January 29, 2008. I started a list of foreign terms, and how to write them in HTML. It was on this page, but it is too big, and it is not time-sensitive information. It is now on its own page. Anyways, midnight is almost upon us, and I don’t think the planet has been hit by an asteroid, but there are several time zones until tomorrow.
Over the last year, I’ve been busy. More work, more pay. When I had assorted thoughts, they often went on a page concerning the work of Bob Dylan, dylanology.eht. There are a lot of thoughts about assorted songs, things that are related to Dylan songs in remote ways. Well, not everything can or should go there. So, it is time to put some stuff here as well.
In the course of my work, I was just reading about the theologian Romano Guardini who was born in Italy and spent most of his life in Germany. He was a leader of the Catholic youth movement in Germany before World War Two. He held a University Chair in Dogmatic Theology, but in 1939 the government authorities (the Nazis) forced him to resign from the university and banned national meetings of the Catholic Youth movement. I read that the theologian Martin Grabmann was also forced to resign in 1939 from teaching dogmatic theology, and the Munich Theological Department was closed. The background of this was as follows. In 1937 Pope Pius XI published an encyclical letter called Mit brennender Sorge (written by the future Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII). The encyclical condemned the ideas of the Nazis, anti-semitism (the Nazis were trying to ban the reading of the Old Testament, for example). It can be read here: Mit Brennender Sorge (1937). The Encyclical Letter was read publiclly in Catholic Churches in Germany. According to Wikipedia (article Mit brennender Sorge), the Nazis retaliated as follows:
After Mit Brennender Sorge was disseminated throughout German Catholic parishes, Nazi persecution of the Church in Germany began by "outright repression" and "staged prosecutions" of monks for homosexuality, with the maximum of publicity. In Poland, the Nazis murdered over 2500 monks and priests while scores more were sent to concentration camps.
Of course, the murders in Poland could not have been until more than two years later, which meant that the Nazi reaction against the Catholic Church was not a mere episode in 1939. Among those who died in the concentration camps was Saint Maximilian Kolbe.
So, the picture I gather is this. Because the highest authorities of the Church spoke out against the essence of Nazism, the Nazis made war against the Church. They were somewhat discrete in Germany, because they did not want to alienate the great number of Catholics, but they shut down the Church’s means of communication, its institutions of teaching, etc. Thereafter, if the Pope were to make sweeping condemnations, it would have been a futile gesture, because they would not be read in the Catholic Churches in Germany. I do not know the details concerning why the Nazis closed the teaching of Catholic dogmatic theology in the two instances mentioned above, but I assume that it was part of a larger pattern.
Another factor was that Nazism and Bolshevism were two sides of the same coin. Both thought that an independent Church that spoke with authority was a threat to their existence. Both ideologies placed themselves above any morality. Both tolerated religion only to the extent that it was sometimes a useful tool to give morale to the people. Stalin eased the persecution of the Orthodox Church in order to raise national spirit in World War II. The Pope always had in sight the Catholics of Eastern Europe under the rule of the Communists. Anything he could have said to condemn atrocities on either side would have led to reprisals. It was not a question of whether Pope Pius XII during World War II should have chosen the path of a martyr and made vocal condemnations, but whether he should have exposed millions of Catholics to reprisals. This was particularly true of Poland, since the Nazis also had the Polish people (or Slavs in general) on their list of people to exterminate, and Poland was a mainly Catholic country.
April 7, 2009). Anyhow, I have a new purpose in this log. Recently, I have started to study biblical Hebrew at classicalhebrew.com. It is a very good setup, with video conferencing and live teachers. Now, of course, I am a rank beginner. I supplement the lessons by listening to MP3s of a man reading the books of the Bible as I follow along with a text. The thing about listening is that you pick up things, how some words are similar. I have become quickly aware that the Hebrew texts comes up with a lot of plays on words. So, I may post my observations here. They are simply things that occur to me, with no great profound scholarly value.
—In Genesis 3 we read about the serpent, who is more clever than any beast of the field. The word for “clever” is “arum” . The serpent says that Adam and Eve break the commandment and then realize that they are naked, which is “eirum”.
—In the first chapters of Genesis, there is a lot of word-play between the name “Adam” and the word for ground “adamah”, which is cursed because of Adam.
—Another is about the Tree of Knowledge of “Good and Evil”. “Good and Evil” is “Tov ve Rah”, and that almost sounds the same as “Torah”, which is the word for the Law, or learning. And indeed, what is law if not establishing knowledge of good and evil?
