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From: alt.fan.jai-maharaj@googlegroups.com

DEBUNKING MYTHS ABOUT HISTORY

By C. K. Raju, Op-Ed, The Pioneer, dailypioneer.com
Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Western history was written exclusively by Christian
priests, who wanted to convert the entire world to
Christianity. A sustained debate is needed to expose the
lack of evidence for churchified history

One often hears about the saffronisataion of history but
never about its churchification. However, for some 1,500
years, Western history was written exclusively by
Christian priests. Their stated goal was to convert the
whole world to Christianity. Did they speak about the
unbiased truth of history? Hardly.

The first church historian, Eusebius, extravagantly
glorified the Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, who
enabled the church to marry the state -- a marriage
which swelled the coffers of the church. To enforce a
profitable monopoly, the Christians waged a war against
the surviving 'pagans'; they burnt down the Great Library
of Alexandria. The next church historian, Orosius, wrote
during this religious war. The very title of his book,
History Against the Pagans, shows it was a war
propaganda. He constantly belittled and denigrated
'pagans'.

This became the model of future church history,
glorifying itself and denigrating all 'others'. With the
rise of the Abbasid Caliphate, Constantinople (Istanbul)
became a tributary of Baghdad, which invested heavily in
knowledge, gathering it from all parts of the world,
especially India and China. The Baghdad Bayt-al-Hikma
seeded a culture of books, and huge libraries sprouted
across the Islamic world from Timbuctoo to Tashkent.

Many of these Arabic books were translated into Byzantine
Greek, in Istanbul. The translators (all priests of the
Greek church) injected their chauvinism into the
translated texts, planting stray remarks, attributing
authorship to Greek names, real or imaginary. Few people
are aware that unlike the Rhind papyrus, or Iraqi clay
tablets, there are no original Greek sources for the
purported achievements of Euclid, Archimedes, Claudius
Ptolemy, etc.

Unlike also the Indian case, there is no continuous chain
of intermediate commentaries which reproduce the original
in full. The 'evidence' for claims of Greek scientific
achievements comes from stray remarks in discontinuous
and late Byzantine Greek texts from over a thousand years
after the purported event. In fact, we do not actually
have even those 'early' Byzantine Greek sources (which
are only a thousand years late) but only purported copies
and translations of them from several centuries later.

This method of falsifying history by attributing all
early knowledge to Greeks turned virulent during the
Crusades. Militarily the Crusades (after the first) were
failures. A key reason for this failure, as reported by
Christian spies like Adelard of Bath, was that the
Christians were deficient in knowledge compared to
Muslims. Hence, the church now sought knowledge from
Muslims. An opportunity arose when Toledo fell, and its
huge library of Arabic books came under Christian
control. But the church dithered. Why?

The earlier church policy was to burn non-Christian books
as heretical. But now it wanted to learn from the books
of the religious enemy. That too during a religious war!
Therefore, an excuse had to be invented to make the
translations of Arabic books seem theologically correct.

It was claimed that all secular knowledge in Arabic books
was an exact replica of what the early Greeks did. Since
there were no early Greek sources, this claim was faith-
based. It is contrary to commonsense that a scientific
text would stay unchanged for a thousand years. But
evidence or commonsense did not matter to the church,
what mattered was that Eusebius had declared the early
Greeks as the (sole) "friends of Christians". Hence,
attributing the source of knowledge to early Greeks made
it a Christian inheritance! This flimsy excuse of Greek
origins enabled the mass translations of books in the
Toledo library, though many of these books were
nevertheless initially placed on the index.

Such acts of faith are not history. As David Fowler, a
leading expert on Greek mathematics, explained, the
earliest source for Archimedes is a Byzantine Greek text
supposedly from the ninth century. Alas, even that was
lost! What we actually have is a 16th century Latin text
asserted to be a translation of it, whereas it probably
reflects 16th century. knowledge. That is, all the
evidence for Archimedes comes from a 16th century text in
another language from another place, 1,800 years after
the purported date of Archimedes!

To call this 'evidence' is as fanciful as claiming that a
modern text on aerodynamics in English, from London, is
an exact replica of an unknown Sanskrit source from the
third century CE! The fanciful 'Archimedes palimpsest' is
hardly worth discussing.

The Greeks could not have done science because they
lacked sophistication in mathematics. Thus, the
Greek/Roman system of numeration was so primitive they
had no systematic way to represent fractions. Hence,
there was no way Archimedes could have done anything on
the sphere and cylinder (as Egyptians did). This
inability to work with precise fractions is seen also in
the calendar. Though the Romans laughed at the Greek
calends, and Julius Caesar reformed the calendar with
great fanfare, the Julian calendar remained defective
just because the Romans had no way to write the precise
fraction (not 365 � days) for the duration of the
(tropical) year.

This churchified history of Greek origins was later
systematically promoted by racist historians who
portrayed the Greeks (even from Alexandria in Africa) as
white. Colonial historians further advanced it, linking
the 'Hellenic' civilisation to the West. This claim
facilitated colonial education: The filtered history
written by losers in an earlier war, helped to
consolidate colonial power. Those who wrote a biased
version of history became victors.

We received this slanted history through colonial
education, failing to see it was church education. It was
intended to create a sense of inferiority among the
colonised, whether Indians or blacks in Africa.
Nevertheless, even 70 years after independence, we
continue to glorify those mythical Greeks and their
imagined achievements in our present-day school math
texts from NCERT and various States. This false history
is harmful in other subtle ways: Our entire teaching of
math is premised on the false history of 'Euclid', and
masks the demand to imitate church practices related to
its theology of reason.

The colonised mind is comfortable with churchified
history, even without evidence, but objects vociferously
to any modification. Our school texts must be changed,
but enforcing a change is counter-productive. This
results in a flip-flop in the school texts every time the
Government changes. A sustained public debate is needed
to expose the complete lack of evidence for churchified
history.

(The writer is an author)

http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/oped/debunking-myths-about-history.html

More news and views at:

The Pioneer
http://www.dailypioneer.com

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
http://bit.do/jaimaharaj

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