Matt Ridley speaks about how ideas have sex and the mating of these ideas create hybrid ideas that have cultural consequences. In history the expansion of Roman power and influence into Jewish Culture in Palestine allowed for an exchange and mating of cultural ideas that led to very consequential hybrids. One powerful hybrid being the religion of Christianity and the rise of Monotheism globally. It was Roman authority, Jewish mysticism and pagan mystery occults that gave birth to Christianity. It was Roman Crucifixion, A Jewish Jesus and Pagan familiarity with divine humans that were ingredients to a soup that would set much of human history on a certain trajectory. The Divine Augustus a Son of God would be replaced in some 300 years with the Divine Jesus the Son of God. It was a hybrid of Rome & Jerusalem and carried with it a hybrid theology from paganism and Judaism. The idea of God as Trinity (3 Gods who are 1) is a mix of  pagan Monotheism. A hybrid idea of cultural consequence.
Without the mating of Rome and Jerusalem there would be no Christianity. It is clearly nourished by human history and not set apart from it.

  Even logistically without the infrastructure of the Roman Empire it would have been impossible for Christianity and the Apostle Paul’s message to spread to the extent it did. The genius of the formation of early Christianity was to take Roman punishment and humiliation as the spiritual and theological significance of their movement and thereby turning death into life and tragedy into a triumph. It was a brilliant form of populism. It was a story that touched the masses where many lived lives of hardship compared to the ruling Roman elite. Jesus was a god of the people not of the state. Not until Christianity became popular in the Roman world and it became politically expedient for the Emperor Constantine to use this religion to solidify his power and unify the empire. In doing so Constantine gave the death blow to Hellenism (which had a fatal turn of events many years before in the Maccadean Revolt 166 BC) and now through Roman power gave rise to the Monotheistic State. An idea from Jerusalem to Rome that birthed a new era of political Monotheism that would not be challenged until the historical currents of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

Hypatia of Alexandria (355? - 415 CE)


She was the daughter of Theon, a mathematician who taught at the great school at the Alexandrine Library. She traveled widely and corresponded with people all over the Mediterranean. We know of her only through her letters because all of her work was destroyed when the Great Library of Alexandia was destroyed. She taught at the school in the Library in Alexandria, Egypt. Letters written and addressed simply to the philosopher were delivered to her. She taught mathematics and natural philosophy.

She died violently. She was dragged to her death by a mob who pulled her from her classroom into the streets where they peeled her to death with oyster shells.

She wrote that

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies.
To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing.
The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy
can he be in after years relieved of them.
In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth
often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it,
but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.


(Source - University of Alabama)