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May 20, 2006 Something like 5 million years ago some of the walking apes started evolving larger brains. Not long thereafter, they invented stone tools and fire. They continued to evolve and one branch lead to the Neanderthal. The evidence of how this creature lived is debatable, but they showed some degree of modern intelligence above and beyond most of the rest of the animal kingdom and maybe even as complex an ability for religion and ceremony. Some think they buried their dead with flowers, some think the evidence for this is too thin. We do know that they wore the skins of other animals and made tools, many more tools than previous walking-apes. Their hunting tools were short-range tools and they didn't paint. It seems that they were not able to abstract the world to the degree that modern humans can. Modern humans came on the scene as late as 150,000 years ago, probably earlier, and spread from Africa to the many corners of the globe. They were able to abstract more, they painted, they wore jewelery (something which must have surely seemed useless to Neanderthals) and had long-range throwing weapons. At least two but maybe as many as four other sentient, intelligent ape-men inhabited the planet at the same time during this period. Odd that the Bible doesn't mention these other beings, who, while certainly having lower IQs (if such a comparison is even possible), cried as their children died, took care of their sick (we have excellent evidence to support this) and would have loved to know that the Christian God cared about them. Anyway, so modern man went into many parts of the world. The Australian aborigines claim that their history goes back 60,000 years. The great library at Alexandria, burned down first by Christians and then later by Muslims, was purported to carry scrolls describing Babylonian history going back 10,000 years from that already ancient time period. In any case, most human cultures developed religion of one sort or another, and the other intelligent walking-apes died off. Very recent evidence suggests that yet another race of walking-apes lived side by side modern humans until relative recently. They've been dubbed, “Hobbits”, and their species seems to exist in the oral histories of the peoples of Indonesia, who refer to them as little people in caves with bad language skills. Again, odd that the Bible wouldn't mention these people. Did angels ever appear before them? Did God sacrifice himself to himself for their benefit as well? What did they do to escape the Flood? The Jewish faith began as a polytheistic religion (many gods), as most ancient religions did. Religion evolves. Typically, it begins with assigning human-like attributes and sentience to trees, rivers, celestial objects and the like and evolves from there to specific deities with rights and traditions and taboos and so forth. Anyway, the Bible offers some corroborating evidence of this polytheistic origin as well (in Genesis, the word, “eloheim”, meaning, “gods”). The Jews spent some time captured by the Babylonians, who waged genocide against them. During captivity, they recorded their oral histories for fear of losing their entire identify and tradition. Much of this became the Old Testament. In one of those tales, they had a nasty run-in with the Egyptians. The Egyptians wrote down everything, but never mentioned that the Red Sea was parted, or any other supernatural elements of that tale. If I were to give the Bible the benefit of the doubt, I might imagine that the Egyptians failed to record this period in their history for obvious reasons. Of course, I do not give the Bible the benefit of the doubt, because I don't buy that humans can live inside sea creatures, that angels reproduce with humans and make evil races of giants and that God turned people into salt pillars for simple disobedience. During the Roman days, several neo-Jewish cults sprang up, many with notions of a savior. One spread in popularity, similar to how wacky new religions like Mormonism and Scientology spring up from nowhere and seem to rather quickly garner vast followings today. More or less, Rome was pagan for 800 years. It became Christian for the last 200 years of its life. The Romans also wrote stuff down, being an advanced civilization, but failed to record any of the supernatural stuff mentioned in the Bible. Now, if the Romans became Christian in the end, why hide those facts? Certainly not to save embarrassment, which we might attribute to the Egyptians.The Romans were also a superstitious people, who, I would presume, would have no real issues with Biblical miracles...Odd, isn't it? Before Rome became Christian, the Christians introduced some new ways to look at things. They opposed the brutal arena fights, they opposed infanticide and other nasty Roman habits. They became the victims of discrimination for being liberal and going against tradition. The New Testament didn't exist yet as we know it today. Even basic notions of what the Trinity is or means weren't developed. The Romans were a political power, which needed to keep their apathetic citizens happy, so mixing Christian belief with pagan rituals was the norm. It's no coincidence that Jesus was said to be born December 25th – it's also the birth date of Mithra, a pagan god. State-forced religion, which bent to traditions which folks were already used too, helped ease in the new faith. Some writings were deemed, by man, not worthy of the Bible and were left out. We've since found many of these – the Da Vinci Code conspiracy theory is based around some of these left-out gospels. After the empire fell, the Catholic church was born, more or less, and by now, most anywhere that the empire had touched remained Christian. The West descended into a Dark Age and Christians, now at the helm, took their turn discriminating, persecuting, torturing and being generally nasty. Unlike the Romans, however, the West stagnated under their rule. Free thought was repressed and the time of ignorance and misery was extended much longer than it might have otherwise been. One tale that illustrates this involves a group of Europeans which came across a Roman ruin. Their best guess was that they were looking at a dragon roost – this is how far the West sank backwards. In reality, they came upon a Roman building with central heating. The Romans also had indoor plumbing, high-quality concrete, and other technology not fully rediscovered until nearly 1500 years later. Anyway, a group of Christians known later as Protestants didn't like some of the nasty practices of the Christians in power, burning people at the stake, for example, so