Most significant piano work of the millennium...

"The keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach cannot be called piano music, but there is one magnificent exception. Many musicians consider the six-voice ricercar from ''The Musical Offering'' to be his greatest fugue, and I would choose this as the most significant piano work of the millennium..."

Here is a great recording of the Ricercar a 6 by Charles Rosen (ricercar is apparently, even in Bach's day, an old fashioned term for fugue) -

https://youtu.be/2-p9KqznYz4



- C

Gibbon's famous 15th chapter on Christianity (an email)

I finally read the famous 15th chp. of Gibbon's history and found it surprising. I really had no disagreement for the first 2/3s of the chapter. In fact, Gibbon says many things I came to on my own and wrote out on my PPP blog. The last third is a bit more of the juvenile atheism we constantly hear in our own day. His constant use of the word superstition, for instance. It's unself-aware, and the concept itself is defined by the true faith.

Yet none of it detracts from the history itself. Gibbon is cynical, which is OK. He is bringing the ways of the world type of understanding, and the nature of human nature, and the nature of power. This is valuable, even applied to the history of Christianity, which obviously has a lot of politics and human nature involved in it.

Gibbon obviously does not have the understanding and sympathy for the faith of a true believer.

The 16th chapter is also on Christianity, and I've just started it, but I can see already it is a bit more of a diatribe against Christians (and Jews) and a defense of their pagan persecutors. The defense thus far is Christians deserved being singled out and treated harshly, well, because. Gibbon doesn't really mount a very good defense for why Christians were the one religious adherents who were not tolerated by the Roman government. The answer is: it's because Christianity is the true faith. It's easy to tolerate a false belief. - C.

The 3 stages of post-modernism (an email)

I like when things are categorized like this. This guy has a presence on YouTube. Here he categorizes the three stages of post-modernism. It's a short video. Post-modernism is basically epistemological nihilism. Epistemology is how we know what we know. Post-modernism is all about saying truth doesn't exist, everything is relative, everything is a semantic powerplay by one group or another (mostly by in power evil people). Etc. The philosophers he mentions at the beginning are the French ones with the strange sounding names. Foucalt (pronounced foo-koo), Lyotard, Derrida, etc.

Then he goes into the second and third phase of how post-modernism has played out.

In another video he talks about the motive behind post-modernist thinking and tactics. It's because Marxists got mugged by reality in the middle of the 20th century. Their great philosophy didn't reflect reality, so instead of changing their views they decided that truth itself had to be destroyed. The very notion that there can be truth. It's all Satanic warfare.

https://youtu.be/1cuxEmy_Ipo

"Understanding Postmodernism: The 3 Stages to Today´s Insanity (Stephen Hicks)
Stephen Ronald Craig Hicks is a Canadian-American philosopher who teaches at Rockford University, where he also..."


- C.

Look at this paragraph

Paul Carter interacts with a difficult verse: “Sooner or later every honest Bible reader finds herself asking some version of that question. These verses are – beyond a shadow of a doubt – among the very hardest verses of the Bible to accept as Christian Scripture.”

Did you see it?

Ah, yes, the use of the feminine pronoun for the standard male which forever has stood in for both male and female.

I come across that, just one, and I'm instantly out of the article (or book). I don't read any further.

I can 'see' this type of author grinning and saying, "OK! So be it! Don't read on! And don't get enlightened by anything modern and thoughtful enough to not want to show disrespect to women, buddy! OK? OK, buddy? Run along, buddy!! Got it, buddy?" Ooh, a bit of an anger problem there with that male feminist and hewer to politically-correct strictures for proper word use in article writing.

No, one female pronoun in place of the traditional English usage of the male pronoun and I don't continue reading. In fact, I mark that author and avoid anything they write in the future.

About numbers

A theme of the Bible is don't count on numbers for success. God doesn't need numbers like worldly forces need numbers. And don't insult God by assuming (or fearfully thinking) you better have numbers to have success. David learned this.

Numbers though play a part in the influence of any school or teaching as well. A school doesn't need overwhelming numbers to be influential. A small number of adherents to any given school - good or evil - can have influence well beyond their number (the Frankfurt School, for instance). This is true for any school including the school of Christ. The Puritans, for instance, were always small little islands in a sea of worldly, unregenerate, hostile humanity. Yet their influence was very big and even defined an historical era. Calvin's Geneva, so influential in world history, changing the course of nations, was small and not only surrounded by Roman Catholic armies but also had people inside Geneva itself hostile to it.

