B. U. G. S.

Back at the end of the nineteenth century it was generally agreed among intellectuals, as Nietsche out it, “God is Dead.” In academia, fashionable thought had moved from dieism to athiesm.

Which makes it particularly funny that at that time all of academia accepted the idea that most people still have, that civilization began and everything useful begean in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Middle East, since that is exactly what Old Testament Christianity insisted on then and insists on today. If an Old Testament believer can’t ascribe everything to Israel, they point to Egypt with total fanaticism.

So both “God is dead” academics, then and many now, still insisted that everything decent came from the Middle East and declared that the greatest enemyof their own Truth was the fundamentalist Christians, while the fundamentalist Christians insisted that everything decen came from the Middle East, and that THEIR worst enemies were the “God is ded” academics.

But everybody agreed on both sides that OUR ancestors, the Indo-Europeans, were just a bunch of ragged, unwashed, illiterate savages who were stagnating until the Light from the East came to them.

This weird allaince is no accident. That happened was this:

In the middle ofthe nineteenth century, the only archeology that had been going on was in the area of the Bible. It went back a LONG way. Theodora, wife of Constantine the Great, went to Palestine and found The True Cross and dug up a number of other unlikely things. For over a millennium, pilgrims and others were digging in the Middle East.

A truth that is so obvious that it would only be discussed in Bob’s Blog is this: You find things where you look for them most. So while people in the city of Rome were sitting in the midst of the ruins of antiquity, they went off to Palestine to dig for The Important History. The result was that by the late nineteenth century, all the academics knew about the ancient past was right there around Palestine.

So, by the most incredible coincidence, acadmeics decided that all history did not come from Israel, Syria and Iraq, where the Bible took place, but from Mesopotamia and Egypt, which happened to be right next door on both sides! So the “God is dead” academics said everything came from Egypt and Mesotomia while the fundamentalists insisted everything came from Palestine.

This was and IS very stupid of both groups. Nobody in the Bible claimed that HISTORY came from there. No one knows where the Garden of Eden was supposed to be, and Mount Ararat is a LONG way from Palestine and Egypt.

Mount Ararat is where all man mankind is supposed ot have been after the Great Flood, and Mount Ararat is suspiciously close to the probable Aryan place of origin, which is now the Black Sea in Russia.

But the academics were stupider. They never questioned the fact that they were simply looking where all the work had been done and all therefore where all the stuff had been FOUND for a thousand years. They weren’t about to go out and LOOK for history in a new location.

So both sides of this alliance agreed, and believe today, that our ancestors wee just picking bugs out of loinclothes while everything began in the Fertile Crescent.

The biblical crowd don’t undersand the difference between religion and history, and that’s bad. But the academics claimed to be experts at REAL history, so the fact that they never thought to dig somewhere ELSE is WORSE.

So our numerical system is still called “Arabic numerals” even thought every literate person should know by now it came to Arabia from Aryan, Indo-European India. If you don’t think this is crucial, try multiplying using Roman numerals. But I was watching a documentary on Islam recently in which they once again said that the Arabs came up with our present numbering system.

This snake simply will not die.

So the fundamentalist/academic alliance simply cannot understand the first thing about REAL history. Fundamentalist feel that Jehovah would be insulted if they don’t give Palestine credit for starting everything, and the even stupider acadmics STILL try to squeeze all of history into the Middle East.

Social science, in this as in other areas, is fighting a losing battle. With carbon dating and other sceintific instruments, NONE of their Middle Eastern obsessions holds up. But they still teach it.

The reason for this is what economists call “sunk cost.” If the results of real historical research were talked about, history would have to be rewritten completely. Right now, history is very simple:

Everything started in the Middle East, so at the beginning of a world history course you study the names of Assyrian and Babylonian kings and a list of Pharoahs. Until you get to Greece, everybody else was just out there trying to get the ticks out of the raw animal skins they were running around in.