Reply #13: Yep. Ditto for Notre Dame Cathedral [View All]

Though it had a nice secular touch inside - some large dioramas showing how Notre Dame was built. The scaffolding, workers hauling and cutting stone, etc. etc.

With my Fundamentalist Atheist mindset, I liked to think this was sending a great visual message: "This place was built with the imagination, sweat and blood of ordinary human beings. So don't be thinking any of that 'Goddidit' crap."

I read somewhere once that, in the Middle Ages, many Europeans believed the old Roman roads had been built by Gawd so they could carry their produce to market. How the roads were really built had been almost wiped completely from the collective human memory bank. A weird and sobering thing to think about...