Chapter 4 Chapter Two Divinity to Reason, Science to Romance

The amalgam that makes up European civilization is an unstable combination.Although it lasted for a long time—the whole of the Middle Ages, a thousand years or so—the components were not in harmony with each other.By AD 1400, this mixture began to disintegrate, and its fragmentation began first with the Renaissance. The Renaissance is often described as the discovery or rediscovery of Greco-Roman learning.This is not to say, however, that these intellectual achievements were lost and are now being rediscovered, although some new discoveries were made at the time.Its change is that ancient knowledge is no longer used to support the theology of the Christian church, but many scholars, mainly outside the church system, yearn for the world when Greece and Rome created this knowledge and intend to imitate it.They wished to practice art as the ancient artists did, to build buildings like themselves, to read and write Latin as they were, to think and think as they did.They want to go back to the non-Christian world of the past - but such a world has been hidden by the Church, because the Church uses this knowledge only for its own purposes.

This is also a relatively "wto" world.People before the classical era did not pay much attention to the life after death, but paid more attention to what people did on the earth. They embraced the power and ability of people with joy, and they would not be full of thoughts about the evil and degeneration of people. .Renaissance scholars now entered a world of free thinking.How to live the best and what to think is the best. The ancient philosophers and moralists have been blooming for a long time, and a hundred schools of thought are contending with each other, but their dialectics and inferences have not been passed down, because the Christian church has tightly wrapped the people's thoughts. A bondage suit.

However, Renaissance scholars did not attack Christianity directly.Their personal attitudes may be different, but in general their views on Christianity are quite similar to the religious views of the ancients, that is: Religion is a basic existence, generally speaking, it is a good thing or necessary to exist, but there are still some people in the world. There are more things to watch.Religion should not suppress all aspects of life and thought, and this is the consistent purpose of the church.Once such a restraint is broken, European thought will become bolder and more open-minded than before.

With the advent of the Renaissance, European society began its long process of secularization.In the secular world, religion can exist, but is a private matter, or an association of people drawn to certain beliefs - like our world today.Religion cannot influence society, compel everyone to follow rules and rituals, or dominate thought. The result of the Renaissance is that people in a certain culture and tradition rely on their thoughts to let themselves enter another culture and tradition.Once you cross this dividing line, you are never the same.Nothing is constant anymore.European thinkers were shaken by the onslaught of the Renaissance, and it wasn't the last time it happened.

It was the people of the Renaissance who first called the Greek and Roman eras the Classical era.Classic here means classic and the best. For example, we say that classic catch and classic performance are unsurpassable splendor.They believe that the achievements of the ancients in literature, art, philosophy and science have never been surpassed, and will never be surpassed in the future.As for themselves, it would be nice to be able to get close to them.In this way, the European assemblage was disturbed by the message of the "Renaissance"—that the classical is unmatched. The current method of calculating the age of Westerners is based on two different benchmarks, which is nothing more than a representative: the essence of this civilization is a hybrid.The establishment of the AD year is counted from the year when Christ was born, which means that Westerners still recognize themselves as part of Christian civilization. AD is the abbreviation of Latin Anno Domini, which means the year when the savior was born (in fact, Jesus was not born in the first year of AD, it is more likely that he was born in 6 or 4 years BC).However, our division of history into several eras—classical, medieval, and modern—has nothing to do with Christianity.This was the view of the Renaissance, meaning that the classical world had reached its pinnacle of perfection, after which humanity gradually drifted away and lost touch with its precious heritage.This period of "pause" is known as the Middle Ages, the period in which the Christian Church assumed total control over intellectual and social life.Therefore, the distinction between classical, medieval and modern times is irrelevant to Christianity.

There are three sculptural works that show the turning points of the three progressions: Classical, Medieval and Modern (see next page).The first is an ancient Greek statue, of which there are only a handful of original Greek statues surviving today; what we see today are usually Roman replicas, and the quality is hardly comparable to the original.This statue, by Praxiteles, shows Hermes holding the infant Dionysus, the god of wine.The idea that the human body is perfect is one of the Greek inventions.As the art historian Kenneth Clark has argued, there is a difference between a nude and a naked body.The nude itself shows a wealth of power and beauty, and it is a proper state; the naked body is just naked, and because it is naked, it appears to be short.

