Journal anzha's Journal: Reading update 1
I finished _Slave Trade_. Thank all that's good. Actually, I did it a couple weeks ago. I've had a couple books I've read since then. Reading ST was oppressive: as I have said before, the book was dispassionate and engaging. It was merely the subject matter that was extremely depressing. Normally I can whip right through a book w/o problems. Even subjects that are horrifying. The book is at home, but I have quotes I want to yank. I'll put them up later. Some observations though.
There are no saints in the story of the slave trade. I cannot even say that about some of the victims. There were cases of Africans caught to be sold as slaves, freed, and turned around to be slavers themselves. Most of the captians of slaver ships were right bastards. The assorted African kings that sold the slaves were too. If I kept the numbers straight, it looks like something on the order of 10 million Africans were exported as slaves between around 1510 to 1870. Most slaves exported were men. It was not until nearly the end of the legal slave trade that women made up more than a 1/4 of the slaves exported. The vast majority of the slaves exported went to the Carribean. There they were far more often than not worked to death in 2 to 3 years: in that time frame the owner will have turned a profit on the slave's work vs his cost (sickening). The north america was admired for how kind the slaves were treated there (stomach lurch) compared to the other new world colonies, esp the Carribean: the slave population in the US, frex, grew more from natural population replacement rather than importing. From what it looks like, that wasn't the case until slavery was abolished in the majority of other places: might have to do with the ratio of men to women too...but then, the women died just as much as the men.
Enough with that for now. Its sickening.
Since finishing ST, I've read _King David's Spaceship_ (fiction) and _Gemistos Plethon_ (nonfiction). The former is the book by JE Pournelle, a good mental rinse and spit with nada as far as lasting impression.
The latter on the other hand is about one of the last 'great' philosophers for the Byzantine Empire (he died a VERY old man a year or so before Constantinople fell to the Turks). He took the name Plethon, but he was born George Gemistos. He was largely responsible for reintroducing the Italian Humanists to Plato. He was essentially the father of what would later be the Neoplatonist movement. He participated in the meetings about whether or not the Orthodox and Catholic churches would unite again in the 1430s+. However, in the end, he turned pagan, but hid it. Given that day and age, its rather understandable why he hid it. Juvenal was executed in Mystra (in Greece where Plethon lived) for such. His _Book of Laws_ covers his religious beliefs. Not much survives of it because it was sent after his death to the Patriarch in Constantinople (Gennadios/Scholarios) who was his long time adversary who then burned most of it.
What I took away from this is...
1) I am not a philosopher: most of this stuff seems like hairsplitting to me to a ridiculous degree.
2) Science really has rolled back the frontiers of religion. Big time. Intellectually I knew that had happened, but reading a samples of what Plethon wrote uber demonstrates this. We know rather than make up some pretty bizarre models based on faith, angels, and everything else.
Definitely worth reading for enlightening us to exactly how much we have learned in the last few centuries about the world really does work.
I am now reading _Snow Crash_. I am getting as many chuckles out of it as anything else. When I read it, I can definitely pick out when it was written.
Religion (Score:2)
You are right. The God of the Gaps has become untenable, as I think serious religious people would agree. It can no longer be about explaining the unexplainable. Does that mean tehere is no longer anything for religion to do?
I haven't seen any easy answers to that question. I don't practice a religion, because I think the burden is on the religious to show that they offer more than relics of past confusions and prejudices. However, I do believe that we humans tend to think mythically, and that this h