The Pokey Finger of God

A recent religion post contained something of a broad statement. It was a conclusion I had drawn without the benefit of third-party confirmation. What I had said was that the term “Christian” did not just apply to those who followed the “Jesus Movement”, but also those who followed any of a dozen Hellenized, Asian mystery [...]

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More notes on the development of culture and the creation of Roman Christianity.
Ancient city-states often worshiped a triad of deities who were, collectively, believed to represent and protect their host city. While several cities may have shared one god or another, the people within a particular city would be faithful to the specific manifestation of [...]

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History is a funny thing. Written history goes back four thousand years, and yet there are periods simply rife with myth to the point that it didn’t matter if “actual” history had been recorded. There does appear to be a natural tendency for famous people to accumulate mythology as they become farther removed from the [...]

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I had promised a review of Franz Cumont’s Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. It is difficult for me to stop where I am with the book and make these few statements, as I desperately want to spend more time tracing out the various ideas and go about verifying his assertions.
In these few lectures, Franz Cumont [...]

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“It hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be,” Barron said. “I really wasn’t for beer. `Course, we had the country club here and I didn’t like that either.”source

Highway 87 drains out of Lubbock through Dawson County and past the happy little town of Lamesa. Like most of West Texas, Dawson County fortunes [...]

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My current book is Michael Grant’s The Etruscans, self-published in 1980. His view of urban development is very organic, seeing it as a disorganized collection of little steps rather than a tidy, straight-line shift. Unlike other writers, who have the Etruscans pop fully-developed from the head of the Alps, Grant describes how the Etruscans represented [...]

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As part of my study of the development of religion and culture, there is a lot I’d like to know about how things got to be the way they are. Unfortunately, many of the most important decisions were made way back in the hidden mists of unrecorded, prehistoric times. We’ll never know exactly which tribes [...]

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A recent revelation in my religious studies has taken more than the usual amount of time to digest. The resulting effervescent fountain of nested implications has kept me busy for a while.
Possibly the biggest question for me has always been based on a need to understand how the whole of Western Europe voluntarily abandoned dozens [...]

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