Of course, most male bodies don't look like that statue; the Greeks didn't aim to show a human body, their intention was to find perfection in the human body and use mathematics to work out the most pleasing proportions and lines. The second sculptural work presents a medieval view of the human body.This is a figure painting on the door of the church in Hildesheim (Hildesheim), Germany. It depicts the scene where Adam and Eve ate the fruit that God warned them not to eat.Adam is blaming Eve, Eve is blaming the serpent, and both are ashamed of their nakedness, covering it up with their hands.

These are obviously not nude works, they are a concrete manifestation of Christianity, showing that the body is evil and the root of sin. The third is the work of the Renaissance Michelangelo, who projects himself into the Greek ancients and recaptures their conception of the nude.The David he carved was the recognized perfect human form; the human being is the embodiment of dignity, nobility and beauty-as Hamlet said: "How like an angel in action! How like a god in understanding!"

From nude works to sinful nakedness and back to nude works, it can represent the evolution of meaning from the classical period to the middle ages and then to modern times, and this is exactly the Renaissance's understanding of itself. The Renaissance was the first major shock to the medieval world, and the Reformation in the sixteenth century was the second, this time a direct attack on the Christian Church.The purpose of the Reformation was to restore the Christian church to its pre-Romanized appearance.We have said that because the Christian church grew up with the Roman Empire, its various characteristics were deeply inherited from Rome; after the fall of the Roman Empire, the pope of the church still stood, his status was like a king, and the bishops and archbishops of each diocese were like ancient Rome. The administrative officials of the empire, and countless local priests and priests under their jurisdiction.This priesthood system not only has its own laws, punishments and prisons, but also its own taxation system.

The pope and the bishops govern the entire church, and the teachings are formulated by them.The church can give you salvation, but it must work through what it holds.You must depend on priests and bishops for your salvation.You have to take communion, attend mass, and have a priest do magic tricks for you, turning bread and wine into the blood and flesh of Jesus Christ.You need a priest to hear your confession, give you forgiveness, and teach you how to atone.The priest may ask you to recite the Virgin Mary a thousand times or instruct you to go on a pilgrimage, or if you have committed a serious crime, he may ask you to accept the whipping before you go to the altar.If you're rich and you're dying, he'll probably tell you emphatically that you won't get into heaven unless you leave a lot of money to the church.

In the Middle Ages, most priests, bishops, and archbishops joined the Church not because they were religious or particularly devout; they joined because it was the largest and wealthiest organization at the time.Receiving the priesthood is the same as today when you become a civil servant, enter a large company, enter politics, or enter a university. It may be for a stable job, an interesting job, or a high salary, or it may be for the sake of gaining popularity and exerting power.In the church, you have a lot of opportunities to earn money and make a fortune, and you can also find jobs for relatives and friends, so that they can ascend to heaven. Yet this rapacious, wealthy and corrupt organization is also the keeper of the teachings of Jesus and the records of what the early Christians said and did.Jesus and his disciples came from humble beginnings, and today popes and bishops stand high in the temple.Jesus had long warned of the dangers of wealth, and early Christians met in their own homes or the homes of other believers. These are clearly recorded in the "Bible", so if the sacred documents preserved by the church fall into the hands of critics against Christianity, they are likely to become explosives that detonate. So, how did the church manage to avoid such destructive criticism for so long? Since the Bible is written in Latin, very few people can read it.The church says it is the first and last authority to interpret the Bible.Anyone who uses the Bible to criticize the teachings or actions of the church will be tied to a stake and burned as a heretic; in other words, if you are a non-believer, you will not only harm yourself, but also pose a threat to Christianity .However, in the 16th century, a "heretic" escaped. His name was Martin Luther. Portrait of Martin Luther, painted by German court painter Lucas Cranach in 1532. Martin Luther was a monk who took his religion very seriously.He was full of torments about his own redemption: "I, a person full of sins, what must I do to be saved?" One day, he read the letter written by Paul to