The Gaming Den

"The Catholics?" You know you shoot yourself and your argument in the foot when you use shit terms like this applied to the "Dark Ages."

During the early centuries of the Church in the first millennium there are five Patriarchs. The Roman Empire had already broken in two and fallen apart and the western empire around Rome was for the most part kaput. What remained of the empire was centered in Constantinople. For the first thousand years (until basically the fall of Constantinople to the Turks) the major political and religious power was in Constantinople, not Rome. Even after the great schism and the division of Christianity into west and east, Rome was still a weak power at best, and was often overrun by the feuding feudal lords.

Likewise your notion about the church and science is a secularist pile of horse manure, and a low grade one at that. It was the Church, whose monasteries were the basis for most scientific research until the 19th century. It was the Church, whose religious orders founded the universities of Europe.

As for the evil iron fist of Rome, do I have to remind you of the centuries where the Bishop of Rome was in hiding in Avignon France? The only time you get a solid unified and strong Rome is after the Council of Trent which was in turn response to the Reformation.

You clearly have been reading one too many Chick tract.

Technology didn't drive wealth in the middle ages, trade did. That trade was created (literally) by the demand in Europe after the Crusades for spices and silk, both of which were "discovered" by the crusaders when they invaded the "holy lands" and which they discovered were really great things to have.

Prior to this there really wasn't a solid money economy, and Christian reluctance to lend with interest didn't help any. The "currency" of the day was land, distributed through feudal payments for service to local lords of constantly waring city states. (The crusades were really a clever plan to get those warring city states to fight someone else for a change.)

All of which wasn't really all that important until wealth multiplied through almost everyone dying. The survivors of the black plague found themselves with concentrations of wealth. This in turn kick-started the economy into a pure monetary system and brought about an age of prosperity which in turn lead to the funding of the sciences and the arts.

"The Catholics?" You know you shoot yourself and your argument in the foot when you use shit terms like this applied to the "Dark Ages."

Oh, my bad, clearly the Catholic church does not exist and we aren't talking about the historical period where the self proclaimed Catholic church, the direct predecessor of the modern day organisation ruled a continent.

It was ACTUALLY a disparate group of totally unrelated guys both in each time period and in succession who never had anything to do with each other, never called themselves Catholics, aren't widely regarded, by Catholics as Catholics and were not the most significant formative force to ever have acted on Christian religion.

And at no point do any of them have any continuity of action or responsibility or common descent. No. Indeed if you can point at any kind of internal (er, oops, "entirely external"?) power struggles or rivals for leadership then the empire never even existed and all of humanity just IMAGINED it for centuries, indeed maybe they imagine the centuries involved into existence too!

You got this "it wasn't me you can't prove anything" comedy line of Bart Simpson right?

Likewise your notion about the church and science is a secularist pile of horse manure, and a low grade one at that.

This utter misuse and failure to understand the meaning of secularism which is utterly irrelevant to my point and your criticism of it indicates once again your tendency to swallow hook line and sinker the propaganda of ignorant evangelical hate mongers.

The "evils of secularism" in that context is almost word for word one of the spectacularly ignorant and arrogant catch phrases of the Christian Dominionist movement. And they really do want to take us back to the dark ages!

Dudes, I'm just going to Godwin this, because it's actually appropriate. Tzor is in a hard spot, because he's arguing for a positive effect on history of the frickin Catholic Church, which is just not reasonable. He trots out the standard Catholic apologies like "We saved all the knowledge we didn't burn in our monasteries because we didn't let anyone outside of the monasteries have any of the books we spared from our own bonfires!" and the ever hilarious "After we shut down all of the Greek and Roman schools we set up our own schools about 800 years later!" Yeah, whatever. Thanks mr. kidnapper, you still let us have food every day.

The thing is that basically the Catholic argument boils down to "At least we aren't Hitler." An argument which is basically pathetic. You should be able to mount an argument better than "Other people committed atrocities worse than ours" or "We didn't take our atrocities as far as we easily could have." It's just a bad argument. The fact that something else somewhere in the world of history or possibility is worse than what you did in no way shows that what you did was good. Even without appeals to something stupid like absolute morality (although intriguingly, the Catholics themselves believe in just that), it s easy to see how something can still be bad even if another thing is worse.

But the thing is that even beyond the fact that it's an argument bad enough that it presupposes a lack of respect for the intended audience just to make it - it's not even true. As a matter of fact, the Catholic church can't honestly make the argument "At least we aren't Hitler" because they actually are Hitler.

Fascism was an aggressively Catholic movement in Europe. Franco, Stepanic, Tiso, Antonescu, Petain, Pacelli, and of course Hitler himself were all confirmed catholics. Many of them held ranks in the Catholic church.

