Hypatia was born in Alexandria in 370. She taught mathematics, astronomy, physics and perhaps many other things in the great Library of Alexandria. Alexandria was a melting pot of cultures. Alexander the Great had established the city many years before although by Hypatia's time it was under Roman rule. Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, was threatened by Hypatia's very existence. She was a brilliant rationalist thinker with friends in the government and many students. Her father had trained her to question dogma and think for herself.
She said "Fable should be taught as fable, myth as myth, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truth is horrifying. The mind of a child accepts them and only through great pain, perhaps tragedy, can the child be relieved of them. Men will fight for superstition as quickly as for the living truth - even more so, since a superstition is intangible you can't get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable." Hypatia was clearly well ahead of her time and clearly a threat to religious establishment. She even recognized the psychological terror religion causes young children, only recently being made public by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others.
Carl Sagan described Hypatia's death in Cosmos "In great personal danger, she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril's parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint." No living thing deserves that kind of sadistic end. She died ripped to pieces by Christians in a church.
Her story is relevant today because of the rise in militant faith among most major religious groups. The Christian fundamentalist resistance to modernity that began in the 1900s shares many similarities with the rise of extremist Islamic violence. Both are a reaction to changes. Both attempt to stifle the advancement of Science, cooperation, civil rights, and dignity for every living thing. The root of this aggression is faith. Faith is the enemy of reason and critical thinking. Sam Harris calls religious faith "unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern." Faith is at the root of the unjustified actions of the religious. It took men of great faith to commit the atrocities of 9/11, it took men of great faith to drink Jim Jones' or Applewhite's poisonous kool-aid. It takes great faith to be exposed to all the evidence for Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and still claim to believe the world is only 6,000 years old.
The answer to this problem is communication and education. The religious groups that seek to take dominion over the Unites States and Europe are enemies of education. They demonize colleges and universities as liberal mills. They associate environmentalism with paganism. They try to teach people that a blastocyst is a human in order to prevent women from being able to choose when to have a child. In some form or another they fight against nearly everything that offers humanity a bright future. Faith must be recognized as a liability and not a value to be respected.
This blog will be dedicated to the memory of Hypatia and everyone lost, tortured, raped, murdered, molested, or robbed by men and women of faith. Sadly, that includes quite a few people.
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