Call Me (Ish)Camel

First:

"In the fields the plowing is done with the most peculiar combinations of animals. The peasants either use a horse and a camel, a burro and a camel, a bull and a camel, or a bull and a horse. I am informed that they cannot use two camels because they fight each other. Any animal hooked up with a camel becomes disgusted and loses interest in life" (War As I Knew It, p. 19).

Maybe I'm hooked up to some invisible camel.

Second:

"Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the 'present state of the question.' To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge--to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour--this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded" (The Screwtape Letters, p. 150).

This relatively long passage came to my mind immediately this morning as I watched Banned from the Bible on the History Channel. The show dealt with questioning why many early Christian texts were not included in the New Testament. The issue of the validity of those texts was not raised. The Gospel according to Mary was not included because the Church would not accept a defiant female voice. Some of the other apocryphal books were too Gnostic. No one discussed, or even raised the possibility, that the apocryphal books were not included because they were not true. They looked at nearly every possible angle: the influences of the texts on early Christians; how the apocryphal books were consistent with the New Testament, and where they differed; how early or late the various books were composed, and their possible authors; how they were recently discovered; what motives the early Christians had for including and excluding certain books; everything except the question: "are these true or not?" It shocked me that such an obvious question was not raised at all.

I guess even a devil cannot lie all the time.

That's all I care to post for now. I'll try to get some pictures up.