Showing posts with label hellenistic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hellenistic. Show all posts

Christian History Myth and Reality


Things They Don't Tell You About Christianity

by ecclesi, freetruth.50webs.org

History

Ancient Greece and Rome

The early fathers of the Church hated Greek civilisation and sought its destruction:

The philobarbarian attitude of Saint John Chrysostom [3rd-4th century]:
"The more a nation looks barbaric and is estranged from Greek culture, the more our teachings shine - this (faithful) barbarian has conquered the entire world and while all Greek culture is extinguished and destroyed, his (the barbarian's) shines brighter every day".

All over the empire, mobs of Christian monks went about destroying the many Greco-Roman works of art, libraries of antiquity, and pre-Christian temples:

The Greek called them "swinish black-cloths", because "they looked like men but lived like pigs".
A contemporary writer tells us

"armed with clubs or stones and swords they ran to the temples, some without these weapons only with their bare hands and feet"
-- (Libanios "Pro temples" 389 AD)

As soon as they had destroyed one temple, they dashed away to the next. They toppled over walls, smashed idols, statues and art-objects and altars, and stole the temples wealth for themselves.

From the time of Constantine, Rome's first Christian emperor:
from 314 CE all the way to 988 CE, the Hellenes (ancient Greeks) were persecuted and their civilisation destroyed. The Greeks were exterminated if they would not convert -

359 CE - In Skythopolis, Syria, Christians organise the first death camps for the torture and execution of arrested Gentiles [adherents of pre-Christian religions] from all around the Empire.
...
385 to 388 - Maternus Cynegius, encouraged by his fanatic wife, and bishop, "Saint" Marcellus with his gangs scour the countryside, sack and destroy hundreds of Hellenic Temples, shrines and altars. Amongst others they destroy the Temple of Edessa, the Cabeireion of Imbros, the Temple of Zeus in Apamea, the Temple of Apollo in Dydima and all the Temples of Palmyra. Thousands of innocent Gentiles from all sides of the Empire suffer martyrdom in the notorious death camps of Skythopolis.
...
950 to 988 - Violent conversion of the last Gentile Hellenes of Laconia by the Armenian "Saint" Nikon.

The oldest and most renowned Churches are actually built on sites which previously had pre-Christian temples on them - which Christians had demolished. This happened all over the Roman Empire, to Syria in the East and North Africa and Palestine in the South.
And:

The cave of the Vatican belonged to Mithra until 376 A.D., when a city prefect suppressed the cult of the rival Savior and seized the shrine in the name of Christ, on the very birthday of the pagan god, December 25.
-- Barbara G. Walker

Until Constantine's time, the most favourable estimate (which many scholars consider too optimistic) of the Christian population in the entire empire was no more than 5%. About 2/3 of these were in Armenia, and much of the remainder in Syria and Asia minor.

According to Roman sources, the Christians ...in Rome ...were considered a small, uneducated group of religious troublemakers from the lowest social classes, operating in the shadowy sides of society.

The educated Romans disliked the religion. Some of them wrote books refuting Christianity, like the Epicurean Kelsos in his Alethes Logos, the last pagan emperor Julian in his Kata Christianon, and Porphyry's Against the Christians. The Church, unable to sufficiently counter their well-reasoned arguments (which it occasionally attempted), "won" the debate by destroying these works when it finally got into power. Even so, some scanty ancient literature against Christianity remains, pieced together from the unsuccessful attempts at responding by Christian Church fathers.

The ancient Romans: persecutors or persecuted?

Facts
No Christian was put to death in the ColiseumAll stories of Christians being exposed to lions in the Roman Amphitheater are bogus.
-- Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk

How many persecutions? And why?

Not 10, as Christians claim, but no more than 2 or at most 3:

Decius (249-251), Valerian (257), and Diocletian (303) were the only general and systematic persecutors.
There is no doubt in the mind of any historian that in trying to suppress or check Christianity -- at first in each case by the lighter penalties -- they were consulting the welfare of the state, which was then sinking.
Professor Gwatkin himself remarks that many of the Christians, so far from being willing to defend the Empire, were "half inclined to welcome the Goths and Persians as avengers." The Pope insolently and openly defied Valerian at Rome: and Diocletian's decrees were torn down by Christians in his own palace who relied on the protection of his womenfolk.
Before Diocletian the Church had had forty years of peace, and it had grown sufficiently to make its anti-patriotic teaching a matter of concern. Yet in not one of the three decrees of Diocletian is the death sentence imposed.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by historian Joseph McCabe

Facts: Historical truths vs Christian fictions
The Acta of the martyrs (records of trials and execution) are entirely from fictitious lives or are forgeries. Pagan deities were sometimes used as martyrs and were turned into Saints.
The fraud led to the birth of the profitable relic industry.Instead of a vast number martyring themselves for Christianity upon persecution, and inspiring pagans to convert, there was a vast apostasy as Christians left the faith in droves. One of these apostates was Pope Marcellinus, wrongly revered as a Saint and Martyr.
Find out the details

Did Christian virtue inspire the pagans to convert?
3rd century St. Cyprian's

letters to the pope describe how a large part of his clergy and bishops were unmitigated scoundrels: fornication, murder, embezzlement, and all the rest of it.
-- How Christianity Grew Out of Paganism, by Joseph McCabe


St. Jerome was convinced that Christian men and women, including priests and nuns, could not be trusted. According to him the only women of virtue to be seen on the streets of Rome were not Christians but pagans.
All the early bishops from all over the empire - St Augustine, Bishop Optatus, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Hippolytus and others - insisted that their congregation of Christians were highly immoral and corrupt.

Why and how did the pagans of the empire convert?

The ... undisputed fact is that there was no "attraction" of the pagans at all. In the extant Theodosian Code we have ten decrees which the bishops got from the emperors suppressing all rival religions and sects under pain of fine, imprisonment, or death.
-- How Christianity Grew Out of Paganism, by Joseph McCabe

See details
The conversion of the ancient Greeks and Romans was achieved through violence and systematic destruction of the Greco-Roman civilisations

Christianity improved Rome?

Slavery

Professor Dill comes close to the facts when he says that "the slave class of antiquity really corresponded to our free labouring class." It will not do, therefore, to identify Pagan with Christian slavery.
-- Christianity, Slavery and Labour, by Chapman Cohen


By the first century the Stoics openly condemned slavery. Other Greek moralists besides the Stoics condemned it.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by historian Joseph McCabe

Such was their influence that in still-pagan Rome:

the "manumission" of slaves -- the grant or sale of freedom to them -- was a daily occurrence.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, Joseph McCabe

It is an historical fact, supported by the most positive of evidence that slavery in the Roman Empire was mitigated by the noble philosophy of the Stoics and not by the teachings of the church fathers, who never thought of recommending the abolition of slavery.
-- History of Civilization, by historian Emil Reich

Emperor Constantine wasn't the only one who undid the humane laws enacted by the Stoic emperors.

in 541 C.E. the Council of Orleans required that the descendants of slaves should be re-enslaved.
-- Faiths of Man Encyclopedia of Religions, by J.G.R. Forlong

This was but one of many laws on slavery enacted during various Church councils.