Cardinal Gerlier, Archbishop of Lyon, Vichy Collaborator wrote:If We had remained victorious, we would probably have remained the prisoners of our errors. Through being secularized, France was in danger of death.

And this sort of atrocity isn't a one-time thing, and it's not even over today. Jean Paul II created a plan to attack AIDS prevention in Africa that has already cost the lives of millions of people. His successor Pope Palpatine has continued that program of mass murder. The Catholic church is in the process of murdering tens of millions of Africans right now. We don't even have to comb through the history books to see the devastation caused by the Catholic Church's position on knowledge - we can just read it in the newspaper. In every century, in every generation, the Catholic Church raises their hands against reason, against justice, and against life. That anything good has happened in spite of that is because the anti-innovation stance of their dogma limits the amount of harm they can do.

-Username17

PhoneLobster wrote:

"The Catholics?" You know you shoot yourself and your argument in the foot when you use shit terms like this applied to the "Dark Ages."

Oh, my bad, clearly the Catholic church does not exist and we aren't talking about the historical period where the self proclaimed Catholic church, the direct predecessor of the modern day organisation ruled a continent.

Case in point and agreement with PL (or rather, with the stance his sarcasm implies of otherwise), they are indeed YET STILL located in the Vatican.

As for the direct trace of pretty much every massive religio-political (is that a word?) shift in Europe since the fall of Rome was either:
• Caused by The Church, whichever incarnation they may be in, OR
• In reaction to The Church. Protestantism, anyone?

On a personal note, they do suck immensely. I don't regret abandoning those douches at all.
Likewise, my mother and her sisters raaage when I shit-talk about the Pope.
Any Pope.
Including that Nazi.

FrankTrollman wrote:Pope Palpatine

Joseph Nazinger.

We know the name of the Christian priest who burned the Mayan books. His birth date, his death date, his wage at the time,, what boats he traveled upon.

Yes, actions were taken in the name of Christ that probably weren't caused by the church... But neither did the church intervene. Not even in the last century have they intervened when things are done in their name.

So by no means are they a force of positive good on society.

-Crissa

I'm not a catholic church apologist or anything, nor have I studied the period closely, but: What was the better altenative at the time?

cthulhu wrote:I'm not a catholic church apologist or anything, nor have I studied the period closely, but: What was the better altenative at the time?

Invent social combat.

See, the splat book for such encounters had not been invented yet so they were probably going by AD&D rules.
The only option for heretics was death.
The DM was harsh; salvation, damnation, etc.

You make do with the rules you have, and so forth.

We have it easy now...

cthulhu wrote:I'm not a catholic church apologist or anything, nor have I studied the period closely, but: What was the better altenative at the time?

As Koumei said, simply not invading other people and putting all those who refused to convert to the sword would have been better. Hell, there are real examples in history of empires that went in and conquered places and didn't go through and incinerate everyone they thought of as having wrong thoughts. There are examples of that going both ways. Rome conquered Asia (the province in Turkey, not the continent) and pretty much let people do whatever - which worked fine. Rome conquered Carthage and they dug holes which they filled with vicious fogs and then dragged all the civilians to those holes with hooks through their flesh and dumped them in - that wasn't cool at all.

But the thing is that the Church wasn't a mixed bag through the ages. There isn't a time in a thousand years when we can see it having a positive effect. From the genocide of the Prussians to the sacking of Jerusalem, they were major dicks. You can paint them with a broad brush because they painted everything else with a broad brush. They opposed all positive change, hoarded what knowledge they didn't burn outright, and waged a forever war on everyone who thought differently from them on all borders.

It's not Catholic, but consider that today Christians try to ban books about banning books. And the thing to note about this is that while it is stupid and fundy-tastic, it's actually fully supported biblically. The third commandment is an injunction to not use profanity in speech or written works, and that means that it is a higher injunction than not murdering people. If you really want to get down to it, rape isn't even a biblical crime, which is why the Lord's Resistance Army uses it as a weapon.

The Christian message is an injunction to perform the worst acts of human history. This doesn't say that people who aren't Christians won't ever do horrible things. Nor does it mean that every Christian will actually go through with the ghastly acts that the bible compels them to engage in. But it does mean that those who believe in the word of the bible do many more horrible things than people who don't. There is a reason that atheists are under represented in prison populations compared to the general population. Making your own moral path is very much more likely to create a good life than basing your moral path in any way on a book that exhorts you to burn Hindus, ban foreign thought, and forcibly marry any girl children you rape.

The alternative to doing the things that the Church encouraged was the same in the 1400s as it is today: not doing those things. Instead of holding up genetic engineering as one of the seven mortal sins, we could just genetically engineer bacteria to make human insulin to save the lives of diabetics. Instead of forbidding condoms in AIDS ravaged countries we could just distribute condoms and education and stop the spread of deadly disease. Instead of condemning people to die in ignorance, we could embrace knowledge and save lives. That is the choice today. It has always been then choice. And when you don't have the papal armies ready to sack Prague, it's a very easy choice indeed.

