the movie Agora as a metaphor for Western civilization versus radical islam

[Breezypointer]

I just watched the movie Agora starring  Rachel Weisz as Hypatia  a female mathematician, philosopher and astronomer in late 4th-century Roman Egypt, who investigates the flaws of the geocentric Ptolemaic system and the heliocentric model that challenges it. Surrounded by religious turmoil and social unrest, Hypatia struggles to save the knowledge of classical antiquity from destruction. Max Minghella co-stars as Davus, Hypatia's father's slave, and Oscar Isaac as Hypatia's student, and later prefect of Alexandria,Orestes.

 

 

I believe  this film is a metaphor for the system we have now in Western Europe which consists of a native Aristotelian, empirically based and philosophically tolerant culture that is being overrun by a dogmatic reactionary envious zealot culture form the middle east.  The Christians in this film were the downtrodden the poor and uneducated who were easily persuaded by sociopathic leaders who subsequently blamed the oligarchic polytheistic leadership of late roman Egypt for their problems. It is easy to see how the envious mob subconsciously seeks to destroy that what makes them feel inferior even if it is to the detriment of scientific knowledge and understanding.  The character of Hypatia is the anthropomorphized ideal of the rational philosopher king.  She is bound by no man or the traditional cultural norms of the day be that raising children or seeking a husband.  She is only interested in understanding the fundamental laws of nature and how they interact with the world she sees.  She is envied, sexually idealized and stalked due to her exceptional talents and demeanor.  As a person of her time she is placed in a sea of turmoil and unfortunately cannot stem the tide of reactionary destruction versus rational civilization.  

 

The roman authorities are forced to compromise with the unruly mob and allow them to destroy the library of knowledge that had resided tin the city for centuries.  This is a classic example of a culture in decline as it accedes authority to those who are willing to exact violence to anything that it finds offensive.  However since the emotion that fuels this violence is envy it seeks to destroy all that is beautiful so that it may not offend the less intellectually gifted.  Modern examples are the promotion of white privilege, cultural Marxism, structural racism, and micro-aggressions.  These are all just code words for making whites and in particular white males repent for their intellectual, artistic and societal achievements. 

The film ends with her former slave strangling her right after utilizing her intellectual gifts she discovered that the earth was not the center of the solar system but the sun.  

If western civilization continues down the path of accommodating the whims of the envious mob I fear we shall suffer the same fate as hypatia.

 

[Sal9000]

which consists of a native Aristotelian, empirically based and philosophically tolerant culture

 

The exact opposite of this sentence is true. The scientific method is based on late Nominalism, a movement that was decidedly anti-Aristotelian. All the early physicists had to fight hard against the church which had Aristotle's physics as its basis.

[NumberSix]

Prhaps against religious extremism in general, not Islam specifically.

[shirgall]

Against Abrahamic religious extremism, at least.

[Donnadogsoth]

 

I just watched the movie Agora starring  Rachel Weisz as Hypatia  a female mathematician, philosopher and astronomer in late 4th-century Roman Egypt, who investigates the flaws of the geocentric Ptolemaic system and the heliocentric model that challenges it. Surrounded by religious turmoil and social unrest, Hypatia struggles to save the knowledge of classical antiquity from destruction. Max Minghella co-stars as Davus, Hypatia's father's slave, and Oscar Isaac as Hypatia's student, and later prefect of Alexandria,Orestes.

 

 

I believe  this film is a metaphor for the system we have now in Western Europe which consists of a native Aristotelian, empirically based and philosophically tolerant culture that is being overrun by a dogmatic reactionary envious zealot culture form the middle east.  The Christians in this film were the downtrodden the poor and uneducated who were easily persuaded by sociopathic leaders who subsequently blamed the oligarchic polytheistic leadership of late roman Egypt for their problems. It is easy to see how the envious mob subconsciously seeks to destroy that what makes them feel inferior even if it is to the detriment of scientific knowledge and understanding.  The character of Hypatia is the anthropomorphized ideal of the rational philosopher king.  She is bound by no man or the traditional cultural norms of the day be that raising children or seeking a husband.  She is only interested in understanding the fundamental laws of nature and how they interact with the world she sees.  She is envied, sexually idealized and stalked due to her exceptional talents and demeanor.  As a person of her time she is placed in a sea of turmoil and unfortunately cannot stem the tide of reactionary destruction versus rational civilization.  

 

The roman authorities are forced to compromise with the unruly mob and allow them to destroy the library of knowledge that had resided tin the city for centuries.  This is a classic example of a culture in decline as it accedes authority to those who are willing to exact violence to anything that it finds offensive.  However since the emotion that fuels this violence is envy it seeks to destroy all that is beautiful so that it may not offend the less intellectually gifted.  Modern examples are the promotion of white privilege, cultural Marxism, structural racism, and micro-aggressions.  These are all just code words for making whites and in particular white males repent for their intellectual, artistic and societal achievements. 

 

The film ends with her former slave strangling her right after utilizing her intellectual gifts she discovered that the earth was not the center of the solar system but the sun.  

If western civilization continues down the path of accommodating the whims of the envious mob I fear we shall suffer the same fate as hypatia.

 

Thanks for this interesting post, more interesting than actually watching the film I'm sure.

 

Islamic terrorism is like John Carpenter's The Thing:  It comes from afar, invades quietly, "taking over" various people who become sleeper agents that spontaneously erupt into gory violence attempting to kill or convert all nearby.

 

Bill Warner on YouTube talks about how wherever Islam enters a society, eventually that society will either push it out and extinguish it, or else the host religion will be subjugated and extinguished.  The examples given were Turkey, for the latter, and Spain, for the former.  Essentially we owe our science, art, and liberties to the Crusaders who stopped the Muslim conquest.  But now the threat has ceased to be military (except for ISIS) and become stealthy, terroristic, the creatures are agitating for Sharia law, they're building their numbers and preaching to their masses, all the while hating everything the West stands for.

 

It's a thorny infection, very difficult to combat on its own terms.  The West as is is hopelessly impotent to stop Islamic conquest.  We've lost our nerve and our economy, we're bound up in paradoxes of "tolerating" the intolerant, which in turn reaches back to "love thy neighbour".  Love those who are and who wish to remain aliens?  Hostile aliens?  Deceptive, terroristic aliens who emerge spontaneously from a body of a "religion of peace" (and which aren't?  Satanism maybe?) to do Satanic acts, very clearly in the tradition of the past 1400 years of Satanic action by Islam.  No answer for this one its own terms.  Bomb them a bit, throw ground troops at them, stomp ISIS, but the infection remains.  Dirty business.

 

The only answer is a general uplift in ideas on the part of the global populace.  The more people listening devoutly to Beethoven, reading Schiller, studying Gauss, the more people philosophising in general, the more people will be reasoning well enough to take an enlightened view and see the structural problems aggravating the situation:  US-Britain-NATO geopolitics destabilising the Islam world and elsewhere, the lack of mega-project engineerig developing Asia and elsewhere, the lack of clean water infrastructure globally but increasingly especially in the US Southwest, the lack of proper education worldwide, these along with proper policework are the ultimate antidotes to terrorism and the tyranny of the mob.