Not Everything is on the Internet

I have often heard it said that “everything is on the internet.” This is patently false. Despite the great advantage that the internet gives by providing vast amounts of knowledge at our fingerprints, it is important for individuals–especially the younger generations who never knew a pre-Internet world–to understand the limitations of the internet.

There is the obvious problem that with the popularization of the internet, everything that was previously in print didn’t magic itself into the digital world. Archivists, historians, and computer scientists have been hard and work to digitize massive amounts of digital information. Most impressively, The New York Times has managed to digitize and archive all articles from its founding in 1851 to the present, The Times of London back to 1791. Yet very few periodicals have been able to retroactively digitize their complete publications. Of most interest to young people, DC Comics and Marvel, while providing access to large portions of their historic comic books, have been unable to digitize their complete historic publications.

Many internet databases of scholarly articles have only been retroactively digitized back to the 1970’s. Of course, we can arrogantly claim that there is little of value to learn (especially in the sciences) from pre-1970’s research. But even without debating that point, it is easy to see how ruling out sources from before that time could potentially limit our perspective on a myriad of topics.

The Centrality of the Infantry in Warfare

This paper discusses why understanding the role of the infantry in warfare is essential for victory in battle.

World War III Has Already Begun

World War III has already begun.

Nations from four continents are acting as belligerents in continually escalating conflicts across the globe. These conflicts, while currently limited in scope and geographically separated are likely to grow and coalesce into a wider and broader conflict.

Let's look at the current state of the globe.

There Is A Kinder Holocaust

On January 10, 2022 the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee unanimously voted to remove Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman, from the eighth-grade curriculum for “rough, objectionable language” and depictions of nudity. This vote came in the wake of school district legal counsel informing the Board that (due to copyright issues) objectional language and nudity could not be redacted, which the school board had initially sought to do.

In a PBS interview on the matter, Spiegelman said “they want a kinder, gentler holocaust to present to their children.” His implication was that truth is being sacrificed for sensitivity.

Spiegelman’s words rubbed me the wrong way. For some reason I could not place, I felt he was wrong. While I agree that we cannot shy away from the horrors of the holocaust when teaching it to our children, I also find the images in Maus distasteful. Maus is not a book I would want to be included in my children's classroom instruction, even if the curse words and nudity were redacted.

I struggled to understand my own uneasiness. Spiegelman depicts piles of bodies, and mass hangings; things I myself had seen photos of when learning about the holocaust in school, and something I would not have a problem being shown to my children. What, then, was the problem with Maus?

A Summary of Grossman's Nonkiller Thesis

 An Enigma Explained

As a student of history, I was often confused by the numerical inconsistency in battle records of wars throughout time: for example, battles in the Crusades involving tens of thousands of soldiers, lasting more than eight hours, and yet resulting in only a couple hundred deaths. In the Battles of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution, after eight hours under fire the British force, numbering 1,500 had sustained only 73 KIA. While the loss of life in battle is lamentable and cannot be downplayed by mere appeals to proportions of casualties, percentages in the single digits during hours of battle (where the goal is, ostensibly, to kill one’s enemy) seemed strange to me. Why do we see such low casualty rates given the scale of many of these battles?

Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and West Point psychology professor Dave Grossman’s Nonkiller Thesis resolves the enigma. Dr. Grossman found historical evidence that a surprising number of U.S. soldiers in the American Civil War, World War II, and the Korean War who never fired their weapon in battle (non-firers) and evidence of many soldiers throughout modern history firing their weapons, but purposely missing (non-aimers). His Nonkiller Thesis states that there is a psychological aversion to killing other humans, which has expressed itself as many (but not all) soldiers playing at war to appease their superior officers, while not actually putting much effort into killing their opponents. This phenomenon is “a resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.”[1] This is not just fun psychological speculation; Grossman has the historical documentation to support the existence of significant numbers of non-firers and non-aimers. Let’s examine what he found.

What the Scriptures Don't Say

In recent years I have encountered a bizarre and alarming need when teaching from scriptures–or even secular accounts–to not only discuss what the sources say but to elaborate on what they do not say. For example, the scriptural accounts of the Nativity do not mention the age of either Mary or Joseph. Nor is it ever mentioned that Jesus was born in a stable, merely that He was not born in the inn, and that He was placed in a manger (Luke 2:7, 12, 17). The assumption is that managers are located in stables, but the type of place where Christ was born is actually never mentioned; the manger could have been located in a cave or in an open coral, not necessarily in a stable building. The number of wise men is not stated, only that there were three gifts (Matthew 2:11), not three individuals. The plural form of the word “men” (Matthew 2:1) tells us there were at least two, but there could have been four, seven, or twenty-seven wise men. The wise men did not visit the Savior on his birth night, but an undisclosed amount of time later, in his house (Matthew 2:11).

The Problem of Polemic

Three related terms are often used in religious studies: polemics, apologetics, and neutral exposition.

Polemics are strong critical attacks about someone or something; in religious theology, polemics often take the form of attacks against religious institutions or religious doctrines. Apologetics is the religious discipline of defending religious doctrines through systematic argumentation and discourse, often in response to polemic criticisms. Neutral exposition seeks to describe and explain doctrines and facets of religion without engaging in either polemics or apologetics; neither praising nor criticizing.