To quote our contemporary, Ricardo Duchesne, who asked in his book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization:
“What caused the buildup of ideas…From the Italian Galileo to the Polish and Prussian Copernicus?… these ideas then being picked up and debated across Europe, to the Dane Tyco Brahe in his study of comets, the German Kepler building on Brahe, and also the Englishman William Gilbert… these ideas then fused with the Dutchman Christian Huygen’s centrifugal force, the French Descartes’ algebraic geometry and so on…”
A sense of independence and freedom runs throughout our history. What we find in our people is that rather than state-sanctioned, top-down mandates directing scientific and artistic life, the Westerners more often had independent spaces of inquiry– guilds, universities, laboratories, artistic circles, who sought to dare and create and explore.
Inspiring, in that even in the midst of the wars that Jesus said Himself were to be persistent (The Bible Book Of Matthew Chapter 24 Verses 6-8 spoke by Jesus):
You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.
.. and yet, the results of wars can be redeemed, and while they may have had evil intentions, there can be healing on the other side and a deeper view of life, as a gift, itself:
… With such engines of passion and curiosity driving us, conflicts naturally arise, but past wars do not negate the wider bonds of our people.
Often times, wars were fought to assert sovereignty, harkening again to that theme of freedom.
And of course, sometimes we were at the hands of leaders who, unrestrained by small scale bonds and duties, sought megalomaniacal gains, or sold out to the lure of unchecked power, sometimes subverted by alien influences.
This doesn’t mean that when the German and English soldiers put down their arms to play games with each other during the Christmas truce of World War I, they didn’t know deep down that they were related. They did.
Just like in the early 1900s, when elderly Union and Confederate soldiers embraced each other at American Civil War battle anniversaries…
Yes, we share a common Source, we are all made in the image of the One who made us. We are designed to tinker, to learn, to improve, to discover:
No matter what we may learn, no matter how surprised we may be by future findings, our story reaches back much further than is commonly thought today.
Know what has been shared in this presentation.
Let it spur you on to discover more.
Know that we have a common source and that now more than ever, share a common fate.
Be well.
Yes, be well.
-SF1