History! For many of you, it was probably the second most boring class in school -- beaten only by math. If you didn't have a satisfying history education, it's not because the past was boring. Your teachers -- and generations of their predecessors -- have conspired for years to keep all the REALLY fun stuff out of your textbooks. It's total bullshit, and Cracked has spent years fighting to bring the balls-out insanity of our shared past to light. Collected below are the craziest examples of hidden history we've found so far. It's time to get re-educated.

44 Ancient Christians Weren't Biblical Literalists

Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Ah, creationism! The age-old belief that everything in the Bible is literal, up to and especially Genesis. Its believers insist that God created the world literally in seven days, about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. As such, things that don't fit the idea -- like evolution and dinosaur bones and tons of scientific proof -- can freely and vigorously suck it.

Scott Olson/Getty Images News/Getty Images

"You're just putting random bones together to make random bullshit. I can do that with LEGOs."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

The rabid anti-evolutionary school of religious thought that most people picture when they think of creationism is actually a recent and radical subset called Young Earth Creationism. Based on a long-standing fringe theory about the Earth being merely a few thousand years old, the idea of a "young Earth" was popularized in the early 20th century by a man called George McCready Price, a Canadian wannabe geologist and anti-evolutionist who made up for his total lack of scientific training with an unbridled enthusiasm for ignorance. Seriously, he was proud of the fact that he never caught "the disease of Universityitis."

Union College

"You know, except for the times I tried to write textbooks for them."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Even in ancient times, Christian scholars didn't buy that bunk. Take St. Augustine of Hippo, who was extremely clear that no one should view the Book of Genesis as a documentary. St. Augustine, it should be mentioned, lived in the 5th century. For centuries, it was understood that the Genesis was an allegory: The "days" of creation weren't actual 24-hour periods, but metaphors for a really long time, which in the eyes of an eternal, omnipotent, time-transcendent God just seemed like an average work week. That's not just the stance of one surprisingly progressive Hippo; this very view was and remains the Vatican's (and therefore the Catholic Church's) official stance on the subject.