Selected quotes from "Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts" © 1979 (conclusion)
Conrad Knauer
http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=554793980
CK
Joseph Stalin studied for the priesthood in a Russian theological
seminary in Tiflis, in Georgia, for five years (1894-99). He was a
model student until he became aware of the liberal political ideas that
permeated the town. He became a Marxist and joined the Social Democrat
Party. Because of this, he was expelled from the seminary.
By insisting that the Puritans enforce their law against Quakers rather
than accepting their terms for freedom, Mary Dyer of Newport, Rhode
Island, was hanged on Boston Common on June 1, 1660, and became the only
woman resident of the colonies in America to die for the cause of
religious freedom. Mary was three times banished from the Colony of
Massachusetts Bay for her beliefs, twice on pain of death should she
return. On her third visit to Boston, she watched the hanging of two
fellow Quakers, then was placed upon the gallows for her own execution.
At the last moment, with the noose about her neck, she was reprieved, to
be sent back to her home on condition she not return. But she was back
in Boston the following May. She again was offered reprieve if she
would remain outside the colony, and again she refused. This time she
was hanged for her challenge of the law of banishment of Quakers.
A room with bath is perpetually reserved in one of Java's best hotels
for the goddess of the South Sea, Njai Loro Kidul.
December 25 was not celebrated as the birthdate of Christ until the year
440 A.D.
A nation other than modern Israel was the first to adopt Judaism as its
state religion. The pagan Khazars, a Turkic people who had migrated
from Asia to southern Russia, established a kingdom on the Volga river
and in the eighth century A.D. adopted Judaism. (They may have done it
to maintain a neutral posture in the wars between Christians and
Muslims.) The kingdom was destroyed two centuries later by invading
troops from Kiev.
In 1831, a persuasive religious enthusiast from New England named
William Miller began preaching that the world would come to an end on
April 3, 1843. He said his reckoning was based on a thorough study of
the Bible, and he convinced thousands of Americans. When Judgment Day
rolled around, his followers gathered on hilltops and in cemeteries- and
waited. Many had burned their posessions or given them away. When
April 3 passed uneventfully, Miller named a new date, October 22, 1844.
Many loyal followers met again at that time. The Millerite movement
then declined. Cynics asserted that on each supposed last day of the
world Miller's woodshed and pantry were full.
Many odd beliefs grew around the sacrament of the Mass in the medieval
church. People believed that the Host (the consecrated wafer of the
Eucharist- the bread used is pure, white and unleavened and baked in
small disks) had magical power; they would carry it secretly away from
the church and use it to cure swine fever, put out fires, fertilize
fields, make love charms, protect a criminal from discovery, and so on.
The practice was popular among average churchgoers in England, but more
so- according to John Lake (1624-89), bishops of Chichester- among
"witches ... sorcerers, charmers, enchanters, dreamers, soothsayers,
necromancers, conjurers, cross-diggers, devil-raisers, miracle-doers,
dog-leeches and bawds."
In medieval times, church bells were often consecrated to ward off evil
spirits. Because thunderstorms were attributed to the work of demons,
the bells would be rung in an attempt to stop the storms. Lots of
bellringers were killed by lightning.
Despite the fact that the church during the Renaissance frowned on the
occult as bordering on heresy, Pope Julius II set the time of his
coronation in 1503 according to astrological calculations.
Although Buddhism began and flourished in India, it had by 1200 all but
disappeared there, but had won huge numbers of followers in Ceylon,
Burma, Thailand, Tibet, China, and Japan. (Less than 1 percent of the
1977 estimated Indian population of 662,200,000 were Buddhists.)
Suspension of the construction of the Washington Monument, at the
153-foot level, was forced by the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing movement,
which was offended by Pope Pius IX's gift of a block of marble from
Rome's Temple of Concord. The suspension lasted twenty-six years. Work
resumed in 1880 and the monument was completed in 1888.
Discrimination against roman Catholics in citizenship and public life
was legal somewhere in the United States until 1835, when the last
anti-Catholic law of colonial times was repealed.
Ten years before Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church and
established the Church of England over the issue of his divorce, he
wrote a book entitled Assertion of the Seven Sacraments, which attacked
Martin Luther's theses and affirmed his loyalty to the pope. The pope
granted Henry the title "Defender of the Faith" for having written this
scholastic work. The king kept the title after breaking away from
Catholicism- as have his successors to this very day.