Pope Gregory was the greatest slave-owner in the world in the sixth century. ... He would not allow any slave to become a cleric, and he expressly reaffirmed (Epp. vii, 1) that no slave could marry a free Christian.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

The early Church fathers, Saints, Popes, Protestant Reformers all condoned slavery - it was Biblical, after all.

The Abbey of St Germain des Pr�s owned 80,000 slaves, and that of St. Martin de Tours 20,000.
-- Faiths of Man Encyclopedia of Religions, by J.G.R. Forlong

Find out more facts about slavery before the trade in Africans

Education
The Roman municipalities supplied free elementary instruction for the children of all workers. Practically every Roman worker could read and write by the year 380 A.D., when Christianity began to have real power. By 480 nearly every school in the Empire was destroyed. By 580, and until 1780 at least, from ninety to ninety-five percent of the people of Europe were illiterate and densely ignorant. That is the undisputed historical record of Christianity as regards education.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Since Christianity regarded learning, mathematics and science as paganism, its followers went about the empire destroying all the schools as they had done the libraries, temples, hospitals and works of art.
Latin, taken over by the Roman Church, was ruined; even monks at the Vatican wrote in barbarous Latin, whilst most priests were illiterate. McCabe writes:

Rome under the Popes had sunk to an illiteracy that has no parallel elsewhere in the history of civilization.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by historian Joseph McCabe

So much so that by the 11th century:

The illiteracy of Europe had increased to more than ninety-nine percent.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Facts about "monks preserving knowledge"

Where the monks did spend any part of their time in "the writing room," they were, naturally, copying the Fathers of the Church and later Christian literature.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Most of the ancient writings had been burnt on purpose, either along with the ancient libraries or in the Medieval auto-da-fes. A few were preserved wholly by accident when monks, desperate for papyrus which was expensive, collected old manuscripts and overwrote them. Among them:

Parts of the Iliad and the 'Elements' of Euclid were covered by monkish treatises.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

Ancient works were never willingly preserved:

As for "monks constantly occupied in copying the classic texts," for the preservation and diffusion of Pagan culture, it is a joke! They couldn't read Greek nor good Latin, and nobody else could read at all, -- also, Holy Church and Churchmen loathed Pagan culture and literature.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

Read more about the ignorant Dark Ages brought on by Christianity

More Christian fictions about Rome

Converting the rest of Europe to the True Faith

It is estimated that Europe was Christianised at a cost of about 8 to 10 million lives.


804 CE. The last heathen resistance in Saxony is put down. In thirty years of genocide, from 774 to 804, two thirds of the Saxons have been killed.

Sami people [the indigenous people of Scandinavia] were converted to Christianity by force and shamanic practices were forbidden.

And like in Greece and Rome, Christians demolished heathen shrines to build a Church over them. For instance, in

1083 CE The temple at Uppsala (Sweden) was destroyed, and construction of a church on the site is initiated.

16th and 17th century Ireland. English troops "pacified and civilized" Ireland, where only Gaelic "wild Irish", "unreasonable beasts lived without any knowledge of God or good manners, in common of their goods, cattle, women, children and every other thing."
One of the more successful soldiers, a certain Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, ordered that

"the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies... and should bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie", which effort to civilize the Irish indeed caused "greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke, and freinds on the grounde".

Tens of thousands of Gaelic Irish fell victim to the carnage.
[ citing American Holocaust, by D. Stannard, 1992]

More
Eastern-Europe remained unconverted until the Crusades when pious Christian knights committed mass-murder and even complete genocide in the north-east.

Intolerance

"Unbelievers deserve not only to be separated from the Church, but also... to be exterminated from the World by death."
-- Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1271


The early Church Councils
These volatile and often violent meetings were held during the 4th and 5th centuries, when bishops voted on which doctrines would be Christian orthodoxy ("divinely inspired") and which were to be considered heresy and persecuted. Disagreements were rife and gave rise to numerous Christian sects which were inimical to each other. The Arians had been persecuted to extinction, so too the Donatists, and the Nestorians killed or driven out of the empire. In the 5th century, the Pelagianists, the Priscillianists in Spain, and the Manichaeans in the whole Roman empire, were persecuted - mostly to extinction.
Read more about the early Christian sects victimised for heresy, and how murder and threats ("divine inspiration") during the early Church Councils determined the orthodox Christian doctrines of today.

Crusades
Besides the infamous Children's Crusade, and those against the Jews and Moslems and Eastern Orthodox Church, there were also:

Crusades to convert-or-kill the pagans of Eastern-Europe and the Balkans:

among such pagans were the Obotrites, Pomeranians, Wiltzi, Serbs, Letts, Livonians, Finns, and Prussians.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

The Baltic (original) Prussians were completely exterminated in a mass genocide, as were the Stedingers of Germany. Heathen Lithuania also faced routine genocides of its population by Christians, and in the end lost out:

Crusades were undertaken against Livonia, Courland, Esthonia, and Prussia. In Lithuania Christianity did not win until 1368.
...
In Hungary, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, "the new religion was spread by the sword. ..."
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

Crusades to exterminate heretical Christian sects: The Catharan, Albigensian heretics: in the Albigensian Crusade half of France was exterminated. By the end of the 13th century one million of the French heretics had been massacred. In 1487, Pope Innocent VIII called for a Crusade against the French Waldensians, who had already been declared heretics in the 1184 Council of Verona. They were hounded and killed until the 17th century. See more on the Crusades

Inquisitions and witch hunts

Then there were the three Inquisitions: the first was against heretics and witches mainly; 95% of the victims of the Second (Spanish) Inquisition were Jews; and the Third Inquisition went after Protestants and other heretics as well as witches again.
At the start of the First Inquistion, the victims were only burnt to death. But:

Torture of suspects was authorized by Pope Innocent IV in 1252, and thus inquisition chambers were turned into places of abject horror.
...Torture was not finally removed as a legal option for church officials until 1917 when the Codex Juris Canonici was put into effect.
Inquisitors were placed entirely above the law by Pope Innocent IV's bull Ad extirpanda. Most of the torturing was performed by members of the Dominican order, whilst many other inquisitors and torturers were monks of the Franciscan order. The inquisitors and the Holy Church became filthy rich from the assets of their victims.

The edicts that established the Inquisition have never been repealed. They are "officially still part of the Catholic faith, and were used as justification for certain practices as recently as 1969."

Historian Will Durant, in his History of Civilisation puts the number of fatalities of the witch hunts between 7 and 9 millions.

