Irreverence

Someone said a pretty rude comment today that made me think.  We were discussing the desktop in Cashen's room of Kronos.  All the sudden someone said, "What does it matter, they didn't exist anyway?"

I got pretty ticked.  I know this probably was only speaking as a devout Christian, but little did they realize that their name was actually a name from Greek myth, which I won't mention for obvious reasons.

It just appalled me how they could make such an irreverent comment.  The religion of the ancient Greeks has influenced so much even up to modern times:

~ Days of the week...

~ Given names...

~ Countless artistic masterpieces (The Birth of Venus painted by Botticelli is one of the most famous works of art in world, and one of the theories about it (it is still be analyzed today) is that Botticelli was actually trying to depict Venus as both a Christian and Pagan symbol of love (that's imporant later...).  It's depicted below (some artistic nudity))...

~ Inspiration of thousands of great thinkers...

~ The beginning of the Renaissance started off the renewal of Classical ideas, many of which were derived from Greek myth!

~ The formation and content of Christianity even!!!

Believe it or not, some aspects of Pagan religions were added to Christianity to make it more appealing to "non-believers" and thus easier to convert them.  Example: Sunday was not the original day of Christian worship, but the Pagan day.  The Christians had the Sabbath, but Roman Pagans worshipped on Sun-Day the holy day of the religion Sol Invictus, or Invincible Sun.  That's where we get the name Sunday from today - it had been a compound word!  So when Christianity became a legal religion the holy day was set down as Sunday to make it acceptable to sun-worshippers.  There were some other common characteristics too to make it acceptable to both parties (don't forget The Birth of Venus, even though that was long after Christianity was legalized), but that's not what this entry is about.

So anyway, it made me think, that attitude toward different relgions is just what got us mixed up in this aweful war with Islam in the first place - an inability to respect each other's cultural differences.  And so I'm not sure how anything "can't matter".  Everything matters if you think about it.  Something as important as Greek mythology can't be called nonrelavent.

Tags: Life, History, Religion, Art