
 > Between Adam and Eve and Golgotha the whole process of the fall
 > of man occurred.  This involved a gradual dimming of
 > consciousness of the spiritual world.  This is discernable in
 > the world outlooks of different peoples through history.  The
 > Greek, for example, could say, "better a beggar in the land of
 > the living than a king in the land of the dead."  (Iliad, I
 > think).

I would not swear that nothing of the sort is found in the Iliad,
but the first passage I thought of was the Odyssey 11:480 or
thereabouts (my copy has no line numbers). The ghost of Acchilles
speaks (Robert FitzGerald translation):

 > Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
 > for some poor country man, on iron rations,
 > than lord it over all the exhausted dead.

The next passage I thought of was from Ecclesiastes 9:4

 + A living dog is better than a dead lion.

 > On the other hand, there is one notion firmly embedded in
 > Christianity that originated most definitely in a pagan source.
 > The idea that the human being consists essentially of soul
 > only, and that the soul is created at birth, was consciously
 > adopted from Aristotle, whose ideas dominated Christian thought
 > for fifteen hundred years and still does today....

Surely Aristotle had little influence on Christian thought before
about 1250 AD.