Entire villages and towns were depopulated of their women-folk.
For 5 centuries throughout Europe, both the Protestant and Catholic Churches went after "witches", especially those referred to as "good witches":

Even relatively permissive England killed 30,000 witches between 1542 and 1736.

More on the inquisitions and witch hunts

Reformation

The Thirty Year War (1618-48) between the Protestants and Catholics, led to the deaths of more than a quarter of Europe's population. -- Ed Babinsky In Germany alone, the war resulted in an estimated drop of its population from 18 million to 4 million. In Bohemia, its 30,000 villages were reduced to 6,000 and its 3 million citizens slaughtered down to 780,000. -- Joseph McCabe In the Netherlands, Catholic Spain murdered more than a 100,000 men and women. -- Joseph McCabe

During the many Huguenot wars ravaging France, Huguenot soldiers hunted [Catholic] priests like animals and one captain is reported to have worn a necklace of priests' ears.

The Catholics butchered 30,000 Huguenots in one day: the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.

There was also utter intolerance and mutual persecution between the numerous Protestant sects that had sprung up all over the continent.

More on the Reformation, its intolerance and the Reformers

Women
Woman was merely man's helpmate, a function which pertains to her alone. She is not the image of God but as far as man is concerned, he is by himself the image of God.
-- Saint Augustine (354-430)

"Wife: Be content to be insignificant. What loss would it be to God or man had you never been born."
-- John Wesley (1703-91), Reformer, founder of the Methodist movement

More of what respected Christians have said about women, firmly basing their views on the Bible.
The Biblical Curse of Eve was used by clergy to prevent physicians from administering anaesthetics to relieve pain during child birth.

Fact
584 CE Council Of Macon: bishops gathered to vote on "Are women human?" By a narrow vote (of 1), women obtained human status in Christianity.
Apparently, the decision was not final, as the question had to be reconsidered by the Protestants too:

Lutherans at Wittenberg debated whether women were really human beings at all.
-- The Dark Side of Christianity, by Helen Ellerbe
Equality in Christianity today:

"A wife should submit herself to the leadership of her husband. Leadership in the church should always be male."
-- Southern Baptist Convention (2000)


Children

Since the birth-control policy of Christianity resulted in couples having many unwanted children, many of them were mistreated in the Middle Ages. In later times (like during the Industrial Revolution) they were still seen as just another mouth to feed and sent off to do gruelling work, even in mines, and were often kept illiterate. Besides hard labour, children of Christian families have also been subjected to severe mental abuse and have also suffered from physical abuse, as sanctioned by the Bible.

Fact
Several Christian denominations have brought back child-beating to chastise their erring children. There are Christian sites selling rods for this purpose, as specified by the Bible.

Christianity in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific

Convert and kill in the Americas

When in 1530 CE the Pope finally declared that the Indians were human, the pious Christians began converting the heathens:

"The [Catholic] Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out; by this means they secured that these infants went to heaven."
-- Bertrand Russell

The Indian chief Hatuey fled with his people but was captured and burned alive. As

"they were tying him to the stake a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the Christians went, he would rather go to hell."
-- American Holocaust, by D. Stannard

The Inquisition remained active until 1834, especially in Central and South America, where "heathen" natives were tortured and burned for crimes against the true faith, such as, "not believing in it".

Massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado 1864. Colonel John Chivington, a former Methodist minister and still elder in the church had a Cheyenne village of about 600, mostly women and children, gunned down despite the chiefs' waving with a white flag: 400-500 killed.
-- American Holocaust, by D. Stannard

Christianity in the Americas: 60 million Native Americans had been exterminated by the end of the 16th century itself.
For instance, good Christians from Spain

"hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles ... then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive."
-- American Holocaust, by D.Stannard

Christians went around burning down libraries of the Indians of Central America, demolishing shrines and burning books Convert or die: 19th century Christian missionaries exterminated the Californian Indians in the most gruesome manner. More on the horrendous history of Christianity in the Americas

Africa: Christian slavery and colonialism

Facts
Estimates vary, but somewhere between 20 million and 60 million people were captured, enslaved and brought to the Americas. Millions more died in the slave raids, in the dungeons and in the Middle Passage.
-- Through slavery's darkest passages - Ghana's slave dungeons - Essence, Special Travel Section, October 1992

Slave castles, with central Churches, were often built over the ancient shrines of the pagan Africans Slave ships often bore appropriate names, like those of the devout slave trader John Hawkins: Jesus, Solomon and John the Baptist. (-- Joseph McCabe)The Africans who survived the journey, were often worked to death:

"The policy of the slaveholder," says Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, "was to kill off the negroes by overwork and buy more."
-- Christianity Slavery and Labour, by Chapman Cohen

This was even more so in South America:

Brazil and the Caribbean were graveyards for Africans and their descendants.
-- American Slavery, 1619-1877, Peter Kolchin

The Bible was used to justify slavery and led to racism: the Curse of Ham, supposedly applicable to Africans, was the reason they "deserved to be slaves". Chuches also went so far as arguing that slavery was all for the best of the pagan Africans:

...the most widespread and effective religious argument was the simple suggestion that slavery was part of God's plan to expose a hitherto heathen people to the blessings of Christianity.
-- American Slavery, 1619-1877, by Peter Kolchin

As Presbyterian minister (and Georgia slave owner) Charles C. Jones argued in The Religious Instruction of the Negroes (1842), blacks "were placed under our control...not exclusively for our benefit but theirs also," so they could receive moral and religious uplift; "we cannot disregard this obligation thus divinely imposed, without forfeiting our humanity, our gratitude, our consistency, and our claim to the spirit of christianity itself."
-- American Slavery, 1619-1877, by Peter Kolchin

In 18th century France, Voltaire estimated that the [Catholic] Church held between 50,000 and 60,000 slaves.
-- Christianity, Slavery and Labour, by Chapman Cohen

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel employed slaves on its estates in the West Indies, and there were 80,000 black slaves in London as late as 1760 (Independent Review, October 1905). The American Churches, Anglican, Methodist, and Baptist, owned 600,000 slaves, and "the authority of nearly all the leading denominations was against the abolitionists," says J. Macy in the chief and impartial recent American work (The Anti-Slavery Crusade, 1920, p. 74). The Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian authorities, he shows, expelled any minister who advocated abolition.
-- A Rationalist Encyclopaedia, Joseph McCabe

Find out who did and who (predictably) did not agitate for abolishing African slavery.

