AR282, I think you need to get your hands on a book entitled The Closing of the Western Mind : The Rise of Faith and The Fall of Reason, by Charles Freeman. Freeman is a thoroughly grounded historian, and he is NOT advocating for Christianity. Anything but. He starts with the philosophical and scientific advances of the Greeks, then covers the whole development of Christianity, including Constantine's so-called conversion, which allowed a body of belief to take on the power of secular law, and what followed, which was not very nice. Definitely a warning for our current times!

As I say, this book is not a brief for Christianity (hardly!), but it will help you get your rather scrambled historical facts straight.

Don Firth