Missionary diplomacy- the influence in foreign countries of U.S.
missionaries and their supporters- had strong and sometimes violent
effects. Protestant missionaries in Hawaii were strong influences for
annexation of the island to the U.S. in china, Protestant and Catholic
missionaries caused U.S. troops to be involved in suppressing the
Chinese Boxer Rebellion, in 1900. Protestant efforts to overturn the
rule of Catholic Spain in Cuba were a contributing factor to the
Spanish-American War.
A visitor in 1946 to the Greek Orthodox monastery of St. Catherine's,
founded in the sixth century at the foot of Mount Sinai (Jabal Musa in
Arabic), learned that the monks there did not know of World War II and
that some had not heard of World War I.
Jesus of Nazareth was born four to eight years before he was "born."
(His birth was in the reign of Herod, who died in 4 B.C., four years
"Before Christ.") In 534 A.D., the first man who calculated the year of
Jesus' birth made a mistake- and we've been stuck with it ever since.
The Chinese Emperor Kublai Khan, a clever politician, observed not only
the holy days of his nation, but those of the three major faiths of the
West- Christmas and Easter for the Christians, Passover and the Day of
Atonement for the Jews, and Ramadan for the Muslims.
In the sixteenth century, many Christians gave up the Catholic faith and
became Protestants. The rejection of the lavish ritual of Catholicism
often took on extreme forms. In England, elaborate ceremonies and
processions were banned to keep religion pure. Later, in 1647, a law
was passed by Parliament that abolished Christmas and stated that it was
to be a day like any other day. Some people felt, however, that this
law went too far. Sometimes, entire congregations were arrested for
protesting the abolishment of Christmas.
Mithraism, one of the dominant religions of the Roman Empire, was
practiced more than Christianity in the second century A.D. Named for
the ancient god Mithras of Iran, who was originally a minor figure of
Zoroastrianism, Mithraism became essentially a soldier's religion. Its
ethics were rigorous, loyalty was inculcated, and fasting and continence
were prescribed. It was a mystery faith. Converts entered by rites
that involved bathing in the blood of a freshly killed bull. Mithraism
became far more popular and important in Rome than it possibly could
become in Persia under the hostile eyes of the orthodox Zoroastrian
priesthood.
In early eighteenth-century Portugal, the Church owned two-thirds of all
the land.
Nearly four centuries before Columbus's first voyage across the Great
Ocean Sea, the first bishop of America was appointed. Named by Pope
Paschal II, Eric Gnupsson had in his province Greenland and Vinland
(America.)
In biblical days, it was forbidden to sell a synagogue for subsequent
use as a tannery, bathhouse, immersion pool, or urinal. The institution
of the synagogue probably dates to the Babylonian exile of the sixth
century B.C. The returnees to Jerusalem brought with them the basic
structure that was to develop by the first century A.D. into the
well-defined institution known from then to this day.
When a statue of native-born Copernicus was unveiled, finally, in 1839,
in Warsaw, no Catholic priest would officiate at the occasion though the
world-shaking astronomer had been a canon of a cathedral in East Prussia
and had in 1543 dedicated to Pope Paul III his revolutionary treatise on
the way the universe really works.
St. Mary-Magdalen dei Pazzi (1566-1607), the Florentine mystic and
Carmelite nun, preached so volubly during her ecstasies that she had to
be provided with six secretaries, who wrote under her dictation for
hours and sometimes for whole days at a time.
Queen Mary, in 1555, banned any version of the Bible in English
translation, commanding "that no manner of persons presume to bring into
this realm any manuscripts, books, papers, etc., in the name of Martin
Luther, John Calvin, Miles Coverdale, Erasmus, Tyndale, etc., or any
like books containing false doctrines against the Catholic faith."
After St. Francis's death in 1226, his followers who attempted to
continue to embrace a life of poverty were burned at the stake as
heretics. The Church had no desire to encourage poverty because it had
become comitted to the financial power structure of Europe.
