As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to come to grips with my mortality. We all live; we all die. We just don’t think about it much when we’re younger. It seems so far away. Think about how we experience time: It always takes forever for Yule or your birthday to come when you’re a kid; summers seem to last forever – as does the school year. But where once it took forever, now it’s here before you know it – before you want it. What, another birthday, already?

The time just seems to start flying by, and pretty soon ten years have gone past, or twenty, and you wonder where they went. Hours become minutes, days become hours, and years…well, some days you wake up feeling like Rip Van Winkle. Is it really more than 30 years now since that rainy afternoon when I first saw Star Wars?

Now too I’ve been told that I am having heart problems. I have known of my mitral valve prolapse for many years – it kept me out of the Army when I tried to enlist back in the 70s (I was going to Berlin as part of the Third Brigade – an artillery spotter). But it’s never really been problematic until recently, when shortness of breath and fluttering led me to the cardiologist, who, after some tests, informed me that my heart was too big, too weak, and that the valve leaked too much.

Surgery was always inevitable, he told me. It was just a matter of when. Well, when was suddenly upon me. “It isn’t the news we wanted, I know,” he told me, “But it is what it is.” That may be a tired old expression, but it has the virtue of always being true.

Two tests later (heart catheterization and transesophageal echocardiogram, or TEE), I have been told that my heart is less weak than previously thought (which is good news), and that because I am fit and healthy in all other respects – no diabetes, etc, I am in good shape for surgery.

The heart surgeon came into my room after the catheterization. He told me that he loves doing mitral valve repairs. He had a childlike gleam in his eyes as he told me he has been doing this for 15 years and that he is successful 90% of the time. If he cannot repair it, he said, he will replace it. I told him I chose the synthetic valve over a pig or bovine valve – not because I don’t dig on swine or cows but because both those would wear out over time and require, as he put it, a second, even more dangerous surgery.

He gave me all the percentages, which is only fair. It turns out I have only a 2% chance of dying. Not bad really. Think about it: climate scientists say with 90% certitude that we are experiencing anthropogenic global warming (AGW). As James Hoggan says in his Climate Cover-Up (2009), if somebody told you that there was a 90% chance the plain you were on was going to crash, you would seriously consider making other plans.

Well, it works both ways. 90% is pretty close to 100% – and you can’t have 100% certainty in science or in most other aspects of life. If there is a 90% certainty that he can repair the valve, I’m going in pretty confident. The 2% seems trivial by comparison – except that if the repairs can last decades, running afoul of that 2% lasts – forever.

I’ve had a lot of time – and many opportunities – to think about death. My brother was killed when I was 10. My grandparents died in the 80s, and I was holding my grandma’s hand as she died.  My ex-father-in-law died in the 90s and I was very close to him. Both my parents died a few years ago. One of my ex-sisters-in-law suddenly died last year. She should have outlived me. As you get older, you start losing people. It’s simple math. I don’t think anyone should become accustomed to the idea of people dying, but perhaps exposure to it makes you a little less afraid of it.

I’m 53. By any generous estimate I’m at the half-way point. When your gas gauge dips below half, you start thinking about a fresh tank. There aren’t any fresh tanks in life, so we should start thinking about our legacy instead, if we haven’t already.

It’s probably no surprise then that I’ve thought about my own death as I’ve grown older – the legacy I want to leave behind, the awareness that time to do the things I want to do is not infinite. Particularly now, with the heart problems.

I’m not afraid of dying. Even before I became a polytheist I liked what Socrates had to say about it. He provided an example for us all in his Phaedo, when he told his friends that there was nothing to fear:

[E]ither death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. . . . Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is a journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?

My Heathen ancestors had a great many conceptions of death, and to what road it led: to the halls of our ancestors, to Hel (nothing like Christian hell but just a place you go when you die), to Valhöll if Odin chooses you. Skjöldunga Saga speaks of “going to King Odin” and “the underworld,” and there is some sense of going “into the mountains” to join your ancestors. There is also a limited appeal to reincarnation, as Ellis-Davidson puts it,  “belief in the birth of the souls of dead ancestors into the living world again, in the persons of their descendants.”[1] And of course, there are the dísir, who are female ancestors who have stayed behind to help the household.

