Saturday, June 9, 2012

2nd Dante’s Inferno – A Response to a Comment Made to My Amazon Account


I am not going to try to invalidate your point because it is a valid opinion.  Thank you for taking the time to comment.  The reason I don’t think very highly of Inferno is that it does not speak to all generations.  That is while this book was influential, it speaks very little to me in the here and now.  It is a has been.  It has been both outdone in antiquity, and it is outdone in modernity too.  That is, authors put out better books than Inferno today, and Inferno doesn’t hold a candle to say a book of antiquity like Plato’s Republic.
Look if you want to get inside this book and read it for the mindset for which it was written, then you are correct.  Inferno is a real shocker.  However, the precise reason you like this book is the precise reason I have not thought it that great.  My opinion is that, if it were a good book, it would speak to all generations, such as a book like Darwin’s Origin of Species, which is as valid today and as controversial today as the day it was written.  Darwin’s books will probably still be as controversial as they were from even a thousand or more years from now.
I should also add that books like Inferno have been outdone by movies.  For example,  in the theater, the recent Tolkien trilogy blew me away even though  I am not a huge fan of fiction books.  Books like The Hobbit didn’t blow my socks off as literature though they blew my socks off in the theater.  Maybe this could be done for Inferno.  I am not incorrect for having that as opinion.  Someone who prefers movies to books with respect to fiction has every right to describe why they think the way that they do.
I am not saying is that this book is beyond recovery out of its historical shell, but I will say that it is fading, especially as time goes by and the history of this time period becomes blurred due to the need doctors of history to come up with new thesis about the way the past was.  Perhaps, Inferno will be able to be reclaimed, such that it speaks to all generations, but as for me and my opinion of Christianity, the same people what worship Christian deities are the descendents of the people that worshipped Greek deities, and the deities before those deities.
Guess what, most people aren’t as knowledgeable these days about Greek or Persian deities anymore as they fall out of popularity.  For example, who would remember a book that was a rebellion against the Zoroastrian priests, but a bunch of college history buffs?  I don’t know if such a book exists, but I do know that Zoroaster created what was at one time one of the world’s major religions, such that some people probably felt the need to rebel against it at times.  Thus, it is such that should Christianity fall out of popularity through replacement by another religion, I think Inferno may be all but forgotten to common people, in the way that any books rebelling against Zoroaster are unbeknownst to me.
I’ll give you another example.  Take for instance the book, “The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors,” by Kersey Graves.  Though some people disagree about the historical reliability of this text, the fact is that myths surrounding all 16 of these supposed saviors exist.  Jesus is one of these saviors, of course, but the point is that the crucifixion myth did not start with the idea of Christianity, but my guess is that most people don’t know all that much about all 16 to the point that it would be difficult to unearth some of these stories even for folks that commonly go to the theater.  In consequence, a book must speak to all generations in order to be remembered for all generations. 

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