Religion
Related: About this forumChristianity Is Just A Better Religion Than Islam
LOL!!!
http://dailycaller.com/2017/11/02/christianity-is-just-a-better-religion-than-islam/
Islam is the basis of a great world civilization with much to admire. But, just as Cortez and his conquistadors stared in wonder at Mexico City for the first time, admiration does not necessarily imply approval. The followers of Mohammed had an advantage over Medieval Christendom when they descended upon the Roman Empire and swept half of it away in the space of a few decades. The Romans were utterly exhausted from almost thirty years of life-or-death struggle with the Persians. They collapsed so fast in the face of this unexpected eruption from Arabia that the damage the Muslims needed to inflict on southern and eastern Mediterranean culture to conquer it was not so extensive. They took over the ancient Near East with little trouble. The Germanic barbarians who conquered the West got the poorer bit of the Empire and then spent centuries fighting the Romans and each other to keep it. By the time the monks began to put the pieces back together there wasnt much to work with.
But then that is what makes the achievement of medieval civilization so remarkable. When you show people a picture of some great Byzantine Church they often say it looks like a mosque but its really the other way around. The mosques are copied off the Byzantine churches and they are a metaphor for much of the rest of Islamic civilisation. By the end of the Middle Ages, the Muslims had spent their inherited cultural capital and were living on borrowed time. Show someone a Gothic Cathedral, on the other hand, and it looks like nothing else on earth. The monks patiently put back together the inheritance of the ancient world and then went a lot further. The self-confidence and brilliance of the century that produced Notre Dame de Paris, the Summa Theologiae, the English Parliament and the Divine Comedy is breathtaking.
What was Christendoms secret? It understood God, so far as this is given to human reason and faith. God is one, God is reasonable and God is free. God consequently doesnt like people being forced to worship Him, He cant and wont make 2+2=5, He has bestowed a single set of laws upon nature, He doesnt like tyranny and if you want to find out what those laws are you will just have to do some experiments. God is also Three so plurality is not an unfortunate side-effect of being a creature that can be stamped out if we just have a big enough government. All the genius of Western philosophy, politics, science and art flows from the Trinity. The ancient world provided the elements but the synthesis is all the work of the Middle Ages. If you want to look at what the elements without the Triune God produce just look at Islam.
Dr. Alan Fimister is assistant professor at Saint John Vianney Theological Seminary.
Wow.
Edit: Just in case my sarcasm wasn't clear, I most certainly DO NOT agree with the views expressed in that article. Haha!
pamdb
(1,331 posts)I find it easier just to not subscribe to any religion. I have no use for religion in my life. After 12 years in a catholic school, and the obligatory sunday mass (which I always wanted to get out of) when I reached college age I just walked away and it felt so free. I find religion somewhat interesting as how it affects history, but that's about it.
We know that non-religious people can be just as decent as religious people, so religion doesn't provide us a clear benefit.
But we can see from history that the downside of religion is pretty severe.
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)1. "Mohammedanism" is a slightly insulting and extremely outdated word for "Islam".
2. The "Roman Empires" of the Middle-Ages were the German Empire in Germany and the Byzantine Empire in Turkey. There were no "Romans".
3. There were no Muslims when Rome collapsed.
4. Rome wasn't "conquered by german barbarians". The West-Roman Empire was slowly collapsing due to lack of money and soldiers, only propped up by their german allies. And eventually the Germans had enough and took over in a coup. There was no conquest.
5. While the Arabs invented math, medicine and astronomy, Europe had numerology, astrology, and it was illegal to dissect a human corpse for study.
6. God can't make 2+2=5? That directly contradicts this "professor's" claim from the sentence before that God is free.
7. The idea of "laws of nature" was stolen by the Christians from the ancient greek concept of the "demiourgos". It was a crazy weirdo philosopher of the 14th century who revived that concept and fused it with Christianity.
8. God doesn't like tyranny? Read the First Commandment. Read up on why Lucifer is supposed to be an evil guy.
9. The modern world wasn't created in the Middle-Ages. It was the Renaissance who invented an occult, experimentalist version of Christianity by outright ignoring certain parts of it. And it was the Age of Enlightenment that created science and the modern world by taking the occult experimentalist Christianity of the Renaissance and cutting away the religious stuff.
If you want to look at what the Triune God produced, you may stop looking after the Middle-Ages, because everything after the Middle-Ages was created by elements beyond Christianity.
Holy fuck!!!!!
