{"id":10600,"date":"2016-09-30T12:16:33","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T16:16:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=10600"},"modified":"2016-09-30T12:16:33","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T16:16:33","slug":"tom-holland-the-tyrannosaur-vs-the-crucified","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2016\/09\/tom-holland-the-tyrannosaur-vs-the-crucified.html","title":{"rendered":"Tom Holland: The Tyrannosaur vs. the Crucified"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

excellent metaphor and accurate insight at the heart of this piece from a scholar of antiquity:<\/p>\n

When I was a boy, my upbringing as a Christian was forever being weathered by the gale force of my enthusiasms. First, there were dinosaurs. I vividly remember my shock when, at Sunday school one day, I opened a children\u2019s Bible and found an illustration on its first page of Adam and Eve with a brachiosaur. Six years old I may have been, but of one thing \u2013 to my regret \u2013 I was rock-solid certain: no human being had ever seen a sauropod. That the teacher seemed not to care about this error only compounded my sense of outrage and bewilderment. A faint shadow of doubt, for the first time, had been brought to darken my Christian faith.<\/p>\n

With time, it darkened further still. My obsession with dinosaurs \u2013 glamorous, \u00adferocious, extinct \u2013 evolved seamlessly into an obsession with ancient empires. When I read the Bible, the focus of my fascination was less the children of Israel or Jesus and his\u00a0disciples than their adversaries: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Romans. In a similar manner, although I vaguely continued to believe in God, I found Him infinitely less charismatic than my favourite Olympians: Apollo, Athena, Dionysus. Rather than lay down laws and condemn other deities as demons, they preferred to enjoy themselves. And if they were vain, selfish and cruel, that only served to endow them with the allure of rock stars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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excellent metaphor and accurate insight at the heart of this piece from a scholar of antiquity: When I was a boy, my upbringing as a Christian was forever being weathered by the gale force of my enthusiasms. First, there were dinosaurs. I vividly remember my shock when, at Sunday school one day, I opened a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[202,403,30,79,22],"class_list":["post-10600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mackerel-snapping","tag-et-exaltavit-humiles","tag-good-friday","tag-mackerel-snapping-2","tag-moral-memories-of-the-past","tag-turn-your-watch-back-about-a-hundred-thousand-years"],"yoast_head":"\nTom Holland: The Tyrannosaur vs. the Crucified<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"excellent metaphor and accurate insight at the heart of this piece from a scholar of antiquity: When I was a boy, my upbringing as a Christian was forever\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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