| From: | James King king-j@**********.com |
|---|---|
| Subject: | OT: We live in a world of SIN!! REPENT! REPENT!! |
| Date: | Thu, 09 Sep 1999 01:35:54 -0500 |
>Rand Ratinac wrote:
<Snip>
>In my opinion, Church in the Dark Ages wanted to control people. And
>what best way to control people by leaving them tottally illeterate and
>guide them afterwards with religion? It is a fact that people with no
>education tend to follow things without questioning them more easily
>than educated people. So what did they do? They destroyed knowledge.
>They burned books, hunted the ones that were questioning their ways, put
>everything they wanted under God's will and everything they didn't want
>under Satan.
*Sigh*
Its unfortunate that several prominent misconceptions about the "Dark ages"
still persist about the role of the church in that society. Few people
realize just how the church was set up, especially in the west, before the
time of Charlemagne. As for the destruction of knowledge and burning of
book, one should look to the monk-scholars in the lands of Saxon England
and Ireland before the 10th century. These monks almost singlehandedly
preserved what we know of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and many other
classical scholars. Any other fragments that were preserved were done by
the Muslims as they occupied the Near East and were exposed to the
excellent curriculum developed by the Romans. Despite this much was lost,
especially as the Vikings made their forays into Europe burning and
pillaging many monastaries (which kept and copied the ancient texts). It is
hard to imagine that such dedication to the propogation of non-Christian
writings (even before the advent of the Thomistic thesis on the
compatability between ancient philosophy and Christianity) warrants the
accusation of the Church hunting down and destroying any text that it opposed.
In fact the Church, under Charlemagne, was responsible for a Renaissance of
learning that would enable western civilization to begin to crawl out of
the depression left by the collapse of Rome. What did they teach? What
Cicero, Julius Caesar, Augustus, and Constantine learned. Poetry,
Mathmatics, Oratory, and Music. The Illiad, Odyssey, and Aneid were all
favorite pieces of literature. In the realm of philosophy one might have
been fortunate enough to read Plato's Republic or perhaps Aristotle's
Nichomachean Ethics. Latin was still the vernacular in Italy.
>They made only one mistake. They executed their enemies in public. And
>when the masses show that many of those "rebels" were being burned
>without showing any signs of cowardness, they started realising that
>maybe they were right... the masses love heroes u see and bravery.
>The Crusades were made for money. And who went to the crusades? Most of
>them were criminals, bandits, people with no life who would do anything
>for a few pennys plus the hope of becoming rich by pillaging everything
>in their way.
Maybe if you are talking about the Fourth Crusade, but if you've read
anything about the circumstances you'd blame Venice. :) I won't go through
a point by point analysis of every Crusade, but a little inspection is sure
to reveal that in general the motives behind them were quite different then
might seem evident.
>The masses really thought that all these were made for good and in God's
>name. But the Church and the religious leaders knew exactly what they
>were doing. They wanted power and religion gave them the means to claim
>it.
Quite a sweeping statement. In essence you are accusing everyone in the
Church of having some grandoise plan to take over the world. Quite amusing :)
Unfortunately it is hard to get a clear, unbiased view of the Carolignian
age and the early middle ages in our time. The Enlightenment in the 18th
century has done much to cloud our judgement in that regard, forcing
foreign values on acts that occured in neither the same intellectual
climate nor evaluated at the time in a "modern" sense. It is a fallacy to
assume that the modern world can somehow stare down at its past and assume
that all was done in the name of the pursuit of power and the domination of
wills. Some historian 200 years from now, I'm sure, will look back at the
20th century and mutter something to the effect of "What fools these
mortals be!"
Just my $.02 adjusted for inflation.
-Regards
Jim King
