...that the Roman Emperor Vespasian was born, in 9 AD that is. According to a few scholarly sources, the claim that he converted to Christianity during his reign is becoming increasingly credible. Interestingly, he afforded the Apostles and Jews relatively more peace in comparison to his predecessor Nero, who accused the Christians of the Great Fire of Rome, or his successor Titus, who besieged Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple. Hmm...at 9 AD, Jesus was probably around 12 years old, and so should have just visited the Temple Himself. A snowball of revolutionary phenomena crescendoing slowly in His little adolescent mind.
...that Mary I of England died, in 1558. She was also known as "Bloody Mary", an underestimated misnomer for the patron apparition of frequent forward-this-message-to-72384-people-or-die-at-12-midnight chain emails. She earned the name for orchestrating the Marian persecutions, in which about 300 protestants were burned at the stake and hundreds more were exiled.
...that the Suez Canal was opened, in 1869. The waterway of today is not to be taken lightly. It has survived as the landscape and the reason for two bloody conflicts of the 20th century - the Suez Crisis and the Arab-Israeli wars. Inextricable from the friction and from the Suez would be the country of Egypt, the other amazing land of biblical wonder. Accordingly, it is said to have seen three major religions, but I would argue five. First, Egyptian paganism (excluding Ham, son of Noah); second, Judaism from the Mosaic era; third, Roman paganism from Roman conquest; fourth, Christianity under Roman shelter; and fifth, Islam from the Ottomans.
...that the world continues to be a crucible of faiths. One religion can be voraciously eager, while another can deny that it is in fact a religion. Some people can believe in one and tune out the rest, while others can tune in to everything and start writing books about why what they're tuning in to are really hallucinations. There are yet others who believe in the absolute golden rule that you shouldn't stop someone from believing what he believes, unless he believes in stopping someone from believing what he doesn't believe. Now that's a pretty shaky belief.
The generic, man-centred purpose of any religion is to answer two questions: 'How did we begin?' and 'How will we end?' In simple words: What happened first and what's going to happen eventually?
So the real question is this: What's going to happen when we breathe our last and fall over the precipice of eternity?
Well, in the end, all of us will find out in at least one of two ways. If the scholars are right, some of us will be asking Vespasian, and some of us will be asking Bloody Mary.
...that we should all start thinking about these things, while we've still got the time.
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