The Myth of Stupid Ancient Man... as Baseless as a Flat Earth

There is a tendency in modern culture to exalt our own achievements at the expense of our ancient forefathers. Theories of evolution have further damaged this understanding of the historical evidence in the general culture. We like to think of ourselves as wise and enlightened and previous generations as rather superstitious and stupid in comparison.

The archaeological facts just do not support this view. With far fewer technological tools ancient men achieved marvelous developments that should not be brushed over. A quick example would be the Great Pyramid of Khufu which was built around 2560 BC. The structure is aligned to within 4 minutes of arc to earth's True North, the passages are straight to within 0.013 inches per 100 feet of travel, and its 13 acre foundation remains almost perfectly level to this day (about 0.8 inches off).

Lets also consider things like the great Library of Alexander which existed centuries before the birth of Christ. Consider some of the names associated with this university and their mind-blowing achievements. All of these existed nearly 2,000 years ago. You should be humbled.

Aristophanes of Byzantium is credited with the creation of the accent system for the Greek Alphabet that assisted readers with pronunciation. He is also the inventor of basic concepts of punctuation for the western languages such as the period, comma, colon, and semi-colon. He was also an accomplished lexicographer that complied large collections of rare, archaic, and unusual words.

Callimachus compiled a 120 volume catalog that chronologically arranged all of the works in the library. He did this by hand without a computer.

Zenodotus practically invented textual analysis. He gathered various copies of Homeric works and compared them to eliminate dubious passages, transposed lines, and copy errors.

Hero of Alexandria invented the first known wind-driven machine and used his knowledge of thermodynamics to create the first automatic door in history. He invented the first vending machine that dispensed a controlled amount of water after a coin was deposited. In physics, he accurately described Fermat's Principle which states that a ray of light will always travel in a path that takes the least amount of time... 1,600 years before Pierre Fermat refined it.

Eratosthenes of Cyrene invented geography--literally! He is the first to apply the basic principles that we use today and is the first to use the term "geography". Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth (which he knew to be round). He was off by less than 1% of the actual number. He deduced the tilt of the Earth's axis and was off by one degree. Not to be a one-trick-pony, he also invented a simple algorithm for calculating prime numbers.

Despite the fire in Alexandria that destroyed the library, these teachings actually lived on and helped to bring us to where we are today. A man named Posidonius lived 150 years after Eratosthenes and he argued that his calculations were too large. This was not unknown to the people of the middle ages. Most scholars of the day held to Eratosthenes' numbers, but Christopher Columbus used Posidonius' research to argue his case for a path to the Indies. The argument of the 1500s was not about the roundness or flatness of the earth. That matter had been settled thousands of years ago. It was a debate over size.

It turns out that almost no credible scholars of the middle ages believed the earth was flat. It is a 19th century modern myth that everyone now believes because that's what they are told to think with no supporting evidence as proof. It was a myth driven by the ideological need of the philosophy of modernity that seeks to pit the correctness and superiority of modern science against the errors of all past belief systems.

The image to the left is a 14th century illustration of Europeans walking on the round earth. The second image in the picture shows men being drawn to the earth by gravity rather than falling off. That's historical evidence folks. In spite of this, our image of them is a total fantasy: the backward establishment pointing to maps with dragons on them and a giant waterfall out past Europe with Christopher the rogue genius claiming something that was so unheard of that he was some kind of crazy radical. This was not the case at all.

The evidence points to a more scientific debate between Columbus and his rivals about the location of east Asia on the globe in terms of degrees based on the debated diameter of the Earth. Everyone at the table knew it was possible in theory. That was not the debate. Some just thought that ship technology would not cover the calculated distances using the numbers proposed over a thousand years ago by Eratosthenes. This historically accurate view means that science and religion can coexist (even cooperate) and we can't have that. It points to smart ancestors and we can't have that either. So... we believe total fiction instead.

(For the record Christopher's calculations were wrong and his critics back in Europe had been right all along because Eratosthenes was far more accurate than Posidonius. Had the Americas not been there to save him, Columbus would have run out of supplies and died... just as his opponents had predicted.)

I quote historians David Linberg and Ronald Numbers: "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even knew its approximate circumference." How about Jeffery Russell who says that "with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century BC onward believed that the earth was flat."

3rd Centruy BC. So... Christ lived in a time where the educated were so advanced that they knew that they lived on a round earth by pure mathematical calculations, observational physics, and the scientific method.... any of you higher critics or old-earth theologians out there have any thoughts on that? ...nobody?