the Roman Church in the "Bible", and he suddenly understood.Paul said, "You are saved simply by believing in Jesus Christ." Martin Luther deduced from this statement: "Justification by faith" is the central doctrine of Lutheranism.You can be saved just by trusting in Christ.Of course, as a believer, you will be happy to do things that please God, as the church says, do good deeds, and do some work that Jesus said we should do.However, doing good deeds by itself will not help you to be saved. This is a fundamental distinction between Protestant and Catholic teachings.The Roman Catholic Church emphasizes that doing good deeds is a process of salvation; pilgrimage, giving money to the poor, all contribute to your ultimate goal - to be with God.But Martin Luther said otherwise; how can we, all sinful and corrupt, do anything to please God?The only thing we can do is believe in God, and as long as we believe in him, God will let us be saved, this is what he promised. This is a kind of self-seeking religion.Martin Luther said that a vast institution that the Holy See had spent centuries building was unnecessary, but the Holy See was not taught that view.The pope dismissed Martin Luther's criticism of the church and his new vision of salvation, and Luther strongly condemned the pope in reply: The Bible is the key to Martin Luther's critique of the church.If it is not written in the Bible, there is no reason for the church to insist on or implement a commandment. The Bible is the only authority.After breaking with the Holy See, the first thing Martin Luther did was to translate the Bible into German so that everyone could read it and become the master of their own salvation. The Reformation Movement is a movement to reform the Holy See based on the teachings and teachings of the Bible.It hopes to reshape the life of the Church in its early years.The message of the Reformation was that Christianity was not the religion of the Romans. Since heretics must be burned at the stake, how did Martin Luther escape this doom?There are several reasons.First, thanks to the invention of printing.Martin Luther's criticism and condemnation of the church were immediately printed and spread throughout Europe.When Martin Luther began to attack the church, printing was still a new invention, only fifty years old; the Pope's plan to suppress Martin Luther had not yet taken shape, his name was already well known, and everyone was reading his books Criticize the article.In the past, there were many pagans who led a small number of followers within a country, but Martin Luther soon had a large following, both at home and abroad. Martin Luther's attack on Rome, which pleased some German princes, was another reason why he survived.Germany at that time was not a unitary country, it was a confederation of many small countries.The influence of the Holy See in Germany is greater than that in Britain and France. This is part of the reason-Britain and France are a unified country.In Germany, the church holds vast land, and some areas even occupy more than half of it; not to mention exploiting the people and amassing money, the bishops of each diocese are also appointed by the pope, and these princes and nobles have no room for comment.If they followed Martin Luther, they could occupy the land of the church, appoint bishops in the territory, and stop donating money to Rome. Therefore, these royal families became Martin Luther's protectors and established Luther's churches in the territory. Protestant church.Protestant churches were set up on half of the land of the Germanic nation, and Lutheranism spread northward from what is now Germany to Sweden, Denmark and Norway.Britain created its own brand of Protestantism called the Church of England. The enemies of the Holy See soon became more than one.Protestant churches come in many forms, varying from country to country.They are self-sufficient in their own countries and have established a series of churches, the Catholic Church is a huge organization that spans many countries.The common people, after being encouraged by Luther and other reformers to read the Bible themselves, soon found reasons to criticize Martin Luther in it too.During the Reformation movement, since there was no longer a unified authority to interpret the Bible and supervise beliefs, new churches continued to be added and eliminated. For more than a hundred years, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism have attacked each other in this way, even at the expense of fighting each other.Both think the other is dead wrong, neither sees the other as just a different kind of Christianity, or even not just non-Christianity, but as the Antichrist, the enemy of the true Church, which can only be established if the other is destroyed. The doctrine that sanctioned murder begets slaughter—it would be better for Catholics or Protestants to kill the other than to preach a teaching that is utterly contradictory to God, and to harm His Church on earth.However, after