So God doesn't need numbers to have influence through his elect. Yet He does need boldness on the part of his elect. What God needs is He needs his elect to fear Him alone and not the world. People who adhere to biblical doctrine, hard doctrine, Reformed, Calvinist doctrine, may yet be so scared of the world to such a degree that it makes them impotent in influencing anything.

Music communicates the spiritual realm

Much is communicated of the spiritual world through sound, for good or ill.

Every Christian should listen to Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, or think about listening to it, as much as they think about reading the Bible. And do it.

Beethoven's 3rd Symphony is a complete spiritual pageant, or journey, beyond the veil, where light is at war with darkness, and wins. It's a triumphant epic in sound with struggle along the way. It not only communicates this to your soul, it teaches your soul. Not with words, but with sound.

Not all works by the great composers like Beethoven fall into this category. For Mozart, for example, it's his last six symphonies, which are Olympian: 35th, 36th, 38th, 39th, 40th, 41st.

With Bach, his Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin are a good example. Many examples with Bach. The Prelude and Fugue in C# minor played by Richter, for instance.

Bruckner's symphonies 4, 7, 8, 9.

Renaissance era polyphony - masses and motets - is in this category as well. Palestrina, Victoria, Byrd, Josquin, Dufay...

I'm giving examples that are pure.

What is the significance of the white race?

Why the attack on the white race? Why is it that only white countries are being told they have to take in people that will displace them and destroy their race and their traditions and cultures and so on? Why isn't China being told this? Africa? Japan? Saudi Arabia?

It's because of the significance of the white race regarding the white race being God's race. White is how people were created. We all came from Adam and Eve. All humans were ruddy complected. All humans were what we know of as classically white. Olympian gods and goddesses, representations of the ideal of the human race. White. The Devil defiled the bloodline. At first his goal was to defile the bloodline from Adam to Christ. He tried it before, and after, the flood. He failed. Though he then kept it up for the purpose of wiping out God's people that were left. Any people group that isn't white is a defiled bloodline.

So why does the Devil want to wipe out the white race?

In these end times the Devil is asserting dominion over the entire planet. He is unbound now and deceiving the nations, and asserting ownership of every land, every nation in the world. The significance of his obvious singular attack on the white race is because it is in the white race that the memory and traditions of our Creator are carried, and it is in the Devil's interest to wipe those memories and traditions off the face of the planet. The Devil wants world tyranny. One world of no borders, complete mixture of humans, at each other's throats, chaos, violence, poverty, sickness, disease, hell on earth. White people are an obstacle to this. The white race is a connection to God and God's ways (and God's future for this world and universe).

Fear God, it is the beginning of wisdom. Why? Because when you fear God alone you then don't fear the world or the world's opinion of you. Look at all the white people walking around fearful of their environments and repeating politically-correct cant (hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature) about race and humanity. Getting embarrassed about the subject, or attacking anyone with the truth they are too fearful to think or speak.

On books (from an email)

Speaking of Gibbon, I recently made what I think is a definitive list of books (and subjects like worldview analysis) for myself. These are works that I think stay with you in essence. Everybody's list would be different, but a lot of overlap. I focus on complete education, summit level, but there may be something to be said for smaller, less universal books, perhaps, in some ways.

My point here is the power to be gained by knowing a condensed, balanced list of influences. Really knowing them. Having it in front of you. Here's mine:

01 Holy Bible, AV1611
02 Iliad & Odyssey - Homer
03 Russian Novel - Tolstoy/Dostoevsky
04 Parzival - Wolfram von Eschenbach
05 Fourth Way - Ouspensky
06 Reformed Theology - Berkhof/Boston/Bunyan
07 Worldview Analysis - Naugle/Sire/Pearcey
08 Elements - Euclid
09 History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides
10 Lives - Plutarch
11 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbon
12 Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville
13 Reflections on the Revolution in France - Burke
14 On War - Carl von Clausewitz
15 Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
16 Spirit of Laws - Montesquieu

I've rarely mentioned Euclid, but for that I just think it's good to know, sometimes, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Kind of a practical, common-sense language.

Also, when you read such books it then opens up in your mind the lesser things you need to get to get a complete picture. You have contrast and context to work off of. It's a lot of reading, but we have to have a lifetime of reading to get to the point of being able to construct such a list to begin with (and we'll already have read many by then, though re-reading is like compound interest, valuable), and there is time in the day to do anything if not wasted. - C.