by Gordon Hempton
Uluru Sunset (photo by Martin Fisher/Flickr)
The day will come when man will have to fight noise as inexorably as cholera and the plague.” So said the Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist Robert Koch in 1905. A century later, that day has drawn much nearer….
This post on Google Drive’s Terms of Service caused a bit of a stir yesterday, as well as some thoughtful replies. The best reply (in my mind) came from tiffanyb. I’ve quoted her response below because it was that good:
These two quotes actually say the same thing. It’s just that the part…
There is a large fight going on against the PIPA/SOPA legislation …
Tumblr looks uninvolved.. Even though if it is passed tumblr will be shut down .
it violates the First Amendment, is Internet censorship, will cripple the Internet, and will threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech…
The Bible as Thomas Jefferson Read Jesus’ Life
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Six years before his death in 1826, Thomas Jefferson constructed a text for his own personal library, which he often read each night for 30 minutes to an hour before bedtime. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth — commonly referred to as The Jefferson Bible — is a compendium of clippings from the four gospels of the New Testament. The former president and author of the Declaration of Independence cut passages from six texts composed in four languages — English, French, Greek, and Latin — and pasted them in separate columns, side by side, so that he could study and compare the different translations.
The 77-year-old Deist believed Jesus’ life and teachings to be “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” But Jefferson was a product of the Enlightenment and was skeptical of the four authors of the Gospels. He intended to tell a chronological version of Jesus’ life, eliminating the passages that appeared “contrary to reason.”
There’s no resurrection story at the closing of Jefferson’s Bible; the tomb is shut.
As outlined in the video above, Jefferson’s Bible has undergone a meticulous conservation process and is now being displayed through May 28, 2012 at the Albert Small Documents Gallery in the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. If you can’t make the trip, or even if you can, be sure to check out the online exhibition, which provides high-quality, zoomable photographic images of each of the 84 pages of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. And they’re all transcribed too!
