Humanities Is So Much Better Than Math

So, you probably read before I was going to try to read all of the Iliad, which I will, but not for this class....We get through the chapters that we are supposed to pretty rapidly so I don't think I can read the whole book in two and a half weeks. Maybe if I wasn't a music major and had 7 classes a day, I could do it, but its just not possible with my schedule.

Today was one Tucker's (the teacher) only lectures but I think it was a really good one. It was about what the class should be about but I learned some pretty interesting stuff. Like....

• Humanities comes from the latin word "human nature" 
• which refers to a quality that distinguishes humans from animal.

The interesting thing about that is that there have been so many people that fight over if animals have feelings or souls. I love to watch people argue about something that can not be proven. I guess when you look at it from that perspective there are a lot of things that can't be proven. I guess I like seeing people defend things with all that they believe.

• Discourse is...
• A social language created by certain conditions to a specific time and place 
• expresses a particular way of understanding human experience 
  

(I took notes, just in case you were wondering I didn't come up with this all by myself :p )
Looks like I learned a new word today because I had never even heard of "Discourse" before.... He talked about how culture is marked by rapid change in dicourse like changes in ideas.

The example he gave was about how before the 4th century when Constantine converted into Christianity, there was no bible so Constantine gathered people from the Latin church to create the bible. The first person to take all the books of the bible and put it all together in Latin was a guy named JEROME and it was called the VULGATE (this word makes me think about 2 things, 1. SUPER AWESOME NAME!! and 2. Harry Potter). When he was reading all the old books he came across a word that he did not recognize "Manoia" and he translated it into Pennants which means to do things that forgive you for your sins. Awhile later a guy named Erasmus and translated the Vulgate into a "new testimate". And he went back to the beginning books to translate everything himself and he too came across the word "Manoia" but he translated it into repent which means to think/believe and ask for forgiveness. Then Martin Luther came along and translated the Vulgate into German but did not go back to the sources. He just stayed with Erasmus' definition of the word. He believed that your faith is between God and you. This lead to THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION.

I just think that it is amazing that one word can change history like that, just that one idea can make the difference.