more than a hundred years of killing each other and no one was better than the other, the two parties finally reached a long-term truce agreement, and the concept of tolerance gradually took shape. First, it was agreed that some countries could be Protestant and some Catholic, and then—and this was a big leap forward—different Christian denominations could coexist peacefully in the same country, although at first Protestants and Catholics were skeptical of the idea. The possibilities are unbelievable. Both the Renaissance and the Reformation were movements that looked to the past, and both aimed to separate a certain part of the European hybrid.The Renaissance focused on the intellectual achievements of ancient Greece and Rome, and the Protestant reformers frequently looked back to the Christian church before the Holy See inherited Roman habits.Documentation preserved by the Catholic Church was central to both movements.The Greek and Roman learning it preserved was used by the Renaissance to evade its grip on knowledge, and the Bible it created and sanctified was used by the Protestant reformers to subvert its theology and unity. Now we're going to look at how European culture has evolved from "looking back" to "looking forward," and how it came to believe in progress, in the belief that the world will get better with time—a strange belief.Belief in progress is a result of the scientific revolution of the 17th century.This period is the beginning of modern science. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Greeks remained the authority on explaining the universe and how it worked.Their basic idea is: the earth is the center of the universe, and all other planets revolve around the earth, including the sun and the moon.According to the Greeks, the earth is stationary; it doesn't seem to be moving - what force could possibly move it?So it is static. And the earth is an impure realm: things on the earth can change and decay, but the sky is pure, perfect, and eternal.And why do other planets orbit the earth in circles?Because a circle is a perfect shape.This is part of the Greek geometry theory that there are perfect shapes in the world, the square is one of them, and so is the circle.So the planets go around the earth in circles, and since the sky is a perfect realm, they don't need any external force to move them.The planets orbit in perfect circles, in perfect harmony. This view was overturned in the 17th century: the sun is the center of the celestial system, and the planets revolve around it, but not in a perfect circle but in an ellipse; the earth is one of the planets orbiting the sun, and the moon is revolves around the earth.This celestial system is a single system; the so-called different realms, the impure earth and the pure sky are a thing of the past.It is a system from beginning to end, and only one law or set of laws can explain everything. What is moving the Earth and other planets?According to the scientist Isaac Newton, the answer is: everything in the universe will continue to move in a straight line unless acted on by an external force.And there is a gravitational force that attracts each other among all objects in the universe, which is a gravitational force that always exists.All objects attract each other: the book is attracted to the earth, the moon is attracted to the earth, and the earth is attracted to the sun.The rise and fall of ocean tides on Earth is also caused by changes in the gravitational pull between the Earth and the Moon.This single system holds all matter together. We now know why the planet works the way it does.There are two forces at work, its own tendency to travel in a straight line, and its tendency to be attracted to the sun.As a result of the saw-saw of the two tendencies, the rotation of the planet becomes inclined, and the orbit around the sun is therefore an elliptical shape. Newton called the attraction between all objects "universal gravitation" (or gravity, gravity). Using the law of universal gravitation, the gravitational force between any two objects can be calculated.This law can be expressed in a mathematical formula.This law says that the bigger the object, the stronger the gravitational force—it's proportional to the object's mass.And the greater the distance between objects, the weaker the gravitational force -- it's inversely proportional to the distance between objects. Therefore, if the mass of two objects increases, the gravitational force becomes stronger, and the farther the two objects are farther apart, the gravitational force decreases.In fact, when two objects move apart, the gravitational force decreases extremely rapidly; the drop is the square of the distance between the two objects.So doubling the distance quadruples the gravitational force (2×2). Above is its formula.Newton used it to calculate the gravitational force between the earth and the sun. Such an equation reminds us that mathematics is indeed the center of science, and the intuition of the Greeks