My lord. It is too much, and not enough
Many people who say they have no religion are simply saying they have no official religious affiliation. They may actually have strong personal beliefs.
The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.
Far too long, historians have accepted the claim that the conversion of the Emperor Constantine (ca. 285-337) caused the triumph of Christianity. To the contrary, he destroyed its most attractive and dynamic aspects, turning a high-intensity, grassroots movement into an arrogant institution controlled by an elite who often managed to be both brutal and lax.
Although it has been fashionable to deny it, anti-slavery doctrines began to appear in Christian theology soon after the decline of Rome and were accompanied by the eventual disappearance of slavery in all but the fringes of Christian Europe. When Europeans subsequently instituted slavery in the New World, they did so over strenuous papal opposition, a fact that was conveniently 'lost' from history until recently. Finally, the abolition of New World slavery was initiated and achieved by Christian activists.
. . . All questions concerning the rise of Christianity are one: How was it done? How did a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization? Although this is the only question, it requires many answers - no one thing led to the triumph of Christianity.
Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these principles. These were the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian Europe and no where else.
Islam, the religion of peace and any terrorism that happens, is not really Islamic or Islamic inspired. This is called a willful blindness. It's also political correctness.
The thing about living in a village at the foot of a mountain is that the world for you becomes, without thinking about it, self-contained. People are of two kinds, really: from the Valley, and from Elsewhere.
I would write about issues and people I met along the way, but not about the process and the life of being on the road.
I'm a living example of getting into films backwards. Merely by accident. Exposure to films and ideas is the best thing that colleges can do.