Rendering unto Caesar: Clarification on Flat-Earth Religion

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Before the sixth century of the Common Era, the most educated people in Afro-Eurasia had the capacity to perceive the rotation of the Earth. In the next level down the ladder of education, the Earth's curvature was recognized, but the Earth was perceived as static. The majority of people conceived of the Earth as flat. They lacked the level of knowledge and experience needed to think of the Earth in any other way. By what process did the people of the third tier of education take control of the Roman Church?

Although the Trinity was crafted in the fourth century, it was not until the sixth century that the iron curtain of ignorance and superstition descended. For two hundred years, people who knew better rejected the bold-faced lie that Athanasius, Alexander, and Constantine had concocted as a loyalty oath. How did Justinian succeed in revolutionizing education to the point of crippling it for centuries to come?

When the Roman Church attacked the established educational system, the people with the highest level of education exiled themselves to domains outside of Roman authority. As ignorant priests snuffed out the light of understanding in the Roman world, the torch bearers carried the flame to more fertile territory. Before the sixth century, the top minds of the Roman Church were drop-outs from the second tier educational institutions. After the sixth century, there were no schools from which to drop out. People who sought knowledge had to leave the domain of the Church in order to find it. Later, Islam became the harbor for educational institutions as it jealously guarded the jewels of the classical world.

In the early centuries of the Common Era, second tier scholars had recorded the work of first tier scholars. They ridiculed their superiors for failing to see stars moving around the Earth. When third tier priests and monks encountered the literature of second tier educators, they accepted the work as gospel truth. Little did they know how little the Peripatetics knew. Thomas Aquinas was just such a monk. He was instrumental in establishing Peripatetic ignorance as Church policy. It was enough light to spark an economic renaissance, but not enough to disperse the shadow world of Roman power. It would take the martyrdom of Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo to pierce the veil of Roman superstition.

To this day, Romans still affirm their loyalty using the Caesarian oath. Those who know the lie behind the oath are considered outside and opposed to "Christianity." Do you espouse the bald-faced lie of trinitarian dogma?

Comments

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Is this a long way of saying that Gnosticism got the shaft in the official canon or am I missing something much more profound?

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

It's not what you gno. It's who you gno.

More profound.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Gnosticism was attacked by the Church, but that attack actually spurred interest in its revival. Let's not forget that the list of banned books was itself banned because people used it as a reading list.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Must admit I was missing this Caesar stuff. You even have your own tag, yay!

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

Why does it say "Caeser" instead of "rambling nonsense"?

[torpidai.livejournal.com]

They lacked the level of knowledge and experience needed to think of the Earth in any other way.

What you mean they lacked the ability to find a stick and google Proof of earths curvature with a stick (http://www.google.co.uk/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=Proof+of+earths+curvature+with+a+stick&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=)? That really is backwards :)

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

I recommend the film "Agora".

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

She's wrong about the Medieval Church. They did understand the world was round and accepted Eratosthenes' circumference (though little else of the man's ideas). However Medieval Geography considered Jerusalem the Axis Mundi and there were belief in all kinds of monsters of which Marco Polo's records record belief in same.

She also likes proffering Irving's myth of Medieval Morons despite that people warned Columbus he was very wrong about how big the Atlantic was. If he hadn't stumbled upon the Taino he would have had a crew that died of starvation on the high seas.

[futurebird.livejournal.com]

Later, Islam became the harbor for educational institutions as it jealously guarded the jewels of the classical world.

They did a good deal more than just "guard" classical knowledge-- they refined, invented and improved it for example, the brought algebra to the point that it would form a firm foundation for the calculus. It is a bad habit of euro-centric histories to describe the Islamic influence as only a passive one. In fact, they created a good deal of new knowledge and they drew together eastern and western mathematics in to something vibrant enough to give birth to calculus and modern algebra later. I mostly know about math history-- I imagine it is the same in other areas. The very numbers we use are an invention from India via Arabic empires.

I did not mean...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... to belittle the contribution of scholars under the domain of Islam. On the other hand, there was some significant persecution of scholarship under the thumb of ignorant mullahs. The Sufis have recently experienced a significant level of assault from both Muslim and Christian fundamentalists. When the Italians invaded North Africa, they staged a vicious campaign against the Sufis.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I think the imposition of al-jabr on Western schoolchildren indicates that the roots of Islamic terrorism extend back many centuries.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

They created most of algebra.