Who knows? It is difficult to know what to make of all the various ideas surrounding death. Islamic traveler Ibn Fahdlan, when watching a Varangian funeral,  spoke of “paradise” which was the best he could interpret the Norse word as he was made to understand it. But anything that smacks of paradise cannot be bad.

Outside of the claim to Valhöll (a claim no mortal can make) the poem heard by Ibn Fahdlan at the chieftain’s funeral, and re-rendered by Michael Crichton in the 13th Warrior, captures the essence of Heathen ideas of death:

Lo, there do I see my father.
Lo, there do I see my mother.
And my sisters and my brothers
Lo, there do I see the line of my people
Back to the beginning.
Lo, they do call to me.
They bid me take my place among them
In the halls of Valhalla
Where the brave may live forever.

My ancestors did not live their lives towards an afterlife, or for a hope in some afterlife, though ideas of joining their ancestors shows that they expected them to be there already, waiting for them. They lived their lives as part of a continuum, inheritors but also progenitors, descendants and ancestors to be. And they lived their lives for life, for what mark they made on this world, what they did for their families and communities – and for their gods. And for what name they left behind them. As I quote in every email I send out:

Cattle die,
kinsmen die,
oneself dies likewise,
but good renown
will never die
for him who earns it.

- Hávamál, 76

I think this is true. And who does not want to be well thought of when they are gone? Who would choose ill-renown over good? We all want to have had a good impact on those whom we love and care for. We want that “son of” or “daughter of” to mean something.

So how have I done? Too soon to tell. As another Norse proverb tells us, “Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.”

And I think that is as it should be. We should not be judged on our accomplishments until we are done with the opportunity to affect change – that is, when we are dead. I hope that when the day comes that I have shaped my final fate that I will have done some praiseworthy deeds. That is what we should all hope for.

Followers of the White Christ hope for some form of eternal salvation, a nebulous form of afterlife in which they will enjoy the fruits of their devotion to their god. I find there is a disconnect between “up there” and “down here.” But our gods, like us, are of this world; there is a connection that is very real between we mortals and the Otherworld.

It is only fitting that as I have lived “down here” that I be judged “down here” and by the people I have lived among, whose lives I have in some way impacted and whose lives have impacted me. I hope that my deeds will have been found worthy of my ancestors, that the good will have outweighed the bad, wisdom foolishness, and piety impiety. I would very much – like Theoden King in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – to go before my ancestors unashamed, just as I have hoped to live my life unashamed.

We all make mistakes. We all make decisions we are not proud of; say and do things we regret later, or fail to say or do things we feel we should have said or done. We don’t have to apologize to our gods for those oversights. Instead, we redeem ourselves here. It is redemption – not salvation – that is meaningful.

But in the end, as each of us shapes our own fate, we have nothing to complain about. Our decisions, our actions, have brought us to where we are now. If sometimes (as in my case) genetics jumps in with a “surprise!” then there is still no reason for complaint, no reason to rail against gods or fate.

So in the end, my concern is where it should be, not with some nebulous and unknowable afterlife or paradise but with the world I leave behind, the world I belonged to, and whether or not I’ve done enough to have made it a better place.

The gods will know, but they will not judge. That will be left to my fellow mortals here on the little island in space we call Midguard.

(I have my surgery on March 8. I will be missing from the Internet for a few days. I am told a couple of days in ICU, completely cut off, and 5-10 days in the hospital after that, during which time I will probably write but may or may not be able to get on the Internet. There will be some limits on my activities afterward, but none that should keep me offline or from writing – 3 weeks without driving, six weeks until I can perform ordinary household tasks on my own, 12 weeks before returning to work, and several months before full recovery. At the end of it all, I am promised I will feel better than I have in a while, which is something to look forward, and something, I should add, more tangible than beliefs in an afterlife. I will continue to post up until March 7 and I will look forward to seeing you all again after that – Hrafnkell)

Notes:

[1] H.R. Ellis-Davidson, The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (1968), 145.

It is a wonder to me that people today can scoff at Pagan divine birth stories but accept without a blink the details of Jesus’ birth as given in Matthew and Luke (Mark wasn’t interested in where or how Jesus was born and John had a different conception altogether – pardon the pun).

