The History of Libraries: Part Two

So, where we last left off, the Library of Alexandria burned down. The sad part is, Rome sort of went along with it, but that's a different story altogether.

But that's a different story.

Skipping to the Early Middle Ages, monastery libraries developed, such as one of the most important ones at the Abbey of Montecassino in Italy. Books, being priceless tomes of knowledge, were usually chained to the shelves, reflecting the fact that manuscripts, which were created via the labour-intensive process of hand copying, were valuable possessions. And when I mean valuable, I mean... Valuable. Worth their weight in silver, perhaps.

Yeah, this is back in the days before the printing press. Don't know what a printing press is?

This. This is a printing press.

Back in the day, if you wanted to read the Bible, there were a few things to consider. 

1. You probably couldn't read it. 

2. You needed to go to church to hear the Bible being read.

Did you want your own Bible?

Too bad. Before the days of the printing press, you couldn't have one, unless you were... You know, the church. This is partially a literacy thing, and partially a "Books are wicked expensive" thing. The church had money and educated people who could read latin. If you weren't part of the church, you had to go to church every Sunday and hoped that the Priest was translating the latin correctly. 

Okay, so you're not a part of the church. And you want a book that's NOT the Bible. Do you have money? Good. Do you have a lot of money? Perhaps. Can you wait 20 years? Didn't think so. 

Imagine taking a book, copying it page for page, and making sure that there are absolutely no mistakes. That's what creating a book was like before the printing press. The only book available back then was the Bible. Really, if you wanted anything else, you weren't in much luck, as other books were kept in these libraries. And you couldn't really take these books with you. Well, you could... I guess.  

Many libraries loaned books if provided with security deposits (usually money or a book of equal value). Lending was a means by which books could be copied and spread. In 1212 the council of Paris condemned those monasteries that still forbade loaning books, reminding them that lending is one of the chief works of mercy. Good on the Catholic Church, I suppose.

The early libraries located in monastic cloisters and associated with scriptoria were collections of lecterns with books chained to them. Shelves built above and between back-to-back lecterns were the beginning of book presses. The chain was attached at the fore-edge of a book rather than to its spine. Book presses came to be arranged in carrels (perpendicular to the walls and therefore to the windows) in order to maximize lighting, with low bookcases in front of the windows.

However, it would be the printing press that would change the library forever.

To be Continued...

Don't worry. I can't wait either.

The Environmental Effects of the Meat Industry, AKA: I Got Much Better at Coding

Did you miss me?

For my final project in my HTML programming class, we were tasked with writing an entire website. The project also dealt with environmental issues, so I decided to choose the meat industry!

For starters, I am not a vegetarian. I sure as heck don't look or eat like one. Regardless, the world has a problem. An eating problem. Specifically, the world eats way too much meat for the world to keep up. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a crisis.

It took millions and millions of years, but humans made it to the top of the food chain, due to our highly-evolved brains. Our most brilliant scientists have recently discovered that Neanderthals, AKA Cavemen, were possibly much more herbivorous than we used to assume. And that makes sense. Before fire and tools, it was very difficult to force a 500-lb proto-deer to the ground with brute strength. Unless if you're Ted Nugent, I suppose.

Once we became homo sapiens, everything started to change. It was slow at first, but then again, do humans like to stay slow? 10,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution began. With it, came animal husbandry and society as we know it. Ever since then, humans have made more and more land for the cattle, swine, sheep and chicken to roam. Even now, roaming is out of the question for some poor animals, stuck in cages, being force-fed antibiotics to make sure that hungry customers don't get sick.

If I haven't chased you off yet, I implore you to check out this website, to learn a few things, and to think twice about what you eat and take for granted. Again, I'm no vegan, but it wouldn't hurt to eat a little less meat. I hope you enjoy my stupid website and learn something from it. I certainly did.

Read the Rest Here!

Begotten, Not Made: The Nature of God

I currently am taking a summer class about religion. This is the result of me thinking about one of the main arguments that God exists.

