I Love Lucian - if they'd had TV in the 2nd century that would have been a favourite of mine!

Lucian's satirical attack on Empedocles was nothing compared to the christian church's attempt to wipe the guy from history. We must be grateful to Cicero of all people for the good bits that survived. I assume the church's beef was that Empedocles' rationale was, well, rational, and made a much better stab at explaining good versus evil than the bogeyman version.

nordmann wrote:

I Love Lucian - if they'd had TV in the 2nd century that would have been a favourite of mine!

You sound just like Erasmus. I bet he and Thomas More had a great time together translating him! Hope this picture isn't too enormous - please shrink it.

Oh heck - sorry. It wasn't that big in the preview, honest. That'll learn me, trying to be clever.

EDIT: Thank you! Here's the link I got that page from:

http://crrs.ca/featured-book/may2010/

As Erasmus would have said - medentis

Edit: Whoops - that should have been the pluperfect - meduerant! (Sorry 'Rasmus)

Sincerely Thine has a faith but I prefer to keep such opinions personal. My atheist friends and I are more likely to remain friends if we don't get into heated debate and agree to disagree.  I learned in childhood that the story that if I prayed and was good I'd get what I want was a rip-off.  I won't go into detail but I was very bitter towards a certain saint about a prayer that wasn't answered when I was a little girl. When I was a child the church was always full on a Sunday - these days there are many vacant seats except at Christmas and Easter. Interpreting "myth" slightly differently,  I did come across something on another forum where a person was saying how awful the early Christian Church had been to the Druids (they had taken the BBC series "Merlin" - which I personally enjoyed as a "romp" as fact).  I was disappointed to read (on Wikipedia) that the story about the housewife telling off King Alfred the Great off for burning the cakes was probably what we would now call an "urban legend".  I was also disappointed that the tale of Marie Lloyd changing "she sits among the cabbages and peas" to "she sits among the cabbages and leeks" was likewise untrue.

Saint Atticus Finch - yet another myth debunked? Are there any saints left for us to believe in?

Go Set a Watchman is not a good book - more a first draft really, but its publication means that we can never read To Kill a Mockingbird in the same innocent way again.

Brilliant review here:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/go-set-a-watchman-harper-lee-review-novel

The slender plot of Watchman hangs on this disclosure. Scout must come to terms with the revelation that her father is not Saint Atticus, leaving Watchman’s readers to struggle with the same problem: we’re all Scout Finch now, shocked at discovering our father figure has feet of Alabama clay. Maybe it is time for us all to grow up.

Maybe it is.