History

What is history? 

It's all the stuff you don't care about enough and should care about more.  It's an account of what happened before that is heavily influenced by those with the most power and influence.  It's a lot of things.  But more than any of the things I just said, it's about religion.

I've never made a secret of the fact that I am fascinated by history, and in particular by the history of religion on earth.  At Michigan, I took a year-long course on the history of Christianity from the New Testament to the present. 

For me, it a natural proclivity.  But for a lot of people, it's a topic to be avoided. 

Those people aren't very smart.

Why?  Because you cannot consider yourself a learned person unless you study different forms of religion.  There's a reason that Montgomery County, Maryland public schools teach a unit on Greek mythology for sixth-graders.  Almost every symbol we take for granted, from our money to our flags to our jewelry, has its roots in religious symbolism.  Just about every major world event can at least be partially explained by religion.  Yet many people, particularly atheists, shun overtly religious events, books and topics as if they might catch leprosy if they were exposed to them.

Right now, I'm reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.  It's an incredible book, if for no other reason than the that so much of it is historically accurate.  I'm only two-thirds through.  But unless he shanks the ending I may have found a new favorite book. 

Jurassic Park used to be my favorite book for many of the same reasons I am enjoying this one so much.  Jurassic Park was less accurate, but contained a lot of concepts that drove my thinking for years afterward (chaos theory, the progress paradox, etc).  I can already tell this book will have the same effect.

I already knew most of Brown's 'revelations' regarding the Church's history.  The manipulation of the Bible to suit church needs, the exclusion of almost 80 gospels and the inclusion of the ones they chose (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John); the adoption of tons of pagan symbols, holidays and rituals to spread and co-opt pagan rituals and practices (why is there a pyramid on U.S. currency?); the incredibly fascinating Coptic and Gnostic texts the Church attempted to suppress because they didn't conform to the message they wanted to spread; the potential paradox and contradiction of a virgin birth...all that stuff was old news to me.  But there is one piece of information, one theory in the book that was mind-blowingly relevatory for me personally. 

I'm not going to give it away, but let's just say that YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK.  It got me thinking about what a contradictory history the Church has, about its attitudes towards women, about the near-deification of Jesus' mom...about a whole lot of things.  And it made me want to run out ad read as many of those previously-suppressed accounts of Jesus' life as I can find.  

Sadly, that material was 'beyond the scope of the class', as my college professor put it.  However, he recommended a great deal of outside reading that I never actually did, being a naive and lazy undergrad.  I think it's way past time that changed.  I also think that I'd like to take some courses (or at least read some books) that detail the life cycles of the other major world religions. 

For those of you who are trying to make sense of a world that often seems to make no sense, I strongly recommend this book.  and, despite its many flaws and imperfections, I strongly recommend the Bible.  I've read the New Testament, I'm working on the old...and as long as you get a good translation, you won't believe the number of questions it answers.  It's all fascinating stuff, and it's what much of the developed world is based on.

And The Da Vinci Code reminds us of one very important fact: history is written by the winners.         

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