In Matthew (1:18-2:23, Mary gets knocked up and Joseph figures she has been sleeping around and he’s going to dump the tramp until he has a dream that says the Holy Spirit is responsible. They get married; Jesus is born.

In Luke (1:4-2:40), it’s a bit more fantastic: Here an angel tells Elizabeth, a cousin of Mary, and who happens to be barren, that she will give birth to John (the Baptist). Apparently, the Holy Spirit is responsible (at least for making it possible for a barren woman to give birth). An angel also appears to Mary (not Joseph) and tells her that the Holy Spirit is going to knock her up personally and that she will give birth to the Son of God.

It gets more bizarre, rather like a bad Broadway play: Mary visits Elizabeth, who is six-months pregnant at the time, and the little tike leaps in her womb because the “Lord” has come into the room (via Mary’s tummy). Mary suddenly starts singing like Maria in Sound of Music. John comes popping forth, and Liz’s hubby, Zechariah, has a spontaneous fit of prophecy. Finally, Jesus himself is born.

Believable? You tell me. Christians don’t even blink. But if they get a whiff of anything faintly miraculous from the Pagan side of the aisle and eyebrows go up. Suddenly it is absurd (far too absurd to be given any credence) – and a myth.

An example of this attitude comes in an otherwise excellent book, Anthony Everitt’s Augustus (2006) – and this is just one example out of many thousands. The author makes some statements that you are unlikely to find being made about Jesus’ birth:

Dio preserves an unconvincing tale that echoes one told of Alexander the Great’s mother and was no doubt designed to encourage a divine comparison. When Julius Caesar decided to make Octavian his heir, he was influenced by “Atia’s [his mother’s] emphatic declaration that the youth had been engendered by Apollo, for while sleeping in his temple, she said, she thought she had intercourse with a serpent, and it was this that caused her at the end of her pregnancy to bear a son.”

On the day of Octavian’s birth, Atia dreamed that her intestines were raised up into the sky and spread out all over the earth, and during the same night her husband, Octavius, thought that the sun rose from her womb. The following day the elder Octavius came across a learned expert on divination, Publius Nigidius Figulus, and explained what had happened. Figulus replied, “You have begotten a master over us!” (201-202).

Now, I ask you, the reader, to tell me how one of these stories is any more fantastic than the other? Does it matter if a snake or a spirit makes you pregnant? Is one more believable than another?

The only difference is Christianity. Because there is only one God, only one of the stories can be true, even though it’s as patently ridiculous as those same Christians claim these Pagan birth stories to be.

It is perhaps significant here that there are incredible similarities between the language used of Jesus and that used for Augustus. It is almost as though the early Christians used the cult of Augustus (the Imperial Cult) as a model for their own religion. One little known example is found in Luke 24:13 (and remember, Luke was an educated Greek speaker). Luke’s account of the risen Jesus bears a striking resemblance to the report of the appearance of the deified Romulus in Dion. Hal. II.63.3f, and Livy I.16.5f .

It is downright eerie when you get down to details, which is what I will proceed to do now.

Son of God

Augustus was the Son of God (“divi filius“) before Jesus (the only difference – if it can be called that – being that Augustus was son of one of many gods and Jesus was seen as son of the “only” god). Augustus was already the Son of God before Jesus was even conceived.

In Greek, his official title was “Emperor Caesar Augustus, son of god.” An inscription from Pergamum reveals Augustus as “The Emperor Caesar, son of god, Augustus, ruler of all land and sea.” A coin of Tiberius reads “Son of the Divine Caesar, the Divine Augustus.”

Christians have tried to differentiate between Augustus as “son of god” and Jesus as “son of god” but Robert L. Mowery (“Son of God in Roman Imperial Titles and Matthew,” Biblica 83 (2002), 100-110) argues that “this Roman imperial formula exactly parallels the distinctive Christological formula in three Matthean passages (14,33; 27,43.54)” and that “the Matthean formula qeou=ui(o/j would have evoked Roman imperial usage for at least some members of Matthew’s community.”

He was spoken of in messianic terms, as the savior of Rome. Virgil wrote in his fourth eclogue,

The firstborn of the New Ages is already on his way from high heaven down to earth

With him, the Iron Age shall end and Golden Man inherit all the world.

Smile on the Baby’s birth, immaculate Lucina [goddess of childbirth];

your own Apollo is enthroned a last.

Anthony Everitt (2006:115-116) believes the child spoken of was the predicted offspring of Augustus and Scribonia. Augustus had from the beginning identified himself with Apollo. It is a bit of a no-brainer.

We have here a god made man but still god himself, and an immaculate birth as well – and the dawn of a new age (analogous to the waited-for “kingdom of god/heaven”).

All this, needless to say, predates Christianity by a long margin: Virgil wrote that poem almost forty years before Jesus was born.

The Star of…

But there is more. Everyone is familiar with the famous “star of Bethlehem.” But Augustus had a star first. The star (or comet) became a symbol of Augustus early on and can be seen on these coins from 17 B.C.E.  This star is an appeal to the comet that appeared during the games Augustus held in honor of Caesar (in July 44 B.C.E.) and was thought to mark the ascent of Caesar to the divine abode (unlike the star of Bethlehem, we know this comet to be real – it is documented by Chinese astronomers).

Just as the “Star of Bethlehem” emphasizes Jesus’ divine origins, so the Star of Augustus emphasized his – but again, Augustus was there first.

The Gospel of…

Augustus was not deified until Tiberius did so, and it is Tiberius who is “largely responsible for propagating the cult of the Divine Augustus.” As Larry Kreitzer writes, “Tiberius was emperor during the public ministry of Jesus.” (“Apotheosis of the Roman Emperor,” The Biblical Archaeologist 53 (1990), 211-217) Significant, don’t you think, that all this imagery should be there for the Gentile Christians to see when they co-opted Jesus the Jewish seditionist cum messiah as their god?

Kreitzer calls this period “one of the most formative in terms of the development of Christianity” and he is absolutely correct. It is also quite clear that the Romans did not get their idea of man as god from Christianity as it has a long history in ancient Near Eastern cultures (as it did in the Far East – see Samping Chen, “Son of Heaven and Son of God: Interactions Among Ancient Asiatic Cultures regarding Sacral Kingship, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 12 (2002), 289-325). As Brian Bosworth writes, (“Augustus, the Res Gestae and the Hellenistic Theories of Apotheosis” JRS 89 (1999), 1-18), “Augustus used motifs which had become familiar during the previous centuries, emphasizing simultaneously the protection of the gods, and his own godlike status” and this is noticeable in his Res Gestae, Augustus’ formal report of his achievements to the people of the empire – the good word, or his “gospel” one might say.

And so it was, as advertised by the Provincial Assembly (koinon) of Asia in 9 B.C.E. (again, Jesus had not even been conceived yet) spoke of the “good tidings” or “evangelion” (that word sound familiar to you?). And so you have it, from before Jesus’ birth: The Gospel of Augustus.

It might be argued that they had identical origins. The imperial cult (to which there was a temple in Caesarea – significant to early Gentile Christian history) was very much “in your face” in the first decades of the first century – a period during which original Jewish Christianity was destroyed (when Jerusalem fell in 70 C.E.) and Gentile Christianity replaced it (by the 90s C.E.). It is no surprise – and no mystery – where Paul of Tarsus got his ideas. He could not possibly have missed what amounted to big neon signs about the new messiah, Augustus and his gospel.

Kreitzer claims that “The Roman concept of apotheosis moved a man from earth toward heaven, whereas the Christian concept of incarnation moved God from heaven toward earth” but that is not strictly true when you claim divine descent, as Augustus did. This claim also conflates the various early Christian concepts of Jesus into the later orthodox idea perpetrated by John. The divine status of Jesus is missing altogether from Mark and Matthew and Luke had quite different conceptions of Jesus – in Matthew Jesus was not literally the Son of God and in Luke it is possible that originally it did not read as if Jesus was “born” as the Son of God. In the earliest manuscripts Luke 3.22 reads, “You are my son, today I have begotten you” when John baptizes Jesus (see note below). In other words, Jesus did not become incarnate until that moment (see the discussion in Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted (2009): 39-40).

