two nits picked gerry palo writes between adam and eve and golgotha the whole process of the fall of man occurred this involved a gradual dimming of consciousness of the spiritual world this is discernable in the world outlooks of different peoples through history the greek for example could say better a beggar in the land of the living than a king in the land of the dead iliad i think i would not swear that nothing of the sort is found in the iliad but the first passage i thought of was the odyssey or thereabouts my copy has no line numbers the ghost of acchilles speaks robert fitzgerald translation better i say to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man on iron rations than lord it over all the exhausted dead the next passage i thought of was from ecclesiastes a living dog is better than a dead lion on the other hand there is one notion firmly embedded in christianity that originated most definitely in a pagan source the idea that the human being consists essentially of soul only and that the soul is created at birth was consciously adopted from aristotle whose ideas dominated christian thought for fifteen hundred years and still does today surely aristotle had little influence on christian thought before about ad yours james kiefer