How does a professor of theology not know such things???????
trotsky
(49,533 posts)LOL!
Igel
(35,191 posts)And insist on not spotting other outdated terms.
When I grew up in the '70s, the Byzantine Empire was still the eastern Roman Empire. And in many languages spoken by Muslims, Xians are still "Romans", but the only Xians the early Muslims had access to were either the intellectual descendants of early non-Catholic/Orthodox Xians or Byzantines.
Arabs inherited a lot of medicine and math from the Greeks, by which I don't mean "those living in Greece" but those who spoke koine. Same for astronomy. Many of the facts they inherited came from Babylonia or Alexandria. They got other parts from conquests and raids in areas of Asia further east. Muslims tend to be maximalist in their claims.
A lot of the Renaissance thought was an expansion of ideas and views that formed in the High Middle Ages.
I consider Xianity by 350 AD to be utterly apostate and foreign to what the first generation or two of Xians believed. In other words, the difference between the Middle Ages and the utter break you see later on is pretty much non-existent. Shift your frame of reference in the other direction--i.e., don't adopt your definitions--and you get the opposing view, that the Renaissance was still highly Xian, just not doctrinaire Catholic.
As for the take-over of the Roman Empire, I suspects that the Volkswanderung is at the heart of the contention. In the East it led to the spread of Slavs into Byzantine territories, and in the West the spread of various East Germanic tribes west and south.
I recently read a history-book written in the 60s and there it was the "Byzantine Empire" ...
I did not intend to say that the Muslims were some sort of masterminds and the medieval Europeans barbarians. Of course the Middle-East has a rich philosophical tradition, dating back to the Egyptians, Persians and Babylonians. I just wanted to ridicule the author's notion that the Christians were supposed to be the masterminds and the Muslims the barbarians.
You are right on the Renaissance: It was deeply christian, but it was a new branch, an occult, magic-related Christianity. "New-Age" so-to-speak. Some of these new ideas got adopted into the christian mainstream, others were declared heretical. I doubt that the author would accept hermetic magic as christian.
The Volkswanderung was the tipping-point for the West-Roman Empire: The Roman Empire had always financed itself by expanding and pillaging other countries. This meant they needed a bigger army, which meant they needed even more money. Then a certain point was reached when Rome could no longer expand: In Scotland they needed Hadrian's Wall and in Germany they needed the Limes as bulwarks against barbarians that were too strong to conquer. And the kingdoms of the Middle-East were too strong as well.
Rome was running out of soldiers to protect what they had conquered. They started hiring local tribes. At the same time, Rome had a bad tax-system, where tax-evasion was normal for rich people. Without money to supply their army, the Roman Empire shrunk. I imagine, the Volkswanderung put lots of pressure on their remaining troops. The power and territory of Rome shrunk until they were totally dependent on their german allies for administration and protection. And then the Germans simply took over.
Act_of_Reparation
(9,116 posts)So this doesn't count.
Act_of_Reparation
(9,116 posts)It's almost like he's forgotten that Christians spent the better part of two millennia killing each other over minor theological quibbles, and would likely go right back to it tomorrow if Muslims, Jews, and atheists were to suddenly disappear tonight.
Cartoonist
(7,298 posts)Was this from the Onion? All through it I was lmao. From the get-go it tripped over it's own feet.
One of the most important, really the only, consideration in whether a religion is any good or not is whether its true.
Amen!
trotsky
(49,533 posts)Go ahead dude, prove the truth of your religion! LOL!
guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)What is truth? Is it a moral code? Is it a scientific theory?
Cartoonist
(7,298 posts)He then proceeded to lie about stuff.
Can those who have trouble discerning truth, have the same trouble with lies? No scientific theory needed.
EvilAL
(1,437 posts)Last edited Fri Nov 3, 2017, 10:56 AM - Edit history (1)
Morality isn't truth. Scientific theories are the sum of our knowledge on any particular phenomenon in the universe.
They are comprised of facts (truths) and laws, etc. Facts are also truths in the sense that we can prove them to be true. They all fall under the umbrella of a theory. There is no level higher than theory.
Christianity, Islam or any other religious beliefs are not truths as in they cannot be verified to be true. Every testable claim made in the bible has been shown to be false, not true so it's obvious that the bible is not a place to look to verify a truth or fact
guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)The Professor has proven one thing to himself, and another thing to others.
Generic, Eurocentric mythology.
Iggo
(47,487 posts)Jeezus-effing-kee-ryst!