DenebStation SF Book Reviews

      Can The Divine Comedy, written around 1320, be relevant today? I was listening to a YouTuber go through The Inferno and he kept saying how certain standards have changed. In 2012, an NGO threatened to try to ban reading Dante in schools because it was offensive and discriminatory and that in  the "Divine Comedy is racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic content.” Fortunately, they were ignored. Some in our day have a problem with the concept of Hell and sin. A chart posted by the Twitter account The World Maps showed that in Germany  only 15% of people believed in Hell, with the rates in Scandinavia being even lower. Can someone who doesn't even believe in Hell learn something from an epic poem about Hell and the afterlife? Would they feel sympathy for the Devil himself?  Would they consider Paradisio boring and anti-climatic?      I read The Divine Comedy a decade ago in a book with English and Italian side by side and also read a book a...

Gunung Padang in Indonesia      As a child, I remember hearing theories that the time before Noah's flood was advanced, perhaps even to our levels today, but because they were evil, God destroyed them in a flood and all of their technology and grand cities were lost. It was never told as a fact but rather an idea to debate and think about. It was a story meant to keep us in the present humble about our great advances in science and engineering. If we forget God, we too will be wiped out. It was sort of a religious Great Filter.  In 1994, I went to watch this movie called Stargate in the movie theater. I didn't know anythings about it but it looked like it had something to do with Ancient Egypt. I ended up loving the movie and the idea that man had contact with advanced aliens and that there were ancient advanced civilizations. I later learned that the director of Stargate, Roland Emmerich, got the ideas from a book called Fingerprint of the Gods written by Graham Ha...