Rhomania, of course, was different, but one of the most intolerant societies in world history, and I say that as a byzantologist. Just look at how quick the Monophysites were to turn on their own government when they saw the promise of tolerance from the Caliphate. Even though it's true that the barbarians tried to adopt Roman customs, they were still living in mud hovels, and the Roman ways they adopted were already well on their way to the theocracy of Byzantium. I'm certainly not denying the value of medieval Christian art, either. Actually, I went to see San Vitale, the Arian Baptistery, and San Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna a few days ago, and the Arian and, of course, Eastern Roman styles are quite appealing. Agia Sophia is, and probably always will be, the grandest thing I've ever seen. Perhaps I should clarify: It bothered me to see things like, for instance, a statue of Jove being, well, objectified by the organisation that, ofttimes violently, outlawed and eliminated the tradition that crafted it. Yeah, again, holding the common man down in ignorance and slavery by suppressing new ideas. Allowing a small elite to have potentially subversive ideas is really no better than Orwell's inner party.
One can appreciate the artistry without believing in the ideas behind it. And, though there was violent repression of ancient ideas in the Christian world, I think it's a little unfair to lay the blame for that at Christianity's feet. That was just the way of the world then. While I agree in principle, I also recognize that times were different four or five hundred years ago. The Church was the main cohesive force in European society and it truly believed that its role was to save souls. Our modern ideas of science and education were nascent then. An education simply wasn't possible for most people; indeed, education didn't reach all of the public until the 20th Century in much of Europe, long after the Church had lost its dominant role.
You got it. You sound like a sharp guy and I'd like to hear your arguments for your particular point of view.
Definitely debatable. I've a feeling that very few of the medieval Pontifex Maximae were truly believers, as evidenced by all the popes with children, the obscene hoards of wealth, etc. Not unlike our latter-day cross-bred political class, actually. A certain type of person is drawn to power like a moth to the flame, and will wield it with whatever degree of hypocrisy and corruption is expedient.
Could you name just two cultures that Catholicism destroyed and that they display art from. Please. Just two places where some of that great artwork came from that was destroyed by the Catholic church. Dual II, of the work that YOU SAW at the Vatican. I'm really curious.
So you do know the arguments about why Christianity in general didn't destroy civilization? Maybe the corruption of Christianity, as you've mentioned here, but that's not really the fault of the ideals that we espouse. It's our baser human natures getting the best of us.
Christianity and "the church" preserved knowledge in Europe during the Dark ages, in very remote places. You'll get no flack from protestants for criticizing the Catholic church, but the clash of feudal kingdoms and the church for power as well as the fragmentation of Europe was the primary catalyst for the Darkness. If anything, the corruption of the church by man hurt Europe in the same way the corruption of governments hurts the world today. Ultimately, it is the unjust power of one man over another that creates problems.
It is amazing how your view of religion is as horrible as the inaccurate, false, and rather foolish image you posted misrepresents religion.
Science forgotten for 1000 years. Pythagoras of Samos (569 - 475 BC) combined science and religion in equal measure. He travelled to both Egypt and Babylon. He is the father of number theory and recognised, among other things, that the Earth was a sphere. Pythagoras and his inner circle of followers (the mathematikoi) held that, fundamentally, reality is mathematical in nature, with each number having its own 'personality.' Euclid (325 - 265BC) of Alexandria brought together the work of several predecessors. The 13 books of The Elements became the primary source of geometric reasoning for two thousand years. Euclid's other works included Optics (on perspective) and The Book of Fallacies (which sounds delightful but is lost). Neo-Platonist Proclus Diadochus (died 485), one of the last great philosophers of Plato's Academy at Athens, wrote a commentary on Euclid's Elements which today is our principal source of early Greek geometry. Aristarchus (310 - 230 BC) applied Alexandrian trigonometry to estimate the distances and sizes of the sun and moon, and also postulated a heliocentric universe. Archimedes of Syracuse (287 - 212 BC) is credited with the discovery of pi. Eratosthenes (275-194 BC), the third librarian of Alexandria, calculated the circumference of the earth to within 1% accuracy, based on the measured distance from Aswan to Alexandria and the fraction of the whole arc determined by differing shadow-lengths at noon in those two locations. He deduced that the length of the year should be 365 1/4 days and put forward the idea of adding a "leap day" every four years. He cataloged 44 constellations and 475 fixed stars. Eratosthenes also suggested that the seas were connected, that Africa might be circumnavigated, and that "India could be reached by sailing westward from Spain." Apollonius of Perga (262 -190 BC), in his famous book Conics, introduced terms which are familiar to us today, such as parabola, ellipse, hyperbola and polyhedron. In another work On the Burning Mirror he described the focal properties of a parabolic mirror. When it came to planetary theory, Apollonius developed systems of eccentric and epicyclical motion to explain the apparent motion of the planets across the sky. No mere theoretician, Apollonius developed the hemicyclium, a sundial which has the hour lines drawn on the surface of a conic section giving greater accuracy. Hipparchus (190 - 120 BC) of Bithynia, during the reign of Ptolemy VII, discovered and measured the precession of the equinoxes, the size and trajectory of the sun, and the moon's path. He charted constellations and speculated that stars might have both births and deaths. He is credited with inventing longitude and latitude, importing the 360° circular system from Babylonia, and calculating the length of a year within six minutes accuracy. Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus) 87 -150 AD worked out mathematically his elegant system of epicycles to support the geocentric, Aristotelian view, and wrote a treatise on astrology, both of which were to become the medieval paradigm. Quite.