Oh God, literally. Where do we begin? God has been described as many things. A bearded man in white robes akin to Zeus or Odin, a kind and gentle creator, who created the universe out of love and kindness, a vengeful spirit that smites the souls of lesser beings that dare speak ill of his name, and then there’s the view of God not being a man in the first place, which makes all of this confusing. People seem to have a lot of answers. They all happen to contradict, and yet, this doesn’t bother people putting those arguments forward. My explanation to the nature of God is as such: There is no way through science, logic, reasoning, or mathematics that God could be defined, described, or identified. We cannot fully comprehend our creator. Though many have dared to try, including natural theology’s number one superstar: Thomas Aquinas, AKA: “The Dumb Ox”. If I can’t pick apart the beliefs of somebody called “The Dumb Ox”, then that says a lot about what I know about religion, and how much I’ve paid attention in class.

Where should I begin to put Aquinas down, using my 500-year advantage of scientific discovery and progress? It’s necessary to start from the first argument: The Argument from Motion. “Nothing can move itself. If every object in motion had a mover, then the first object in motion needed a mover. Movement cannot go on for infinity. This first mover is the Unmoved Mover, called God.” So, this is basically restating Newton’s law of motion. A good start, but it’s odd to assume that the first mover is God, at least in my opinion.

The second argument of five: Causation of Existence, basically restates the previous argument, just without the whole “Motion” thing. “There exists things that are caused (created) by other things. Nothing can be the cause of itself (nothing can create itself.) There cannot be an endless string of objects causing other objects to exist. Therefore, there must be an uncaused first cause called God.” I have a question: How do we know God was uncaused? There is no evidence that explains that there was not an endless string or not. This proves that there is either an infinite string, or no string at all, being that the universe just came into being out of nothing, which is just as confusing.

The third: Contingent and Necessary Objects. “Contingent beings are caused. Not every being or creature can be contingent. There must exist a being which is necessary to cause contingent beings. This necessary being is what we know as God.” Again, this assumes that God exists, and doesn’t prove it.

The main problem with the first three arguments of the great cosmological argument is that they all seem to assume that God exists. Let me explain. I find it very odd that he uses the term “Called God” as if the God that we’ve studied is the only logical choice. The three claims tend to stray towards the belief that only God could have created the universe, when it’s quite possible, due to scientific evidence, that the cosmological argument does not explain how the universe came into being.

As for the “First Mover” argument, the one that holds the most ground in terms of logic, also, paradoxically, gives the greatest counter-argument. If the universe could not have existed, had there been a first mover, being God in this case, that would also mean God existed before the universe. This raises a gigantic question about God and the nature of the universe. Since energy cannot be created or destroyed, and if God moved the universe into being, having existed before the universe, which would mean that both God and/or energy would have had to exist before the universe, which by all logical standings, makes absolutely no sense.

You can’t create something unless you exist. But since the universe is everything, and you existed before it, it must be assumed that you were created yourself. The only semi-legitimate answer that I could think of is that God created himself. But watch out! This would also contradict the “First Mover” argument, as one needs to exist before one is able to create. This means, by the laws governed and stated by the cosmological argument, that the only way that this could have happened is that if God and the universe were created at the same moment, which the bible contradicts, stating that God came first, bringing the universe into existence, leaving us with the ultimate paradox, akin to the “God lifting a rock he could/couldn’t lift” conundrum.

I’ve spent plenty of time on this paper explaining about how I’m right, but the question persists: What if I’m not right? Perhaps I’m not. Perhaps I should look at things a different way, and try to understand where Saint Thomas Aquinas was coming from in his cosmological argument. Given the time and lack of scientific evidence, I will forgive Aquinas’s possible lack of knowledge of the laws of motion and the laws of energy.

The one counter-argument that comes to mind is “Aquinas would have noticed the paradox, so there shouldn’t be one”. This is a good argument, but as I’ve stated, his understanding of the universe is one before the times of Newton. If he could read and write, I’m pretty sure he understood logic quite well. Aquinas seems to leave out any other possibility of how the universe could have been created, God or no God.

The point is, Saint Thomas’s Cosmological Argument neither proves nor disproves the existence of God. While it makes many assumptions, many of these assumptions are based on logic and understanding of how things work. No, these do not give us a definitive answer, but neither do they lack in a basic understanding of logic. The final answer is that there is no answer. As I’ve stated before, if we know so little about our own universe, then there’s no way that we can even begin to understand who or what God is.

The real question remains, however: Why did God create the universe? And what are we to him? Who knows? Perhaps, this universe was begotten, not made. That’s right, I like to bookend things. Maybe God doesn’t exist, maybe God does exist. Maybe he wants us to know the secrets of the universe, and perhaps, it would be better if we didn’t know at all. Perhaps we should have never tasted the fruit of knowledge.