Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Hey it's a new week so I am allowed to link to Free Advice! In the "Legalize Murder!" thread , John Goes pooh-poohed my private alternatives to government handling of violent criminals (and what a fine job they've been doing on that front). John argued that my proposed private mechanisms could exist today, and so their absence shows that they really aren't a workable solution to the problem of violent people. I confess I don't know all the specifics, but I think there are government measures that prohibit competing, private sector agencies that perform traditional government services. I discuss a beautiful illustration over at Free Advice today. A meat packer wanted to test all of its beef for mad cow disease, and the government said it can't. An excerpt from the WSJ article on the story: A federal appeals court said the government can prohibit meat packers from testing their animals for mad-cow disease. Because the Agriculture Department tests only ...

Ah, the heavily armed SWAT teams just keep pushing the boundaries back little by little. Apparently they are raiding houses--and doing standard procedure of coming in with semi-automatic weapons, cuffing everyone and putting them on the floor for a half an hour at a time, you know--where people are planning to protest the upcoming Republican convention. The people who were raided claim that they weren't planning anything illegal, and were just going to exercise their rights in this free country. But that's what you expect lawbreakers to say. Glenn Greenwald was actually there, interviewing people after the fact, but the videos are kinda boring. You should read his (short) article though to see exactly what I am talking about. We're getting there, folks. They started doing SWAT raids like this on citizens' houses because of the possibility of armed drug dealers, and nobody cared. "Hey, I don't deal crack out of my living room. They won't knock down my...

Since various Protestants have been known to frequent this blog, maybe they can clear something up for me: Luther famously held Scripture to be the sole guidance to the true Christian ("sola scriptura"), always trumping the supposed authority of the Church. But, of course, just what Scripture consisted of had been decided by... the authority of the Church! (There were many candidates vying for inclusion in the status of being scriptural books, and hot debates about which ones would be so stamped with approval.) So, once Luther rejects the authority of the Church, how can he insist on just those four gospels being scriptural? What if a Protestant wants to follow, say, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of James, the Gospel of Judas, the Secret Gospel of Mark, the alternative Gospel of Luke, the Diatessaron, or the Gospel of Peter? They all had their adherents back in the day, but were declared infra dig by the authority of the Church . So on what basis can Luther criticize a Pr...

My classes first assignment was Phaedo by Plato, and I must say... well, I had heard/read many times that Christianity was the child of the marriage of Jerusalem and Athens, but I was stunned by how much "pre-Christianity" was in this dialogue: monotheism, the immortality of the soul, turn the other cheek, a disdain for "the world" and devotion to spiritual purification... even the phrase "through a glass darkly"! Of course, you also get a doctrine -- indeed, what Socrates holds to be a proof -- of re-incarnation, which we don't get in Christianity, but, as I understand, that was actually a disputed point early on, and apparently we easily could have had a Christianity that embraced the idea. UPDATE: By "easily could have" I mean, of course, from an historian's point of view. If you believe the Church Father's were divinely guided and re-incarnation a false doctrine, then, of course, the rejection of it was inevitable.

I tackle this and other questions in this Free Advice post .* * I promise to limit the cross-blog contamination to about one post per week. But in truth I better understood the flaws in the typical press coverage about recessions after typing out the post linked above.

And mine of late has been salting slugs. These little, slimy %$@^%#$%$^%@ have just been destroying a dozen or so plants in my garden, so I've taken to going out at night with a flashlight and salt shaker, and gleefully watching them dissolve. I'm reminded of reading about the British philosopher F.H. Bradley , of whom, the piece in question said, while he never taught at Oxford, he did like to go about the campus at night and shoot cats.

I've started teaching my course on death and dying, and assembling some Internet resources for use in the class . Any suggestions for more good material?