It’s just he way things were built to fulfill a certain function.

This is why you have all these goofball “multiverse” theories from the “scientists.” It just cannot be possible that there is any design to the universe. But if it was just a random set of laws spewed out by an infinite number of universes, then you don’t need any teleological component. And the infinite number of universes is necessary because it is intuited by nearly all that for just one to have the perfectly-balanced physical properties that ours does is not consistent with random chance.

I thought the lecturer’s remarks on this were disingenuous. Whether there were a hundred or 100,000 Exodus Jews, I wouldn’t expect there to be much, if any, evidence left in the desert if their residence was always meant to be temporary.

And assuming there really were this large Jewish kingdom that eventually developed, it seems it could never have been started by just a hundred people, especially if they had to displace the Canaanites and others. Whether there were the ten plagues of Egypt, I would reasonable remain doubtful. But that there was a mass migration of a people from one place to another is eminently believable.



The acid drip of cultural Marxism will try to eat through everything. My disposition is that I’m a bit skeptical about the miracles but think the overall history is probably pretty close to the truth.

But to distrust tradition just because it’s tradition is the acid bath of Marxism. I think it’s all well and good to say that there could be some self-serving (that is, not factual) accounts in many of the world’s religious texts. But given that the Cultural Marxists in the mainstream media are wantonly manufacturing news every day of the week, I think we have to be plain about the fact that there is an entire faction in the West who wishes to bury the past just because it is the past, regardless of what is true or not true. They are not to be trusted as interpreters of what is true and what isn’t.

Now, I’m not saying all this applies to the present lecturer. She seems more to have committed the error of not getting to the point rather than academic bias or fraud. She seems well-meaning enough within her own academic context. And that context, frankly, I would hardly call rigorous even if they can spread their lectures out into 20 parts or more.

I watched a little more of the lecture series. I can tell I’m not going to make it through 24 episodes of this guy doing his best to stretch out the subject. Now I think I understand what’s going on. It’s what one might call “pseudo-thoroughness”. I mean, if someone is blabbering on for 24 episodes about Gnosticism, this must be the epitome of being “academic” and “scholarly.”

And I have no problem with detail. But it must be structured detail. And that “structure” must not be an excuse for stretching things out and not getting to the point.

No doubt the Catechism of the Catholic Church is likely going to have a different point of view than left wing anti-Catholics (whether outside the church or inside the church). I understand that. Everyone has an axe to grind.

You would suppose an academic handling of this topic would cover all sides fairly and put it all into context. And maybe this guy eventually does but I don’t think I’m going to hang around to find out. It’s such a plodding, information-starved pace. I’m more interesting in learning about Gnosticism than be amazed at what an academician thinks he knows.

So I’m already at cross purposes. Is the point to glorify oneself or to pass on useful and interesting information? This was so often the dividing line that many could not cross at StubbornThings.

I did watch a little more the The Black Death. The chick presenter is very good as a presenter. But this still seems a bit stretched out to match the conceit of what is considered “academic thoroughness.” But she does, in this one episode, explain how Florence dealt with the plague. And that was more or less interesting. It would seem Florence did its best not to devolve into anarchy even if anarchy was inevitable a time or two.

I think she said it wasn’t until the end of the 15h century that Florence’s population got back to 1348 levels. But they did try in the meantime to grow the population by incentivizing marriage and thus birthrates.

Because so many people died, and because so much of this wealth got passed on eventually to guilds (or other institutions) because the living relatives were all gone, the guilds and politicians had some money to play around with. So they actually started to fund pensions for widows and orphans, as well as schemes for trying to induce a higher birth rate. This seemed to be primarily by offering some women help with their dowries with up to 20% of of all dowries being offered at the time being funded in part 0r in whole by a guild (or government…I forget who funded what, not that there was all that much difference between the guilds and the government).

Although the sheep-shearers and other workers took over for a time (because of the die-off or abandonment of Florence by so many of the ruling class), eventually, and fairly quickly, Florence returned to normal operation.

But the population rebound was slow in coming because Florence endured about a dozen instances of plague after the major outbreak in 1348 when it is estimated the population of Florence was reduced from 110,000-120,000 inhabitants in 1338 down to 50,000 in 1351.

It’s interesting that there were some rare islands, such as Nuremberg, who where not hit by the plague….at least this large attack of it from 1347 to 1351. The presenter noted that details regarding the plague are necessarily sketchy regarding what life was like for the majority of the people because the majority of the people couldn’t read and write. We get more of the story of the elites therefore.

There was an interesting moment when the presenter was defining feudalism, that it consisted basically of the ruling class, the priests, and the workers. She said when she asked her students what percentage these classes made up, many went for an egalitarian 33-33-33 split. My first thought (and I’m not making this up) is that 90% of the population was the working class. It was a guess. But then the lecturer noted that most of her students were surprised to hear that the workers made up 90% of the population.

Note: It’s not that I’m so smart. It’s just that yutes have been made dumb. Common sense should tell you that rulers and priests are always a tiny minority in any society. But so brain-dead and propagandized are today’s yutes, most had no clue about this.

They know not that their almost certain destiny now is to become serfs. But the elites, while always self-interested of course, didn’t always do a bad job. Would the rabble have done a better job? Well, I think this experiment was run (it was in Florence, and it didn't las long) in the French Revolution and elsewhere with poor results. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that a minority ruling class claimed to be ruling for “the working class” as one of their own. You can use the word, Comrade, a dozen times a day. But at the end of the day, Stalin and the Communist Party was ruling with an iron fist….far worse than any ruling class in Florence, for example. And today’s yutes will find very little Renaissance in AOC or the other evil Marxists.

Oh…you can bet your sweet ass my ears would perk up if any kind of reality-based information like this were part of a “scholarly” series of lectures.