[Athena]

Until Athens, rulers ruled by whim, as does the God of the bible. In Athens people gathered and debated truth, as we are now doing in forums as this one. They began with a belief in several Gods and as they questioned life through the imaged preceptive of many Gods, they exploded human intelligence, far beyond what faith in one autocratic God could do. Then they asked, how do the Gods resolve their difference? They concluded the Gods debated and aruged as they were doing, and what really ruled the universe was reason. Reason, results from all this arguing and coming to a consensus on the best reasoning. This is what democracy is all about. It is rule by reason, not the whim of God or king.

Reason, is the controlling force of the universe, made manifest in speach. We are not born knowing it all, but must learn. Anyone who has potty trained a child or attempted to teach a child to read, knows how hard teaching and learning can be. The Greeks reasoned because we can learn and we can reason, we are like the Gods. This understanding of being made in the image of God, is very different from the Christian superstition of a God and Satan with supernatural powers, and the possibility of being possessed by these supernatural powers.

Athena, the patron Goddess of Athens, taught men to make the own laws, as opposed to the God of Abraham arbitarily giving man laws. She didn't begin doing this until after the Persian wars, when her temple was rebuilt and used to teach the world about the new relationship with the God, about democracy. Her male match is Apollo, who gives us words like apologize, apology. This goes with words like polite and political.

Pythagoras studied math in Egypt where it was a secret of the preist class, and he attracted a Greek following who saw math as sacred and wrote down their on going research in math, making Pythagoras and not the preist of Egypt known for this math.
This played a huge role in understanding rule by reason and how we need to make our laws. Science is to democracy, what religion is to autocracy. Religion is rule by a God and those who claim special knowledge of this God. Democracy is rule by reason, and the laws are made by people who debate the reasoning until their is a consensus on the best reasoning. This is not exactly rule by the majority as we have understood it without an understanding of democracy as it was conceived in Athens.

Christianity has lately preverted our understanding of democracy, and men like Pat Robertson preaching the power of Satan are in front of the pack of those who could detroy our democracy. We must return to understanding democracy as rule by reason, and that means an effort to understand universeral law, not just the bible.