Fact
During the brutal Christian colonisation of the Congo, which was defended by the Catholic Church,

As many as 10 million Congolese are estimated to have died as a result of executions, unfamiliar diseases and hunger.
-- Leopold reigns for a day in Kinshasa - The Guardian, February 4, 2005

This and much more on the history of Christianity in Africa

Christian colonisation of Asia

In China, Japan, Thailand: Here Christians of the Catholic Church implemented forced conversions, persecuted the followers of Buddhism and other pre-Christian religions, and attempted political take-overs of these countries. Christian converts became traitors to their own government, like those of ancient Rome had been. Fortunately, the end result in each case was that these countries expelled the Christian missionaries and closed themselves off to foreign (Christian) relations entirely.In Vietnam the situation was much the same, except that it did not succeed in expelling the missionaries, for which it paid the price later.In India and Sri Lanka, Christians from Portugal destroyed hundreds of indigenous shrines and built Churches over them (as usual). Once again, they went about violently converting the local population and exterminating any of the Hindus and Buddhists who did not convert. In India, Saint Francis Xavier got the Inquisition started in Goa which terrorised, tortured and gruesomely murdered many of the pagans. Read the details on the ruthless Christian colonisation of Asia

The Pacific

Fact

In thirty years of despicable missionary rule in Tahiti, only 6,000 of the indigenous people remained from an initial 200,000. [The Missionaries, by Norman Lewis]

The Protestant missionaries then carried out the same conversion/extermination campaign in the rest of the Pacific.
Christians in Hawaii, had massacred most of the population:

By the 1860s,

"in Hawai'i the Reverend Rufus Anderson surveyed the carnage that by then had reduced those islands' native population by 90 percent or more, and he declined to see it as tragedy; the expected total die-off of the Hawaiian population was only natural, this missionary said, somewhat equivalent to 'the amputation of diseased members of the body'."
-- American Holocaust, by D. Stannard

More on Christian genocide in the Pacific

Missions and colonialism

Teurer Segen - Christliche Mission und Kolonialismus by Gert von Paczensky ("Costly blessing - Christian mission and colonialism"),
translation of the book summary and review at KirchenKritik:

Missions were in league with colonialism, often even gruesomely so.
They helped to destroy old cultures, to uproot people, to divide families and entire populations.
They supported and approved of a system that let countless of millions in three continents be reduced to poverty, bringing them hunger and sickness.
In the misdevelopment of Latin America, Africa and Asia - [which is] the major problem in the present - missionaries and Churches of all persuasions and confessions (denominations) were complicit.

Review from KirchenKritik:
This work lacks neither facts, nor references nor information handed down from the time of mission-work and colonialism.
It is established that the Church has to answer for the main share of the guilt of the impoverishment of the present 3rd world. Yes, one can even go so far and assert that without the Church everything would have turned out differently!
In light of this book, the numerous speeches of Pope John Paul II in impoverished countries appear hypocritical and cynical.
Moving historical literature at it's best. Parts of it are not for weak nerves.

More on this

Anti-Semitism before Nazism
The Jews are the most worthless of all men. They are perfidious murderers of Christ. The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ and for killing God there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. God always hated the Jews. It is incumbent upon all Christians to hate the Jews.
-- Saint John Chrysostom, Church Father, 4th-5th century C.E.

More of the highly anti-Semitic statements of the pious early fathers of the Church, Popes and Reformers. The centuries of Christian preaching against Jews was founded on the Bible - the New Testament in this case. Martin Luther's book On the Jews and their Lies inspired Nazis and Christian Churches in Nazi Germany. The Church invented most of the means of persecuting Jews which the Nazis later used All the early non-Jewish Christian sects, like the Marcionites, were anti-Semitic.As soon as the Greco-Roman empire was wrested from pagan hands, the Christians started persecuting the Jews. Christian Roman Emperor Justinian was the one

who legalized the burning and pillaging of Jewish synagogues by Christian bishops and monks (often canonized later).

Then in the Middle Ages, a great many extermination campaigns were enacted by Christians.In the large scale pogroms of Orthodox Christian Russia and Ukraine, at least several hundreds of thousands of Jews were exterminated.

"But we must never forget that the Jews have crucified our Master [Jesus] and have shed His precious blood."
-- Czar Alexander III, affirming the eternal Christian doctrine

Fact
The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion, in which Jews supposedly conspired to bring down the western Christian nations, is a Russian forgery:

If The Protocols appeared outlandish, it may have been because they were a Russian forgery plagiarized from a 1869 German novel which, itself, was plagiarized from a 1864 French political satire.

The forger was Czarist agent Sergei Nilius whose work was designed to deflect the misery of Nicholas II's policies onto a scapegoat: the Jews of Russia.

This forgery is still used by many pious Christians as additional "proof" of why Jews are to be hated.

More on anti-Semitism before Nazism

Roma (Gypsies)

When Gypsies first appeared, Christianity had shaped the doctrine of war between light and dark and personified the white angels against the black devils. To the church the Gypsy culture was non-acceptable and their dark skin exemplified evil and inferiority. Hence in western Christian Europe the dark-skinned Gypsies became victims of prejudice as a result of this Christian doctrine.
-- Gypsies: a persecuted race, by William A. Duna

The persona of the Romani as non-white, non-Christian outsider became incorporated into Christian European folklore, which served to justify and encourage the prejudice against him. Like Asahuerus, the Jew doomed to wander through eternity because he refused to allow Jesus to rest on his way to Calvary, Romanies were accused of forging the nails with which Christ was crucified. And while Jews were accused of drinking the blood of Christian babies in hidden rites to which no outsider was privy, Romanies were likewise charged with stealing and even eating those babies. Parallelling even more closely the Asahuerus myth is the belief that the original sin of the Romanies was their refusal to give Mary and the baby Jesus shelter during their flight from King Herod into Egypt (Scheier, 1925, vol. II, p. 77).
-- The roots of Anti-Gypsyism: To the Holocaust and After, by Ian Hancock

Of course, the Roma were nowhere near the Middle-East in the 1st century CE, and this libel was but another Christian fiction. Like Jews, the Roma were also attacked in sermons. Monasteries in Eastern-Europe kept large numbers of Roma as slaves until the the 19th century. Roma who converted to the Christian (and Islamic) faiths were not accepted or if they were, then they were still treated as outcasts.The anti-Roma prejudice which had been created and had long been fostered by Christianity would result in their persecutions and exterminations in Germany, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and other countries during the Nazi era. In fact, the same continues today. More on Romany and anti-Gypsyism

Fascism including Nazism

Nazism in Germany

Nazi Germany was a very Christian country. Its anti-Semitism was rooted in Church teachings:

according to historian Dagobert Runes, Hitler's methods were actually modelled on the Christian one:

Everything Hitler did to the Jews, all the horrible, unspeakable misdeeds, had already been done to the smitten people before by the Christian churches ... The isolation of the Jews into ghetto camps, the wearing of the yellow spot, the burning of Jewish books and finally, the burning of the people - Hitler learned it all from the church. However, the church burned Jewish women and children alive, while Hitler granted them a quicker death, choking them first with gas.

And the anti-Semite Luther had written On the Jews and their Lies which inspired the Nazis as well as the Christian clergy.