—There is the matter of Cain. First of all, after his sacrifice is disregarded, Cain becomes angry. The Lord has a conversation with him, and that conversation is very much like the conversation that the Lord has with Jonah, when Jonah is angry that the Lord has not destroyed Nineveh. Another parallel strikes me. Cain is a murderer, and the Lord says that anyone who slays Cain will suffer seven-fold. Cain's descendant, his great-great-great-great grandson, is Lamech. Lamech kills two men. Then it is written, “If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold”, truly Lamech seventy and seven-fold”. All those sevens are echoed in the New Testament, where Our Lord says that we must forgive those who offend us. Forgive seven times? No, but seventy times seven times.
(April 8, 2009). Nor am I a Sanskrit scholar. But I deal with so many articles about Indian philosophy that I started to collect Sanskrit words. Of course, people noticed long ago all the similarities between Sanskrit and the European languages, hence they talk about Indo-European languages. So, here are some I came across today:
vīra (Sanskrit)—heroic. HTML: ī = b;, which is close to Latin where vis means power, vir means man, in the sense of a strong man, virgo means a woman with the virtue of a man.
May. I bought some books at a sale at a Church bazaar around the corner. “The Life of Pi” by Yann Martel, and “Death on the Ice” by Cassie Brown. The “Life of Pi” is excellent, and everything hinges on the very last line of the book. “Death on the Ice” is the account of a great disaster in Newfoundland in 1914 due to a communication-breakdown between several ships. I probably met, and worked under, descendants of Captain Abram Kean, who had a major role in the whole thing. He was a captain that was respected and feared, and it seems that the disaster happened because his underlings were afraid to pass on news to him if they thought it would displease him.
In 1986 I was not too distant and was downwind from Chernobyl. Professor Mieczysław Krąpiec said a few days later, that the name “Chernobyl” meant “wormwood”. The Ukrainians were already interpreting the nuclear disaster in terms of the Apocalypse, where the waters are poisoned by a star that falls from the sky, and the name of the star is Wormwood. Curious, I could not find the word in the Ukrainian bible, but I did find that “Chernobyl” is the name of a particular kind of wormwood called Mugwort (see Wikipedia).
(June 2009). Latest learnings. In the original text of the bible, curses and blessings are expressed in a highly poetic form. The Hebrew word for serpent (nahash) and a Sanskrit word for serpent(nagas) are similar (an accidental discovery).
And there was this reading in the Church this past Sunday, that Jesus was asleep in the boat on the Sea of Galilee while a storm raged, scaring the Apostles. This seems to closely parallel Jonah, who slept soundly while the storm raged, until the captain of the vessel woke him up.
And the local paper is saying that honeybees are virtually extinct locally. And orchards are a big local business (though less so with each year). The naturalists would like to know about any wild bee colonies that might have survived. From my own garden observations I can attest that there are very few honeybees (lots of bumblebees). I have seen a few on the flowers, but also slowly crawling on rocks as if sick or exhausted. Those might not even be local bees, since farmers hire hives that are moved a long distance. Initially, there were speculations that colony collapse, and bee depopulation is called, was related to increasing Wi-Fi and cell phone use. This is in part based on the observation that bees vacate areas near cell-phone transmission towers. But that blew over. They pinned it down to an infectious agent. However, this does not mean that cell-phones are not involved. If cell phones interfere with bees’ navigation, or otherwise affect their nervous system, this could weaken them and make them susceptible to agents that otherwise would not affect them. So, the next thing. Would we be willing to do without cell-phones in order to save the bees?
Now for current events. I am not a fan of Obama. But I thought he was being wiser than his critics in not speaking about events in Iran. The critics were baiting him, saying he lacked courage by not taking sides. Some Americans think that every time they elect in a new administration, they have made a clean slate, and that the world should recognize this. For other parts of the world, people still remember what Americans did forty, fifty, or sixty years ago, and do not really care or remember what particular administration did it. And the foreign policy of any nation has a life and continuity beyond the electoral process. Now, from the Encyclopedia Brittanica I learned that in 1953 Iran had a democratically elected government. That government nationallized Iran’s oil resources. The British and Americans worked covertly (but not so covertly as to elude the Encyclopedia Brittanica) to discredit that government. Part of the plan was to orchestrate demonstrations against the government. So, if you were an Iranian, if someone were to say that the demonstrators were being led by agent provocateurs, it would not seem implausible. It might even seem probable. The current government of Iran is the result, albeit indirect, of the events of 1953, and so it is the result of American policy.
I thought it was wise also that Obama remained aloof for this reason. What is the point of saying how bad something is, how immoral, how unjust, if you are not going to do anything about it? It is moral posturing, and that is repugnant. A proverb: “Do not sit in judgement, unless you are able to crush the evil”. However, it does not matter, because eventually Obama made a statement, the sort his critics urged.