News Flash: Dark Ages Didn’t Happen
239 words.
I’m just trying to kill time here, so I don’t really feel like looking up hard evidence to support my claim, but the article Christianity credited for West’s success, which discusses the book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success by “leading” U.S. sociologist Rodney Stark, sounds like.. what’s the word I’m looking for… total crap. (By the way, I didn’t know there was a sociologist race going on… I wonder if it’s on ESPN?)
He thinks the basis for the West’s rise was “an extraordinary faith in reason” resulting from Christianity, which “alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guide to religious truth.” Faith in humanity’s reasoning capacity, in turn, stimulated scientific theory-making, democratic theory and individual freedoms. Capitalism applied this to economics, producing an explosion of wealth.
I seem to recall that quite a number of scientists were thrown in jail or otherwise harassed by The Church. Galileo comes to mind. That doesn’t sound like the best way to stimulate scientific theory-making to me. And I always thought the “explosion of wealth” came from the spoils of Church-sponsored wars.
Apparently the dark ages didn’t really happen, either. “That’s a ‘hoax,’ he says, that was invented by 18th-century intellectuals who hated religion and especially Roman Catholicism.” All that feudal oppression, inquisition and torture, wholesale slaughter of innocent Muslims in the Holy Land? Those were the good times, man. Hurray for Christianity!
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