B. H. Manners

I for one believe that if the Bible had never existed the Roman Empire would have lasted longer than it did. The reason why I think so is the fact that a nation, for psychological purposes, has to have its heroes. When Rome was pagan, it looked to the likes of Brutus, Romulus, Caesar, ect. for its heroes and examples of noble behavior. These men were all nominally polytheist as most of their forbears. While Rome remained pagan it had a history that its people could be proud of and desire to eminate in the future. When Christianity came along and took over a sense of cultural anomie developed and the empire lost its sense of heroism and to some degree legitimacy. The old heroes were now deceived foolish pagans who were not worthy of respect.

I guess the closest thing to compare it to is the Soviet Union before and after Glasnost. Before it, everyone looked up to the likes of Lenin, Stalin, ect. and when Gorbachev let the truth come out no one really had anyone to look up to anymore thus undermining the legitimacy of the state itself.

[ June 13, 2002: Message edited by: BH ]</p>

case

If the Bible had never been written, the world would be vastly more forested, and Billy Graham would run a saloon/brothel somewhere in Tenessee.

beoba

I think this is the passage from Cosmos you're looking for:

Only once before in our history was there the promise of a brilliant scientific civilization. Beneficiary of the Ionian Awakening, it had its citadel at the Library of Alexandria, where 2,000 years ago the best minds of antiquity established the foundation for the systematic study of mathematics, physics, biology, astronomy, literature, geography and medicine. We build on those foundations still. The Library was constructed and supported by the Ptolemys, the Greek kings who inherited the Egyptian portion of the empire of Alexander the Great. From the time of its creation in the third century B.C. until its destruction seven centuries later, it was the brain and heart of the ancient world.
Alexandria was the publishing capital of the planet. Of course, there were no printing presses then. Books were expensive; every one of them was copied by hand. The Library was the repository of the most accurate copies in the world. The art of critical editing was invented there. The Old Testament comes down to us mainly from the Greek Translations made in the Alexandrian Library. The Ptolemys devoted much of their enormous wealth to the acquision of every Greek book, as well as works from Africa, Persia, India, Israel and other parts of the world. Ptolemy III Euergetes wished to borrow from Athens the original manuscripts or official state copies of the great ancient tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. To the Athenians, these were a kind of cultural patrimony - something like the original handwritten copies and first folios of Shakespeare might be in England. They were reluctant to let the manuscripts out of their hands even for a moment. Only after Ptolemy guaranteed their return with an enormous cash deposit did they aree to lend the plays. But Ptolemy valued those scrolls more than gold or silver. He forfeited the deposit gladly and enshrined, as well he might, the originals in the Library. The outraged Athenians had to content themselves with the copies that Ptolemy, only a little shamefacedly, presented to them. Rarely has a state so avidly supported the pursuit of knowledge.
The Ptolemys did not merely collect established knowledge; they encouraged and financed scientific research and so generated new knowledge. The results were amazing: Eratosthenes accurately calculated the size of the Earth, mapped it, and argued that India could be reached by sailing westward from Spain. Hipparchus anticipated that stars come into being, slowly move along the course of centuries, and eventually perish; it was he who first catalogued the positions and magnitudes of the stars to detect such changes. Euclid produced a textbook on geometry from which humans learned for twenty-three centuries, a work that was to help awaken the scientific interest of Kepler, Newton and Einstein. Galen wrote basic works on healing and anatomy which dominated medicine until the Renaissance. There were, as we have noted, many others.
The last scientist who worked in the Library was a mathematician, astronomer, physicist and the head of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy - an extroardinary range of accomplishments for any individual in any age. Her name was Hypatia. She was born in Alexandria in 370. At a time when women had few options and were treated as property, Hypatia moved freely and unselfconsciously through traditional male domains. By all accounts she was a great beauty. She had many suitors but rejected all offers of marriage. The Alexandria of Hypatia's time - by then long under Roman rule - was a city under grave strain. Slavery had sapped classical civilization of its vitality. The growing Christian Church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate Pagan influence and culture. Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman goveror, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with Paganism. In great personal danger, she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril's parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.
The glory of the Alexandrian Library is a dim memory. Its last remnants were destroyed soon after Hypatia's death. It was as if the entire civilization had undergone some self-infliced brain surgery, and most of its memories, discoveries, ideas and passions were extinguished irrevocably. The loss was incalculable. In some cases, we know only the tantalizing titles of the works that were destroyed. In most cases, we know neither the titles nor the authors. We do know that of the 123 plays of Sophocles in the Library, only seven survived. One of those seven is Oedipus Rex. Similar numbers apply to the works of Aeschylus and Euripides. It is a little as if the only surviving works of a man named William Shakespeare were Cariolanus and A Winter's Tale, but we had heard that he had written certain other plays, unknown to us but apparently prized in his time, works entitled Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet.

beoba

Digitized by yours truly

The Resistance

What would happen if the Bible never existed?

ALL TOGETHER NOW!!

&lt;sing&gt;

I can see clearly now the rian is gone
I can all obstacles in my way
Gone is that dark cloud that had me blind
It's gonna be a bright, (softly) bright, (loudly) bright, (softly) bright,
(regular) bright sunshiny day.

philechat

alphatronics

I heard about the story of Hypatia. It is one of the greatest tragedy in human cultural history, one that destroys human wisdom and values of the ancient Greek/Roman world, and replaced with it a base, resentment-filled morality of Christianity.

It reminds us heathens to remain alert to any attempt of cultural destruction by organized religion. The Bible was indeed the nightmare of all noble values.