"If I had to baptise a Jew, I would take him to the bridge of the Elbe, hang a stone around his neck and push him over with the words 'I baptise thee in the name of Abraham'."
-- Martin Luther, "Hitler's Spiritual Ancestor" by Peter F. Weiner

Thus, it's not surprising that inspired by the the New Testament and centuries of Church tradition, Saints and Church fathers, Popes and Reformers, the clergy in Nazi Germany merely added to the existing Christian anti-Semitic literature:

Bishop Martin Sasse of Thuringia, a leading Protestant churchman ... edited a brochure for his ministers at the end of November 1938 titled, "Martin Luther and the Jews: do Away with Them!" He quoted extensively from Luther's book "On the Jews and their lies." (Wollenberg, p.73)

The Jew was created by God to act the traitor everywhere.
-- Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit monthly publication, cited in John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope"

All German Churches, except the Confessing Church, were in line with Nazi Germany and its policies. Many clergymen and pious Church-goers were prominent Nazis. Most Germans were members of the mainstream German Churches, whilst the Confessing Church had but small numbers of members.The Catholic and Protestant Churches and their congregations actively helped the Nazi state in hunting down Jews. Both furnished racial data about Christian members in their own congregations who had Jewish ancestry. Neither Church accepted such Christians:

After the Nazi party took over, Protestant Churches began to exclude Jews from jobs and schools and later to exclude baptized racial Jews from the Land churches and to force them to live completely by themselves.

Catholic priests across Germany became part of an anti-Semitic attestation bureaucracy, supplying details of blood purity through marriage and baptism registries in accordance with the Nazi Nuremberg laws which distinguished Jews from non-Jews

In fact, the German churches

advocated composing an "Aryan Paragraph" in church synods that would prevent non-aryans from joining the Church, which of course included Jews.

The small, dissenting Confessing Church did not oppose Hitler for his anti-Semitic policies. Many of the prominent Pastors in this Church were self-admitted anti-Semites. It turns out they opposed the "Aryan Paragraph" in order to retain Jewish converts, but

For Jews who did not convert, they held strong anti-Semitic feelings.

The Catholic and Protestant Churches helped in the murder of people with disabilities.
There is nothing new in this, as the Church had for centuries taught that people with physical disabilities were devils and those with mental disabilities were possessed by devils. Throughout the Middle-Ages, handicapped children would be brutally murdered, often by their own Christian parents.Protestant and Catholic Churches used forced labourers during the Third Reich Strangely, Christians today are surprised when faced with such facts, forgetting how, throughout Christianity's history, Churches, clergy and everyday Christians had been involved in extermination campaigns against Jews and others, murdered people with disabilities and had kept slaves for centuries.

Read more about Nazi Germany

Nazism in wartime Yugoslavia

It is a matter of historical record that the Croatian Catholic Church was closely entangled with the Ustashas. In the early years of World War II, Catholic priests oversaw forced conversions of Orthodox Serbs under the aegis of the Ustasha state; Franciscan friars distributed Ustasha propaganda. Several high Catholic officials in Yugoslavia were later indicted for war crimes.
-- A vow of silence - U.S. News and World Report, March 30, 1998
"Kill all Serbs. And when you finish come here, to the Church, and I will confess you and free you from sin."(54)
-- Father Srecko Peric of the Gorica Monastery, reassuring his fellow Ustashi prior to a massacre

The Ustashe were the Catholic Nazis of CroatiaThey ruthlessly exterminated about 750,000 people: mostly Orthodox Christian Serbs and several tens of thousands of Roma and Jews.In the Catholic Independent state of Croatia that was formed during the Nazi era, clergy took part in great numbers in the massacres.The Italian fascists and even the German Nazis were horrified at how gruesomely they murdered their victims.

The Croatian clergy brought the Ustashe to power

While the Catholic Press in the country kept praising the rising Fascism in Europe:

Monasteries, parish houses, cathedrals, Franciscan high schools, seminaries, etc., throughout Croatia doubled as meeting places, recruiting centers, arms depots and staging areas for Croatian fascism and terror in the years prior to the war.
... Among the very first armed divisions of the Ustasha army were numerous Catholic priests. The military exploits of one priest, Ilija Tomas of Klepac, were hailed in the Croatian fascist publication "Hrvatski Narod" on July 25, 1941.(21) Another Catholic publication "Nedelja" praised the military exploits of dozens of priests, especially those in monastic orders such as the Franciscan Radovan Glavas, and the priest Ivan Miletic who led Croatian fascists in joint battle with Wehrmacht forces.
... The entire Catholic press in this period in Croatia was thoroughly pro-fascist, racist and supportive of the elimination of the "minorities." [the Serbs, Jews and Roma]
-- The Vatican's Holocaust, by former BBC commentator Avro Manhattan
Christian priests create racial theories again

Ustashi's leading racist theorists were Catholic clergy. ... priests were among the intellectual godfathers of Croatian fascism and racism.
... anti-Semitism in Yugoslavia was almost entirely the product of Catholic propaganda after World War I.
... The Catholic Press preached racial theories - e.g. the theory that the Croats were not of Slav descent, but were Gothic German. One of the founders of this race theory was a well-known Catholic priest, Kerubin Segvic, who as far back as 1931 wrote a book entitled, The Gothic Descendance of the Croats, with a view to creating racial odium against the Slavs, which was synonymous with "Orthodox."
-- The Vatican's Holocaust, by Avro Manhattan

The Vatican and communism united after WWII to whitewash history.

More on Nazism in Yugoslavia during WWII

, by Barry Lituchy describes how it is that the Vatican got away scott-free from its active involvement in genocide, especially in Croatia. How, through deflection and obfuscation, it has absolved itself of all crimes pertaining to genocide, restricting its "errors" merely to "not speaking out" against what was happening to the Jews. Though it is well-known that the Catholic Church was involved in tracking down Jews for Nazi Germany, and involved in Nazism in general (see ), it has carefully kept silent about its . Among other things, Pius XI and Pacelli (Pope XII) arranged the with dictator Mussolini and the with Germany. The Pope was directly responsible for the dissolution of Germany's parliamentary system which gave dictatorial powers to Hitler. Pope John Paul II's intended beatification of Pius XII was to make the public believe Pius' conduct was above board, when in fact it was wholly the opposite. on these wartime Popes, including that deal with the Papal involvement in Nazism and Fascism. Croatia's Nazi (Ustashi) leader Pavelic is another example: Much Nazi blood money made it into the Vatican, but not out. Further details

Source
http://freetruth.50webs.org/Index.htm

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Origin of Buddha Image

Today India is known for Idol Worship. All religions in India have in Form worship, either as symbols, letters, pictures or Idols. But this was not the case 2000Years ago. Any form of Form in Faith was not considered. In some places like Karnataka not even name of the dead Jain persons written on the Graves even until 400 AD. Hinduism , Jainism and Buddhism did not support gods in human form. So how did this extreme swing took place , from nothing everything in human forms. This explains the lack of Inscriptions, temples, Idols before 5th century BC. Classic study in this transformation is Buddhism. This was the religion at the prime when this transformation occurred. So Let us see how we got the Image of Buddha. Which will explain the transformation. Let us see if Image in Indian religion and the Origin of Buddha Image and associate controversies.

