Preface. Ever since reading Gibbons “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” I’ve been fascinated by the complexity of reasons for why the Roman Empire fell. But so many books and writings were lost that much remains unknown. Mainly due to Christians destroying and looting books, temples, art, statues, and anything deemed Pagan. It is estimated that less than 1% of ancient literature survived to the present day. Yet the role of Christian authorities in the active suppression and destruction of books in Late Antiquity has received surprisingly little sustained consideration by academics.
This is a book review of Nixey (2019) The darkening age: The Christian destruction of the Classical World, a book about how Christians destroyed most of the books of ancient philosophies, encyclopedias, and other writings. And much more. Other books on this topic include Rohmann (2016) Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity, and Ovenden (2021) Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge.
This is not only a fascinating, and horrifying book, but important now that American Christian Nationalist and other evangelist sects are trying to ban books (Rosen 2023 Banned in America! Christian Nationalists are demanding the removal of books from public and school libraries across the country in a growing wave of culture war battles, Baeta 2025 The Normalization of Book Banning, Randal 2022 Why Christian Nationalists want to ban books.
And rewrite textbooks and school curriculums (Laats 2023 The Right-Wing Textbooks Shaping What Many Americans Know About History, Clossen 2025 Inside a new bible-infused Texas English curriculum, Christian textbooks used in thousands of schools use an alternate version of history and make Christian nationalism more mainstream).
This is quit upsetting for me because I write about why the collapse of our fossil fueled civilization is likely to be triggered by diesel shortages, since there are no supply chains that don’t depend on transportation provided by heavy duty road and off-road trucks, ships, and locomotives. Consequently, the Preservation of Knowledge has been one of the overriding themes of my website energyskeptic.com. I would sure hate it if Christians triumph and create the fiction that God did it because we had danced, partied, and used scientific knowledge to give us joy and awe of the universe rather than Accepting Jesus As Our Savior.
Preface. Below are excerpts from two articles on why and how the extinction of insects could lead to our own extinction and many other species. Although climate change is more deadly now, an insect apocalypse will kill far more people and other species in the future. Billions of people, birds, plants, animals, fish, and more will starve since 75% of crops depend on insect pollination. They also control insect pests, break down organic matter to recycle their nutrients for new plants, aerate the soil, disperse seeds and more (Goulson D (2019) 