A Fulfillment of Prophecy

Early Christian apologists (like Matthew where everything about Jesus is a fulfillment of scripture) were keen to show that Jesus’ coming had long been foretold. So, too, as it happens, had that of Augustus, at least according to Vergil, who has Anchises the Dardanian say that “prophecies of Augustus’ coming are already causing panic, over a millennium before his actual birth” (Aen. 6.798-9). Needless to say, this was written before Jesus’ birth and the mad scramble to find prophecy about his coming. According to Anchises, “Augustus will revive the golden age of Saturnus and bring felicity to Latium – and indeed to the human race in so far as it came under his sway” (Bosworth, 6).

The hopes of the early Jewish and Christian apocalypticists come readily to mind – a Golden Age, a Kingdom of God on Earth, the restoration of Israel for the Jews, a restoration of Rome for the Romans.

What comes across is a sense of inferiority complex – the early Christian writers were anxious to compare Jesus – who compared unfavorably – with Augustus, whose own accomplishments were more in line with the messianic aspirations of the time (see for various ideas of what the messiah would be like, Jacob Neusner, William S. Green, Ernest Frerichs, ed. Judaisms and Their Messiahs At the Turn of the Christian Era (1987).

It is perhaps no coincidence that both Vergil and the Gospels are strongly Hellenic in character and both written in Greek. Language is, after all, a reflection of the culture that created it. As Bosworth says, Vergil places emphasis on “conquest, deliverance, and benefaction”(Bosworth, 9)  – three elements quite familiar to apocalypticism and indeed, the New Testament.

Bosworth points to 9 B.C.E. and the koinon of Asia (already mentioned above) which proclaimed Augustus god (Bosworth, 12): “Since the providence that has divinely ordered our existence…has brought to life the most perfect good in Augustus, whom she filled with virtues for the benefit of mankind, bestowing him upon us and our descendants as a savior – he who put an end to war and will order peace, Caesar, who by his epiphany exceeded the hopes of those who prophesied good tidings (evangelion), not only outdoing benefactors of the past, but also allowing no hope of greater benefactions in the future…”

Sounds pretty Christ-like to me – and two years before the earliest postulated birth date for Jesus.

Summary

Is the idea of a God-man improbable, as Kierkegaard asserts (Christian faith being necessarily a belief in the absurd)? (see the discussion in Robert Herbert, “The God-Man,” Religious Studies 6 (1970), 157-174). For Christians, yes, given their conception of the divine; for polytheists? Not at all. The apotheosis of Augustus has at least as much to recommend it as that of Jesus as it eventually came (under the auspices of orthodoxy) to be conceived.

What is of paramount importance in all this is that all the ideas of Christianity are more pre-existent than their savior. Every element of Christianity can be found previous to Jesus’ birth – including John’s logos, which is Pagan in origin and dates from the 6^th century B.C.E. – a logos which, incidentally, is not found in the other three Gospels.

Augustus is just one example, one small slice of the pie. Everything is already there, in the first century – a century of faith indeed – but Pagan – and no intolerance of other forms of belief are part of the equation. All beliefs can be true, and they can coexist peacefully, without strife, without war, without inquisitions, and without burning books, witches, or heretics.

If the truth is not quite the golden age Augustus and his court poets advertised, it still has something to recommend it on that basis alone. Universal tolerance may be a logical impossibility, but that does not mean we cannot strive for tolerance – as much tolerance as a functioning society can manage. But for the discourse on tolerance to have any meaning, it must appeal to the facts, and not simply to pious history “as it should have been” and it must not privilege one set of miracles over another.

In speaking of god become man and man become god, I have used deliberately provocative language. Such language is fitting for what is a provocative subject. The ancients understood that it was no trivial detail, the degree to which an individual might partake of the divine. It was a powerful message Augustus and his publicists put out, just as it was again a powerful message the Gentile Christian publicists put out in the name of Jesus decades later.

I’m not saying the idea of divine birth or apotheosis is impossible. As Bart Ehrman points out, that is not the domain of the historian but of the theologian. My point is that many historians, Christian themselves, accept without criticism the story of Jesus’ birth but still speak of similar (and far older) stories told of Pagans as absurd or mythical or openly propagandistic and self-serving.

