Yesterday I was off to the Castell library first thing, arriving there a bit after 10-am, having walked all the way and taking some photos as well. This for my spring photo collection with in mind my intention to liven up my daily entries. I keep working on my ‘picture project’ as I mentioned a week or so ago.

The walk takes me about forty five (45) minutes going through Lindsay park, then down Centre street to about thirteenth Ave and over to one of the MacLeods to the ‘Bieb’ - Dutch folk name for library since they say ‘Bibliotheek‘, similar to discotheque.

The subject of my intent was Mani and Manichaeism on which it had about fifteen pages.

Once there I headed for the reference shelves where I extracted volume nine (9) of ‘The Encyclopaedia of Religions’ edited by Mercia Eliade who passed away in 1986 a year before its official publishing date. The subject of my intent was Mani and Manichaeism on which it had about fifteen pages. These I copied for home study, using my now monthly copying credit on my new library card, a welcome service.

Later on I worked on retrieving some PHP programmes I wrote in 2012 which create folder names and directories from file names. The file names were car license plate numbers from various countries, which each have different conventions of course.

I am thinking of applying some technique like this to insert image file names into my daily entry html markup to get the scaled photos to display in my Daily Entries. I do this now manually, but since this would be an almost daily process, it is worth my while to reduce the manual aspects to a minimum.

This, because I have noticed of myself that if such type of extras take up too much time, that I just do them occasionally. So, I’m wishing myself luck, fortitude and insight to get this fairly complicated process to automate satisfactorily. All the while keeping in mind that I do like a programming challenge, among others as my former wife Ina often noted.

At around 9-am I went out for some shopping, had my coffee break and phoned Juliet for her grocery items to bring this aft. And now I’m ready for some writing on Mani below at 10:18am.

Mani strikes me as a ‘Man with a mission’ in the way the Apostle Paul comes across in the New Testament. Mani travelled through the Persian Empire from its western border with the Romans to the West coast of India, preaching and promoting his views and convictions.

He incorporated ideas from Buddhism and Christianity with the core of the Zoroastrian tradition, which he modified. His conviction was to spread this new religion that would unite people under one roof and so it did for several centuries.

From my readings about Manichaeism so far a new perspective is emerging for me in that Christianity, Manichaeism and Islam share a searching drive that is syncretic in nature, conviction and outcome.

From my readings about Manichaeism so far a new perspective is emerging for me in that Christianity, Manichaeism and Islam share a searching drive that is syncretic in nature, conviction and outcome. All three are formulated or even constructed religions with the aim to bring order to a very diversified cultural scene from which they emerge.

This diversity began with Alexander the Great’s conquering adventure in the third century BC and persisted until the end of the Roman Empire around 500 AD. At that time Christianity had settled down in its Orthodoxy and Manichaeism was diminishing, making room for the Islam over time.

These three newly assembled religious traditions differ from the foregoing ones in India, Egypt, Greece and Rome in that they are missionary in nature. They seek to unite quite disparate older tradition that were tied to territory based power structures of which Egypt is the best example.

This is my thought on this so far, but I’m sure more is to follow as I continue with my studies on Manichaeism and its shared aspects with Christianity and Islam.
<10:43am~