A Greek Orthodox religion comics. A saint condemns ancient Greek religion in front of a Artemis temple. God hearing his prayers destroys the temple. Why did the fanatic “artist” not use directly the Parthenon instead the Artemis temple?
Religion
and Science
Napoleon: How is it that,
although you say so much about the Universe, you say nothing about
its Creator?
Laplace: No, Sire, I had no need of that
hypothesis.
Lagrange: Ah, but it is such a good hypothesis: it
explains so many things!
Laplace: Indeed, Sire, Monsieur Lagrange
has, with his usual sagacity, put his finger on the precise
difficulty with the hypothesis:
it explains everything, but
predicts nothing.
Conversation between
Laplace and Lagrange mediated by Napoleon, DeMorgan's Budget of
Paradoxes
A
Greek Orthodox religion comics. A saint condemns ancient Greek
religion in front of a Artemis temple. God hearing his prayers
destroys the temple. Why did the fanatic “artist” not use
directly the Parthenon instead the Artemis temple?
Pope Alexander III forbade "the study of physics or the laws of the world", to all ecclesiastics, and ordered that any person violating this rule "small be avoided by all and excommunicated."
Is there an explanation why science was developed by the ancient Greeks and was their religion for this important? I like one remark that ancient Greek “Religion” was invented by a few poets. The gods may have been imported from older civilizations but they were transformed and made almost “ in the image of humans”.
An explanation is provided in an article of the Brittanica Encyclopedia:
There seems to be no good reason why the Hellenes, clustered in isolated city-states in a relatively poor and backward land, should have struck out into intellectual regions that were only dimly perceived, if at all, by the splendid civilizations of the Yangtze, the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Nile valleys. There were many differences between ancient Greece and the other civilizations, but perhaps the most significant was religion. What is striking about Greek religion, in contrast to the religions of Mesopotamia and Egypt, is its puerility. Both of the great river civilizations evolved complex theologies that served to answer most, if not all, of the large questions about mankind's place and destiny. Greek religion did not. It was, in fact, little more than a collection of folk tales, more appropriate to the campfire than to the temple. Perhaps this was the result of the collapse of an earlier Greek civilization, now called Mycenaean, toward the end of the 2nd millennium BC, when a dark age descended upon Greece that lasted for three centuries. All that was preserved were stories of gods and men, passed along by poets, that dimly reflected Mycenaean values and events. Such were the great poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which heroes and gods mingled freely with one another. Indeed, they mingled too freely, for the gods appear in these tales as little more than immortal adolescents whose tricks and feats, when compared with the concerns of a Marduk or Jehovah, are infantile. There really was no Greek theology in the sense that theology provides a coherent and profound explanation of the workings of both the cosmos and the human heart. Hence, there were no easy answers to inquiring Greek minds. The result was that ample room was left for a more penetrating and ultimately more satisfying mode of inquiry. Thus were philosophy and its oldest offspring, science, born.
...The
Greek looked out upon the world through an atmosphere singularly free
from the mist of allegory and myth: the contrast between the
philosophy of the East and the first attempts of the Ionian
physicists is as striking as the difference between an Indian jungle
and the sunny, breeze-swept shores of the Mediterranean. Greek
Religion exercised hardly more than an indirect influence on Greek
philosophy. Popular beliefs were so crude as to their speculative
content that they could not long retain their hold on the mind of the
philosopher. Consequently, such influence as they directly exercised
was antagonistic to philosophy. Yet it was the popular beliefs which,
by keeping alive among the Greeks an exquisite appreciation of form
and an abiding sense of symmetry, did not permit the philosopher to
take a partial or an isolated view of things. In this way Greek
religion indirectly fostered that imperative desire for a totality of
view which, in the best days of Greek speculation, enabled Greek
philosophy to attain its most important results
Encyclopedia
Britannica, History of Science
I am not sure if there was any culture that had a similar religion like the ancient Greeks in which the gods were so anthropomorphic, had all the weakness of humans. Is it a crime that Zeus had relations with so many mortal women? (around 115 names are known)
As good Christians expect he should only love Hera, if we ignore that she was his sister. Can we consider so many “gods”, one for hunting, one for wine etc. (even one for Thieves – Hermes) seriously as gods as Xenophanes of Colophon criticized? (ει χείρας είχον βόες <ίπποι τε> ηέ λέοντες, ή γράψαι χείρεσι και έργα τελείν άπερ άνδρες, ίπποι μεν ίπποισι βόες δε βουσίν ομοίας και θεών ιδέας έγραφον και σώματα εποίουν τοιαύθ’ οίον περ αυτοί δέμας είχον <έκαστοι> “But if cattle and horses and lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the form of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle”)
Roman Copy of a Greek Hermes (430 BC) who sometimes has not only shoes with wings but also wings on his head.
As Herodotus explains the “Greek” gods were imported from Egypt and Libya and other places. Plato tries in Cratylus to explain the name of Poseidon:
Socrates:
Then let us next take his two brothers, Poseidon and Pluto, whether
the latter is called by that or by his other name.
Hermogenes:
By all means.
Socrates:
Poseidon is Posidesmos, the chain of the feet; the original inventor
of the name had been stopped by the watery element in his walks, and
not allowed to go on, and therefore he called the ruler of this
element Poseidon; the e was probably inserted as an ornament. Yet,
perhaps, not so; but the name may have been originally written with a
double l and not with an s, meaning that the God knew many things
(Polla eidos). And perhaps also he being the shaker of the earth, has
been named from shaking (seiein), and then p and d have been added.
Plato Cratylus
Religion unites and divides people. The Ptolemies in Egypt invented new gods, a mixture of the Greek and Egyptian gods, to produce a new religion accepted by the Greek and Egyptian population.
Quotations
I think. Therefore I am not a Christian K. Deschner
It was subtle of God to learn Greek when he wished to become an author -- and not to learn it better. F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
St. Paul, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, who called the wisdom of the Greeks foolishness, was drawn to their , and found himself accommodating his gospel to the style, and quoting verses from the poets of this alien race. After him, the Church, which was born to protest against Hellenism, translated its dogmas into the language of Greek thought and finally crystallized them in the philosophy of Aristotle. R. W. Livingstone, The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2nd revised edition , 1915.
There is another form of temptation... This is the disease of curiosity ... which drives us to try and discover the secrets of Nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing, and which man should not wish to learn.
Saint Augustine
Surprisingly there are some trends to revive ancient Greek religion (not only in Greece) and there is unfortunately a “fanatic holly war” between the “official” church and the paganistic groups.
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