The Beethoven Mystery Why haven't we figured out his Ninth Symphony yet?

Beethoven kills! (in a good way) See this article

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2003/06/the_beethoven_mystery.html


excerpt:

"Famously, the Ninth first emerges from a whispering mist to towering, fateful proclamations. The finale's Joy theme is almost constructed before our ears, hummed through, then composed and recomposed and decomposed. The Ninth is music about music, about its own emerging, about its composer composing. And for what? "This kiss for all the world!" runs the telling line in the finale, in which Beethoven erected a movement of epic scope on a humble little tune that anybody can sing. "

forum comment re: christianity false

On a web forum a skeptical person offered some thoughts (in red), to which I responded (in my usual ham-handed fashion):

If [Christianity] works for you, that’s great. But do not get it confused: the power of belief is the issue here, not the existence of a god.

The issue is in fact the existence of a god. There are good, principled reasons for believing that God exists. These include scientific evidence such as the fine-tuning of physical constants that allow for the existence of human life and philosophical arguments (in fact academic publishers have lately been churning out books about God and religion. A recent example is the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology). If there is no God it’s hard to see where meaning and reasoning comes from. If there’s no God then nature is all that exists. But can meaning come from mere matter? Can our reason come from non-rational stuff?

If there’s no god then all that has ever existed is blind matter in motion. That would include every thought we’ve ever had. This puts us in the peculiar position of saying that our thoughts are rational while at the same time professing that these thoughts are the result of non-rational forces. But if our thoughts are the product of blind matter in motion, do we really have any good reason to trust our thoughts about anything, including those thoughts about rationality? It seems more reasonable to believe that more than just matter exists, and that our intelligent, rational minds are themselves the products of intelligence, namely God.

So why would a perfect being need to test his own creation, to see if we are worthy to grace heaven with our presence

Because God has high standards. Should we rather desire a God who doesn’t care about our spiritual maturity? How can people improve in any area of life if they don’t face adversity of some kind? People often will say that they’ve grown and matured the most when in the depths of suffering. With time and perspective we can often see the reason for some of the pain we go through. If God is all-knowing, then would it be far-fetched to think that from His perspective there are good reasons for all the suffering in the world?

Free will gives us something valuable; a choice to want a relationship with god or to want nothing to do with him. You’re a self autonomous being. Just imagine that your free will was taken away. Would a person consider that an improvement? I suspect most would say no. But is all that suffering worth the trouble? Well again imagine that nature is all that exists. What is the chief characteristic of nature? Violence, survival of the fittest, dog eat dog.

There is however something God did about evil. He became a human being to experience that evil firsthand. Even if I can’t understand why there’s so much suffering, I know that it’s not because God doesn’t love us. He takes it so seriously that He willingly suffered Himself. He know what it is to suffer, and can thus identify with us.

We can’t count the so-called self-publication that is the Bible. Biased information is useless.

All history is biased. All history is written from a particular point of view. Former University of Durham professor Henry Turner notes that “There is nothing anti-historical in writing history from a standpoint”. The important question to ask is: “do these documents stand up to critical scrutiny?” Take Holocaust historians. Their close involvement with and passionate commitment for their subject matter makes us all the more certain that their work is accurate. The same goes for the New Testament writers.

Using normal methods of historical investigation much can be learned about Jesus from the Gospels. Greco-Roman historian Michael Grant (a non-Christian) writes:

“…if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus’ existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned” (from Jesus: An Historian’s Review; Scribners, 1977).

The gospels are independent eyewitness accounts. Remember that the New Testament was collated later on. In the first century, these documents were written early (within 30 to 40 years of Jesus’ life), and were circulated throughout the Mediterranean world as separate writings. So it’s not the case that there’s one source of information (i.e. the New Testament as a whole) but multiple sources. And there are references to Jesus in Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, Josephus, and others. Given that Jesus was, in the eyes of the powerful, merely an itinerant preacher in some backwater Roman province, it’s remarkable that we have as much information about him as we do from non-Christian sources.

Obviously comments on the internet probably won’t convince anyone. These things require hard thinking. One of the best ways to think hard is to read a book. I recommend Tim Keller’s book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Dutton, 2008). May I also suggest that you read the New Testament simultaneously? I recommend reading first Philippians, then the Gospel of John, then the book of Acts.

I hope you keep asking questions, but that you also keep looking for answers.