is indeed right—the world is simple, and its operating rules can be expressed in mathematics. Scientists in the 17th century overthrew the Greek theory of the universe, but they were able to overthrow it by using Greek mathematical methods. What a great achievement it is to be able to discover the workings of this entire celestial system from our vantage point—the earth, the third planet farthest from the sun!In the past, how natural it was for human beings to place themselves at the center of the universe, to deduce from their intuition that the earth was always standing still, and how appropriate to respect the doctrines conceived by the first-rate Greek minds; but the science of the seventeenth century But it went against all these trends and won the final victory. The message of the scientific revolution was: the Greeks were wrong.The strong reverence for the classics was broken, and we not only equaled them, but even surpassed them.How clever these scientists are, but what has their cleverness brought?Humans, they discovered, were not the center of the universe; they were in fact insignificant.This is the dilemma facing the West in general: we are smart, but we keep discovering our own insignificance.But the worst was yet to come. In the 19th century, Darwin took this argument even further: Humans and apes came from the same ancestor.This is an even greater boon to humanity itself and to human arrogance.We are not the center of the universe, we are not any special creatures, we are just offspring from the animal kingdom by an accidental mechanism. For the new theory that the sun is the center of the universe and the earth revolves around it, both the Protestant and Catholic churches initially opposed it. The Bible says that God created the earth and then placed the sun, stars, and moon over it, but the church eventually had to bow its head and declare that these scientists were right—just as they refuted Darwin in the first place, with both results. Lost prestige every time. After the scientific revolution, people of that era did not think that the various discoveries of science belittled the importance of human beings.On the contrary, they believe that if human beings can achieve this step—think out the operation of the entire natural system through rationality, and express it mathematically, of course they can use rationality to a higher level.We can apply this rationality to human life and make it completely improved. This desire to respect rationality has become the driving force of the Enlightenment. This intellectual movement of the 18th century aimed at unleashing reason and applying it to government, morality, theology, and social transformation. The Enlightenment Movement started in France, and its momentum was the strongest.For the scholars of the Enlightenment, this was a world ruled by ignorance and superstition.There are two powerful irrational forces in society, one is the church, that is, the Catholic Church; the other is the king of France, the absolute autocratic monarch of a country.It is the ignorance of the people that keeps the Church and the King of France alive. The church sells stories of miracles everywhere, in order to make the people obedient, and threatens to make them suffer in hell forever; the French king claims that he governs the country by the oracle of God, and questioning the kingship is against the teachings, and the people have no choice but to obey obediently.One promoter of the Enlightenment summed up the movement's appeal this way: "I wish to see the last king hanged by the entrails of the last priest." Admittedly, this is an extreme view.The Enlightenment was not a revolutionary movement, or even a political one.It was driven by a group of scholars, writers, artists, and historians who believed that once reason and education became widespread, superstition and ignorance would disappear, and people would no longer believe in miracles or the divine right of kings. nonsense.As long as the people are educated, the wisdom of the people will naturally be enlightened. The leaders of the Enlightenment, however, were not democrats; if an enlightened monarch would begin to implement the rational society they had planned, they would be happy to see it done. In the 18th century, several monarchs in Europe did achieve what is called "enlightened autocracy" in the world.They abolished barbaric punishment and torture, put the law in plain language, and began to educate the people in concrete deeds. The great achievement of the French Enlightenment was the compilation of an encyclopedia.This is the first masterpiece with a modern concept, and the reason why it is famous in the world is not because some specialized scholars have written it into a well-balanced and authoritative work, just like we know about encyclopedias today .Its fundamental difference lies in the application of reason to everything, so that there is no hierarchy in the field of knowledge.It doesn't start with theology and God, as the