I highly recommend the movie Agora, which depicts the life and death of the female philosopher and mathematician Hypatia in Alexandria, about 400 CE. An agora is a marketplace, in this place the marketplace of ideas in ancient Alexandria where Egyptian paganism, early Christianity, and early science were all in public view. As the Roman Empire crumbled, the Christians of Alexandria seized power and suppressed the marketplace of ideas, replacing it with religious dictatorship. This was the main theme of the movie: both the leader of a Christian terrorist organization, and Cyril, who is today esteemed as a great figure in church history, used violence to suppress scientific inquiry. In particular, Cyril used a passage from the writings of Paul (which, it turns out, was inserted into Paul’s writing by a later religious leader) to condemn Hypatia for being a woman who dared to teach men. You cannot watch this movie without coming away with a dark understanding that the early Christian church, far from being a community of love that welcomed the downtrodden of the world into its embrace, was little different from a terrorist organization, and hated scientific inquiry. The Christian terrorist leader gave bread to the poor with the conscious purpose of recruiting them as rioters to take over the city of Alexandria. Not surprisingly, at the end, the Christians strip Hypatia, stone her, mutilate her, and drag her through the streets of Alexandria for the glory of God and Jesus Christ.
Of course, we all know that many Christian thinkers have embraced scientific inquiry. But the historical facts, as dramatized in this movie, show that this is not how the Christian church got started. It got started as a way of violently repressing all freedom of thought. Christian philosophers and scientists came later, and always represented a minority within Christianity. To this day, among conservative Christians, there are far more people who merely want to use religion as a way of controlling the minds of others, and of grabbing political power, than people who truly want to understand the universe from a Christian viewpoint. Back when I was a Christian intellectual, a member of the American Scientific Affiliation and a professor at Christian colleges, it was clear to me that Christian intellectuals were as out of place in most conservative churches as were non-Christian intellectuals. Christian scientific inquiry exists, but is almost invisible against the flames of conservative Christian suppression of science. The pursuit of knowledge was, and is, an artificial and withering graft onto the corpus of conservative Christianity.
A secondary theme in the movie was the utter joy that Hypatia experienced when she finally understood how the planets revolved around the sun in ellipses rather than circles. This joy was in her heart as she walked out into the street to offer herself as a sacrifice to the Christian terrorists. We do not know if the historical Hypatia figured out the discoveries usually attributed to Kepler, over a millennium later, but she might have: her works have all been destroyed, perhaps by Christians of fifth-century Alexandria who insisted that a flat, unmoving Earth was the only belief that should be permitted.
The dark repressive attitude of the Christian church, even in its earliest centuries, contrasts starkly with the brilliant embrace of wisdom that Jesus had. Within a century of Jesus’ death, his church had turned into a political force that would gladly have impaled its own founder on a stake for daring to preach love and forgiveness and for going out onto the hillsides to try to learn about the world through observation.
Even today, most churches are merely mechanisms for extracting money from and exercising control over the minds of people who are looking for love. Not all churches are like this, and there are individual exceptions within most churches. But as an expression of human thought and a conduit of love and altruism, religion has little to recommend it. If you want to learn the truth about the world and how to live, study science, and read the words of Jesus, but don’t bother with any Christianity that came after Jesus.
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