Bad example since we don't have a great deal of source material to evaluate (the burning of books in Alexandria) as is the case for the existence of Jesus Christ.
well Greg , having such scant historical facts and source material is usually what is the case when you go on systematic campaigns burning books ( and heretics) for centuries , for the credit of your own mythmaking machine. One can't have to much competition from othersources if you have a great story to sell . A story with all of its elements stolen or borrowed , right down to the "God/Savior/Judge/Son".
We do have pretty good ideas of the number of volumes written in the cases of many poets , playwrights, philosophers and mathematicians from antiquity , and we are so lucky to have what little was preserved . One can be fair that there were many libraries that suffered from the destruction and vagaries of many wars and even natural catasptophes . In 365, Egypt, Sicily, Dalmatia and Greece were inundated by a tsunami that an earthquake drove two miles inland. With 50,000 people died in Alexandria alone.
A Roman Emperor commanded the mass incineration of all NON-Christian books in 373, the year the Castillians burned down Lisbon. A Christian mob led by the archbishop of Alexandria, destroyed its Serapeum (Temple of Serapis) in 391. That was the same year a Byzantine Emperor ordered every pagan temple razed. In 401, the final version of Ephesus’ Temple of Artemis was destroyed, by order of St. John Chrysostom.
Some historians attribute the next thousand years’ Dark Age to these acts of Christian fanaticism. You may not want to believe at all in this kind of book burning and persecution of knowledge took place, for you can easily post here that that you "believe" there is not sufficient evidence . Such is the nature of "belief" as we persecute the truth.
You can’t stage a respectable Dark Age without burning all the books beforehand ...I'm sure the God you believe in would never allow you to be so "heretical" as to percieve that. There are many over in Islam that feel just as ardently as you.
Its more fun to stay in the sandbox , head submerged.
;-)
PS: I seem to remember the burning of those Beatle records before ....not a great incident , but one can only wonder on what violent scale the purges were back in the 4th century by the overzealous rampaging Christian bigots then ? But that would invite you to use reason and intuition and a clearly focussed unbiased hindsight .
Let's make sure to stay hunkered down far inside the tunnels and catacombs of belief , OK ? |
