Dear Poirot,

Quite possibly most Greeks at the time of Eratosthenes were aware that the world was round. At that time the Bible was not clouding up their minds. John Dragoumis, the cultural attache to the Greek embassy on London, said that the arrival of Christianity was death to Greek culture. I am not sure I quoted him accurately, but that was the sense of what he said.

David f.,

Too true.

Another interesting subject is Islamic guardianship and preservation of much ancient Greek knowledge during the Dark Ages when Christianity held sway in Europe.

Last night I watched the new film "Agora", all about the rise and barbarism of Christianity in Alexandria between 300 and 400 AD, scenes including the trashing of the library, numerous stonings and the appallingly cruel torture and killing of the brilliant philosopher Hypatia by the Christian mob. Roman rule, barbarous in its own right, had to be overthrown, but the Christians set back philosophy and learning for a thousand years.

Syriac Christians and oriental Jews, often collaborating, preserved much of the writings of the ancient world which were lost to Europe. These peoples were able to keep their identity to a large extent after the Islamic conquests and made Islamic scholars aware of these works. Europeans then got those works from Islamic scholars. This was one of the influences on the Renaissance.

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-closing-of-the-western-mind-by-charles-freeman-642541.html

Freeman points an accusing finger at early Christianity – the charge being that the authority of the church and its political supporters destroyed "the tradition of rational thought" that was "among the major achievements of the classical world".

Sometimes in the fourth or fifth centuries CE, he insists, faith won out over reason. It was a victory which determined the course of Western culture until, in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas re-discovered Aristotle and restored the place of scientific research.
Even the most fervent exponents of the irrationality of the classical world would accept that much of our own tradition of scientific enquiry finds its ancestor among the Greeks of the fifth century BCE, rather than in early Christian culture a millennium later. As Freeman points out, the Western tradition of astronomy is often said to go back to the correct prediction of an eclipse by the Greek scientist Thales in 585 BCE. The last recorded astronomical observation of antiquity was by the pagan philosopher Proclus in 475 CE. It was not until the 16th century that "these studies began to move forward again".

The review also is critical of the book. Look it up for those parts.

There was a great deal of irrationality in the ancient world, but in general polytheism was much more tolerant of dissent and enquiry than monotheism.

The Moors in Spain had a crucial influence on the preservation of ancient knowledge - and in the development of their own.

http://www.culturespain.com/articles/what-did-the-moors-do-for-us

Talking about the irrationality that existed in the ancient world...

I came across an interesting article on the web (sorry, I've lost the link). But the questions being asked were:

"Since when do we respond by burning things that upset us? The answer given was - for millenia actually. Christians were burned for years and they didn't enjoy it. There was Joan of Arc. There were people who thought Harry Potter books were the "devil's text."

Books are supposed to be the repository of history and cultural memory and the ink on their papers will last for generations, but light a match and there goes the library of Alexandria. The author of
the article went on to say - "I've always hoped that book burning would be one of those things we'd leave behind once we became more enlightened (once they installed indoor plumbing in your home).
I think book burning is always a sign that something has gone awry in our civilisation..."

"It's impossible to boil any religion down to a single sentence. As some people have tried to do (recently - Jones in the US with the burning of the Koran) and others on both sides of the debate. To say
"Christianity is purely a religion of peace," is as great a fallacy as to say "Christianity is founded on hatred." The Bible encompasses both cloud and fire, both turning the other cheek and the arm of the Lord that smiteth..." There are those who read and believe it.