The militant mystic is on a 'downvote' spree again. Obviously, evidence of a big flood is not evidence of the mythology.

You just repeated an Objecticist article of faith contrary to an array of known facts. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) did not "introduce" Aristotle to the Church. It was Gerbert d'Aurillac (946-1003) Pope Sylvester II who brought Greek learning back to Europe as a result of his studies among the Muslims of Spain. He also brought the astrolabe and "Arabic" numbers.

Your hatred for religion, rooted though it may be in reason, eclipses too much, not the least of which is that your highly valued Greeks and Romans were just as religious as the people of the Middle Ages. For the Greeks from about 650 BCE to about 300 CE from the Crimea to Spain and from Egypt to England, traditional religion did not have a monopoly on customary ethics. However, remember that Anaxagoras, Aspasia, and Socrates were all tried for impiety. Even after 400 BCE, Diogenes the Cynic engaged and challenged pious people in the streets. That he got away with it marks a change, but that was one full generation maybe a lifetime after your "Golden Age of Athens" in the time of Pericles - when Anaxagoras and Aspasia were tried for impiety.

We call it the Roman Catholic Church for a reason. If you know anything about the sociology of republican Rome you can see the root and rock of the Christian Church in the Vestal Virgins, the elected priests, and the fact that one of the titles of the Pope is "Pontifex Maximus" i.e., the head guy in charge of maintaining all the bridges. (Later, they said that he was a "bridge" between God and man, but that was not the origin of the title.) The very word religion a Latin word has LEX and then legio as a root: to bind, as in ligature. Nothing says "Rome" like "legion" and "law." Roman lictors carried the fasces in ceremonies.

Compared to that, the high Middle Ages were a wild and heady time of new ideas, new customs, new words, new ideas... including the fact that Aristotlean argument moved into the mainstream of Church doctrine via Thomas Aquinas. But there were other people - largely anonymous; some not - who advanced real learning and real science.

And some of it was religiously motivated. After 1000 AD it was clear that Jesus was not coming back anytime soon. ... But they had the means to project the calendar centuries into the future. And centuries later they could see the drift in the numbers. By the time of Thomas Aquinas - who as far as I know did not write about Astronomy - they measured and remeasured the precession of the equinox and the distance to Saturn. They worried about that not because of Christmas, but because of Easter. Until about 1000 AD, the best advice the Church could give was to ask. your Jewish neighbors when Passover is.

I could go on all day about this. Ayn Rand blew through the Middle Ages in two paragraphs of FNI. She had a point to make. But just like her opinions on Darwin and the hemlines of skirts, not everything ex cathedra is error free.

"Objectivists value the scientific method as the cornerstone of the engineering achievements of our civilization from structural trusses and direct current to alternating current and cybernetics. We too easily see the Middle Ages as a time of ignorance and barbarism in which learning was chained to (and by) theology. The reality is more complicated." -- "Science in the Middle Ages" here: https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2...

"In fact, because of the religious viewpoint, the very scale of the measurable universe and the comparatively small size of the (spherical; not flat) Earth, were substantiating evidence to the relative unimportance of Earthly affairs. Saturn's orbit was estimated to be 72 million miles from Earth. (McCluskey, page 203)."

The brain can do many things but it can't view itself, inspect itself nor control it's own temptations. The ultimate desire for power and control is not only a hubris one but a non introspective one.

In other words, if they were truly conscious beings, possessing a conscience, they would think twice about what they were doing or at least hate themselves for it...we actually see a lot of that these days.

That's my take anyway, Irshuttis, and I think I will stick to it, until I learn of and convinced of, something different.
After all, that's what "Conscious Beings" do.

If you can prove it didn't happen, more power to you. But ask yourself this: since you don't believe it happened, why does it matter?

The "big picture" was to live for the supernatural and do your duty to the edicts of a god. That does not "translate" to "being productive, inventive and honest with self and others" or rational self interest.

The "emerging consciousness" line is the usual meaningless New Age nonsense. Humans during that era already were fully conscious and aware of themselves. How else do you think they left a record of what they were thinking? But there is no record that they had any concept of or talked in terms of the "automatic brain"; they were torn in a false alternative between range of the moment irrational feelings and following their authoritarian duty because they had no understanding of Aristotelian rational thought and egoism that came later or not recognized or ignored. Today we know how the subconscious is 'programmed' by one's choices in thinking and that emotional reactions are responses to values accepted consciously or by default.

Right now, I am reading The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World by L:aura j. Snyder (Broadway Books, 2011). Charles Babbage, William Whewell (who invented the word "scientist" in an argument with Samuel Taylor Coleridge), William Herschel, and Richard Jones fell out with each other after 50 years largely over religious interpretation. Everyone accepted that species come and go. The fossils that were revealed fiirst by coal mining then by canal building established that. Does God create each new species? Babbage the computer maker said that God made a programmable universe that changes its actions according to a scheme invented once and left to run: "the divine clockmaker" of the Enlightenment. They had a hard time giving up the idea of God. Darwin - a frequent guest of Babbage's - eventually did.

"People did see things that were real, and wove them into their myths." Agreed. One interpretation of the "floating rocks" seen by the Argonauts is that it was ice, a phenomenon unknown to the Greeks. "Walrus" means "foreign horse" and "hippopotamus" is "river horse" and the rhinoceros became the "unicorn." The historical Jesus is less well established than those.

"Real events from history that may be confirmed have no implications for a claimed validity of the rest ..." George Washington did not throw a silver dollar across the Potomac, but maybe he did throw a piece of slate across the Rappahnnock. In any case, we are pretty firm in our acceptance of the reality of George Washington. That brings us back to the historical Jesus. As far as I know, the only existing manuscripts - copies of copies - of Josephus Flavius's "History of the Jews" have been altered and re-altered so that no trace of the original can be detected. So, I have no opinion beyond that on the question of who was born when.

"Do you think they are all attempts at rationalization?" Yes. All kinds of things are always haopening in the sky. According to the two different accounts in the New Testament, the range of dates is 4 BCE to 6CE. Use your sky calendar to find your favorite interpretation. Note also, that astronomy aside, modern scientists offer different constellations as being indicative of the Jews: Aries or Pisces? Or was it in the constellation of the Virgin? Take your pick. The first "son of God" born on the Solstice was Octavius Caesar. That was just one element of pagan religion that was adopted into Christianity.

But for personal reasons, aesthetic reasons, from the context of an amateur astronomer who goes out in the backyard with his telescope, I found it more satisfying to write it as I did, versus saying "All you guys are wrong."

You can argue with Lucky all you want, but he did not write the article. MEM.