and again, thanks for edification. it is wonderful to see ideas fleshed out so nicely and to really see where you are coming from.

i point you to this as a point of reason of where i am coming from:

"In The Story of Christian Origins(also published as The Religion of the Occident), Martin Larson writes, "Zoroastrianism ... was for centuries embraced by those Caucasians known as Aryans or Iranians; and it became for them an instrument of national policy in their bitter conflicts against surrounding nomadic tribes and Semitic nations ... With the emergence of the first Persian Empire under Cyrus and its further expansion under Darius the Great Hystaspes, 521-486, the worship of Ahuramazda dominated twenty-three nations." (p. 83). Larson notes that Ahuramazda not only had seven archangels, but he also had "the Spirit of Wisdom, his active, creative agency in the universe: a concept startlingly similar to the logos of Zeno the Stoic, Philo Judaeus, and the Fourth Gospel" (p.93). Even more startlingly, Mills derives Heraclitus' metaphysics - the cosmic war of opposites, and Logos (an underlying unity) as Reason embedded in Nature - from Zoroastrian inspiration. In The Presocratic Philosophers, Kirk and Raven endorse Aristotle's opinion that Pythagoreanism was fundamentally dualistic, and write, "Zoroastrianism, like Pythagoreanism, was based upon a dualism between a good principle, Ormazd, and a bad, Ahriman" (p.241). Also, "Zoroaster was well established as a sage by the early Hellenistic period, and Aristoxenus had stated that Pythagoras visited Zoroaster in Babylon. Of the vast mass of pseudo-Zoroastrian literature produced in the Hellenistic epoch ... A second wave of Zoroastrian literature was produced in the first two centuries A.D. by various Gnostic sects" (p.65). Acknowledgment of the Zoroastrian influence need not undermine the Greek contribution, the experimental science and freethinking dialectic (rational debate) not found in Persia; it merely locates the Greek effort within the dominant Persian cultural context. Unlike Greek freethinking, Zoroastrianism was a revealed religion like Ezra's reconstructed Judaism, and like Islam: Zoroaster being its Prophet, the Avesta its Bible, the Gathas its Psalms, the Zend its Talmud (commentary). In a most unusual discussion, Martin Buber in his book Good and Evil devotes as much attention to the Avesta as to the Bible.

Zoroastrianism, then, was the first fundamentalist religion, spread by missionaries, embraced by King Cyrus and King Darius, prepared to use war as a means of enlightenment, the first form of Internationalism. It pressed the Greeks at the gates of their cities, and within, as the above authors show. The term "Medic" designated the early Zoroastrians; Greeks influenced by this creed, and its hymns, the Gathas, were said to be "medising". It greatly influenced Judaism (during and after the captivity in Babylon, which led to a rewriting of the Bible {footnote 9}), Christianity and Islam, Internationalist religions which followed in its wake, daughters so to speak . . . Whether Zoroastrianism is "monotheist" or "dualist" is a matter of debate, because it combined the two as a dualism created by a single god. In Marxism one see the same combination of monotheism and dualism: the transcendent law and force of History as "mono", the clash between exploiting and exploited classes, recurring throughout class history unril the resolution, as dualist. The dualism was more pronounced in gnosticism and Manichaeism: "While in Zoroastrianism both the spiritual and material world, both the soul and the body, were created as Ohrmazd's allies against the destroyer Ahriman, in Iranian Gnosticism the spirit and matter, Light and Darkness, appeared as two primordial and antagonistic principles {footnote 14}".

The worst of fundamentalisms arose when Zoroastrian dualism (which was not present in Buddhism) was fused with the separation of the sexes (which was not present in Zoroastrianism), in a theology developed around Alexandria in the first century BC and the first century AD. This theology featured a cosmic war between Spirit and Matter (Body, Sex), the latter being evil. It is exhibited by the Essenes, and was current in Gnosticism. Various Christian writers attacked this theology, but it has nevertheless penetrated deeply into Christianity, perhaps through Paul rather than Jesus. Gnosticism was in part a Western form of Buddhism, but Zoroastrian ideas (such as its angelology) are also prominent in it - Alexandria was such a melting pot. Zoroastrian angelology has greatly influenced the Jewish Kabala, and through it remained an influence on the Western "occult" tradition, continuing into our own "New Age" movement. The Gnostic undercurrent kept surfacing within Christendom, e.g. in the Cathar "heresy". How different would Europe have been, if the Church had extended to others, when embraced by the empire, the toleration it itself had demanded when itself a minority."