Posts by Simon Grigg
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And this is even more relevant:
Online Listening Replacing Music AqusitionThe downturn in paid acquisition was also matched by a downturn in the number of tracks downloaded from P2P networks which also fell 6% in 2008. The number of teens borrowing music, either to rip to a computer or burn to a CD, fell by 28%
The industry just has to find a way to adjust itself to the way people want to consume and if they don't they die. They haven't begun to come to terms with it yet.
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From that article:
There will never be another 100-million-selling album, there may not ever be another 20-million-selling album.
The biggest selling album in the US this year is U2's which is just over 700,000 copies and may never get to platinum (1,000,000) but the simple fact is the unit sales of music are up, and up quite a bit. Dollar value is down because album sales are have tanked. But people are still buying music units at a healthy rate but no longer buying albums. I rarely buy whole albums unless it's an act I really like, but I buy dozens of tracks.
What the record companies are fighting is the collapse of this dollar value as it kills their bottom line which relies on selling albums of hit artists rather than singles or the 'good' tracks that are sometimes sparse on albums. The performing rights associations and publishers are actually doing rather well at the moment because they don't rely on the album bloat to survive, and it could be reasonably argued that it's in their members and writers best interests, at least for the vast mass who never really make money from the 'hit album' syndrome of the past, that the old system never returns.
I had a fairly substantial NZ writer email me and ask, after receiving the APRA newsletter, when APRA became the agents of U2 rather than the 99% of it's members who do benefit from a more wide ranging unit sales based playing field.
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I don't see any reason why Christian scholars would have invented a passage that blamed them for the Great Fire.
Except that it doesn't really say that, it says that they were persecuted for it, which Suetonius also says and I think there are other sources. This could well be the case, we don't really know but it seems likely and it seems like the sort of imperial information Tacitus may well have and be reliable on. So still playing the devil's advocate here (although only just) there is no reason to take the jump and assume the whole paragraph was inserted rather than just the references to Christus.
Rob mentions Robin Lane Fox and, it's a long time since I read The Unauthorised Version, but the manipulation of the truth by the early Christians (and the not so early Christians) is a fairly central theme of that book.
I agree that Tacitus is mostly reliable but his reliability is mostly with matters that would have been commonly known or recorded parts of the Roman record such as the wars and intrigues of Imperial Rome. He is less likely to be reliable on distant and obscure events from a generation or two earlier, such as the execution of a minor religious figure in Judea.
To be clear, I'm not trying to say that Jesus did or did not exist, just that there is no reliable evidence either way. To read what information or evidence we do have with any sense of conclusion in either direction I would argue is just being reading too much into it.
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a century of scholarship
longer than that, going back to this chap
But on balance it seems more probable than not that Jesus lived.
the problem is, it wasn't an uncommon name. Mark sums up the problems with the oft quoted evidence rather well I think. There is also the problem of the term procurator as applied to Pontius Pilate in Tacitus, as the term wasn't used until well after the supposed date of JC's death (although the Pilate Stone carries the term Prefect, which was contemporary so we know that someone called Pontius Pilate likely existed) This too adds some weight to the idea that Tacitus may have been adjusted a little to suit by interested parties.
The simple fact is, on balance if you will, we really have no idea, once you leave belief driven by faith behind, whether he existed or not.
And I guess we never will.
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No bibical evidence?
Hardly evidence, mostly 2nd or 3rd generation stories. There's been a whole industry going back centuries attempting to verify the NT, but it's largely come up empty handed to date.
Evidence is the stuff you can use in court, y'know.
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It's also a matter of biblical record that JC liked a drop himself
Correct me if I'm wrong but there is no contemporary record of JC, either biblical or otherwise. We really have little idea what he did or did not like, or for that matter whether he actually was.
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The only time Jesus actually describes heaven, he says it is like a wedding feast.
So heaven consists of watching drunken relatives dancing to Come on Eileen?
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Why do pakeha have more trouble with the concept of an afterlife than Maori who acknowledge the presence of ancestors on formal occasions?
Here in Bali at the mo' there's a bit of a rabies scare and the street dogs are being culled in large numbers (which, if done humanely, sadly not always the case here, is a good thing) with official enthusiasm.
It does, however cause a problem as the dogs are regarded as the lowest form of reincarnation by the Hindu Balinese, thus culling is killing your badly behaved ancestor, and removing their cahnce to move upwards again as it's an unnatural death. It's caused much discussion and concern in the local press and on talkback.
Although strangely enough that concern doesn't really extend to caring for the poor mutts when they are alive.
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Why do people talk about death as passing on or over
Passed away is probably more common, but any are surely just to give some comfort to those left behind. 'She's / he's dead' doesn't have the same implied sense of placidity that we need to assign to the departed to make ourselves feel better.
"They've gone to a far better place"....well, actually no...they're dead.
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You've got to give us point for that.
What I do give Italy points for is the grand tradition of quite twisted 70s and 80s Italo Disco. Some of it is very good.
Oh, and a bloke called Giorgio Moroder