-Username17

The romans didn't really have a long term policy of letting people do whatever - there was a long term policy of completely assimilating roman culture and replacing it with theirs.

FrankTrollman wrote:If you really want to get down to it, rape isn't even a biblical crime, which is why the Lord's Resistance Army uses it as a weapon.

To be fair, they're either heretical or ignorant, since they aren't marrying their sex slaves as demanded by Holy Scripture.

cthulhu wrote:The romans didn't really have a long term policy of letting people do whatever - there was a long term policy of completely assimilating roman culture and replacing it with theirs.

Exactly. The Romans forced their culture on you unless you proved as a society that it wouldn't take. (For instance, the Greeks. However, Rome stole enough from Greek Culture that it wasn't actually that different.)

When Rome converted to Christianity and forced people to become Christians, it was only a continuation of a theme. Instead of forcing people to worship Mercury instead of Cernnunos and Iupiter instead of Wotan, they were forcing Yahveh down everyone's throats. Details were different, but the results were the same.

Uhh, Romans didn't demand you change how you farm or what churches you went to or even how you elected local officials.

They might insist you not piss and shit in the water supply or pay taxes on trade and lands or give up your local weapons.

How that's 'forcing culture upon' someone is a bit odd in my eyes.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:Uhh, Romans didn't demand you change how you farm or what churches you went to or even how you elected local officials.

They might insist you not piss and shit in the water supply or pay taxes on trade and lands or give up your local weapons.

How that's 'forcing culture upon' someone is a bit odd in my eyes.

-Crissa

They also forced you to give up all your customs and worship Roman gods unless they liked your gods enough they adopted them into the Pantheon. (For example, Epona was adopted into the roman pantheon.)

The Romans might not have invented the idea that "Our culture is superior and we're doing them a favor by making them adopt it", but they were pretty good at it.

Christian Rome was just following the SOP of non-Christian Rome.

FrankTrollman wrote:Dudes, I'm just going to Godwin this, because it's actually appropriate. Tzor is in a hard spot, because he's arguing for a positive effect on history of the frickin Catholic Church, which is just not reasonable. He trots out the standard Catholic apologies like "We saved all the knowledge we didn't burn in our monasteries because we didn't let anyone outside of the monasteries have any of the books we spared from our own bonfires!" and the ever hilarious "After we shut down all of the Greek and Roman schools we set up our own schools about 800 years later!" Yeah, whatever. Thanks mr. kidnapper, you still let us have food every day.

No that is not my argument at all. My argument, such as it is, boils down to this. A few hundred years from now, some "know it all" on the hyper-net will be ranting and raving about how much the United States sucked. "The United States sucked man, it's all about Bush."

"But what about Obama," will come the one moderate in the group.

"No no, it's all Bush. The United States is evil and incompetent. You can't argue that. All you can argue that at least it's not as worse as Hitler."

There exists, throughout all of human history, really good people, really bad people and morons. They existed in the Roman Empire, and they existed in all the since then. They existed in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, and probably in Australia.

Normally this would segway into my traditional monologue about Francis of Assisi and of course Clare of Assisi, but Ironically it happens to be the day to celebrate good old Thomas Aquinas. I'll skip te droll details and get to the reall long term effects of this "Oh my God it's a Christian."

Many modern ethicists both within and outside the Catholic Church (notably Philippa Foot and Alasdair MacIntyre) have recently commented on the possible use of Aquinas's virtue ethics as a way of avoiding utilitarianism or Kantian deontology. Through the work of twentieth century philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe (especially in her book Intention), Aquinas's principle of double effect specifically and his theory of intentional activity generally have been influential.

It is remarkable that Aquinas's aesthetic theories, especially the concept of claritas, deeply influenced the literary practice of modernist writer James Joyce, who used to extol Aquinas as being second only to Aristotle among Western philosophers. The influence of Aquinas's aesthetics also can be found in the works of the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco, who wrote an essay on aesthetic ideas in Aquinas (published in 1956 and republished in 1988 in a revised edition).

The Eastern Orthodox Church has had a complex relationship with Aquinas' work. For a long time, Aquinas and scholastic or schoolbook theology was a standard part of the education of Orthodox seminarians. His philosophy found a strong advocate in the person of at least one Patriarch of Constantinople, Gennadius Scholarius. However, in the twentieth century, there was a reaction against this "Latin captivity" of the Orthodox theology (Georges Florovsky), and Orthodox writers have emphasized the otherness of Scholasticism.

