This day is just full of surprises. My first surprise this morning was that I came to work. I figured I'd work from home today and Monday, but for some reason, I came in anyway. Things like that do not bode well.

Another thing that doesn't bode well is a dream (in color) that I had a couple of nights ago (If you recall, yesterday's entry sailed off into the wide blue yonder due to browser issues). In this dream, there was an explosion in a complex by a river. I saw bodies on fire, falling into the river. There was at least one guy alive. He was definitely Caucasian, and I would say either American, English or French. Dreams like that tend to have a 2 week window of opportunity. I used to keep a dream wall (big post-it notes and magic markers) in the bathroom, so that when I got up in the middle of the night, I could write down anything I dreamt that seemed important. I stopped doing that after 9/11. And destroyed the page for the weeks leading up to it. I have this premonition thing for plane crashes. My plane crash dreams tend to manifest pretty consistently, but generally speaking, those are the only ones I'm aware of that work. So this recent dream about the exploding dream by the river could just be the result of too much cheese before bed.

Or maybe my higher self is up to something again.

Speaking of which, I want to get back to the whole Council of Nicaea thing. If I had talked about my higher self 400 years ago (or even more recently), I would have been labeled as a heretic and burned at the stake.

When the Roman Empire was folding up, Emperor Constantine realized that the military had become a liability, rather than an asset, and he needed a way to maintain control of and communication with the outlying areas of the empire. He noticed that the Christian church had done pretty well for itself over the last 300 years, and being somewhat pragmatic, he adopted and sanctioned Christianity for the empire. So the Church became the administrative body of the Roman empire.

Now the church had issues, because although it had branches everywhere, they were all teaching different things, since there were over 80 accounts of what this carpenter had been up to in Palestine 275 years earlier. And the story they told was of a man. A man with a good message, perhaps, but a man nonetheless. The church needed a strong belief structure on which to build its future growth, and so the 80 accounts were weeded down to four � Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Facts were tweaked. Some were exaggerated, some were suppressed.

After the Nicaean Conference, the new testament consisted of only four gospels. Hellfire and damnation had been introduced for sinning, and everyone was a sinner, because of a woman. God was a man, of course. Oh, and the only way to wipe away that original sin and redeem yourself and thereby avoid the pit was through the church. And the church required �donations�. So cough up. Sex was, effectively, outlawed. It took a while for the church to change its view on that one. It was originally felt that since the purpose of sex was procreation, and the purpose of procreation was to bring about a savior, there was no more need for sex since the savior had been and gone. Or at least, that was one of the reasons given. Mary Magdalene was a whore. The Virgin Mary was, well a virgin, and remained so until the day she died.

As the Roman empire collapsed, the church became the only source of literacy and intellect in the western world, and so for the 700 years, if you wanted to know anything, learn anything or make anything of yourself, you had to become part of the clergy.

For 700 years, any view that contradicted the church was silenced, usually violently. Books, scrolls, people and ideas all went up in smoke together. For 700 years in history, we know very little except what the church told us, and for the 300 years before that, thanks to some revisionist history we are somewhat sketchy also.

What did the church want to destroy? What did they keep from us? Well, take a look at what they suppressed: