Thanks KY but kudos not needed. I am pretty happy that anyone still READS.
Yeah I have read a LOT, but the old saw still stands..."The more you know the LESS you KNOW."
About the only thing my degree taught me is "Don't believe everything you read or are taught...."
Read everything about a topic you can find then make your OWN mind up on the "available evidence."
I think it started in my very first History course, Western Civ 101. Taught by a 6'6" Fransciscan Monk with a deep voice and a thick New Joisey accent who chain smoked camel filterless during class and NEVER exhaled, never missed a beat in his lecture even pulling the pack from the sleeve of his robe, flipping one in his mouth and flicking open and lighting the Zippo with one hand...you would swear the smoke came out of his EARS...
He made us study what a bunch of famous historians said about all the important points of Western Civ...we got the input from everyone from Santayana to Gibbon to Karl Marx (yeah, he was a HISTORIAN) on everything from the original Greek Democracies to the fall of the Roman Empire from about half a dozen DIFFERENT historians...and it taught us there are WILDLY different "learned" opinions about ANYTHING in History....and incidentally that Karl Marx was full of CRAP.
Heck, I'm CATHOLIC, born and raised, and it was a CATHOLIC University! And I learned MORE about the corruption and down right UnChristian actions of the Catholic Church during the middle ages from a pious Fransiscan PRIEST....he even taught us you will have a STRONGER Faith if you DO question it!
That's why History is an ART not a SCIENCE....
Father Conan, RIP, taught us to THINK for ourselves....NOT to take somebody elses opinion as fact, on ANYTHING....
A FAR cry from the drivel college kids are being taught TODAY, from their Liberal professors, by the way.