they split off and attempted to reform the “church”. During the translation of the Bible into languages that ordinary folk could read, the Book of Revelation was almost left out. This always makes me wonder – how many modern American faiths based their “end times” malarkey on this book which was almost omitted!? In any case, it wasn't long before the Protestants took their turn burning people at the stake and conducting their own witch trials. Eventually, we started to think again and regained an interest in science, and free thought made a slow comeback. Christians still burnt people and did nasty things in the name of God. Kings and Queens, for example, in the West, were now rulers by “diving right”, and the few flavors of Christianity at the time had no real issue with this and the abuse which resulted. Still, it beat the Dark Ages... Of course, a good chunk of rest of the world, utterly non-Christian and totally oblivious of Jesus and his teachings except for trade encounters, was coming along just fine. Some European missionaries went to Japan, for example. Japan had a thriving, civilized, country, with their own non-Bible history going way back. The Europeans thought the Japanese were heathens which needed to convert and the Japanese thought the Europeans were “smelly barbarians”, but they seemed to tolerate them for a while anyway, though they never converted in significant numbers as there was no political pressure/reason to do so. The divine, God-approved, Kings of Europe, with great expense, sent vessels and colonists the world over and “found” the New World. For “their own good”, the native non-Christian people were made to suffer greatly and many were forced to convert. One wonders why their own histories also didn't mention the Bible or Jesus, another odd fact. Anyway, many nasty things were done under a Christian banner for their own good and eternal souls, much like gays in modern times are “fixed” and discriminated against for their own good. Those Kings also fought wars with each other and generally shafted each other much like the Middle East today, and parts of Africa do. Modern Muslims certainly have good historical role models to emulate. Ironically, during the time that Europe stagnated, the Muslims advanced in science and technology. They named many of the stars in the sky, names we still use today, they transcribed ancient Greek works. They bathed on a regular basis, and reinvented the idea of clean hospitals. But enough about Islam. A new philosophy was taking root in Europe. It was known as the Enlightenment. It built on the Renaissance ideas of inquiry into all things and began the death blow to Christian political dominance of the West. The West was waking up from the 500 year shackles of religious thought control. Christianity was finely ingrained into tradition, an enduring success of the power of the Roman Empire, but it would soon be caged and tamed by other forces. Remnants of the Dark Ages would continue to haunt the West, however, even through to modern times (even today). The American revolution was based, in part, on the ideals of the Enlightenment. They apparently had enough with state-enforced religious worship once and for all. The Declaration of independence was a call to action for ordinary colonists – it was a motivational tool meant to get light a fire under the common man. It mentioned that which most colonists believed in at the time, the Christian God, though it was surprisingly non-specific, referring to him merely as the Creator. This document, which is not legally binding, was written about 12 years before the Constitution (which didn't mention God in any form, deistic or otherwise). The West regained control of the world and remains a leader in science and technology – free inquiry and the caging of religion are to thank in large part. During the late 1700s, the West reinvented high-quality, Roman-like, concrete. During the Civil War, religious groups urged Abe to put God into the Constitution; Lincoln wanted nothing to do with it. Lincoln was a different breed from today's opportunistic religious zealots. He also never claimed that God was on his side, quite the contrary, he often wondered if he was doing the right thing. How utterly sensible of him. In the early 1900s, the US government had an advertising campaign which urged Americans to bathe more – thank goodness it worked – one more nail in the coffin of the Dark Ages. Prudish religious Americans were convinced, by science, that being clean was good, even if it meant being naked more often. The American ideals of secularism took hold in Europe even more, and today, this very secular continent enjoys working solutions to many of the social problems plaguing America. Ironically, a certain species of Christian has arisen in America to political power. These non-meek folk typically think that the end times are near, that American politics should reflect their brand of fanaticism and that America has some special place in God's plan. Some even credit the human rights in our secular Constitution as the work of Jesus. Jesus, why did it take you 1700+ years?!? Like servants of the Dark Ages come to turn the lights back out, they dangerously mix government with religion and attack rational thought. Politics and war spread Christianity around the world. It certainly wasn't the first religion, it certainly won't be the last. Soon, it won't even be the most practiced. The Bible is not an accurate history going back to the dawn of time, and “Biblical times” are thoroughly modern compared with the age of sentience on our planet. Christian societies have historically been as brutal, evil and ruthless as any other, though man has, thanks to reason, and rational thought, and great pain, attempted to improve himself. Right now is a time between ice ages, dark ages, extinction level events from space, mass disease outbreaks, and political religious upheavals. Do what you can to enjoy it while it lasts. ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. I now have a blog that I will start to increasingly maintain and update. Here is the link: fredsuberview.blogspot.com/ About my personal background and life: I was born, I got some education, worked, ate, and had some kids. It seems I like to write � something that was unknown to me until relatively recently...How's that for detail? ;) Hate mail is welcome unless you are from the Army Of God. Please! It's not that I mind seeing pictures of aborted fetuses in my inbox, but once you've seen one you've pretty much seen them all... Email: dahlek65@gmail.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. 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