Did Religion Destroy the Alexandria Library?

There's a new meme running around among Progressives and militant atheists that says, "Religion is responsible for burning the famous ancient library at Alexandria, Egypt."  The story goes on that Christians burned the library and that if they hadn't we'd be living on other planets and driving flying cars today. It's easy to say what would have been from the safety of a millennium and a half distance in time and easy to assign blame when you don't have to string up crime scene tape.

It's a lot of balderdash, besides, but why "waste a good lie" to paraphrase a former White House Aid - especially when you can use it to make your enemies look bad. 

The truth is rather different.  The Alexandria library actually suffered several fires during it's history. Julius Caesar more or less accidentally set fire to it in 48 BC during a battle for the city.

Roman Emperor Aurelian lit it up again around 270 AD during the sack of Alexandria during his war with Queen Zenobia. Troops got a bit enthusiastic and burned a goodly bit of it.

The one ostensibly Christian foray into library burning was instigated under Coptic Bishop and later Pope Theophilus.  After a spate of pagan, Muslims and Jewish attacks on Christians and a couple of riots in which everyone participated, Theophilus ordered reprisals and then promptly died. Stories have it that he had the cheeky female chief librarian, Hypatia assassinated, but he was dead well before Hypatia's murder so is not likely the culprit. In all the kerfuffle the restored library was burned in 391. It was done mostly for political reasons, but why ruin a good anti-religion story.  The Bishop at the time apparently thought all that book-learning was making it difficult to subjugate the Egyptian pagans and Jews.  Typical government thinking.

The Muslims finished off what was left when they conquered Egypt in 642.  So the idea that Christians or even "religion" destroyed the library is absurd. Virtually every decision to torch the scrolls was a political one, even those made under the guise of religion. Keeping people ignorant is a technique most frequently used by governments to insure the peons are too stupid to make trouble.  Religious people tend to revere the written word.

The only written words revered by governments are found on the Tax Rolls.

© 2013 by Tom King

Pro-Obama Art - Putting the Fun in Making Fun

by Olga Kuczer

I added the "comment". The original painting was submitted straight as a tribute to President Obama. What's really sad about this picture is that the artist, Olga Kuczer, says she painted it because, "I really Hope People will look at this painting and Believe in Good Changes are coming in America with Obama.” The capital letters are hers. I'm sure she has absolutely no idea why, when most of us look at this image, we see echoes of the sycophantish worship of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and Mao and a thousand other charismatic leaders who were going to save "the people" and change their countries for the better - and then proceeded to give us the gas ovens, the gulags, mass starvation, genocide and tyranny.  Ms. Kuczer cannot possibly realize what a horror this image represents to hundreds of millions of us. There's more stuff like this at the Art of Obama website. Take some Dramamine first. You'll need it.

Olga got some negative comments on her art even on the pro-Obama website that original version was posted to. What's particularly telling is that her responses reveal that she has no clue as to why anyone would take offense.  Her response is that "Everybody sees what they want to see." Boy does she have that right. It's what's scary about the Obama acolytes. They see what they want to see, not what is. When more Americans become like Olga and don't cringe at idea of someone exchanging a man's image for that of Lady Liberty, we are so done as a free nation!

Can you imagine the horror and outrage in the media if someone had painted THIS picture 8 years ago???

The left would react with the same horror that conservatives find in the original image of Obama destroying Lady Liberty from within.  It's ironic that a painting in honor of President Obama would so clearly depict what his administration is doing to this country.  Unfortunately for all of us, the irony is lost on sycophants. They always have this surprised look on their faces as their dear leader cues them  up for the trains to Treblinka.

© 2013 by Tom King

ABC's Rick Klein Gives "Helpful" Advice to Republicans

Rick Klein - Boy King of all things
Political at ABC News

Ditch the Tea Party Candidates

Yahoo News' gleeful analysis of two East Coast state governor's races draws the conclusion that Republicans ought to reject the Tea Party conservative wing for candidates that are just slightly right of center - a formula for disaster virtually everywhere else in the country except the East Coast. Author Rick Klein cites Chris Christie's success in New Jersey and Tea Party supported conservative Ken Cuccinelli apparently losing campaign in Virginia as THE examples of what's wrong with the Republican Party.

Before the GOP starts taking advice from Klein, the brother of openly leftist Huffpo columnist Ezra Klein and would-be guru of all things political, as the new political director at ABC, they might want to consider the source of all this helpful advice and the premise behind it.

New Jersey as Klein's article points out is "Deep Blue" and Virginia, while ostensibly a Southern State, is virtually a parish of Washington DC so far as the number of Northern Virginians working in the capital goes. So many DC workers depend on Democrats for their continued and growing employment opportunities these days that the modern Army of Northern Virginia while still distinctly pro-Democrat, supports a very different party from the one that poor white Southerners fought for in the name of "States Rights". The Democrat party's pro-union and anti-states rights policies are the polar opposite of what Bobby Lee's descendents once claimed to have fought for, although very much pro-rich plantation owner if you judge by the number's of so-called 1 percenters that contribute heavily to Democrats.

Rick Klein's "strategy" to help the Republicans win elections might work in a heavily Yankee state like Jersey or the new Virginia, though I suspect that what the Yankees like most about Christie is his saucy, kick-ass rhetoric rather than his Republican-ness.  However, Klein's advice to kick the Tea Party conservatives to the curb would pretty much finish dividing the party and secure a Democrat majority ad nauseum anywhere west of the Alleghenies or East of the Sierras - which is likely just what Mr. Klein hopes for.

Klein, trained in the best leftist journalism schools, buys the mistaken premise that one captures the moderate "swing vote" best by running a moderate candidate, despite the fact that the moderate lost to the leftist in both of the last two elections. The only big wins for Republicans in the past 40 years have been when they've run a hard nosed conservative for president and similarly conservative candidates in most of the heartland.

What Klein neglects to mention in his "advice" is, that if the Republicans run a bunch of Chris Christies next go round, the Tea party will exit stage right and take their votes with them to a third party, or worse, to nowhere at all. Given the leftist tone over at the Libertarian Party, it's not likely they'll go there, so a fourth party (if you count the Libertarians as a party) becomes an even more likely possibility, leaving the plurality of votes solidly in the hands of the Democrats and likely to remain there.


How much more entertaining would it be for an ABC political director to have three or four political parties upon which to opine?


© 2013 by Tom King