Tales of Times Forgotten

Yes, Public Schools Can Teach About Religion

In many countries around the world, teaching about religion in public schools is normal and generally uncontroversial. For instance, in Germany, all public schools are required by law to offer courses about religion and all students are required to take either classes in religion or classes in philosophy and ethics. In Greece, students are required to take classes in Eastern Orthodoxy, although parents are permitted to opt their students out of these classes if they choose.

In the United States, though, very few public schools offer classes that are solely devoted to religion and most people incorrectly believe that public schools are not even allowed to teach classes about religion at all. In reality, public schools in the United States are allowed to teach about religion, but there are limitations on how they are allowed to teach about it.

Religion is only allowed to be taught in public schools in the United States if it is taught in an academic, non-sectarian manner. Schools are not allowed to encourage students to follow any religion or discourage them from following any religion; they are only allowed to teach students the facts.

Common English Words You Probably Didn’t Know Came From Ancient Greek

There is a popular perception that words derived from Greek are long, exotic-sounding, and mostly only used in discussion of science and philosophy. It’s true that there are a lot of Greek words that fit this description. For instance, very few people would use words like otorhinolaryngology, homoousian, ataraxia, or peripeteia in casual conversation.

There are, however, a lot of really simple Greek words that people use nearly every day. Some of these words don’t sound Greek at all because they have passed through so many languages that they no longer bear any of the distinctive sounds or spellings that we normally associate with Greek words, but they are still of Greek origin.

Yes, There Were Ancient African Civilizations!

Most people in the United States and Europe imagine that, prior to European colonialism, all of Africa south of the Sahara was nothing but a jungle full of simple, illiterate savages living in straw huts with only Stone Age technology. They imagine that there were no civilizations there of any kind.

This stereotype couldn’t be more inaccurate. Contrary to what most people have been led to believe, there were peoples in sub-Saharan Africa in ancient times who had systems of writing. They had cities. They had iron tools and weapons. They minted coins. They established empires and built colossal monuments. At least by the standards of the ancient world, they were civilized.

The main reason why you probably haven’t heard of any ancient civilizations in sub-Saharan Africa is because, for centuries, racist white people—including many racist white historians—have chosen to ignore and dismiss all evidence for their existence and to instead falsely portray pre-modern Africa as a civilizationless void.

Thankfully, the old racism that once pervaded the historical discipline is slowly starting to go away and historians are beginning to recognize that ancient Africa was actually just as civilized as Europe and Asia. Today, I want to talk about some of the civilizations that we know existed in Africa in ancient times.

Should We Be Tearing Down Statues of Socrates and Aristotle Because of Their Views on Slavery?

You may have heard that there are bunch of statues that have been taken down recently. I think that’s a good thing. Some other people disagree. On 12 June 2020, the British comedian John Cleese—who is known as a member of the comedy group Monty Python and as the co-writer and lead actor for the sitcom Fawlty Towers—issued this tweet:

Cleese followed this up with another tweet in which he said this:

There is a lot to unpack here. Cleese is obviously joking, but, through his misunderstanding of what protesters want and why, he has inadvertently raised some very serious questions that I think are worth addressing.

Is Karl Marx’s Great-Great-Grandson Really Doing Parkour in London?

Earlier today, I stumbled across this Quora answer by Eric Wang about a teenaged parkourist named Joseph Marx who lives in London and claims that he is the great-great-grandson of Karl Marx. The story was so bizarre and yet so awesome that I started looking around on the internet to see if I could find out more. I uncovered at least half a dozen articles online talking about it.

Despite how intriguing I found this story, I very quickly became skeptical of it because I noticed that some of the details didn’t seem to fit. I have always had an interest in reading about living descendants of famous historical figures and I had a bit of time on my hands, so I decided to investigate this claim.

I can’t prove for certain that this Joseph Marx is not a descendant of Karl Marx, but, having now charted all Karl Marx’s known descendants, I’m 90% convinced that Joseph Marx is just some guy who happened to have the same last name and incorrectly assumed that Marx was his great-great-grandfather without any solid evidence.

Why Are the Byzantines Significant?

At the time I started writing this article, the most upvoted answer to the question “Why was the Byzantine Empire important in world history?” on Quora was an answer by Bryden Walsh that basically says that the Byzantines aren’t important in world history and that the only reason why anyone imagines that the Byzantines have any historical relevance is because people have overromanticized them due to their association with the old Roman Empire.