They moved classical (Euclidean) geometry to the first non-Euclidean geometry: spherical geometry.

They created most of trigonometry. (The Indians figured out sines before the Arabs. The Arabs created all the rest.)

They were the first to examine algorithms.

Heck, the work in Haroun al-Rashid's court anticipated the Renaissance by centuries: in optics, in creating mechanisms, and other fields.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, people don't often think that paper, the printing press, rockets, forks, guns, artillery complete with explosive ammunition, the moldboard plow, paper currency, Jeffersonian-style "If the government sucks, time to get a new one" ideology, signaling flares, and toilet paper were all created by the Chinese any more than the diehard Evangelicals who see Babylon as the mother of all evil stop to reflect that the 60-second minutes that make up a 60-minute hour come from the Babylonians and the concept of weekly weekend breaks is a carryover from DA JOOS.

People also forget that without Maize and the Potato countries like Ireland would still be living in Neolithic lifestyles and that Maize was partially responsible for the mass population boom in late Qing China.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

This is all wrong. All of it. Even the "and's" and the "the's."

Ptolemy. Look him up.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

You ptell 'em!

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Astrologer?

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

It's honestly weird how consistently wrong it is. You'd think the law of averages would make a correct claim come out by accident every now and then.

[torpidai.livejournal.com]

Ptolemy. Look him up.

Pedents are revolting ye know(SIC)

[roofless.livejournal.com]

As a non-catholic, I am unfamiliar with the Caesarian oath. Care to enlighten me?

Check out...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... this site (http://www.ancient-future.net/nicene.html).

[reality-hammer.livejournal.com]

So...the Vatican still won't give you that divorce, eh?

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

Call Henry VIII. He might have some advice that would help.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't you say there's Trinitarian doctrine in John?

[green-man-2010.livejournal.com]

Oh , I dunno about our freind here, but I would.
also in Hebrews I:6
Also Matt 14: 33.
i would love to hear how Sophia explains these verses, and the general tenor of Paul and others in the Epistles.

I mean , they describle themselves as either serviants or slaves of the Lord Jesus...a bit much if Christ were just another human prohet and nothing more to them.

[prader.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say I think it's "wrong", but I don't get the Trinity. Although recently it has occured to me to think of it like the three parts of a football team- Defense, Offense, and Special Teams. Three parts. One team.

Or something.

The problem...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... with the Trinity comes in the notion of consubstantiality. Without an understanding of what the underlying concept meant at the time, it is almost impossible to see why anyone would disagree with the notion. If we take the example of sports teams, it would be like saying that there is only one Giants team: New York and San Francisco. And if you disagree, you get roasted over an open fire.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The problem with blaming the Church for the retrenchment of education is that Eratosthenes and Anaxagoras both deciphered that the Sun was not a God, but a glowing ball in the Sky and that the Earth revolved around said ball in the sky. Like Galileo they were placed under house-arrest and the polytheists came to prefer the geocentric cosmology.

I should note also that Islam was not merely a guardian of tradition but it discovered germ theory a full millennium before it spread to Europe. Muslims were also the first to make effective use of gunpowder and artillery. And of course European states have regressed intellectually and culturally multiple times, the 20th Century offering two notable instances of same.

It should be noted first that Copernicus died of old age and published On the Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies while on his deathbed, that Bruno was hung for belief in extraterrestrials, and that Galileo was not martyred but put under house arrest for insulting his patron, who just so happened to be the Pope, generally a bad idea in Clientage societies.

It should be noted also that in the Early Modern era, the only cosmopolitan state with a professional standing army was the Ottoman Empire, the various European states were saved solely by the limits of contemporary logistics as opposed to the virtues of their own system. And that the concept of "progress" intellectually speaking tends to gloss over that Fundamentalism in its modern sense is 100% an ideology of the late 19th Century based on German Higher Criticism, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with historical Christian ideals or practice.

[drcruel.livejournal.com]

If I remember correctly, Galileo-who was in his seventies-was given a tour of the torture chamber he would soon be visiting if he did not recant (or, in terms of modern-day science haters, refudiate) heliocentrism.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the hell you guys are talking about so I'm gonna sit here and fight my head-ache with a glass of rakia.