Close, but based on where I was on the road when I used to think with a like mind as dual II and the board's religion-hayters, I would have guessed closer to 22-25 years old. At my current point on the same road (the 'so what's up with religion' road) my current thinking revolves around two niggling truths- it sure survived for a long time (as long as history) for a bunch of patently false ideas kicked around by a population full of brilliant skeptics that apparently know it all about everything (except science, of course), and two, education of masses was a key step in our progress and -via the bible- the church was the source (however reluctantly (or kicking and screamingly)) of the education of the masses. So I guess you're not a believer of the 'butterfly effect' concept (as it's called in popular terms)? Because many thoughtful people would concede that the development of the past 110 years scientific advancement demanded the foundation upon which it sat. Which would mean that this pic you posted and that I quoted above is complete shit, wouldn't it?
The graph of technological progress is funny, but it isn't really accurate: (1) China, while culturally and technologically on par with the west, experienced no dark ages and still did not pull significantly ahead. (2) Islam, which was reaching its height of intellectual power at a time when the west was still pretty barbarous, did not go on to bigger achievements. (3) The Roman period (presumably the Western Roman Empire, since it ends in the fifth century) is shown ever-rising, when, in fact, it declined considerably during the last two centuries of its existence. (4) The Dark Ages are really misnamed and today aren't considered quite so dark. (5) The peak of the Renaissance is about the same as the peak of late Roman civilization?
You can't really blame Christianity for the start of the Dark Ages. As for later on, the Church certainly did play a role in squashing societal development ... but the picture is more complex than that. On the one hand, Christian authorities censored books, jailed heretical scientists, and just generally tried to hinder any intellectual exploration that ended up running contrary to established dogma. On the other hand, many of the greatest works of art to come out of the Renaissance were religious in nature, some of the greatest philosophical minds of the era were religiously motivated, and the clergy -- being, for the most part, the only people who could read and write -- played a major role in preserving knowledge. Religious authorities did a lot to hold back human progress, but in other ways, they advanced it. It's a mixed bag.
This is probably going OT, but something to note about your first two examples is that both of those cultures made a choice (knowingly or otherwise) to stagnate. With the Chinese it was the Great Wall that did them in. They cut themselves off from the rest of the world and became insular. With little to no interactions with its neighbors (trade, war) and based on their main theological system, the culture stagnated and didnt begin to change again until it began interacting in a significant way with outside entities. Then look how long it took for them to get from the Boxer rebellion to where they are now and the hell that was paid along the way. Look at your second example, Islam, through its dogma and the administration of it, chose to take a technologically advanced society and freeze its self. To this day under that religious belief they still have as of yet to make any meaningful progress technologically since that self imposed freeze. Now that I flesh out those two examples, maybe this isn't such an OT post as I thought. Maybe in fact those two examples show that Christianity isn't the big bad boogeyman that many like to paint it to be and that the real horrors (as alluded to in the OP) lie in other directions. Keep in mind that Christianity has its very fair share of horrors that it has to own up to, but maybe, just maybe, its not the worst out there.