The Egyptians attacked the Jews on a holy day in 320 B.C. An army led
by Ptolemy I of Egypt attacked Jerusalem on the Sabbath. But unlike the
Israelis in 1973, the ultra-pious Jews in those days refused to fight on
the Sabbath, even in self-defense, and so Jerusalem- which had withstood
Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar with admirable tenacity- fell easily to
Ptolemy.
By "deciphering" the Book of Revelations, a minister in Lochau- in what
is now East Germany- proclaimed that the world would end on October 18,
1533. When it didn't happen, the minister- a Michael Stiftel- was given
a thrashing by the townspeople.
No other country has as diverse religious groups as the U.S., which has
at least 52 major denominations with membership exceeding 100,000. The
Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches lists 223 sects, cults, and
denominations, not counting groups such as the First Church of Christ,
Scientist, which provide no membership statistics.
Piles of skulls of dead Greek Orthodox monks are stacked in St.
Catherine's monastery near the foot of Jabal Musa, the traditional Mount
Sinai (at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba), the holy site revered as the
place where God spoke to Moses from the Burning Bush. Christian monks
since about 250 A.D. have lived and prayed at St. Cathereine's, and it
is their wish even today to have their own heads added to the piles.
A Baptist church in Hammond, Indiana, reported a record church
attendance of 12,350 worshipers in December 1972. The church employed a
fleet of sixty-eight buses, picking up people over a radius of fifty
miles. Their advertised program for "Heaven Sunday" included Carl
McIntire, and an organist without arms or legs, a karate expert, a
former Hollywood stunt cowboy, an ex-football hero, a rodeo star, Santa
Claus, and a ventriloquist.
The great British physicist Robert Boyle (1627-91), who was the first to
study gases scientifically, was a fairly religious youth who became even
more devout the rest of his life after being frightened by a
thunderstorm in Geneva. In middle age, he learned Hebrew and Aramaic.
He wrote essays on religion and financed missionary work in the Orient.
In 1680, he was elected president of the Royal Society, but would not
accept because he disapproved of the form of the oath. Through his
will, he founded the Boyle Lectures, not on science but on the defense
of Christianity against unbelievers.
No clergyman attended the U.S. Constitutional Convention, and the
Constitution itself contains no religious references, not even a mention
of God. The Founding Fathers even added these strong words in the Bill
of Rights two years later: "Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise therof."
In 963 A.D., Athanasius established the famous monastery on the sharp
peak of Mount Athos in northeastern Greece. Though the monastery is
dedicated to the Virgin Mary, no woman has ever been allowed on the
mountain.
A chief tenet of John Humphrey Noyes's utopianism held that the
pleasures of sex and the bearing of children were events that might be
separated in the interests of his community, which was called Oneida and
located in New York State. Withholding of male orgasm would satisfy the
tenet. Older women of Oneida initiated boys into the art of coitus
reservatus and older men instructed the young women. Carefully chosen
couples were permitted to have children, who were then raised by the
community instead of by the parents, in the manner proposed by Plato.
This religious society of "perfectionists" was established in 1848. It
prospered economically by making steel traps and silverware. It was
reorganized in 1881 as a joint stock company and the social experiments
were abandoned.
Thomas Aquinas was kidnapped by his own family. After an education at
Monte Cassino and at the University of Naples, Thomas joined the new
Dominican order in 1244. His family objected, kidnapped him, and held
him in custody. He escaped, and made his way to Paris. His
philosophical system remains the basis of catholic teaching to this
day. By upholding reason as a respected method for extending the
boundaries of human knowledge, he helped to make science respectable
again in Christian Europe after it had been considered pagan for a long
period. He was canonized in 1323, a mere half-century after his death.
Various gatherings of bishops in southern France in 990 A.D. tried to
set up a "Truce of God," a subjection of warfare to rules. The chief
rule called for converting all ecclesiastical property and persons into
a kind of neutral territory that was not to be touched. Eventually,
this was extended to a total prohibition of warfare from Wednesday
evening to Monday morning of each week, and on numerous fast and feast
days as well. In the end, as much as three-fourths of the year was put
off limits to fighting- in theory.
The Society of Jesus has never officially adopted the term "Jesuit," and
the popes in their official documents about the society have never used
the term. In an unofficial way, however, members of the Society refer
to themselves as Jesuits.
The Jews and the early Christians started the day at sunset. "Christmas
Eve" means, accordingly, the first part of Christmas Day, and it was
only later that it came to be considered as the evening before
Christmas. The same goes for New Year's Eve.
