On 12-21-97 Mark Bloss wrote to DAY BROWN... 
 MB> >DAY BROWN wrote to John Boone about Reality and Consciousnes 
 MB>  
 MB>  DB> Had it not been for Alexander, we would probly still have this  
 MB>  DB> religion.  But his armies were so successful, that anything that  
 MB>  DB> was associated with Persian culture was discredited.  If this God 
 MB>  DB> was so good, then why didn't he protect them from the Greeks?  
 MB>  
 MB>  You cannot use this premise in your question - "If this God was so 
 MB> good, 
 MB>  then why didn't he protect [Persians] from the Greeks?" - because, in 
 MB>  fact, Alexander's armies, first, did not have to defeat the Persians 
 MB>  at large, in fact Darius surrendered fairly without a fight, and with 
 MB>  gifts too.  And secondly, the Persian culture, as with all cultures 
 MB> which 
 MB>  Alexander came in contact with, was _embraced_ and not discredited at 
 MB>  any rate. 
I should have put quotes around that question.  Perhaps you recall 
the outrage of the prophets at the new guys in city hall downtown 
in Jerusalem, who began shaving their faces, wearing togas, took 
to chasing the boy servants, and wearing perfume.  No doubt the 
same thing was going on in cities all over the Levant. 
 
While Alexander was quite open minded, his successors weren't, and 
even tried to deify him hoping to unite the empire.  Just as the 
day came 500 years later when the pope converted to Christianity 
following the example of his Emperor, so also there must've been 
wholesale conversions of Zoroasterian and Magarian priests who 
could read the writing on the walls of city hall, and converted 
to the Hellenization of their dogma. 
 
When Moslems burned all the books in Bagdad and the rest of the 
Persian empire, they destroyed most, but not all, of the record 
of the plagarism in the Koran and the Bible of these eastern 
mystical writings by the Magi. 
 
The shepards watched by night when their savior Mythras was born. 
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