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Last updated 21st September, 2007.
In about 4 B.C (2,000 years ago or about 70 grandfathers ago) Jesus Christ was born. After he died, his brother James and other followers promoted his ideas in letters to each other. For the next few hundred years his beliefs gained influence in the Roman empire and his brothers and followers wrote many letters which were put into a book called the new testament or bible. The bible has many parables about Jesus, what he said and did and rules by which Christians should try to live.
Generally, Jesus was a peaceful person, who did not approve of violence although he did up-end some tables in a temple once, angry at moneylenders being there. He would not like the modern corporate world much. The Jewish Bible, the old testament had been predicting such a saviour, which is why the wise men came to visit him as a baby in Jerusalem. They wanted a leader to make things better for them and give them the homeland promised by their God which they later got 2000 years later with the Balfour declaration. Some patience! Most did not want to believe that Jesus was their saviour so they can feel lonely at Easter and Christmas time and are still waiting I guess, for their saviour.
In the Christian theology, Jesus atoned for the original sin of Adam and Eve, who ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge and were expelled from the Garden of Eden by the Old Testament God. The great advantage of Christianity was that it offered forgiveness. The old testament God was vengeful, vain, belligerent and very insecure. Rule number one. "Thou shalt have no other God before me." An insecurity complex. Christianity was a great improvement, being less egocentric. Christian Confession, is very sound psychologically, even if you don't believe all the rules, self-observation can be psychologically beneficial. A different Islamic practice that is similar to the Christian confession, the Sufi STOP exercise.
Rome was the most powerful country in the world at the time. At first the Romans, especially emperors like Nero persecuted and killed the Jews and Christians, but after a few hundred years, one Roman Emperor Constantine adopted the beliefs of Jesus and all the other Roman citizens wanted to be Baptised Christians as well. Thereafter Rome was called the Holy Roman empire.
In Rome 2,000 years ago, you would be expected to study subjects like rhetoric (speaking), grammar and argument, music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy. You have to share your hand copied textbook, if you are one of the lucky few to get any education at all, the same textbook will be used for 600 years! No new edition nothing new to add.
In Astronomy, you would learn that the other planets they knew of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (and the SUN) all went around the earth in crystal spheres. Archimedes of Syracuse around 220 BC reputedly constructed a mechanical planetarium showing the motion of the known planets around the earth at the time. Cicero stated that Archimedes must have been a great man to be able to build such an unprecedented device. The Christian church adopted the Ptolomy system and a complex system of 46 circles around the earth to explain the planetary motions in "circles around the earth".
This caused many problems later when comets, like the great comet of 1572 (which lit the night sky for two years) seemed to be smashing through the crystal spheres, anyone could see the bible and church were wrong and even the calendar was wrong. Because they did not know how the solar system worked, or God forgot to tell them, they didn't know how to keep time properly and it seemed to be the middle of winter when it should be early spring. You would never be able to measure time on earth if you have a false belief in crystal spheres going around the earth.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were very superstitious believing in many things which we now know are not true. They practiced many forms of what we would call fortune telling or Divination.
About 400 years after Jesus, the Roman empire was overextended and weak, it had lasted a thousand years since 753 B.C it was founded by Romulus and Remus related to Aneas feeling the loss of the Trojan war. Rome was overrun by other tribes, mainly from Germany one cold winter about 410 A.D when the rivers froze solid ice, they were able to cross solid ice with their horses. The Goths did not value the language and art of Rome, a lot of which came from Greece. Some Romans, like Capella wrote school textbooks that preserved the Latin school course which was used for the next few hundred years when there was a Christian who could teach students to read, they were rarely taught to write.
After the Roman Empire was destroyed by other tribes in 410 AD, there was no central world culture, no authority other than history. A few monks worked
away copying a few ancient Roman handwritten books, but hardly anyone could read or write except a few priests and monks who were members of the Catholic Church
set up to work according to the book "The City of God", written by St Augustine Bishop of Hippo in Africa hundreds of years before them.
It was the opposite to what things are like now. It is sometimes called the dark ages the time from about 410 A.D between the fall of the Roman empire and Christian civilization re-emerging with Charlemagne (standardised writing and Christian education) the 8th Century King, 400 years later. There was nothing new invented, no latest model horse and carts, things stayed the same and people did not travel far from home. There was no such thing as old fashioned. Things were as God planned them and people did not like change. The same model straight stick; hard to use, handle bucket was used to carry water for hundreds of years.
One thousand years after Jesus was born, some Christian leaders went on a war against the Arabs who also believed the same area around Palestine was sacred to their religion as well. Instead of finding non-Christians to be not as clever as themselves as they expected (Almost every religion says; it is the best, the only, they all seem very egocentric) they found a great library of books and medical knowledge better than their own. They also discovered chivalry from an enemy like Saladin, while the Christian knight El Cid, showed how uncivilised Christians can be in the name of God. See the history time line Christian suppression of native American cultures. When you think you are better than someone else, you are not far away from saying that it does not matter what you do to them. Everyone matters all the time! Instead of their object to take land, the Crusaders brought back many great books translated by Arab scholars from Latin and Greek it is an ongoing educational process for it to be widely appreciated that there were ancient philosophies older than the Christian Bible.
For example, the ancient Greek culture believed in a plethora of Gods who all interacted in human affairs. The Greeks were the first ones to give their Gods human personalities. They could be cranky or jealous. They were not perfect themselves. Most other religions like to claim their God is infallible, cannot make a mistake and organisations like the Christian church like to claim that God acts though their leaders on earth, papal infallibility, an outrageous fraud, that the Pope can do no wrong.