What I am saying is that miracles are miracles. You cannot classify one set of miracles as more possible than another. If you are going to accept miracles about Jesus, you have to accept miracles about Apollonius of Tyana – and about Augustus and Alexander and others. And if there is to be a discourse between Pagans and Christians it cannot be on the basis of “my religion is better than yours.” We need to agree either that all miracle stories are equally absurd or equally likely – or at least possible. That’s a big leap for the folks who claim to have sole possession of the truth, while it’s much less a problem for those who understand that there are many truths.

In the end, we Pagans can make the approach, but discourse is possible only with a willing audience and acknowledgment that there is room for more than one iteration of “good tidings.”

Note:

With regards to Jesus’ apotheosis Luke actually offers three methods (I chose one above for the sake of argument):

Acts 13.32-33:  Upon his resurrection (also Acts 2.36)

Luke 3.22: Upon his baptism by John (noted above)

Luke 1.35:  Via virginal conception by the Holy Spirit (also Luke 2.11)

Paganism, in the Roman Empire, died hard. For centuries, laws and edicts punished the devout. People continued to believe, to celebrate their gods. They loved their religion; they did not want to give it up.

From the fourth century to the ninth, you can see the measures taken to crush the beliefs of the people.

The same was true in Northern Europe. “Barbarian” Christian successor states rose up from the ruins of the Christianized empire and began to impose Christianity not only on their own people, but on peoples beyond their borders. The Frisians, the Saxons, and Slavic peoples, all resisted. None of them wanted the new religion.

Further north, in Scandinavia, Heathen practices persisted for centuries. In Iceland, which was forced under threat of war to convert to Christianity in 1000, Heathenism simply went underground.

Much of the myth of Christianity centers around the idea that people flocked to become Christians, that it was a liberating experience. It was not. Christianity succeeded because it was imposed by force, including torture and death. It was maintained by the same forces throughout the centuries. In the later Roman Empire, every time Roman Christian authority waned, Paganism sprang up and the people cast off the unwanted religion. This happened in Britain, it happened in Spain, and it happened elsewhere.

Another sign of Paganism’s enduring nature comes from central Mexico – from the descendants of the Maya. This video is brief but it’s message is powerful and compelling: people love the gods, they love their religion: The Secrets of the Maya

It’s refreshing to see something like this, with no hint of disapproval in the narrator’s voice, no sign of missionaries engaged in cultural genocide (though we all know they’re out there somewhere). Leave people alone; let them worship as they wish. If it’s a syncretic form of Christianity that pays homage to the past and to ancient religion, fine. You may think of them as heretics, but let them be. If it’s something else, something closer to the beliefs of their ancestors, even better. Either way, it’s their choice.

We need to get over our strange belief that we know best, and I’m speaking of Western cultures in particular, given the age we live in and the influence of Christianity on these cultures. Never before in history has the idea been prevalent that a culture has to export its religion, and not only export it, impose it and enforce it. Bring the missionaries home. Let the people be. If you think your god wants everyone converted, he will do it in his own good time

There is a reason you don’t hear much about Prosper of Aquitaine. Why? Because he agreed with the position I stated above, that it was “for divine grace alone”to bring about conversion. Prosper wrote in 440 CE a book called “De Vocatione Omnium Gentium (On the Calling of All Nations). It has been called “the first work in Christian literature to be concerned with the salvation of infidels” (A. Hamman in the Encyclopedia of the Early Church Oxford:1992) but what sets it apart is that Prosper spoke of salvation, not evangelization.

It was an enlightened position for fifth century Christian culture; it would be an enlightened position today, in the twenty-first century, sixteen hundred years after those thoughts were put to parchment.

The Associated Press reports that, “Egypt said Tuesday that its archaeologists have unearthed a Ptolemaic-era temple dating back more than 2,000 years, that may have been dedicated to the ancient cat goddess, Bastet.”

The Supreme Council of Antiquities said the temple’s ruins were discovered in the heart of the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, the seat of the dynasty founded by Alexander the Great in the 4th century B.C., that ended with the suicide of Cleopatra 300 years later.

The statement said the temple was thought to belong to Queen Berenice, wife of King Ptolemy III who ruled Egypt in the 3rd century B.C.

It is an exciting find. Mohammed Abdel-Maqsood, the Egyptian archaeologist who led the excavation team, believes “the discovery may be the first trace of the long-sought location of Alexandria’s royal quarter.” We’ve seen elsewhere recently that much of this part of Alexandria is now lying in the harbor.

Zahi Hawas, Egypt’s chief archaeologist, said the temple may have been used in later times as a quarry and that this was evidenced by the large number of missing stone blocks.

This is not unusual, obviously. Many ancient temples ended up as quarries. Those that did not survived only because they were turned into churches or were in remote areas. Alexandria is most definitely not remote. We are further told that this temple “was found in the Kom el-Dekkah neighborhood near the city’s main train station and is also the site of a Roman-era amphitheater and well preserved mosaics.”

Unfortunately, the ancient city lies directly beneath the modern city and maps of ancient Alexandria are incomplete and speculative as a result. Finds such as this, which illuminate the ancient city, are exciting. It leaves you wondering what else is lying under the streets, or in the harbor, waiting to be discovered.

I’m sure I’m far from the only one who would like to see Cleopatra’s Alexandria come to light.

So I am sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office and the TV is on. It is tuned to ABC rather than FOX (the station of choice here in town) and for that I was thankful. The View was on, and though the chattering and the way the hosts talk over each other can be annoying, it was at least not Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.

But then their conversation turned to Pat Robertson and his heinous remarks about Haiti. I was glad to hear all four of them – including conservative Christian Elizabeth Hasselbeck, roundly condemn Robertson. I was surprised also to hear Elizabeth defend Obama and what she felt was a veiled reference to Robertson in Obama’s reassurance that Haiti would “not be forsaken.”

But the conversation quickly came to annoy me. “Why,” I thought, “am I forced to sit here and listen to all this crap about what their god would or would not do?” You cannot escape it. This is a debate we would not even be having, we would not be forced to listen to and to endure, if it were not for monotheism. There was no Satan in the days of polytheism for people so sell their souls to. This was an accusation that could not have been made. And therefore, a debate which could not have taken place.

We cannot escape it, however. We see it on TV, we see it in magazines, in newspapers, and on the Web. Hate, hate, hate. Condemnation after condemnation.

It is only at times like this, it seems, that any sound of condemnation comes from moderate Christians. Most of the time, the hate goes unremarked. Generally, the only people who speak up are atheists. Even many Pagans refuse to speak up. I’ve been told – scolded would be a better word – by Pagans who tell me that “Pagans don’t do that.” We Pagans are supposed to make nice with Christians. Apparently, no matter how egregious the offense.

And I am offended. I take my own advice. I turn the channel, I flip to a different page of the of the paper or the magazine I’m reading, or go to a different website. But when you’re out in public, you’re a hostage. You have no control over the TV while you’re waiting to see your doctor or your dentist, or while you’re eating your meal. And in a town like this, it’s very rare to find a TV tuned to ABC.  If the girl behind the desk hadn’t been so busy, I’d have gotten up to tell her how much I appreciated them keeping the TV on a channel other than FOX. It was that remarkable, I thought.

But even having to fend off the propaganda, to dodge the shitstorm of falsity and disinformation spewing from the conservative media, is an aggravation. These people, I think, must be insecure about their god and their beliefs to have to invoke him with every other word. Even Elizabeth Hasselbeck managed to get a “holy spirit” thrown in for good measure before all was said and done. Maybe she was afraid of being forsaken if she didn’t.

I am a pious Heathen. I am devout. I love my gods and my religion. I do not, however, feel the need to mention them in every breath. They are part of my life. I am secure enough not to have to keep them and my beliefs on the tip of my tongue to prove it to anyone. And I know Jesus spoke of this, of this public display of piety that conservative Christians seem to think is required of them today. But they cherry-pick his words, just as they cherry-pick the “Old” Testament, choosing what to believe and what not to believe as if it’s a multiple choice with no wrong answers.

Frankly, I would be happy if I never had to hear another word out of them. If I want to know what they think about their god or their beliefs I’ll visit their website or blog or read their autobiography or follow their Twitters. Otherwise, I’d like to get through supper just once, or a doctor’s appointment, without having to hear about the holy spirit this and the holy spirit that. Do you think that’s too much to ask?