So I’ve been sick. I got sick on April Fools Day (no direct connection to the pink and purple site that I’m aware of) and have basically remained sick. It started one week ago as a fever and muscle aches which continued on-and-off until Monday, at which point it transitioned into a plain-old cold. I’m finally starting to feel a lot better today.
On the other hand, I’ve been doing some reading that I’ve been meaning to do for ages. First, I’ve started digging through my Classics of Modern Political Theory book. This was a required book for a political theory class—I never read it, but kept it because I thought it might be interesting. So far, I’ve read Machiavelli’s The Prince, excerpts from his Discourses, and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, and I still have more than 3/4 of the book to go.
Since you can only take so much political theory at a time, I’ve been mixing back and forth between that book and The Holy Bible. So far I’ve read Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. I plan to continue alternating (one book of the Bible, one book of political theory) until I’ve finished them both.
After I’ve finished the Bible, I’m going to move on to an introduction/overview of the Talmud followed by the Qur’an.
Knowledge is a good thing, and to understand modern politics and religion I think it’s important to go back to the founding documents and see what they say. This is especially true since modern practice doesn’t always reflect the true meaning/intent of the founders and philosophers that introduced these ideas—whether we’re talking about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam or democracy, socialism, and capitalism.
I also find that there is significant overlap between politics and religion, and each had an immense impact on the development of the other over the millennia. Thus, I hope that gaining an understanding the interplay between Christianity and western political development will help me understand the similar interplay between Islam and middle-eastern politics.
Wish me luck ;-).