Vedic Hinduism.

Vedic religion says Absolute or Trancendental can be realized in diverse ways. Co-existence of Sakara(diety with Form) and Nirakara(Diety without Form) in the same household , with men with different Intellectual and moral denominations aspiring for spirituality in their respective ways. Kena Upanishad says man cannot comprehend God with his sense organs. That is God cannot be seen with Eyes. Svetasvatara upanishad says that Great one has not likeness to form. In Bhagavat Gita Arjuna asks Krishna in what forms and objects the Great one should be meditated. In response Krishna first Enumerated all phenomenal objects , all flora , all fauna and so on. Then Krishna gives Arjuna supernatural Eye , in which he sees entire universe, process of creation and process of destruction. Arjuna beholds God is identical with Cosmos. Later Supplements of Gita say God can be worshipped by Agni by Brahman, Devata(divinity) worshipped in the heart of Muni,Pratima(Image) is adored by men of Low intellect. While one whose sight is not limited can see God everywhere. Adi shankara preferred Formless and Ramanuja said he is prefers both Formless and With Form.

Jainism

Jainism says In the theist world the loftiest entity is The God. It has thousands of names like Paramatma (the ultimate soul), Bhagavan (the most glorious one), Siddha (the liberated), Buddha (the enlightened), The God, etc.

In the Jain tradition there are two forms of this entity-

(1) The formless God or Siddha (the liberated) and

(2) The God with a form or Tirthankar / Arihant.

The Tirthankar is a detached individual who is the ultimate altruist and benefactor of not only mankind but every living being. He propagates the religious path and preaches about it for their benefit. His benevolent voice promotes happiness, peace, and infinite bliss for every being.In the Jain tradition there have been twenty-four Tirthankars during the current descending cycle of time, Bhagavan Rishabhdev being the first and Bhagavan Mahavir being the last. For every Jain these Tirthankars are the entities to be worshipped and revered. The ultimate goal of Jainism is to tread the path shown by them and acquire infinite powers and virtues.

Buddhism

Thervada ban on Buddharupa( Buddha Image) is well known. An old Disciple of Buddha Vakali was eager to see Buddha before he died. One day buddha came and said to him “ O vakkali why do you crave to see this body of impure matter, one who perceives Dharma Perceives me. One who perceives me perceives Dharma” On different occasions through dialogues and sermons Buddha spoke against adoration of his Rupakaya or Buddha Rupa.

What does faith say?

The Trinity Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism say that God is formless ,but it does not go against worship of forms , saying that is done by lower intellectuals. So the form is also present in Indian Dharma along with Formless, which is the basic or ultimate. Now let us see how Buddha Image developed.

Origin of Buddha Image

Buddhist followers remained faithful to Buddha teaching of non-worship of buddha Image. The first to break the rule King Udyana of Vatsa or Kausambi, who was very devoted, The story goes that he was worried that Buddha would not return. Buddha's disciple Maudgalyayana used magic to send an artist (some say 32 of them) up to heaven to capture the likeness of the Buddha in a 5-foot figure carved out of sandalwood. This image was so accurate and imbued with devotion, that when Shakyamuni returned, it rose up to greet him. The Buddha acknowledged then, the power of the rupa to inspire and to teach the dharma to future generations. This story is not accepted by most Buddhists. For Five centuries after Buddha until 1st century BC , Buddha was represented by Symbols. Until 1st century AD he was never represented in Human Form. Immediately following this period the Graeco-Buddhist or Indo-Hellenistic or Ghandara period presents us with enormous anthromorphic images. Immediately we have suggestions from western world that the images were introduction from west , particularly from Greece. The present Image developed after the 5th century AD. Our main debate of the article comes here, Was the Concept of Image of God came from West (Persia, Middle east , Greece, Rome , etc).

Image or Icon in Indian Religions – History Debate.

In the First two decades of this 20th century Western scholars like Albert Foucher and John Marshall has concluded that Image or Icon was not the characteristic of Indian religions till the advent of Persians , West Asians and Greek. This Western Idea was supported by Arya Samaj, Brahmo Samaj and Prarthana Samaj. They maintained that Worship of Image was un - Vedic, Un - Brahminical and was the later development in Puranic age. Thervada buddhist also accepted this theory.

Other Hindus who held Pratima(Likeness = Image) was an Indigenous element nothing was foreign. Kashiprasad Jaiswal and Anand Coomaraswamy contended that Rupa (form) is integral part of the Vedic religion. At this time Indus Valley civilzation was unearthed, Archeologist R.P chanda found earliest representation of Siva Pasupathi and Yogi in the Indus valley. Also scholars pointed to Tibetans traditions and showed that Image was used before Mauryas. Also aborignals(Not Aryan and Dravidian) like Veddas and Nagas have their dieties and symbols of worship. So the worship of symbols and dieties is not totally absent.

Image worship in India

  • Image worship as we have seen in the Formless debate was accepted and prevalent.

  • Images of Shiva, mother Goddess,Yogi and wide variety of Terrocotta statues representing Human and Animal like forms. in Indus valley have proved beyond doubt that Image worship was prevalent.

  • Aboriginal like Yaksha and Naga have dieties. We find numerous dieties in their settlements since earliest times. Which show that Idol worship was prevalent before vedic times(7000BC)

  • Sakya, the clan Buddha was born in, had its own Yaksha deity, the Yaksha Sakyavardhana, the benevolent guardian of Sakyas. As prevailed the custom, soon after his birth, the child Buddha was presented to Yaksha Sakyavardhana for child's long life and glory.

So from the above points the worshipping of Forms and images was widely prevalent and the Idea is not Import from west. Let us move to the next point. Was the Buddha image creation due to influence of the west.

Foreign Influence.

Foucher argued that the Buddha Image is a eurasian one or Greek one. Let us analyse the facts.Before the Gandhara buddhist images there were Mathura Buddhist Images which were Indian in look and Indigenous. So there is no question of Gandhara images being the first buddhist images. Infact Gandhara images are continuation of mathura Images. Let us see the if there is any influence of Greek or western on the Gandhara images. Let us see one by one

Image

  • The Asanas are all Indian. The early art shows five sitting postions with hands showing mudras (Dharmachakra Mudra, Dhyna Mudra, Bhumisparsa Mudra, Varada mudra, Abhaya Mudra)

  • The Dress worn by Boddhisattvas are Indian.

  • Physical attributes: Protuberance(usnisa) on the crown is evident, urna or turf in the fine hair between the brows is evident, Fingers are webbed, The Ears are elongated by wearing the ear rings before monastic robes.

