Text 25836, 87 rader
Skriven 2006-12-16 07:37:00 av John Hull (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 25832 av Mimi Gallandt (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: Muslems
===============
Mimi Gallandt -> John Hull wrote:
 MG> John Hull -> VERN HUMPHREY wrote:
 JH>> VERN HUMPHREY -> JOHN HULL wrote:

 MG> (some snippage)

 JH>>>> And, since books were so labor intensive, only the Church and
 MG> royalty
 VH>>> had
 JH>>>> access to them.  That left the common folk uneducated and
 JH>> illiterate for
 JH>>>> hundreds of years until the first printing presses made
 MG> replicating a
 VH>>> book
 JH>>>> cheap.  The Church kept them that way.  It was a far cry from the
 VH>>> Roman empi
 JH>>>> when most Romans were able to read, even many of the slaves.

 VH>>> John, the common folk had ALWAYS been uneducated and illiterate.
 JH>> Making
 VH>>> a book was a whole year's work for a highly-trained man -- and poor
 VH>>> people had NEVER been able to afford them.

 VH>>> The vast majority of Roman Citizens under the Republica were not
 JH>> classed
 VH>>> ("Capitae censae") -- they couldn't afford to buy swords and shields.
 VH>>> And there were no public schools.

 VH>>> After the "fall" of the Roman Empire, the Church christianized the
 VH>>> barbarians, restrained their barbaric tendencies, and brought
 MG> learning
 VH>>> back to the world.

 JH>> Sure thing, Vern.  I guess that's why the French king gave the pagan
 JH>> Northmen land in Normandy (that's how they became 'Normans')
 MG> because it
 JH>> was easier to stop their pillaging of monasteries and seacoast
 MG> towns by
 JH>> giving them land than fighting them.  And I guess that's why
 MG> William, no
 JH>> friend of the church (to be sure, he allied himself for political
 JH>> reasons, not religious ones), invaded England and did his best to wipe
 JH>> out Saxon nobility and centers of learning, all with the approval
 MG> of the
 JH>> Church.

 JH>> As for bringing back learning, what a joke!  Only royalty and
 MG> churchmen
 JH>> got any formal education, peasants got spit.  Women at all levels were
 JH>> locked out of the system.  Early scientists were hounded, persecuted,
 JH>> and even executed for heresy for trying to advance the knowledge base,
 JH>> all with the approval and participation of the church.

 JH>> I won't even go into the Crusades.  You forget I have no axe to grind
 JH>> here.  It took Europe nearly a thousand years to get back to the level
 JH>> of civilization, in general, that the Romans enjoyed, and most of that
 JH>> was because of intransigence of the clergy in Rome.

 MG> IIRC someone told me that Muslims saved many texts, too and how much
 MG> more learning would there have been earlier if the library at Alexandria
 MG> hadn't burned?


Correct, although the great library in Alexandria was gone before the Papacy
was established, so I wouldn't lay that on them.  But bits and pieces of things
were saved by monks and clerics and the nobility despite efforts to destroy
most of it that didn't line up with church "doctrine" over the centuries.

The history of the papacy itself reads more like a political history than a
religious one.  Most of the Popes, until fairly modern times, were religious in
name only.  Murder, corruption, vice, invasions, theft; you name the crime, and
one or more of the Popes is guilty of it at some point in that history.

From an historical viewpoint, religion has done damn little to advance the
cause of civilization in recorded history.  The Egyptians fought over whether
there was one god or many gods. Virtually everybody in the ancient world went
to war calling on the gods for success.  Everybody persecuted the Jews.  The
Crusades bankrupted Europe and set it up for a series of small wars, which led
to bigger wars between the Protestants and the Catholics.  The Crusades also
set Christianity on a collision course with Islam, and we've been fighting that
right up until now with no end in sight.

Call me a cynic, but I'd say that given the history of religion and its
interaction with humans, we're damn lucky we're even here!

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 * Origin:  (1:123/789.0)