Michael Faraday (1791-1867), the great English chemist and physicist,
was a member of the Sandamanian Church, a tiny sect of fundamentalists.
He was invited to dinner with Queen Victoria on a Sunday in 1844, which
meant he would have to miss services. After an agonizing period of
uncertainty, he decided it was necessary for him to obey the Queen. His
fellow church members excommunicated Faraday as a result, and would not
reinstate him until he had undergone considerable penance.
In a church in Czechoslovakia, there is a chandelier made of human
bones. The ceiling is festooned with the remains of former worshipers.
During the Middle Ages, there was, on average, a church for every 200
people. the area covered by religious buildings took up a large part of
every city. In the English cities of Norwich, Lincoln, and York, which
had populations of between 5,000 and 10,000, there were fifty,
forty-nine, and forty-one churces respectively.
The story of Noah's Ark was written earlier than the biblical version-
in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. The "Noah" of this epic is
Utnapishtim, who is supernaturally warned to build a boat in which to
survive the deluge. Similarity extends even to the sending out of birds
to see if dry land has appeared.
Muslims are forbidden to drink liquor. Saudi Arabia's prohibition law
requires that that foreigners' liquor cabinets, when not in use, must be
sealed. Violation by two Britishers in 1978 led to 200 strokes with a
cane and a ten-month prison sentence.
While there is no law that forbids the mentioning in Swiss newspapers of
suicide as a cause of death, suicides are not specifically mentioned in
many cases. The reason for such omissions is related particularly to
Catholic doctrine that regards suicide as sinful.
A war was ended by a solar eclipse- and became the oldest event on Earth
that can be dated to the exact day. The armies of Lydia and Media were
preparing for the battle in Asia Minor when the eclipse occurred.
Sobered by the event, the two nations signed a peace treaty. Modern
astronomers have fixed the date of that eclipse at May 28, 585 B.C.
The villagers of Gonesse, France, were sure their visitor from the sky
was the work of Satan himself, and they attacked it with pitchforks,
then tied the wheezing, deflated carcasse to the tail of a horse, whose
dashes over the countryside tore it asunder. "It" had been a
rubberized-silk hydrogen-filled balloon- one of the first, in the year
1783.
The year is previewed in Bhutan by astrologers. If a particularly
unlucky coincidence of signs for a combination of day and date is
discerned, the calendar is fixed so that the day and date do not occur
as they ocur elsewhere. Bhutan, in the east Himalayas, has been known
to skip a whole month, e.g., there might be no December, but then there
are two Januarys.
Girolamo Cardano (1501-76), the great mathematician, was a firm believer
in astrology. He went a little too far, however, when he tried to cast
the horoscope of Jesus; that had him imprisioned for blasphemy for a
while. On the other hand, he cured a Scottish cardinal of asthma by
forbidding him to use feathers in his bead- the first case of an
understanding of what we now call "allergy." There is a story (probably
false) that Cardano predicted astrologically the day of his own death.
When the day, September 21, 1576, found him in good health, he committed
suicide.
The German astronomer Johann Bayer (1572-1625) felt it was blasphemous
to have the constellations named for characters in Greek mythology. He
introduced a new system in which the northern constellations were named
after people in the New Testament and the southern constellations after
people in the Old Testament. It didn't catch on.
At an eclipse of the sun, the Ojibwa Indians of North America and the
Sencis of Peru shot flaming arrows into the sky, hoping thus to rekindle
the light. At the autumnal equinox, ancient Egyptians held a festival
called "the nativity of the sun's walking stick" in the belief that the
declining sun needed a staff to lean upon.
When a vigilante organization raided a communist bookshop in Oklahoma
City in 1940, it seized a number of publications throught to be
"advocating violence" and publically burned them at the city stadium.
Among the publications picked for destruction were the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
The woman who has appeared most on the covers of Time magazine is the
Virgin Mary- ten times.
As in Abraham's time, it was the custom among men in Rome, when swearing
to tell the truth, to place one's right hand on one's testicles. The
english word "testimony" is related to this custom.
