Doug Metzger
speaker
2,647 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 6d ago
Doug Metzger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
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There are, however, still valuable takeaways from this little grotto of the book.
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During the 800s and 900s, in present-day Iran as well as the rest of the world, the universal
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Human desire to catalog and understand the world took form within various religious cultures.
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Contemporary Islamic science, while the Bundeshion was being written, was also cobbling together great big lists of things and punctuating those lists with remarks about the Quran and other works of Islamic theology, so as to make the natural world comprehensible and
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Congruent with Islamic teachings.
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Isidore of Seville had done the same thing two centuries before with his etymologies during the life of Muhammad.
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And so to put it simply, the medieval encyclopedia was a hip intercontinental trend.
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One of the great purposes that religion serves is that it explains what in the hell is going on around us all the time.
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And although
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Although passages like the Bundahijan's weird inventory of sweat and saliva and semen can make us raise an eyebrow, such passages still demonstrate a scientific desire to understand and tally, a desire that thoroughly permeated the Middle Ages in spite of stereotypes otherwise.
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What comes next in the Bundeshion is many more pseudoscientific inventories.
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In fact, a hundred pages divided into various sections on different kinds of animals, people, plants, fire, sleep, songs, weather, vermin, wolves, and other subjects.
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A dense chunk of text with hundreds of obscure Middle Persian nouns that must have been absolutely
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Brutal for our translators, Domenico Agostini and Samuel Trope.
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For your sanity and the purposes of audience retention, I will summarize the next hundred pages of the Bundeshion quite quickly, dutifully calling attention to anything that is memorable, educationally valuable, funny, or some combination of the three.
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We'll slow down again when we get to the final quarter of this book.
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Plants, the Bundahijan says, sprung up from the remains of the first cow when it passed away.
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Grape vines came from cow blood, which is why wine has such a strong effect on our blood when we drink it.
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as in Hinduism, and almost certainly under the influence of Sanskrit writings, in the Bundahijan cattle are counted as especially sacred.
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The Bundahijan attests that cattle were created twice, once with the first cow, and then later when a cow and bull were created at the same time.
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Showing 2261–2280 of 2,647 · page 114 of 133
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