Showing posts with label Oxford. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oxford. Show all posts

Sunday, October 16, 2011

God didn't write Bible, and Shakespeare...

didn't write a single word at all
Wisdom Quarterly
(SonyPictures)

The two most famous, or at least biggest selling, pieces of literature are biblical and Shakespearean. Both are frauds. The gods may have inspired the Bible over time, but men reworked, reframed, and redacted much of it. It is almost unrecognizable. Yet, God is still credited with it as if the Vatican had done nothing to conceal large portions of it.

But the King James Version is little better, and its Jewish roots are far from pure. They extend back to Sumerian tales. In fact, the mythology of the world has more in common than details (pronunciation of names, peoples, lands) to differentiate it. But religion is sacred. And no one can question it.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, can be questioned. And he did not write the works attributed to him. This has long been known by scholars. But it is such an unpopular position -- because, after all, they are great works -- that few get any mileage out of saying so. There are many accolades for crediting the gay, poorly educated commoner William. This obscures the real artist, likely an aristocrat banned from writing for the decadent theater of the Elizabethan Age.

"Anonymous" investigates the matter. Roland Emmerich directs this political thriller, a drama on drama, set in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. The plot is focused on the mystery surrounding the works of William Shakespeare and the alleged true author of the famous theatrical texts that have become the foundation of Western culture -- the Earl of Oxford Edward De Vere.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Science: Laughter Really is Good Medicine

() A contagious language we all understand that brings us closer.

Scientists Hint at Why Laughter Feels So Good
Text by James Gorman (New York Times, Sept. 13, 2011)
Laughter is regularly promoted as a source of health and well being, but it has been hard to pin down exactly why laughing until it hurts feels so good. The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral humor, but the physical act of laughing.... ha, ha, ha... endorphins... “Laughter is very weird stuff, actually”... laughter contributes to group bonding and may have been important in the evolution of highly social humans. Social laughter, Dr. Dunbar suggests, relaxed and contagious, is “grooming at a distance,” an activity that fosters closeness in a group the way one-on-one grooming, patting and delousing promote and maintain bonds between individual primates of all sorts. More