| bimmylee said: "Well-edited by Constantine?" Please tell me you don't believe fools like Dan Brown; Brown says that Emperor Constantine imposed a whole new interpretation on Christianity at the Council of Nicea in 325. That is, he decreed belief in Jesus' divinity and suppressed all evidence of his humanity. This would mean Christianity won the religious competition in the Roman Empire by an exercise of power rather than by any attraction it exerted. In actual historical fact, the Church had won that competition long before that time, before it had any power, when it was still under sporadic persecution. If a historian were cynical, you would say Constantine chose Christianity because it had already won and he wanted to back a winner. But of course, some people apparently like to draw their historical arguments from works of fiction, such as "The Da Vinci Code." Anyways... I admit, I made a mistake. Some of the items on the list would indeed appear to be vestigial remnants. I overlooked it. HOWEVER, you cannot equate such a theory to gravity, which can be easily TESTED, and its effects are visible and obvious. Unless you can explain how the Scientific Method can be used to test Endosymbiotic Theory (which would be interesting), then no, there is no proof. It is more of an educated guess than anything else. |
No, actually I believe the Da Vinci Code to be a big pile of dross (haven't read the book and don't want to). Everything I stated was from established archaelogists (including one who was also a priest). And yes, Christianity was formed due to politics and a way to prevent riots from occuring on the streets due to conflicting religious tensions. Chritianity, in its different forms was growing in popularity. In fact, prior to the time of Constantine there were many different interpretations of Christianity, not just the current dogma. Many Romans considerred it to be nothing more than upcoming Jewish cults. Constantine HAD to unify the religions creating the current form the New Testament takes for the sake of peace. Whether you believe in god or not, humans had a big hand in forming religion into what it is.
Of course, I have mutiple books and sources rather than a single religious and historical document.
And the effects of the endosymbiotic theory are all around us... we're alive aren't we? Even if you think it's only an educated guess, it's pretty much the best one we have available. It's the only one that makes any sort of logical sense. If any new evidence comes to light, then fine, the theory is open to change, but that's the whole point of science, to disprove current theories. Kinda like how all the religious creation stories have been disproved, yet people still seem to think it's not true.