church would have hoped.Where will you find God in this encyclopedia?Under the entries for the prefixes D (Dieu, God) and R (Religion, Religion).This is a set of knowledge bases indexed by letters, and the act of sorting them by letters alone is a big shock to the church that claims to hold the highest truth.It applies the same test of reason to all knowledge. For example, when it comes to adoration, the advice of this set of encyclopedias is: "The adoration of the true God should not deviate from reason, because God is the originator of reason..." The editors of this set of books must be very careful about directly offending the church or the king, because there was still a censorship system in France in the 18th century, although the censor in charge was sympathetic to the editors and once advised them to hide the printing plates in the censor's Home, because it is the safest place!Just look at the article "Noah's Ark" to know how many landmines this encyclopedia has stepped on.It asked right from the beginning: How big is Noah's Ark?It must be very big.It had to accommodate not only all the pairs of animals in Europe, but other species of animals in the world had to be on board.And not just animals, the ark had to be filled with a lot of food for the animals to survive.Two sheep could never be enough; it would have required hundreds of sheep to feed the pair of lions.The ship must have been huge, but the Bible says that only four people can handle it.These people must be extremely powerful, three-headed and six-armed!Through these seemingly serious questions, this encyclopedia highlights the absurdity of the story. Enlightenment scholars would not necessarily object to the idea that God was the Creator or the agent at the beginning of the universe.What they oppose is what is now denounced as superstition by the world, and the church's use of superstition to dominate people's thinking. The church warns the people that if they do not obey, they will go to hell and be burned. They hate this. The message of the Enlightenment was this: Religion is superstition.Thus, although religion had been at the heart of European civilization, it had to be sidelined and replaced by reason.Follow rationality and science, and there will be progress in the future.This arrow (see next page) takes us out of this page, and also takes us out of the darkness and into the light. Progress is a new idea.The ancients did not believe in such a thing as progress.They believe in the cycle of heaven, where there is prosperity and then there will be withering; all organizations and societies are vigorous and full of vigor when they are young and strong, but then naturally enter the process of decay. The advancement of history is one such cycle.The church also doesn't believe in progress, or that humans can progress without God and by their own efforts, because it believes that humans are basically evil, and that it is impossible to create perfection by relying on reason alone as a guide for humans society. The first test of the ideas of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.Sadly, despite high expectations of rationality, the French Revolution, after the sweeping away of both the king and the church, did not bring about a new era of enlightenment, but bloodshed, tyranny, and dictatorship.However, the last element of this strange mixture lost its mooring before that, the result of the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Romantic movement celebrated feelings, emotions, and all strong emotions.In this respect, it stands in stark contrast to the Enlightenment's single-minded commitment to reason.This movement spread throughout Europe, but especially in the German region (today's Germany), where the ideas were most fully developed.Followers of Romanticism do not want reason to control emotions and passions.In their minds, it is not a great writer or artist who just reinterprets classical tunes gracefully; it is the one who exhausts his soul and lays out passion, pain, and despair nakedly on the front line.Art should be emotional, expressive, and earth-shattering. These concepts developed in Germany were deliberately aimed at the concepts of the French Enlightenment.The Germans say that you can't talk about human beings and society in abstract terms, because people are different, depending on the country you grow up in.Believers in Romanticism say that we are shaped by our language and history, built into us.Therefore, the Germans, with their own history and language, will never be the same as the French.The French intellectuals who babbled in their salons believed in a universal reason, but that did not exist.As Germans, we have to find out what is German. The Germans wanted to know what the early Germanic peoples were like before they mixed with civilization, Rome, and the Catholic Church.They wanted to take the Germanic peoples out of this group.They like these reckless ancestors, their vitality, vitality and simplicity. They don't want to follow