Homer is my Father, and Christ is my Mother

Homer was and continues to be the single most predominant solute in the remembering blood of the Western Ethos. His epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, reside deep in the cultural DNA of our collective consciousness. He was the first architect to codify the original and still current paradigm of Citizen Virtue and he set the fundamental template of all that would follow in Greek and Roman traditions. We are the descendant diaspora of this tradition. It was not until Christ, that any of these virtues, values/ ethics were challenged in a populist way.
Christ not only posed threats to the Sanhedrin and to Rome, but to an entire 800 year Homeric legacy. He and his new populist gospel of compassion was a very dangerous counter current to both Jewish and Roman hegemony. We Westerners are the progeny of these two parents. We are still torn between the Homeric definition of the Virtuous Citizen of the State and the universal disciple of Christian compassion.

The Christian revolution attempted to reverse the effects of the Homeric tradition, and we are still in this "epoch" struggle to define what is the "nature human". We are far closer to Rome and Greece and to the original City States than we are to our far more enlightened becoming. The Christian/Homeric struggle is still being played out and it will not be until there is a universal legal end to all wars between nations that the Christian revolution finally prevails in the international body politic. It is not about the dogmas of religion at all. It is about fundamental underlying human morality and ethics that are part of the Evolutionary Imperative that constantly strives for species survival. Religion and its various dogmas are just the superficial structure upon which these underlying morals play out through religious institutions and their relationships w/ political structures..

Who knows when the ultimate milestone of Christian ethics of universal peace becomes a global ordering principle, but if we survive the nuclear weapons age, we will eventually reach this milestone where humans will solve their conflicts w/out having to kill one another and a legitimate "New Age" will have finally arrived. This new age will be established by enacting international laws outlawing wars between nation states of any kind.. This eventual modern age will incorporate the morality/ethics and codes of behavior as is told by countless saints and seers and spiritual icons of all cultures through time. The reason I go back to Homer, in the West anyway, is because there is no further back to go, as far as a cohesive written record- The East, Middle East and Far East is a whole different matter.