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The Over-the-Bree-Hill Gang Rides Again - Page 5

© Michael Martinez

Napoleon led an entire generation of Europe's young men to their deaths on numerous battlefields. Mankind does a good job of generating its own evil. We don't need Dark Lords to threaten our survival. And if we don't need Dark Lords, then we don't need to combine the stories of our own masters of evil with the tales of the Dark Lords who preceded them. Napoleon and Hitler are but pale shadows of the Devil. They may be his servants, but they are not as powerful as he. The evil they inflicted upon the world, though not forgotten, has receded with each generation. The Silmarillion is presented as a testimonial to an ancient conflict in which uncounted multitudes of Men, Elves, and Dwarves suffered. We have similar testimonials, such as "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and Homer's "Iliad". Do we believe these stories? Not really. We know there was a war fought for Troy about the time given in Homer's poem, but the poem makes that war seem larger than life. The ancient epics, if they were ever based on history, have made the transition from history to mythology. The Bible is a controversial testimonial to the past. Most of its stories can still be verified through other sources, and if not regarded as history by most scholars, it is still viewed as a largely contemporary record of the living memory of events. For example, there has been debate over whether David actually lived. Why? Because so far only The Bible says he lived. A tombstone in Britain, naming a centurion from a Roman Legion, is often regarded as a more accurate record of history than the Bible, a collection of books which has been carefully preserved and studied for nearly 3,000 years. Why? Because books are considered less reliable than tombstones. We have no idea of whether the centurion named on that tombstone really lived. Someone could have just carved a name and epitaph into a slab of rock with no regard for who lay beneath it. Such a deception is at least as likely as (if not greater than) hundreds of priests and scholars conniving to deceive people for thousands of years. But we'll put more credibility into carvings on a piece of rock than we will put into stories written down on paper, preserved and passed on, generation after generation, for thousands of years. Maybe that's because the tombstone carvers didn't have time to describe the balls of fire which came flying from the grave as the centurion was laid to rest, but writers of Biblical books and other ancient documents did have time to record omens, dreams, and prophecies. Ammianus Marcelinus, one of the most respected Roman historians, is often treated with great skepticism. Why? Because he took the time to record "the facts" that is, he mentions such things like balls of fire shooting out from the foundations of the Jewish temple at the approach of workers sent by a Roman emperor to restore it.

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