babe, have you watched movie Agora? I strongly recommend it for you.
I haven't seen it, though I think I've heard of it. I wiki'd it, and read some reviews. Some critics seem to think the point of the movie is not directed specifically at Catholic adherents but at ignorance in generally fundamentalist zealots. Could be just as relevant to marxist ideologues, or any other ignorant zealots you could imagine. I'll have to see it myself to judge it for myself.
I am aware that real intellectual scholarship disappeared under Catholic statism in Europe until after the black plague restored the concept of how valuable the lower classes were to the elites, and in turn gave the peasants a new sense of their own abilities. The Renaissance followed, naturally.
I am afraid that our darkening intellectual age is turning out too many ignorant zealots who have somehow missed out on the concept of human dignity and human worth and human liberty under the crush of progressive New World Order statism.
I value my ancestry that traces back on some lines to the Berbers in North Africa who became caught up in the Islamic expansion and ended up in Spain, where after a whole lot of fighting, it all resulted in a blending of cultures and traditions to some extent, with some of the ancestors I speak of converting to Christianity. These became significant contributing lines to British royalty and possibly infused England with some appreciation for arts and science. . . . . though not so thoroughly as would have averted a whole lot of ignorant religious zealotry in support of English statism.
It pains me to hear of libraries being burned by ideological or religious mobs of ignoramuses. I'd be just as pained if todays Christians burned all the research that supports understanding of life in the context of ongoing genetic transformations.
I'm pretty sure there were people around for tens of thousands of years before this present age, and I don't quibble about the evidence. The former Lake Bonneville was here until about 10,000 years ago, and whatever floods affected Babylon or any other pre-historic civilization in the Mediterranean Basin had no impact here. Pretty clear to me that the writers of the Bible incorporated verbal legend traditions into their account, not necessarily "the word of God". I watched the movie about the Ark on the side of Mt. Ararat,too. Don't know what I think about that. Haven't been there.
I and my kids have hiked up to the caves where archaeologists have done several excavation projects establishing it was inhabited ten thousand years ago. Lake Bonneville's shoreline would have been a lush grassland in that age, with clear mountain streams teaming with Bonneville trout, lots of deer. There were also saber toothed tigers, woolley mammoths, camels, pterodactyls, and boat-based trade routes throughout all the lakes in the Great Basin.
Too much to ask for/demand that some goatherd scribbler priests in Jerusalem knew all about all that.
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