About 1,400 years after Jesus, books and printing became much cheaper with the invention of the printing press. There was an Age of questioning and not just believing the bible or the church. Guttenburg's bible was the first printed book, a remarkably beautiful book with colour pictures and gold leaf illustrations, but many other philosophy books followed from the Greek philosophers that said to question everything Sic et Non.
There is in human nature a religious X factor that belief in something can lead to great actions. So for example, the Egyptian belief in an afterlife led them to construct the great Pyramids which have lasted thousand of years. If they did not believe in an afterlife, they wouldn't have gone to all that trouble. Beliefs are important as they direct our energy to things we have faith in. Having faith is believing without proof that it is true.
Science currently believes in the expanding universe theory that everything (every sun) was in one spot and exploded outward billions of year ago. Most religions believe that the universe and everything was made by someone or something they generally like to call GOD.
There are different explanations for all flavours of God:
Deism - A creator who starts off the universe and then sits back to see what happens with the creation.
Theism - A creator who starts things and remains involved.
Pantheism- Creator and Created are united.
Animism - everything in nature has a soul, from Plato material, world is a pale corruption of the pure spirit world.
Atomist - Ancient Greeks were reductionist materialists in that they reduced matter to its finest components known as atoms.
Many boys have the skin on the end of their penis cut off (circumcision) as a religious demand by the God of the old testament bible as a sign of being Jewish or Catholic. The old testament God would even demand that his followers sacrifice their own children. Nasty stuff God! There are many impacts flowing from religious beliefs in your family and community. Name three things you had/have to do because of a family religious belief that does not make any logical sense? Group membership often entails doing things that are a family ritual, to please your mum. Going to mass on Sunday! Thinking you are the member of a special Christian family of God's people, is even harder. The older I got the more difficult is was to accept ritual without belief.
GOD made the world and intervenes in it.
Oracles can predict the future.
Left handed people were in league with the devil.
The sun circled around the earth.
The planets circled the earth in crystal spheres.
If you are good you will go to heaven.
If you are bad you will go to hell.
The Bible could not explain much about how the solar system worked. If God was real, he/she didn't know how things worked or forgot when they inspired the writers of the old and new testament.
The bible was wrong or had nothing to say about science about the earth being billions and not just a few thousand years old. The bible assumes that humans are the pinacle of creation, made in God's image, that we were made separately from other animals and are the rulers over other life forms, but three millions years ago our ancestors were being eaten by wild tigers and cats. What is so special about humans, apart from the ability to communicate and think in abstract terms, to design and build a Saturn Five rocket or discover our own genetic link with other life forms.
In 1844 Darwin began his voyage on the Beagle leading to publication of his monumental work in 1859 Origin of the Species Darwin had discovered 100 years before DNA was discovered in the 1950s that, animals changed in response to their environment, but not by their own striving as Lamark had proposed. We inherit our genetic makeup from our parents not the characteristics they acquired in their life. Events in the world, like not enough to eat low down near the ground made short necked giraffes extinct and those who could reach food lived and had offspring who also had long necks. I always wonder what vanity makes people have cosmetic surgery, I would consider if fraud not to be told my new love is likely to have children with a massive proboscis. Nothing you do to yourself in your life (apart from physical damage to reproductive system testis or ovaries) affects your offspring much. We are just another animal related to every other animal. See the Evolutionary timeline for approximate dates in the development of different animal phyla.
The discoveries of science over the past 400 years have shattered the bible as the source of authority for real world applications in space or biology. Now we are able to scientifically explore our solar system and DNA profile ourselves and other species and I don't see anyone inviting their cousins the monkeys to tea. We prefer to look at them in a zoo or try and make human parodies of them and like to consider ourselves as superior just as the writers of the Christian Bible preached. Seven million years ago, Hominids emerged who are 93% similar in DNA to monkeys but perhaps closer to orangutans physically. Our closest genetic relative is the Chimpanzee 98.4% similar in DNA.
On a morphological argument we have more in common with Orangutans.
See the website above for in-depth discussion of physical similarities and differences. Either way, Our 1.6% genetic difference from chimps or our similarities to Orangutan makes us part of the monkey family, before we are a distinct species. We are also still partly primate in nature, shared with chimpanzees and Ourangutans Richard Wrangham Unique to humans among mammals and distinct from chimps, humans have hands with opposing thumbs rather than paws, a free hanging penis?, larger brains with a better developed Broca's communication area in our temporal lobes, bi-pedalism and a dysfunctional sialic making gene. Emotions are one of the biggest differences. We have a larger range of emotions, empathy with others and can laugh and cry. To cry all you tears and laugh all your laughter is perhaps a large part of being a human being.
Christians believe that you have to be baptised, blessed with water, usually performed on babies following the ceremony that Jesus performed, especially with John who also baptised Christians. The teaching was that if you were not baptised (males also circumcised) you would not be allowed into the place they believe you go if you are good after you die, Heaven.
B.C. Stands for, Before Christ, due to a miscalculation by a monk hundreds of years later, they miscalculated the birth year of Jesus. For dates after Jesus the Latin abbreviation A.D is used which is the latin term ann domini after the Christ.
Giordiano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church in 1600 for his beliefs.
ATHEIST FOUNDATION OF AUSTRALIA
Evolutionary psychology