  • The Boddhisattvas represented in less rigid position holding attributes in the hands(vajra pani in Vajra, Padmapani by roselotus , Avalokitesvara by blue lotus, Maitreya Amrta Flask) These attributes can be held in any hand, but they are always held in Right hand by Indian Tradition.

  • The Dieties are either seated or Standing on traditional Indian lotus Flower.

Symbols

All the Symbols used in the Art are indian such as bull, Sacred Tree,Mountain, River , many Solar ,Nandipada, Trishul, Swastik, Lotus , Bow and Arrow Etc. These are Hindu, Jain and Buddhist or Indian.

Art form

In Indian art (abstract) the emphasis is laid on the significance of the object not the appearance. In Greek art (naturalistic) the emphasis is laid on the object and its looks. Every art is a compromise between the abstract and naturalistic, but what we see in Gandhara and other Indian art is continuos concept of Abstract(whether one finds a sacred tree or Buddha Figure) , no swing from one style to another as seen during 19th century when there were wild swings to European art. The Gandhara artforms are infact reproduction of early mathura artforms.

Technology

The Technology , Craftsman were already present , when the need for buddha arise and they had no problem in making the images.

Conclusion

So we cannot say that the Buddha got the Image due to Western Influence. The Gandhara art shows lot of Influence of Hellenistic artform, but the Image is originally Indian. Hinduism , Jainism and Buddhism embodied accomodation of non-believers into their fold as they are , without losing anything. Unlike in Europe when pre-christian gods were banished once christianity took hold, Indian faith accepted aboriginal Yaksha and Naga dieties and symbols and absorbed them. This process continued and Buddhist and Jain elements were absorbed into Hindu fold. So the Image and Deity worship are essentially Indian , though they were not part of Hindu, Jain or Buddhist Dharma initially.

Ref:

The origin of Buddha Image by Ananda K Coomaraswamy

Trojan War Myth or Reality?

Did the city of Troy really exist? Is the Trojan War myth or military reality? And what about that giant horse?

In the Greek poem The Iliad, the basis for Troy, Prince Paris of Troy steals the gorgeous Helen, of Greece, from her husband, King Menelaus. The act brings the two nations to war, and eventually Greeks led by the warrior Achilles lay siege to Troy. The poet Homer probably wrote the epic several hundred years after the war is supposed to have taken place. Much of it is no doubt fantasy. No evidence that Achilles or Helen exist.

Not single Event
Archaeologists who have been digging into the myth of Homer's poem believe the legendary war may have been a process rather than a single event. Eric Cline cline said Trojan war or wars took place, and that Homer chose to write about one or more of them by making it into a great ten-year-long saga.

Nine Cities of Troy
Archeologists who dig the placed said to be troy say , the site contains nine cities built on top of each other. There is a citadel in the middle and a town around it. A high wall fortified the town.
Eager to find the legendary treasures of Troy, Schliemann blasted his way down to the second city, where he found what he believed were the jewels that once belonged to Helen. As it turns out, the jewels were a thousand years older than the time described in Homer's epic.

Today archaeologists believe that the sixth and seventh oldest cities found in layers at Hisarlik are the best candidates for the Troy of The Iliad. Resplendent and strong, city number six looks like Homer's Troy. The problem is that this city's destruction in 1250 B.C. does not appear to have been caused by war but an earthquake.

Homer Clue
In The Iliad, the Greeks breach the city walls by hiding inside a giant horse, which they present as a gift to the Trojans. The Trojan horse could have been a metaphor for Poseidon, a god associated with horses who was both the god of the seas and earthquakes. "The suggestion is that Homer knew that the city he was describing had been destroyed by an earthquake," Cline said. "But that's not how you want to end your monumental saga—with a whimper. So he concocted this idea of a Trojan horse."

The seventh oldest city at the site, on the other hand, fits the description of a city under siege and destroyed by war in 1175 B.C. Archaeologists have found arrowheads in the streets. But the city itself was not as grand as the one described by Homer. cline said Homer may have taken the description of Troy 6 and the destruction of Troy 7, and, using poetic license, blurred the two into one ten-year-long war. But these are the words of people who have already agreed to trojan war and are searching for evidence.

Sea People
In the late Bronze Age, Troy, if located at the Hisarlik site, would have been a great prize for power-hungry kings. Perched at the entrance to the Black Sea, the city would have been at an international crossroads. The Greek Mycenaean empire would have lain to the west. The Hittite empire, which stretched from Mesopotamia to Syria, would have been to the east. As for its great wealth, Troy may have acquired that by taxing seafarers traveling into the Black Sea.
One theory suggests that the lesser known Sea Peoples wrecked Troy. Originally from what is now Italy, the Sea Peoples swept across the Mediterranean Sea from west to east. According to inscriptions found in Egypt, this group came through Troy at the time of the Trojan War, around 1200 B.C.

Hittites and Greece
Yet another theory, supported by ancient Hittite texts, suggests an intermittent, 200-year conflict that raged between the Hittite empire and a rebel coalition that included Troy. In this text, the Mycenaeans of Greece actually allied themselves with the Trojans against the Hittites. Archaeologists have found Mycenaean pottery in Troy 6, supporting the suggestion that the two nations were allies.

The least plausible explanation, most archaeologists agree, is that the Trojan War was fought over Helen, described by Homer as the most beautiful woman in the world. However, there is a historical precedent for a war being fought over an injustice done to a king. In the 14th century B.C., the Hittite king received a letter from the Egyptian queen. She said her husband had died and asked the Hittite king if he could send a son for her to marry. The Hittite eventually agreed and sent one of his sons. On his way to Egypt, however, the prince was killed. Believing the Egyptians killed him, the Hittites declared war on Egypt.

If the Hittites and the Egyptians could go to war in the 14th century over the son of the king, why wouldn't the Mycenaeans and Trojans go to war less than a hundred years later because the king's wife has been kidnapped? Cline asked. "One can't really rule out that it was fought over Helen, but at the moment we don't have any supporting data for that."

Romantic History
One thing is clear: The wars seem to have ended an age. "Homer is writing a memory of the end of the world," said Diane Thompson, author of The Trojan War: Literature and Legend from the Bronze Age to the Present. "Nostalgia fuels his writing, and it has fueled it ever since."

When the Roman poet Virgil in the first century B.C. rewrote Homer's story in his own classic The Aeneid, he turned the Greeks into scruffy villains and described the Trojans as beautiful losers who went on to found the Roman Empire. Through the ages, European people clung to this version—many of them tracing their ancestry back to Troy.

Source
 Is Troy True? The Evidence Behind Movie Myth by Stefan Lovgren
National Geographic News May 14, 2004


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Dating Ancient Greek Civilization

Greek civilization is said to have started around 2800BC by many western scholars , eventhough we have no information about the Greek before 770BC. Let us analyse the facts.