Dual, I find this thread of yours interesting. Not because your opinion is particularly radical, but because you seemed to take exception to me saying very similar things about Islamic civilizations. In fact, the charges I made against Islamic cultures, especially PRESENT Islamic cultures were quite similar to the ones you're making about Christian civilizations. Yet you don't think the same yardstick can and should be applied to both?
Or it could make them, you know, wrong. Or make the relevant 'foundation' the enlightenment movement against religion rather than religion itself. Not sure what popular usage for "the butterfly effect" you have in mind either.
A dickhead, best I can tell. Maybe there are other classicistically inclined atheists out there who aren't dickheads but then you'd have to know you were talking to a classicistically inclined atheist in order to know.
10/10 - Would be trolled again. The rest of you fail history forever. In any case, the Gibbonist revisionism here is quite rampant. Christianity didn't bring down the empire, the Romans did. They moved to Constantinople, and since only the elite and the Greeks were educated, so did all the knowledge of the world around them. It didn't help that the barbarians in the West didn't have access to Constantinople's libraries, or Alexandria's after the Arabs conquered it. Even then, the knowledge in antiquity is a drop in the bucket when compared to the advances in the Middle Ages. People like to pretend that the Church was some all-powerful entity that deliberately tried to keep people ignorant - they weren't. The ugly truth of the matter was that Western Europe in the medieval period inherited their forebearer's mess: the decline of Rome was a chaotic and messy affair; the city itself was sacked by the Vandals, so say nothing of how many times it changed hands after that. Plagues, war, disease all tend to limit the growth of science too you know, and it doesn't help that a large portion of their scientific theories were dead ends. People act like the Romans had floating cities and transporter pads; they didn't. Christ, they didn't allow physicians to conduct autopsies; most of their anatomical knowledge was gleaned from battlefield wounds and assuming the insides of monkeys was the same as a person's. What little medieval Europe did know, it was from taking apart the world around them and reading old instruction manuals. Most of their developments and advancements were the result of trading and the educational centers at the monasteries and cathedrals. I mean, imagine if the bomb went off tomorrow and then think about how long it would take before society started building rocket ships and lasers again. That's basically what happened to Europe. Most of what you know today, including the scientific method, were profoundly shaped by the Middle Ages. To claim otherwise is ignorance and bigotry.
And you credit Catholicism for this unprecedented preservation of antiquity? And you blame Catholicism for this unprecedented destruction of antiquity? Quite a claim! Okay make your case. That has potential as a multiple choice, fill in the blank type of template: [________] obliterated the classical world, exterminated the Mesoamerican Disease The Kraken Boobs Partisans Soccer Lead poisoning Humans Booze Cane toads Drought Oprah Other Wait, what? Greedy Catholics are to blame for today's trouble in the Middle East? To be fair you have a point here, Aztecs and Mayans weren't Spanish speaking Catholics, yet it was the entirety of the Spanish culture (not just religion) that took over.
Yeah. Let's talk about #3. The romans went down hill once they started this emperer shit thanks to Ceaser. Plus they worshiped greek gods. Gub'mint's good at that too.
Not really true on either point. The peak of the Roman Empire was probably in the second century AD, two centuries after Julius Caesar. And Roman religion went through several stages. It was influenced heavily by the Greeks for some time before the establishment of the Empire, after which it became dominated by personality cults based on the divinity of the Emperors, imported religions like that of Sol Invictus and finally Christianity.
The Celtic and Norse cultures. True. I watched a documentary on the Black Plague on the history channel not too long ago. That wiped out between 30 and 60 percent (depending on which expert you ask) of the population of Europe. After that, the bulk of time, energy and resources were spent rebuilding. Not a lot of time, energy or resources left for science or engineering.
The plague was clearly the fault of Christianity. The practice of coming together in religious ceremonies no doubt helped greatly in increased the transference of fleas, which were carriers of the plague. Further, the church stomped out those with the greatest gifts in treating the plague, calling them "witches" and "ducks" and "wood" and pulling their carrot noses. We know this, thanks to the great historical teache, Monty Python.
How did you get that? I was agreeing with Tafkats that the Catholic Church is not entirely to blame for the Dark Ages.
I'm wondering if you know what Dual II saw at the Vatican, but since you're sticking your nose in this: Destroyed? Links please?
