is you is, or is you isn't? / the path of western civ

Is you is, or is you isn't?   You can be is, or you can be isn't, but you can't be both, and you can't  be neither, and you can't be something else.  That is the canon of western civ.  Back in the day the Greeks had all these gods up there in Olympus fornicating and fighting and getting drunk, and who could figure out what was going on?  Nobody, and that's why nobody bothered.  The earliest Greek philosophers turned against them, and that's an interesting word, Them.  If They were always colluding to keep you from the truth for unknown purposes, how could you ever know anything?

So they tossed Them aside and sat on a rock with their legs crossed and their chins on their fists, and they set to thinking.  And they did pretty good, they figured a lot of things out that wouldn't be figured out again for a thousand years.  But they never wanted to leave that rock or turn their head to look at what was around them.  They disdained the real world as some kind of illusion and thought that they could figure out everything from that rock without even turning their heads.

So they were pushovers when the Romans came knocking on the door.  The Romans weren't big thinkers and disdained the theoretical and, as you know, they conquered almost all of the known world.  But once they conquered you, if you didn't put up a fuss, they were pretty lenient.  You didn't have to worship their gods, who were just the Greek gods in more practical clothes, you could keep worshiping your old gods, and hell, the Romans would join right in with you and worship them too, let a thousand gods bloom, it was new age in the old age.

I wasn't quite correct when I said that the Romans didn't want you to worship their gods, they did want lip service, just some little sacrifice some little oath, and then you could head on out to the Sun God's for the rest of the afternoon.  It was no big problem for anybody but, the Christians..

Maybe Zeus, or the Sun God didn't mind if you played footsies with other gods, but Jehovah wasn't having any of that shit, no other gods before Me crumb bums, you got that?  They came a cropper for that when they found themselves facing a lion with their bare hands and the whole goddamn crowd rooting against them.  But they were tough little nuts and they ended up ruling the Roman Empire, and when it fell they converted the barbarians and pretty much ruled Europe until modernity.

They inherited that whole Roman rigmarole of rules and regulations and applied that to their church, monks debating the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin (strangely Wiki has no answer), and everything was pretty much cut and dry, this was so because of this and that.  There were a few things that didn't make any sense and they were called miracles and roped off from discussion.

And they didn't disdain the natural world the way some other religions did, indeed it was the creation of God, and a close inspection of it was all to the glory of Him, and just as there could only be one god, there could only be one truth.  If you weren't is, you were isn't, if you were is then you weren't isn't, that was it.

That's how we got to have science in the western world, there was no thought  that things could never be figured out because maybe Zeus was drunk that day, or They were colluding to make you think that.  An electron has a mass of 9.109x10^-31 and that's it. There are no alternate facts and that's a fact Jack.  To think otherwise is to disdain the whole of western civ.


I am wondering about Trump's physical too.  This won't be his wacky personal doctor, this will be some hotshot military doctor.  I wonder how much will be revealed.