We were all taught that "middle ages thought the earth was flat" myth in school by our substandard education system. Like dopes we just ate it up and didn't do any study to test what we were told by the powers that be. We took it on blind faith. It is as false as gods living on the mountain of Olympus. Now who is the ignorant savage that is living in a dark age filled with baseless superstition and ideologically motivated errors? hmmm? :)

A Difficult Challenge

"Tis better to suffer wrong than do it."

-Thomas Fuller

I Knew It! ...or did I?

I could never really describe the delusional problem that we all seem to suffer from. Today I stumbled on a few articles on these studies. At last, the ugly truth has a name.

The Real Problem

The greatest allies of a failing bureaucracy are not the bureaucrats; they are the common people who believe that the bureaucracy could be used for good if only it was steered in the right direction. Bureaucracy isn't a big ship with a bad captain. It's an oil slick. It isn't a productive machine that is just going the wrong direction. It is the juggernaut that systematically destroys all productive ideas because it is in its very nature to do so. The man who tries to harness a wild bureaucracy for "good" is as foolish as the various heroes of story and legend who--in their hubris--thought that they should try to control the mighty cave beast rather than just slay it.

"Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work"
-Albert Einstein

"Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
-Oscar Wilde

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."
-Mary McCarthy

"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing."
-Thomas Sowell

"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies."
-Honre de Balzac

"Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients."
-Alan Keys

Purpose Driven Toyota.

About the same time that the contemporary Christian church began to advance the idea of a Purpose Driven church, the business practices of the 1990s began promoting a new business paradigm. It's vision casting ideas were in all of the business and manufacturing books and the church basically copied those ideas word for word in their new church growth books.

If there was one shining example of business in those days, it was Toyota. Toyota had gone from mediocre to awesome so fast and their innovations were state of the art that no one company highlighted this new way of doing business better. If you sat in a business meeting or a manufacturing floor in the 90s, you heard about Toyota and how their successes had to be copied. If you read a business book or went to school for business, Toyota usually came up as an illustration of the latest business practices. Toyota was the Willow Creek of the business world... or should that be the other way around?

So, by proxy, the church was chasing after this kind of business model. The business ethic of thinkers like Toyota has as much to do with the Church Growth as anything else. It is no coincidence that the cracks in the mission of the new church are beginning to show as the recalls, lawsuits, and government investigations loom over the poster boy for purpose driven secular business.

Read this article about what went wrong with Toyota. It is a business critique of success over quality that is eerily similar to the church critique over the Purpose Driven movement. The similarity is no coincidence.

Now it is time for the church to follow the lessons of Toyota once again. When you skip quality and humble listening for bigger numbers in a spreadsheet, you fail.

Grand experiment over. Let's get back to work.

The Hidden Horror of Gospel-less Ministry

It's horrible that some churches aren't preaching the gospel correctly to their people. What people rarely consider is the horrible truth that so many of them don't ever "fix" their ministry problems when tragedy hits.

When you don't give the gospel to people in the congregations, you don't have the mindset and experience that you need to deliver the gospel in times of crisis and critical illness. If you don't understand Law and Gospel from the pulpit or in the pew, you won't know what to say at the bedside. Even the best of us have trouble in emotionally difficult situations so, if you aren't immersed in the Gospel, you aren't going to dust that off and declare repentance and the forgiveness of sins when it really really counts.

For all the talk of relevance, helping, and healing people, if you don't have the gospel then you've got nothing in clutch time. All of your rhetoric and platitudes mean nothing in those crushing times when all human words fail. I've been there. I've stood by the beds as the trendy pastors mumble positive thinking and empty hope. I've been at the scenes of a violent death where counselors don't know what to say or they say things that make it all so much worse.

This is the hidden shame of Christ-less Christianity. Nothing they have to offer is eternal... and so it becomes an insulting joke when death looms.

How Free is our Will?

Okay... so this is not about theological Free Will. This is about us and our free will in earthly terms when it comes with our powers of choice in dealing with ourselves and others. In that context I ask, "How free is our will?"

Even if you are one of those rare individuals who is humble and honest enough to admit that Total Depravity is the correct doctrine regarding our disposition towards God, there are still many otherwise intelligent people who frankly delude themselves into thinking that they are virtually immune to influences that affect their judgement.

