Credit: ESO
thought for the day -
John Romer in his "Byzantium, The Lost Empire: 1. Building the Dream", says the Roman empire didn't just 'fall.' It just got poor, and Byzantium just got rich." The truth is that the Roman empire as I've shown throughout this blog was destroyed by an inner religious war. I'll just quote Saint John Chrysostom again, ""5. And as for the writings of the Greeks, they are all put out and vanished," This is in Saint John Chrsostom's "Homily 2 on the Gospel of John". As I had pointed out in my "Gospel of Truth", religion makes these contradictory vague tactics; I gave examples of God telling Moses that "I am that I am", and I'm forgetting a New testament example.
Mathematics and Mythology share a common property, that of analogy. Back tens of thousands of years ago and even over two to three thousand years ago, mankind took steps to move from vague mythology to precise analogy of mathematics. Many things can take on many different forms. For instance, the the ancients from the Greeks to the Judahites new that water, ice were two different forms for the same thing. Thales tried to understand everything as water. But, also one form can be expressed as by more than one content. This is abstraction; this is one of the major properties of mathematics. What mathematics does above and beyond mythology is structural linkages. Everything has structure. Kind of like a sentence; a sentence has a verb which links elements/nouns together. One could keep the nouns/elements the same and vary the verb/relation and get many different forms for the same content(nouns/elements), or one could keep the verb/relation the same and vary the elements; this is abstraction. In mathematics, we can make relations between abstractions by noting that different abstractions share a common element or a common relation. Numbers can be generated by counting processes; but, what about relations between the numbers? One could add. In counting, one maps from one set to another, and if they are the same, then they are in the same abstract concept/number. Addition is also a mapping; it maps from sets of numbers to another number. It also generalized and makes numbers more precise than they were from counting. This is all well and good, but as mathematical science as opposed to mythological science/magic from the pre-real knowledge of the universe from mathematics progressed, the mythologists didn't like the idea of accepting that their old ideas were wrong. Do I need to bring up Galileo and the creationist debate? What I've shown throughout this blog is that while yes, mythology and art is a great formative stage of mankind, the mythologists seem to believe in their religions for more than truth. And, they'll do anything and resort to evasive vague games to avoid having to learn(learning is the human strength that allows humanity to grow and prosper). The John Romer language technique more or less quoted above is one example of the religious style of thinking.
I should also state that rational intellectuals(as opposed to irrational intellectuals; Christians consider themselves intellectuals) solve their problems by reason, not violence. Now, the irrationalists might resort to evasive language at first, if that doesn't work, they gang up on you and if they can, they'll go to violent means. Do I have to point out the fight between the Christians and muslims, the muslims and the Buddists and Hindus with one another? Much less the fight between mathematics and religion?
Back to these evasive language tactics. The general structure of these mentalities is kind of deal making. There's the famous Pascal's wager, "if you don't believe, and god exists, then when you die, you go to hell." The old testament is practically this whole "Pascal's wager" thousands of years earlier and recasting the whole history of the Judahite region in this light. Now for a kind of list of examples.
James Burke makes a few 'white lie' examples of his own! In episode 2 of his connections, he says, "nobody knows who; fanatical Christians/fanatical Arabs" in respect to who burned down the Library of Alexandria. The truth is both did at different times; both did so for the reason of anti-science and that both didn't want to question their religion. In 'tdtus' episode 3, Mr Burke says that those who painted the walls with Christian scenes did so not because they were stupid; they just had different priorities when splashing paint around." Here we see that people fear pointing out the truth, and to let the poor stupid ones who will strangle you for pointing out they're wrong, they find a evasive vague language technique to kind of slip the truth in easier.
In James Burke's "The Day the Universe Changed", or 'tdtuc' for short, Episode 2, he relates how the Church around 1300 made a deal with everyone playing around with the Aristotle logic recently discovered in the Arab-Spain translations, they said, "o.k. there's two kinds of truth; real world logical truth, and 'revealed truth' that you can only get from the churches interpretation of scripture."
Those who are socially bound up with old mythologies in one way or another will try to marry rational thought with irrational. In 'tdtus' episode two again, Mr Burke shows that Chartres cathedral has a door on the west side, which has Capels's seven liberal arts. One of my favorite art pictures, Rafael's "School of Athens" is actually in the Vatican museum!
When people went to Arab-Spain to translate their works and discover Greek mathematical knowledge, they did so by dressing up and acting like an Arab. The Christian Europeans didn't exactly conquere Andelucia by force. They did so by making deals and getting the Arabs socially bound up. When the Arabs were too weak to fight, the books and great architecture of Andelucia was free for the taking without force. How else is this
and this
all in one piece today?
The Christians did the same thing with the Vikings. The Vikings were a pagan retaliation from the European Christians forcing everyone to their religion. But, they were eventually socially bound up.
The crusades were often about sending off the local competition to some far away land. While the patriotic crusaders were fighting in some distant land, those who stayed in Europe took control of their local lands.
In episode 4 of 'tdtus', Mr Burke notes how when people tried to collect inheritance after the black death, it was in the legal interest to make it all as long and tedious as possible. The church took advantage of the effort to get to heaven by making people pay for 'indulgences.' This is what paid for the Vatican as we see it today!
When Copernicus wrote his book, some monk wrote in the introduction that one should not fear this theory of Copernicus's; understand that this is just some theory.
Christopher Columbus figured out how to deal with people that refuse to think about new ideas and experiment and explore. When someone turns you down(playing vagueness games; refusing to learn), go to someone else. Just when Columbus was about to go to the French, the Spanish changed their minds! This would be episode three of his "The Day the Universe Changed."
I won't link to any more gangland videos; i'll just mention that those videos show that all gangs follow the same pattern of dictatorship and follow our 'ten commandments' or else. Cults equal gangs, and religion is just one big cult/gang.
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