We're Ridiculous - What I learned from a lecture on Church History.
We're Ridiculous - What I learned from a lecture on Church History.
Tonight I was sitting in an hour-long class with a priest teaching about Church History. Rather a whirlwind tour, if you have to fly us through about 3000 years of history in an hour. I kept losing my place in the lecture, because he would touch on something, and I'd start to ruminate on that part, and annoyingly lose bits of his next important point. So my notes are filled with half-notations of salient points, but say "in the year 1500-something", or "The Emperor Somebody decreed". I get the gist of everything, but I miss out on the details, and that bugs me.
(This was half of my problem in college, and the problem with the educational system often. Folks get more points for Emperor "WHO" and in year "What" than they do for actual knowledge of what happened, why, and its impact. This is compounded in music college. Wow, if you thought most of your history classes asked the stupidest, most trivial questions on tests, try Music History. We had to know WHO wrote it, What OPUS number it was, what YEAR it was written in, and in what KEY ! I usually could just SING it, and none of those other facts stayed in my pretty little head. Sigh.... It was quite a humbling experience to have thought all your life to that point that you were a "gifted" kid, and quite intelligent, and then to stumble out of the classroom, having failed yet another test on what seemed to me to be Music Trivia.)
Back to the Church History class... At one point, the priest was explaining the advantages of Roman occupation at the time - better roads, less worry about marauders/invaders/barbarians, education, etc. And he said that with that stability came the first widespread communication. You could finally go from place to place, region to region and bring your knowledge with you. And there was frequent communication between towns and cities and regions for the first time.
Then he said this funny..... "It was like their INTERNET."
So I chimed in with, "Yeah, everything (news) was just one chariot ride away."
Then it happened again. First I was distracted by the funny picture this painted in my mind of dusty bare feet in laced up sandals, and men in skirts (whatever they call them - they're skirts) and armored breastplates and those goofy red-plumed helmets, driving hell-bent for leather on chariots with sweating horses..... And I thought about what news they'd be relaying via their "Internet".
And then I thought about the the lightning fast speed of OUR true Internet and what great advantages that gives us. They thought it was modern times to be a chariot's ride away (comparable to Colonial America's Pony Express). How fast can we send messages to the nearby "city-states"?
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So what life changing missives do we tend to convey? What great wisdoms?
Yesterday, I copied and pasted the following joke onto my Newsfeed on Facebook - and this tells far too much about us.......
Facebook: The best way to tell 600 fake friends that you just ate a sandwich.