Let us see the The Aegean Civilizations and how is Greek they are.
Before 2000BC we do not have any information

Minoans
The first people on aegean were the Minoans from Crete. Their civilization lasted from about 2000-1400 BC. Their capital, Knossos, was the cultural center of the Aegean. What caused the Minoan civilization to decline? An older historical opinion said that the volcano on Thira (Santorini) erupted in 1450 BC and caused massive tidal waves, etc., that washed the Minoan civilization away. The new historical data dates the volcano eruption to the 17th century BC -- much too early to have been the cause of the Minoan decline. Now, scholars are debating what really happened. No one really knows.

Mycenaeans
The next civilization to rise in the Aegean was the Mycenaean Civilization which lasted from 1400-1200 BC. (In Homer, the Mycenaeans are called "Acheans.") These people were still not the "Greeks" who later ruled the region.

One theory states that the Mycenaeans really were the Greeks who came down from the north. What is known, however, is that the Greek speaking people came to the mainland around 1450 BC. Around 1400 BC, the Minoan civilization was destroyed. The culture of the Aegean shifted from the islands to the mainlands.

During the time of the Mycenaeans, the Hittites controlled much of Asia Minor. Their dates, 1450-1200 BC, coincide with the dates of the Mycenaeans. It is logical to say that the two cultures had to have communicated with one another although there is little scholarly evidence. This, too, is a point in Greek history that is often debated.

According to Greek tradition, the Trojan War happened around 1200 BC, near the end of the Mycenaean civilization. The old scholarly view was that the Mycenaeans were invaded by a Dorian tribe from the north who destroyed them. Currently, scholars believe the Mycenaeans declined because of fighting amongst themselves. This view is the most archeologically correct.

Greek Dark Ages
After the Mycenaean decline, the Greek Dark Ages occur (1100-750 BC). (Depending on when Homer is dated, he could have lived during this time period.) This period also has an old view/new view perspective. Older theories state that all Greek civilization came to a complete halt during the Dark Ages. Greeks later had to begin their civilization anew. The current historical opinion is that the Greeks still had some level of civilization -- they didn't revert to barbarianism -- but they lived simpler lives.

Despite being called the "dark ages," this period of Greek history led to many fantastic developments.
  • Greek speaking people migrated to the islands of the Aegean and the coast of Asia Minor in an exodus known as the Ionian Movement
  • The notion of the Polis or City-State was developed
  • The Greek alphabet was developed from Phoenician
Greek New Age
These three major developments led to the Greek New Age (750-500 BC). Other names for this period are: the Age of Colonization, the Lyric Age, the Archaic Age, and the Greek Renaissance. This period saw extensive colonization by the Greeks and their rivals, the Phoenicians. Art and literature increased, as well.

Classical Age
From 500-323 BC, Greece experienced the Classical Age. This is the period that most people think of when they hear "Greek civilization." There were two major wars during the Classical Age: the Persian Wars (499-449 BC) and the Great Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC).

The Classical Age continued for about another 100 years, but the Greek city-states were not able to withstand the invasion of Phillip of Macedonia and the expansions made by his son, Alexander the Great. In fact, the Classical Age's end is marked by the death of Alexander the Great.

Conclusion
As we can see the date markers like Homer, Trojan war, date of Ionian and Mycenaean decline is not known and there are about 400 years where there is no information about the greek. Western scholars have putting a very classical picture ,but as evidence we have nothing. The greek civilization developed due to proximity to Egypt, Syria, Palestine, the lands of Asia Minor, and the Mesopotamia valley. And western scholars have developed theories to somehow prove that Greek is independent and developed on its own not from adjoining civilizations.

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Myth of Pythogores theorem

Pythagoras is Ionian philosopher and Mathematician of 6th century BC , who is also called father of numbers by greek, He established a religion called Pythagoreanism. He is best known for pythagoras theorem. Let us analyze the facts behind Pythagoras theorem.

Pythagoras Legend
Pythagoras was born on Samos, a Greek island in the eastern Aegean, off the coast of Asia Minor. He was born to Pythais (his mother, a native of Samos) and Mnesarchus (his father, a Phoenician merchant from Tyre). As a young man, he left his native city for Croton, Calabria, in Southern Italy, to escape the tyrannical government of Polycrates. According to Iamblichus, Thales, impressed with his abilities, advised Pythagoras to head to Memphis in Egypt and study with the priests there who were renowned for their wisdom. He also was discipled in the temples of Tyre and Byblos in Phoenicia. It may have been in Egypt where he learned some geometric principles which eventually inspired his formulation of the theorem that is now called by his name.

Pythagoras theorem
Pythagoras is commonly given credit for discovering the Pythagorean theorem, a theorem in trigonometry that states that in a right-angled triangle the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle), c, is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, b and a—that is, a² + b² = c².

As this is the contentious topic. Let us find out the truth.
  1. Pythagores school- It is not clear whether he, or his students, have constructed the first proof. Because of the secretive nature of his school and the custom of its students to attribute everything to their teacher, there is no evidence that Pythagoras himself worked on or proved this theorem. For that matter, there is no evidence that he worked on any mathematical or meta-mathematical problems.
  2. Five centuries after death - Some attribute it as a carefully constructed myth by followers of Plato over two centuries after the death of Pythagoras, mainly to bolster the case for Platonic meta-physics, which resonate well with the ideas they attributed to Pythagoras. This attribution has stuck, down the centuries up to modern times. The earliest known mention of Pythagoras's name in connection with the theorem occurred five centuries after his death, in the writings of Cicero and Plutarch.
  3. Biography after seven centuries- Biography of Pythagoras (written seven centuries after Pythagoras's time).
  4. Pythagoras mathematicians who had an influence on the beginning of axiomatic geometry devlopment two hundred years later was written down by Euclid in The Elements not during pythagoras time.
  5. None of his works exists- Many times it is reference from secondary sources. Thales and Pythagoras brought knowledge of Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics to Greece.
  6. Classical era of Greek did not produce any mathematical lore , only after alexander 323BC and Hellenistic period and contact with Babylon and Egypt did mathematicians emerge from greek.
  7. Pioneers Thales and pythogores studied in Egypt before any contribution, raising doubts about their contribution.
  8. Rig veda(1900BC) has all the details of pythores theorem and applications, so no longer can pythagores claim authorship of the theorem.
  9. Sulbh sutras(800BC) all the details of geometric , numerals , square roots, pythagores theorem.
  10. From the Hellenistic period, Greek replaced Egyptian as the written language of Egyptian scholars, and from this point Egyptian mathematics merged with Greek and Babylonian mathematics to give rise to Hellenistic mathematics. Egyptian mathematics also built pyramids , which is proof where these theorems originated. It is not greece, it is Egypt.
From the above points we can see that pythagoras is just a legend, who was made a mathematician to suit greek superiority , which is proved by the gap between the existence and commentry on them much later. The mathematical theories like geometry , numbers , pythagoras theorem was borrowed from Indian, Babylonian and Egypt sources and has been claimed as greek own, eventhough we can say much work was done later by greeks.

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