So can the human mind be totally independent? Of course not and we wouldn't really want to achieve that. You want to be open minded. The key is not to be empty minded. The idea that we are independent moral agents which are incapable of being seduced by others is just not backed up by history or science. It is not as though people who fall under these influences are some how defective or weak. Everyone, in the right circumstances, can be pressured and manipulated. Half the time we manipulate ourselves!

This is important because about the worst way to approach any situation or idea is to go into it with a "that could never happen to me" attitude. The generations past called this hubris and it was considered the very definition of foolishness that doomed even the most noble of intentions.

The fact is that it looks like our subjective human experience is alot less reliable than we want to believe. Even worse than that, our grasp of objective truth is far from rock solid. In both cases, the people around us and the situations that we find ourselves in have a tremendous amount of influence on the very nature of our judgement. These problems of perception suggest that any attempt to understand truth must be done with a sober mind and a very critical eye (and often times that means a self-critical eye.)

I am going to include some links that highlight some research and stories that will give you an idea about what I am talking about. Please don't make these links the sum total of your research in these topics.

The concept of Groupthink is summarized in this wikipedia article.

Sometimes our own brain chemistry and mental health conspires against us. It makes us want to resolve things that don't initially make sense through any means possible. Read about cognitive dissonance here.

Sometimes we can experience very important emotional experiences that shape our lives, but these feelings may not be true or based in anything other than our own brains. After all these religious experiences can now be artificially created in lab conditions.

Sometimes we are alot weaker to peer pressure and authority than we want to admit. It affects our moral choices and claims to truth. Read about the Milgram Experiment and the Asch Conformity Experiments.

Even when you get past these influences, the very way we think is much weaker than it used to be in previous ages. Check out this list of logical fallacies and become familiar with what they are talking about. Then you can start to examine the faulty assumptions and flawed arguments in your own world view. Better than that, you can start to tell when people are trying to convince you of things that just don't cut the mustard logically.

This is just a very shallow summary of what I am talking about when it comes to being a truly independent thinker, but you get the idea. Why is this important? Because when you recognize just how badly the deck is stacked against you, there is no choice but to actively engage in a careful quest for the truth underneath the layers of delusion. When you recognize all of the subtle tendencies that all humans have working on them, you can more easily recognize when you are being pushed around by something other than logic, ethics, and plain reason. Will you able to start thinking independently with total success? Of course not, but you stand a better chance of being clear headed than if you wander through life unprepared and under the assumption that you understand everything that matters.

Does any of this interest you? Do you have any thoughts or questions?

Amen!

Go read this post over at Confessional Gadfly.

Another Problem

Pastor Weedon made an excellent point about the gospel on his blog. It got me thinking of another really big problem that is really just a different manifestation of the exact same thing:

Another problem is when we get caught up in constantly worrying about how we are "doing church" or how we are "protecting the church" rather than just actually being the church.


...and, if you happen to think that we confessional Lutherans are in some way immune to this temptation as if to say that the danger of drifting away from being Christ-centered in favor of a focus on what men need to do is merely some external danger that only afflicts the less-enlightened people "out there", I would encourage you to engage in prayer and close self-examination in light of Holy Scripture with a spirit of humility and love.

How Will Ted Know if He is Not Told?

This happened in Iraq.

I was in the small chapel for music practice. I played piano for the contemporary service and organ for the liturgical (See? I can play nice with other people when I want to. :P) As the praise band finished their practice, I started picking the hymns for the litrugical service. The drummer for the praise band (we'll call him "Sergeant Ted") walked by and glanced over my selections. As I continued to go through my binder, he scanned the lyrics.

"I have a question," Sergeant Ted said. He then asked me, "Why are all these hymns so macabre? I mean why does there have to be so much blood in them?"

I responded, "Because, Ted, the Bible says that 'without the shedding of blood there is no forgivness of sins.' Christ's bloody death on the cross for the forgiveness of your sins is the only thing that can save you from hell. It is what Christianity is all about."

He stood up as if I had just said something very odd and remarked, "That's wierd."

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This is what Christless Christianity does to people. You can have regularly attending church members who help run the services as your worship leaders or musicians in the music program week after week for years and those people might still not even know why topics like blood and death would show up in a Christian song. This is more common than anyone wants to admit. Lord have mercy! If you want an evangelism opportunity, go find out where the Ted's in your church are hanging out and love them enough to share the gospel with them.