NEWS FLASH
the entire non-christian world believes in a totally different historical record than the christian world, evidence is turned up in the mid-east - mostly in israel - that flies in the face of what the catholic church claims to be true, like all of the time.
i'm not talking earth-born-in-seven-days stuff but the life and times of jesus, the essenes / qumranians (sp?), etc.
emperor constantine pulled at least two books from the bible, that haven't made it back (for us), any historical investigation into this stuff without rose-coloured-dogmatic glasses reveals a whole wealth of information.
say what you want aboot the people of the mideast but while constant religious strife might be rampant from 1897 - today, the history previous to that is quite different, and little bits of this or that religion or sect survive to today, including in iraq what can be described as people carrying the torch from original christianity.
or in ireland, the celtic christian church, before st. patrick, before catholicism wiped everything else out, or adapted 'pagan' rituals to its own brand of christianity to better spread (ie. christmas from winter solstice-eat-people-under-the-tree-every-year)
gnostic christianity, kind of a catchall term, stems from pre-catholic christianity, just never had the backing of the roman empire, yet survives in little pockets all over the mideast where religious tolerance (with occasional exploitation) has been the general rule over the last 1500 years, unlike western europe, where until relatively recently (historically) it was "wit' us or agan' us"
these little nuggets come up all the time and are big news in say, jerusalem, but rarely heard of here.
millions of books, jeez, the bible the president swears in on has some of the missing books, none of this stuff is 'hidden' or 'secret', it is all out there for anyone interested. pull back the saran wrap on history!
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