Charles Bradlaugh (1833-91), an English atheist, fought against the
requirement to take oaths on the Bible. He was elected to the House of
Commons in 1881, 1882, 1884, and 1885. He finally won his point and was
allowed to affirm instead of swear. In 1888 a law made affirmation
sufficient in the English courts.
The Greek philosopher Thales (624-546 B.C.) is the first man in history
to ask the question "Of what is the Universe made?" and to answer
without introducing gods or demons. In later centuries, when the Greeks
made up lists of the "seven wise men," Thales invariably was placed
first.
The Donatists of fourth-century North Africa were so committed to the
idea of martyrdom that they would stop strangers and demand to be killed
by them. Since the strangers were threatened with death if they
refused, the Donatists found martyrdom easy enough to come by.
The story of the Temple Mound Indians of the Mississippi Valley, known
for their extensive archaeological remains, is a mystery. At the height
of their cultural achievement, around the sixteenth century, they
developed an apocalyptic death cult, and before the invading Spanish
could conquer them, their entire society had died out. No satisfactory
explanation for their disappearance has been found.
"Thugs" were originally religious mystics of India. Banded together in
a secret society, and devoted to the sinister goddess Kali, they
performed countless ritual murders by twisting a rope around the
victim's neck. The society was broken up in the nineteeth century.
Medical treatment, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was
aimed at ridding the sick of "vile humours" by vomiting, purging, and
bleeding. The treatment was often the immediate cause of death. Some
perscriptions called for "letting" more blood than is now known to exist
in the whole body.
Parsis, the religious community of India that stresses education and
practices Zoroastrianism, believes that the sooner the dead body is
picked clean of flesh, the sooner the spirit will be released. Parsee
dead are placed on platforms- towers of silence- where they are ravaged
quickly by vultures.
In seventeenth-century Russia, the Great Schism (the Raskol) left the
dissenting religious group (the Raskolniki) in such despair that many of
its members sought death rather than wait for the end of the world they
had predicted would occur before the end of the century. Between 1672
and 1691, there were thirty-seven mass immolations in which more than
20,000 Raskolniki voluntarily burned to death. They had thought it
senseless to remain on Earth and risk being contaminated by heresy.
In early England, suicides were interred in unconsecrated ground on the
north side of the churchyards or at the crossroads with a stake driven
through their bodies to keep them from rising and haunting the
neighborhood. The latter practice did not end until 1823, when a
murderer and suicide was staked and buried in St. John's Wood.
Thereafter, such interments were forbidden by law.
Hatto II, archbishop of Mainz, Germany, was said to have found a unique
solution to the great famine of 914 A.D. According to the chroniclers,
he gathered in a barn at Caub a large number of the exceedingly poor and
oppressed, under the pretext of feeding them there; once the crowd was
inside, he set fire to the structure. His rationale: If the poor were
sent to their heavenly reward, the famine would cease sooner. Years
later, Hatto may have gotten his just reward- he was said to have been
eaten alive by mice.
In a number of cultures- among Indians of Central America, the Thracians
of antiquity, and others- when a child was born, its family sat around
wailing over the woes the child must endure, ticking off every calamity
that could befall humankind. But when death occurred, the survivors
laughed and joked on behalf of the deceased, whom they saw as departing
for eternal bliss. Sometimes a favorite wife or consort was slain so
she could share her loved one's paradise.
A common American coin, the nickel, is named for the Devil. It is so
called because it contains the metal nickel, which was called that by
German miners of the 1700s because it interferred with the smelting of
copper. They called it Kupfernickel- "copper Devil," or "Devil's
copper." (We still speak of the Devil as "Old Nick.") A related metal,
cobalt, presented similar trouble, and the German miners got the name
from the earth spirit Kobold because it was thought cobalt was copper
that had been bewitched.
Assassins originally were members of a secret order, a Muslim sect, in
Persia and Syria. Their leader, called the Old Man of the Mountain,
would serve them opium, later confused with "hashish" (which became
"assassin"), and then dispatch men to kill his enemies. They were given
the "hashish" and treated to great sensual pleasures. It was supposed
to be a sampling of the pleasures of Paradise, where they would go if
they died while performing their duties. The assasinations stopped
after the Mongols stormed the sect's Alamut base in Persia, in 1256, and
killed most of the Persian branch of the sect. But the sect, however,
continued. Its leader today is Aga Khan.