Walsh bitterly insists at one point in his answer, “But unlike the neighbouring Islamic civilisations, or the Catholic societies of the west, Byzantium did nothing to move human civilisation forward.” Near the end of the article, he says that the modern world doesn’t owe “anything to Byzantium” at all and that the modern world is “the opposite of everything the Byzantines believed in.”

This is, unfortunately, a reflection of the view towards the Byzantine Empire that has dominated the west for centuries. Despite its perennial appeal, this view is also totally inaccurate; the Byzantine Empire has affected the modern world in ways that few people even realize and there is much to be gained from studying it.

How Old Was Mary When She Gave Birth to Jesus?

The ages of Mary and Joseph at the time of Jesus’s birth attracted a great deal of controversy in November 2017, after the Republican Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler defended the Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of pursuing a sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl at a time when he was thirty-two. Ziegler said:

“…take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus… There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual.”

Ziegler claimed that this fact absolves Roy Moore from all blame for his alleged ephebophilia. This is, of course, preposterous. Even if what Ziegler says here were completely correct, that still would not mean it is excusable for men in their thirties today to have sexual relations with fourteen-year-olds. We live in a very different society from the one that existed in Galilee in the first century BC and, regardless of what people 2,000 years ago thought, in our society, it is completely unacceptable for a man in his early thirties to seek sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old.

If we leave aside the whole question of Roy Moore’s guilt, however, we must ask, “Is Ziegler correct about Mary’s age when she gave birth to Jesus?” In other words, was Mary really a teenager when she gave birth to Jesus? The truth is, we really do not know.

The Amazing Origin of the Story of Achilles’s Heel

We all know the story of “Achilles’s heel.” The story you probably learned in school goes like this: When Achilles was a baby, his mother Thetis dipped him in the river Styx to make him immortal and impervious to all wounds—except she held him by his heel, meaning his heel was the only part of him that was vulnerable. Many years later, near the end of the Trojan War, the Trojan prince Paris shot him in the heel with an arrow guided by the god Apollon and killed him.

This story is the source of our English phrase “Achilles’s heel,” which is often used to refer to a single fatal weakness in something that is otherwise seen as invincible. It may come as a surprise to some people that this story is not actually found in the Iliad or in any other work of classical Greek literature from before the Roman Era. In fact, in the Iliad, Achilles isn’t even invulnerable at all!

The Extremely Strange History of Artistic Depictions of Muhammad

It is widely known that Islam strongly discourages Muslims from creating anthropomorphic representations of the prophet Muhammad. This tendency towards aniconism isn’t entirely unique to Islam. As I talk about in this article from March 2020, early Christians seem to have been rather hesitant to depict Jesus in art and, as I discuss in this article from May 2020, early Buddhists were similarly hesitant to depict Siddhārtha Gautama.

Nevertheless, in modern times, most Christians generally don’t have a problem with creating images of Jesus and most Buddhists don’t have a problem with creating images of the Gautama Buddha. Most Muslims, however, are strongly opposed to the creation of images of the prophet Muhammad.

There are a number of reasons why Muslims generally oppose images of Muhammad. Nevertheless, not all Muslims are as strict about not making depictions of Muhammad as others and many Muslims artists throughout history have actually created images of him. Let’s take a look at the extremely strange, somewhat disturbing history of representations of the prophet Muhammad.

Were Mythical Creatures Inspired by Fossils?

It is popularly believed that stories about dragons and other mythical creatures must have arisen when ancient peoples discovered fossils of prehistoric animals, especially dinosaurs. As we shall see in a moment, there is definitely some evidence that ancient peoples did sometimes discover fossils of prehistoric creatures and interpret them as the remains of mythic beasts.

Fossils, however, seem to have only rarely been the source of belief in such mythic creatures to begin with; it seems to have been far more common for people to interpret fossils in light of mythic creatures they already believed in, rather than inventing entirely new mythic beasts to explain the fossils.

Furthermore, the vast majority of claims about specific mythical creatures being inspired by specific prehistoric creatures don’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny. There is almost no solid evidence to support the assumption that dragons, Cyclopes, or griffins were inspired by prehistoric fossils and there is actually quite substantial evidence against these assumptions.