I promised everyone some blog posts last week the last few weeks, but because of life issues I have had to put them off for more important matters. Thankfully, I will have some available time this week within the next week to deliver what I could not by tonight. This includes the following (so stay tuned and keep checking in to see what I’ve written – or subscribe to this blog):
- A blog on ancient literature and its composition, model use, genre, and most important of all, how ancient authors learned how to compose literature (the use of ‘ancient’ here should be read as ‘hellenistic and roman period’) This is taking longer than I would have preferred.
- The second installment of my disagreement with John Loftus. He has three parts and I will have to work on my response to his second part sometime this week sometime in the near future. My apologies to those readers and John Loftus in particular for not being able to complete this task as quickly as I had hoped.
- I am reading Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin, by Nicholas Ostler. I hope to finish by the end of the week (because it is on loan and needs to be returned by then) and when it is done, I will be writing a review of it here.
- I would like to write another installment of my ‘Why the Gospels Contradict each Other’ series, but doing so is time consuming–more than other blog articles. I will work to include an article in this series this week, but I cannot make any promises.
- The first installment you’re likely to see is an article on how classical peoples and behavior compared to our modern society. In antiquity, out of fear of eternal powers and all encompassing fate, some turned to mystery religions to deal with and try to predict not only their own ends, but the ends of others and even life itself. Today, people hold similar fears, and even more pressing, realistic ones (nuclear holocausts, bioterrorism, etc…), but instead of joining mystery religions, many turn to metaphysical spiritualism (i.e. Sylvia Brown) or self-help (Wayne Dyer, Dr. Phil). I want to explore why this happens, how people went from joining religions and partaking in rituals to spending hundreds of dollars on pseudoscience and con artists. It is not so much that these people have changed how they interpret the world (its still all completely huey), but rather it is the means by which they buy into it – the method in which the message is transmitted – that has changed. I thought it may make an interesting article. I decided to scrap this one.
