If it wasn’t for religion we’d be two thousand years ahead.
A BuzzFeed video titled 10 Facts That You Thought Were True takes ten popular myths and crosses them out, listing the true facts.
Einstein did not flunk math, it says – he mastered differential and integral calculus by the age of 15.
We don’t need seven years to digest chewing gum – it passes through the gut normally.
We don’t use 10% of our brain – we use 100%.
Etc.
The clip doesn’t offer elaborate explanations, which could shed more light on the matter. It doesn’t say, for example, that even though we use 100% of our brain, we probably use it to 10% of its capacity, which is what the myth is trying to convey.
Beyond the intriguing aspect of these busted myths and the facts behind them, something extraordinary jumped out at me.
It had to do with two facts. One, the earth’s round nature was not proven by Columbus, the video said; it was first discovered by the Ancient Greeks, circa 600 BC. And Darwin was not the first to propose the theory of evolution. A similar theory was proposed by Anaximander, a Greek philosopher, 2000 years prior to that.
Interesting!
Here’s where Greeks around the world rejoice, elated to see their ancestors behind some of the world’s greatest discoveries.
But that is not what is most intriguing here. There’s a far more interesting point to make.
See, some of the things we consider pack and parcel of the modern world were in fact developed, contemplated and explored much, much earlier. 2000 years earlier, to be precise.
So what happened? Why the 2000-year gap between the original discoveries and the ones we take for granted? Why did it take so long to expand on these theories?
Well, in a nutshell, Christianity happened! A belief system that demanded total obedience to a God that commanded blind faith plunged the world into a long Dark Age, taking most of the knowledge developed by the Ancient Greeks, Romans, and other prescient people to the grave. Fact!
Think about it. We had a thousand year delay in our evolution because we were hijacked by religious dogma and blind faith. What a monumental waste of time.
Which begs the question: dare we let this happen again in the name of a resurgent Christianity, a surging Islam, or any other religious creed that believes it has the answer to the world’s nature stashed in a couple of books and a string of traditions that stem from the Middle Ages?
Woe to us if we do. Let there be religion to enrich the dry materialism of science, but let it not dictate the way ahead.
If it does, we’re headed for a second Dark Age. Fact!
This article was originally posted in Urban Times