civis-anima replied to your post:

May I be cheeky and ask what Yale lectures you watch?

Certainly!  So far, my girlfriend and I have watched a handful of lectures together.  We generally watch two series at a time, about four total a year and discuss a bit afterward, sometimes supplementing it with some reading material of our own:

History: The U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction Era
(this one is especially good)
http://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119

History: Introduction to Ancient Greek History
http://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205

History: The U.S. Revolution
http://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205

History: European Civilisation, 1648-1945
http://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-202

Music: Listening to Music
http://oyc.yale.edu/music/musi-112

Religion: Introduction to the Hebrew Bible
http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145

Religion: Introduction to the New Testament
http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152

There are plenty of other ones we plan to watch and I am taking a sneak peek at the philosophy lectures on death which look really interesting.

Here’s a list of all the lectures with links.  I highly recommend them!
http://oyc.yale.edu/courses

And Happy New Year!

Ahistoricism is a necessary pre-condition for every form of ideological blindness.  The more ahistorical, the more fanatical.

‘Ahistoricism’ does not mean merely one’s ignorance of dates, events, and names in history, but the interconnection of those things out of which all our ideas today have evolved.  Ideas never spring from an ahistorical vacuum.  One can know many historical facts and yet have an entirely ahistorical outlook.  One may not know many historical facts and yet may possess a keen sense of historical awareness.

Hence the simplistic notions of fundamentalism and jingoism: A fundamentalist is someone who understands very little about his or her own religion; an jingoist is someone who understands very little about his or her own country.

Conversly, the a greater historical sense one possesses, the more one’s pride in identity is tempered.

From Plato onward, as metaphysical dualism was refined, the rift between the Divine and divine creation expanded.  If the world is merely a cold machine, the seeds of this view lay, ironically, in Christianity’s own de-divinisation of an existence which is created ex nihilo.  Out of an obsessive desire to keep the creator god separate, theology and philosophy inevitably gave birth to nihilism.

People rarely quote Nietzsche in full: ‘God is dead.  God remains dead.  And we have killed him.’  And most importantly, Nietzsche is not speaking of a metaphysical entity called ‘God’—he is referring to the entire foundation of metaphysical dualism itself, which makes the idea of the Christian god possible.

The separation of the Divine from the world and the separation of the human from the world are actually two sides of the same coin.  This is ontological violence, a fragmenting of the Whole.  And this double separation has led to an even more intolerable antagonism from which now even the very ecosystem of the earth suffers. 

Wikipedia’s list of dates predicted for apocalyptic events.

We’ll have yet another day to add to the pile…

What a shame that this magnificent Latin word virtus, as transformed by Seneca into the idea of inner strength, power and integrity—available to all—was subsequently, after centuries of religious dependency, gradually stripped down to mere word ‘virtue’ in the most banal moralistic sense.

Pride has a happy use for ignorance.

Leon Wieseltier, Against Identity

They still don’t know why he was excommunicated. The idea that there is nothing but God is basic Jewish mysticism.

From what I understand, it wasn’t the pantheism per se that upset the Jewish leaders, but other ideas of Spinoza (non-anthropocentric, no afterlife, the denial of divine authorship of the Torah, and a general dislike of religion in general, etc.) which landed him in hot water (and not just with the Jewish leaders). 

But more important than these religious disputes, there was a larger political context: The Jews in Amsterdam originally came from Spain and Portugal, but were allowed to live in Amsterdam only under the condition that the Jews stick to Judaism—because of some theological quibbling between Calvinists and others at the time—and so the city council expected the Jews keep their own house in order—which they did (Spinoza was not the only one excommunicated in Amsterdam during that time).  So Spinoza was partly the victim of politics (not unlike Galileo was with Lutherans and the Catholic church).

I did think of the Shema actually, where Spinoza writes, ‘God is One’! 

Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.

Socrates Scholasticus (born after 380 AD, died after 439 AD)

~ ~ ~

And, in those days, there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes, and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through Satanic wiles … A multitude of believers in God arose under the guidance of Peter the Magistrate … and they proceeded to seek for the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the Prefect through her enchantments. And when they learnt the place where she was, they proceeded to her and found her … they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesareum. Now this was in the days of the fast. And they tore off her clothing and dragged her … through the streets of the city till she died. And they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they burned her body with fire.

John of Nikiû (7th century)

Surely it is foolish to hate facts.  The struggle against the past is a futile struggle.  Acceptance seems so much more like wisdom.  I know all this.  And yet there are some facts that one must never, never accept.  This is not merely an emotional matter.  The reason that one must hate certain facts is that one must prepare for the possibility of their return.  If the past were really past, then one might permit oneself an attitude of acceptance, and come away from the study of history with a feeling of serenity.  But the past is often only an earlier instantiation of the evil in our hearts.  It is not precisely the case that history repeats itself.  We repeat history—or we do not repeat it, if we choose to stand in the way of its repetition.  For this reason, it is one of the purposes of the study of history that we learn to oppose it.

Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish