I was reluctant to read this book for several reasons. First off I’m not a big fiction reader. I like to think of reading as educational and usually seek out books that teach substance or improve ones state of mind. Second, this is a book that a lot of people have read and that just made me think of here today gone tomorrow fads, which I don’t like. But after reading Voltaires Bastards I felt a nice, easy, fun read was in order, so I relented and turned the first page.

The books main character, Robert Langdon is a Professor of Religious Symbology. Robert happens to stumble into an intriguing secret society – "The Priory of Sion" – A European secret society founded in 1099, which functions as the keeper and protector of a religious secret that would shake the foundations of Christianity as it is known today. Throughout the story Langdon is tracked by a member of the Opus Dei – A deeply devout Catholic sect, whose soul purpose is to prevent the "secret" from being exposed to the general populace.

The book is comprised of 105 Chapters, all of them very short so its easy to pick up and read a few pages when ever one has a moment. I would describe the story as fast, exciting and thought provoking. It would seem a great deal of time has been spent trying to "prove" some of the claims made in the story. The book has also upset the Catholic church enough to generate Many official statements “Enjoy the read, but discount the history.” Cardinal George notes that The DaVinci Code, in the name of historic accuracy and scholarship, pushes an attack on the Catholic Church. The claims made in The DaVinci Code, the cardinal says, are preposterous."

As usual I feel compelled to share a couple of paragraphs from the story that struck me as very interesting.

"Nobody could deny the enormous good the modern Church did in today’s troubled world, and yet the Church had a deceitful and violent history. Their brutal crusade to "reeducate" the pagan and feminine worshipping religions spanned three centuries, employing methods as inspired, as they were horrific."

The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked, publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum-orTheWitches’Hammer-indoctrinated the world to "the dangers of freethinking women" and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed "witches" by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gathers, and any women "suspiciously attuned to the natural world." Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth-a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God’s rightful punishment for Eve’s parinal Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women."

"The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall Magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved throughout countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book."

Months ago I had a conversation with a fellow who had a "Christian weblog" the title of my post was "Does God have a Penis?" After reading this book and some of the other books on philosophy I think the answer to my question is –Yes, god has a Penis and it belongs to man. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good thriller. Its fun, captivating and thoroughly enjoyable. And for arguements sake, yes it is fiction.

 I turned the last page on this book over a week ago and needed time to let my head clear somewhat before I tackled the review. Voltaire’s Bastards is a book about the decline of our Western Civilization, how we are approaching the end of an era and some of the serious issues that confront our way of life. Saul paints a bleak picture of our current society, our language, our politics our economics and our leadership. The book was a long read, I found myself re-reading sections several times either because I didn’t get it or I couldn’t believe it. My wife and I have had several discussions about Saul’s point of view on various issues in the book, most of which have been approached with disagreement. The overall tone of the book is kind of gloomy, many problems are described in detailed, a great deal of research was performed to support the position and very few solutions are suggested. It is however an excellent catalyst for discussion which may have been his intention from the beginning.

Saul claims that our western society has been in the "age of reason" for the past 200 years and this "age" is nearing its end due to several factors such as the breakdown of our language, the perversion of democracy, the specialization of the individual and poor leadership. Some of his views on things like the economic practices of our society and the individualism approach to our lives are quite disturbing. Over all I found the book well written and well researched. As I read I found myself marking pages and underlining passages that pulled at the strings of my consciousness. Here are some of them, what do you think?

"The new Holy trinity is organization, technology and information. The new priest is the Technocrat – the man who understands the organization, makes use of the technology and controls access to the information, which is a compendium of ‘facts’."

"To this day, men who find themselves burdened by the adjective Machiavellian also find their careers severely limited. And yet the question that might be asked is: Why do so few men carry the adjective? If you were to edit the sixteenth-century references out of ‘The Prince’ and then to re-title it Power and the executive of Effective Government, the book would immediately be adopted by all contemporary management courses aimed at training businessmen, civil servants and professional politicians. It would be considered an ideal manual for the preparation of the modern world leader."

"In the nineteenth century, doctors were at the centre of political, social and cultural change. Today, a doctor tends to reach her summit when her view of the human body consciously limits itself to a single organ. Is this woman not illiterate."

"A predefined argument in which the people’s questions and answers would inescapably lead them to accept the pope’s authority. Everything lay in the advance definition of the form of the interchange between the priest and the individual. Rhetoric was the science of that form….This is precisely the method used today by the MBA or the Enarque. The modern technocrat attempts at all costs to initiate any dialogue. Thus he is able to set, in the first sentences of any exchange, the context of the theoretical discussion about to take place. In written arguments briefing books play the same role. The intended audience unthinkingly accepts the parameters laid out. It is then caught up in the coil of the resulting logic and kept busy rushing back and fourth between the questions and answers which the predefined structure imposes. In the process it feels the satisfaction produced by simply keeping up of the despair of inferiority if it does not. There is no time for reflection or consideration of the basic parameters."

"Seventy-two million Americans are illiterate, the majority of them white. This doesn’t include the functionally illiterate. One-quarter of American children live below the poverty level. Forty percent of children in public schools are from racial minorities. The whites who can afford to are slipping away into the private school system. Twice as many children are born to American teenagers as to those of any other democracy. But if you begin to add such facts as that forty million Americans do not have access to medical care, you are also obliged to wonder if the problem lies not with the population but with the elite’s, their expectations and their own education.

If Harvard, to remain with the same example, is what it claims to be and its graduates are to be found everywhere, then why are they showing no signs of dealing with their society’s terrifying problems? Were Montesquieu’s proverbial Persian to look in upon American society today, the only possible conclusion he could draw would be that never has such a magnificent elite failed so miserably and done so with such little grace, insisting as it does upon blaming the lowest end of the social scale for much of what is wrong….Or about developing a common sense line linking general with elite education. Or about evaluating why the most complex and competitive higher education systems ever seen in the history of the world do not produce elite’s capable of addressing the problems of their society."

"We are now caught in the midst of great economic and moral confusion. Public officials, appointed or elected, of the Left or the Right, are terrified to speak out against a sector which, according to universally accepted dogma, stands between us and economic collapse. Many of them believe arms production to be a weight tied around our necks. But this is an heretical and therefore secret belief. As a result armaments dominate our economies in a silent, sullen manner, without the public knowing quite what to think."

"The more the United States and Canada modernize – or rationalize – their mail delivery, the less mail they can deliver at a slower rate to fewer places, with increasing irregularity and at both greater expense and higher cost to the user…Meanwhile, in Canada, in order to cut employment costs, post offices are being closed. The postal service is being franchised to variety stores as a sideline. These offer little more than stamps. They also cut the public off from their public servants in the post office.

The question of employment is particularly interesting. Humans deliver mail. If you reduce costs by reducing employment, you undermine the systems performance. This sets in motion the spin towards shrinking services. Systems analysis doesn’t understand this because it is busy realizing that a public service is not a separate, private corporation but part of a whole which is the entire public structure. If the profitability of a service were to be measured accurately, it would have to take into account the effect of that service on the lives and businesses of the population."

"There is a whole series of governmental and paragovernmental services in which the assumptions of modern management are quite simply wrong. In education is it cheaper to keep a teacher unemployed or employed? All the costs must be calculated, not just salary. The cost to the state of that teacher’s own education, for example. And the increased value to the future economy of the education given to a child in a class of twenty, or better still ten, rather than the current thirty or forty. And the cost to the state of rampant illiteracy. All the Western nations now admit that their universal education systems are not working. They are all in structure, method and content. But education – quantity and quality – is above all the result of teaching. And teaching requires teachers, the more the better. A national education strategy may sound reassuring but without more bodies a strategy is just a strategy."

"Governments use the weapon of quantity as often as the weapon of retention in order to sell their point of view. Factual attacks from the outside can be neutralized by a volley of governmental facts. Governments and large corporations always have more material than their critics….How is the citizen to choose among so many "True" statements? The factual snow job is one of the great inventions of the late twentieth century."

"The scientific community has changed our life more in this century than any parliament, and yet it feels obliged to justify nothing."

"The New Right is even more undisciplined than the liberal middle classes, which have redefined personal freedom as the privilege not to give of themselves when it comes to protecting or advancing the public good. Throughout the West they have gradually withdrawn from public life, claiming that politics si too damaging to their private lives. These lives tend now to be devoted to careerism, travel, holidays, sport, exercise and the caressing of a private state of mind which might be described as an obsession with their personal well-being. For both the New Right and the middle-class liberals, individualism has come to mean self-indulgence. Such a childlike approach to the role of the citizen has allowed them to invert logic in a remarkable way. The public servant- Police officer, soldier, tax collector, health authority – who is paid by the citizen, now becomes the enemy of the Citizen."

"The theory is that competition draws each individual along, bringing out of him or her the best he or she has to offer. Competition and the resulting fame are thought to be among the great achievements of our rational meritocracy. They promise both self-improvement and participation.

The reality is almost the opposite. In a world devoted to measuring the best, most of us aren’t even in the competition. Human dignity being what it is, we eliminate ourselves from the competition in order to avoid giving other people the power to eliminate us. Not only does a society obsessed by competition not draw people out, it actually encourages them to hide what talents they have, by convincing them that they are insufficient. The common complaint that we have become spectator societies is the direct result of an overemphasis on competition."

"The novelist was constantly pushing at the front edge of specific knowledge and understanding. Today’s novelist, living as he usually does in the isolation of literature’s own professional box, is unable to do this. What is it that he now knows profoundly enough to be able to write about? First, he knows about writing; second, about the world of writers; third, about the writer’s inner life; and fourth, about his own practical situation, on the margins of the normal world, where he may exist in comfort or in poverty. At on extreme are those who write about writing – the university novelist and the experimentalists. At the other are those who, like Raymond Carver, refuse this self-indulgent cocoon in favor of charting their own experiences on the edge.

In neither case do we have the novelist running ahead of society, dragging everyone else behind. Walter Bagehot had already seen the problem looming late in the nineteenth century. "The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.""

I have always liked wine. Its fun to drink, it often tastes good, Its great with food, It can be very complex, like life or very simple, like life. My next store neighbors are from France and the man of the house has painted some very vivid and awe inspiring pictures of life on the farm (Vineyard) during his youth. Of course this always occurs over a delicious glass of CabFranc or Shiraz while listening to the kids playing in the background and watching the sun drop behind the houses of our suburban neighborhood. My wife and I have often toyed with the idea of living on a farm, with its wide open spaces and soil rich with dreams, filled with future sweat and rewards. Not a place to call a home but a place to make a life. A place where are kids could be exposed to some of the values and experiences that only life on a farm could teach, hard work, extended family, nature and creation. A place not entirely dominated by fast food, fast TV, Hi-speed this and Hi-speed that.

Yesterday my Wife surprised me, she pulled up a listing on the web for a 40 acre vineyard/farm and started to act like this was something real, concrete, tangible. Today she surprised me again by making an appointment to go and see the property.

In our dining room we have a large painting of sun drenched hills in Tuscany. I have often starred at it and wondered what it would be like to work that land, to walk in those fields, to visit that small town off in the distance and meet the people that live there.

Tomorrow we are going to look at the vineyard, walk its fields and touch the vines that make the grapes. We are going to talk to the farmer that lives their and if the cosmic tumblers of life click the way of the dream.......

 ALMOST 40 ACRES, UPPER BENCH APPROX 14 ACRES PLANTED IN GRAPES & 5 ACRES TO PEARS & PLUMS. BEAUTIFULLY FULLY RENOVATED 5 BDRM HOME IN PRIME LOCATION. PRIVECY GALORE WITH LONG DRIVEWAY LEADING TO THIS C/A, C/V, FENCED INGROUND POOL DELIGHT. COUNTRY LIVIN

The recent death of 4 RCMP officers in Alberta seems to have set in motion a great deal of public debate over illegal Grow Operations in Canada and the Marijuana laws that govern our society. While the loss of life is a tragedy, I fail to see how grow ops can be held responsible for this recent event. Are we asking the right questions here? I am sure organized crime plays a role in the production of pot in this Country, but did pot kill the RCMP officers? No a violent offender with a gun did. If this is not a blatant example of the failure of our justice system, what is? Why did this guy have a gun? Why did the RCMP officers approach this situation in such an unprepared manner? Did they not know who this guy was? Did they not know about his violent background?

I have been reading in the press about solutions to the grow operation problem in our country and again I’m not sure the right questions are being asked. I hear calls for stiffer sentencing and increased resources from the law enforcement sector. I may be naïve in my assumption here but do these producers not require hardware to grow the pot? The piece of hardware that immediately comes to mind is the large, expensive, light bulbs that are used in all hydroponics grow houses. Would it not be a more efficient and effective way to control this activity by regulating and controlling the distribution and sales of these bulbs?

 Without the sun you can’t grow plants. Why not control the purchase of the bulbs. "A bulb registry". Large grow operations need dozens if not hundreds of these bulbs in order to grow the weed on an ongoing basis as they have a finite life. We have beer stores, liquor stores, pharmacies and automobile licensing centers. Let’s just ad sodium and halogen bulbs over say 400watts to the mix. I’m not saying this would eliminate the problem but it sure would ad a barrier to entry into this business.

And finally in regards to the marijuana consumption by John Q public. I fail to see how giving an 18-year-old a criminal record for the rest of his/her life teaches any lesson or benefits society? Why we would want to punish our youth in such a manner as to limit their future options over what may amount to personal curiosity, is beyond reason. Or lets look at the same situation for an adult user. Would it make our communities safer if we labeled our mothers and fathers, friends and neighbors, our co-workers with the tag of "Convicted felon"? If anything would this not have the opposite effect intended and create a bitter disrespect of the law. Would the dollars spent on law enforcement for possession not be better allocated on education or literacy or for that matter a myriad of other social issues that plague our way of life?

Frost takes readers on a Philosophical journey through Western Civilization, starting from the early Greeks right up to the 20^th century. Each chapter of the book looks at the most basic questions that have been posed by mankind and outlines the theories of various logicians in a chronological order. (The Nature of the Universe, Man’s Place in the Universe, What is Good and What is Evil, The Nature of God, Fate versus Free Will, The Soul and Immortality, Man and Education, Man and the State, Mind and Matter, Ideas and Thinking and Some Recent Approaches to Philosophy) The thoughts of over 125 philosophers are outlined (some more than others) on these various subjects.

After reading the book I now have a general concept of who these people were. I also feel better informed about life, values and concepts that had never occurred to me before this. The book made me question many things I previously just accepted. I also have some insight as to which ones I would like to study further.

Here are a few of excerpts that I found quite interesting. What do you think   

David Hume- ‘Belief in God, Hume taught, does not come from man’s reasoning but from human desire for happiness, fear of death and future misery, and the thirst on the part of many for revenge. Because we have these emotional and impulsive characteristics as human beings, we construct a belief in God and then seek to prove that such belief is justified by reason. Hume writes at length in his attempt to show that while, from the point of view of reason, we must be skeptical about God, from the fact of our impulsive and emotional nature we do not believe in God and construct a theory about God, which is necessary for us. This approach to the problem of the nature of God was, as we shall see later, the part of Hume’s philosophy, which stimulated Immanuel Kant to make a distinction between pure reason and practical reason.

Immanuel Kant – ‘Kant attacks the arguments fort he existence of God advanced by philosophers before him, seeking to prove that each one is full of inconsistencies and logical fallacies. But, although it is impossible for one to prove the existence of God by reason, belief in His existence is necessary for the moral life. We need this Idea of the Whole, this transcendent theology, as a foundation for our ethical principles.

William James- ‘James recognized that many men believe in the existence of a soul which has immortality and that such a belief has a certain usefulness in man’s moral life. But he was not able to make a place for this belief within the structure of careful thought. John Dewey is more certain than was James that there is no basis for such beliefs. Indeed, he is convinced that the doctrine of the soul may be definitely harmful since it carries a load of tradition which weights man down or causes him to give up altogether the attempt to understand experience which has the quality of the religious.’

Miguel De Unamuno- ‘The basic urge of life, thought Unamuno, is not simply to go on living, but to grow and to develop. Therefore the fundamental problem of life is the necessity of coping with the idea of death, which stops all growth. Each man lives in the agony of conflict between his will’s need for a life after death, and his reason’s denial of life after death. If one is to exist in meaningful terms, on must accept this frustration, and in spite of the awareness of death one must will passionate action. For even meaningless action, if it is profoundly motivated from the inner core of an individual’s existence, will provide the necessary balance to the twentieth century’s stifling, all-pervading dependence on impersonal reason.’

I love the way this book has made me ponder about things on a deeper level. If you are looking for a tool to assist you in initiating conversation at a party, this book will not let you down. You have my word on that!