the soft intellectuals. They are proud of the Germanic ancestors who were close to the land and well versed in the original appearance of the Germans. The interest and respect for culture in modern society originated at this turning point. For the first time in history, intellectuals began to collect folk culture.To the boastful rhetoric of rationality of the conceited French intellectuals, their answer was: put on your boots and go for a walk, to the common people, to the peasants, and write down their stories and their songs, from which you True enlightenment will be found.The message of Romanticism is: Civilization is man-made, it constrains us, limits us, and you can live a complete life only if you live in traditional culture. Since then, this concept has been deeply rooted in Western society. There was a major explosion in the 19th century, and one of the forms it took was to cry for freedom and liberation: let us get rid of all norms, let us live simple, direct, and free, let us farm and weave by ourselves; Hu, live in a commune, let us face our emotions honestly, and be honest with each other.Also, let us draw on more real people—workers, farmers, or "noble savages." The Romantic movement also gave birth to the ideology of nationalism, an idea that remains a powerful force in the world today.Nationalism holds that peoples with different cultures and languages ​​must live together and form their own government.It is not enough to imagine good government behind closed doors; and it cannot be good government if it is not composed of your own people.Serbs must live together to form a Serbian government; Croats must live together to form a Croatian government.If there are Serbs and Croats in a country, it means that neither Serbs nor Croats can fully express themselves.The essence of the Serbian nation cannot blossom unless it has a state of its own.This is the ideology of nationalism. Romanticism advocates emotion, culture, nationalism and freedom and liberation, and what runs counter to this arrow in the picture is rationality, science and progress. (see previous page) Our graph is now complete.You can see what happened after AD 1400.In the center of the picture, the church, once the center of civilization in the Middle Ages, is now blank.The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Romantic movement all diminished the authority of the Church in different ways. The Church, now known as the Holy See, still holds some authority, and if you're an open-minded person, you might still think that the Pope's attacks are justified.Every open minded person knows that birth control is a good thing, but this pope says birth control is against the teaching of God and no practical considerations can make it right, even if most Catholics in the West ignore it The opinion of the pope, the pope has always believed that birth control is wrong.In general, though, we have been in the process of a major secularization. The twin forces of science and progress on the one hand, and emotion and liberation on the other, are still strong today, sometimes reinforcing each other, sometimes opposing each other.Let's see how these two forces divide us.First, let's look at the record of the creation of human beings in the Bible. The LORD formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living being.Yahweh opened up the Garden of Eden in the east and placed the man he had created in it."It is not good for the man to be alone," said the LORD; I will make him a helper for him. The LORD put him into a deep sleep, and he fell asleep; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh again.And the LORD made a woman from the rib which he had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.The man said, "This is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; you may call her a woman, for she is taken from a man." Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother, and be united to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh . What do you think if I suggested that we set aside biology and evolution and teach this chapter in schools? “不行不行。”你一定会这么说，因为你是个进步的文明人，这就是我们所说的教育的功能；要是父母希望自己的小孩了解《圣经》的这段记载，他们可以自己教。那要是我们在学校里既保留生物学和演化的课程，同时也教上述这段章节，你觉得如何？ “不行不行。”科学显示我们都是从动物演化而来，而且这世上到处都有笃信上帝造人的疯狂信徒，让他们趁着这个缺口进入学校殿堂，代价我们负担不起。 现在，来看看以下另一个故事，这是澳大利亚土著人的传说。 很久很久以前，有个老人非常喜爱他的侄儿，年轻侄儿远赴异国，爱上了一个女孩。这一对情侣后来私奔，可是被当地部落的长者追到，因为女孩已经被许配给部落的一个老人，于是他们用矛射死了年轻人。老人听到噩耗后非常伤心，因为他非常爱他的侄儿，虽然他很老了，还是跋涉到那个国家，打算把尸体带回故乡。 尸体对这位叔叔来说是个重负，因为老人家年事已高，而他的侄儿已近成年。可是他办到了；他把尸体带回故乡，好好埋葬了。直到今天，你依然看得到老人行脚的踪迹。在他中途将尸体放在沙地歇息的地方，你会发现喷泉；在他放尸体的岩地，你会发现水潭，装满了老人的泪水。 传统土著人住在一个魔幻世界里，他们土地上的每样东西都有一个故事，将他们的生活和祖先串连在一起。你认为这样的故事应该保存吗？“应该。”你会说。应该讲给土著人的小孩听吗？“当然应该。”学校应该教他们这些吗？“应该。”而学校确实有教。 假装我是启蒙时代的人，我会说：“如果孩童想知道喷泉和水潭的来源，他们应该去读地质学。” “什么？”你会大声反驳我，“这不是重点。” 如果我继续假扮启蒙时代的人，我会说：“土著人活在黑暗和魔法的恐惧当中。”你不会听得进去，因为你已经被故事迷住了。从这些故事听来，土著人的生命似乎更完整，更健全，更贴近自然，因为你迷失在浪漫情怀里。 你似乎被分裂成两半。对我们的孩童，你希望他们懂得科学就好，可是你也羡慕那些传统信仰没有断裂的人。 被分裂、被撕扯、被困惑，是欧洲的宿命。其他的文明只有单一传统，不是这种具有三重元素的大拼盘，欧洲在道德和智识生活上一直受到煎熬、困扰和瓦解。欧洲的血统来自一种非常混杂的渊源，没有一个可以称为“家”的地方。