[FRIAM] now it's personal

[Prof David West]

While I have always regarded **The Christian Church **with disdain/antipathy/disgust and considered them the source of many many evils (e.g. Crusades, Inquisition), it was always kind of impersonal.

I just discovered that it was a Christian (nee Roman) Emperor, Theodosius, that shut down Eleusis and outlawed the Mysteries; setting the stage for the Visigoths to literally destroy the temple complex that an earlier Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, had, correctly, recognized as the fount of Athenian philosophy and science. You could make a good argument that banning the Mysteries is the direct primal cause of our alienation from each other as human beings as well as Nature — thus precipitating all our current woes, including the climate crisis.

To rub salt in the wounds, the same year Theodosius was wreaking his mischief, Bishop Theophilus led a rabid Christian Mob in the sacking and burning of the Library of Alexandria and hundreds of satellite libraries (all in Pagan temples according to Theophilus), around the city.

That makes it personal and I am pretty pissed that I was not informed of this long before now.

davew
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