The pioneer of neurodynamics, cognitive neuroscientist Walter Freeman, considers the work of Aquinas important in modeling intentionality, the directedness of the mind toward what it is aware of.

And this is my argument in a nutshell. Yes there are evil people who have soiled the reputation of the Church, just like there are people who have soiled the reputation of te United States. Bush doesn't prove that the United States is stupid evil or that all Democracies are responsible for crimes against humanity and similiar arguments against the Church are lilkewise flawed from the outset.

Oh and Frank, you need to really look into getting your view of the history of the University in order.

The original Latin word "universitas", first used in a time of renewed interest in Classical Greek and Roman tradition, tried to reflect this feature of the Academy of Plato (established 385 BC). The original Latin word referred to places of learning in Europe, where the use of Latin was prevalent. The Latin term "academia" is sometimes extended to a number of educational institutions of non-Western antiquity, including China, India and Persia:

Academies such as Shang Hsiang, and later Taixue and Guozijian, succeeded by the medieval Academies of Classical Learning
Taxila[2] in Gandhara, Ancient India and the Buddhist Nalanda University[3] and Vikramaśīla University in Bihar, India (5th century BC).
The Sassanid Academy of Gundishapur was founded in the 5th BC century in Persia/Iran.

The University of Constantinople, founded as an institution of higher learning in 425 and reorganized as a corporation of students in 849 by the regent Bardas of emperor Michael III, is considered by some to be the earliest institution of higher learning with some of the characteristics we associate today with a university (research and teaching, auto-administration, academic independence, et cetera). If a university is defined as "an institution of higher learning" then it is preceded by several others, including the Academy that it was founded to compete with and eventually replaced. If the original meaning of the word is considered "a corporation of students" then this could be the first example of such an institution.[4]

If the definition of a university is assumed to mean an institution of higher education and research which issues academic degrees at all levels (bachelor, master and doctorate) like in the modern sense of the word, then the medieval Madrasahs known as Jami'ah ("university" in Arabic) founded in the 9th century would be the first examples of such an institution.[5][6] The University of Al Karaouine in Fez, Morocco is thus recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest degree-granting university in the world with its founding in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri.[7] Also in the 9th century, Bimaristan medical schools were founded in the medieval Islamic world, where medical degrees and diplomas were issued to students of Islamic medicine who were qualified to be a practicing Doctor of Medicine.[6][8] Al-Azhar University, founded in Cairo, Egypt in 975, was a Jami'ah university which offered a variety of post-graduate degrees (Ijazah),[6] and had individual faculties[9] for a theological seminary, Islamic law and jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, Islamic astronomy, early Islamic philosophy, and logic in Islamic philosophy.[6]

tzor wrote:about how much the United States sucked

You see it's your startling ability to ignore history that is amazing. Your united states argument simply assumes that the united states is some sort of marvellous utopia that has always (except for one leeetle exception) brought light and happiness and puppy dogs into the world.

The united states, though arguably not quiet as bad as the Catholic church is an organization with a massive history of perpetrating horrific evil on a grand scale world wide. Just ask The entire continent of South America They'll set you straight. While you're there they'll let you in on some of the more modern evils of the Catholic church, you know, like Pinochet, Opus Dei, and how very very close both those great evils have been to the current and previous Popes (And to the United States!).

But again you run a fucking Equivalency of Evil argument effectively declaring there is good and bad in the world and nothing is ever the fault of any organisation or social movement and that such movements basically don't exist to any practical extent.

That is fucking insane.

Then you try some more of your narrow focus on isolated cases again (the very thing you continue to accuse others of).

Well here is some news for you. The Franciscan movement? A bunch of credulous dupes that have achieved NOTHING but to be used by the Catholic establishment as a propaganda front to further their evil ends.

Scholars of note in the Catholic Church? Why it's almost as if they had a total monopoly on what little academia was left in Europe. Like you HAD to be a member if you wanted access to books, learning, or even literacy. Well. I'm sure that was entirely in order to produce the largest possible number of productive scholars and not an effort to limit, control and destroy knowledge and learning! And I am SURE that once a scholar of note among their number produced something it was never destroyed and always shared productively with the masses to better their lives.

Or maybe they just kept knowledge to themselves, destroyed anything and anyone that had inconvenient ideas and never propagated or applied ideas or even literacy among the non priestly classes.

PL your technique of dismissing all good and higlighting all evil is fun and easy to do. Really I can do the same thing with the United States. You have the KKK, the Know Nothings, the treatment of citizens of Japinese descent in WWII, the various campaigns of genocide and relocation of native populations, not no mention the whole bullshit notion of manifest destiny.

You know there are whole people who live such pathetic lives that they have to blame the US for everything and consider them the most evil thing they can imagine, just like your irrational attitude towards the Catholic Church.

"There are not more than 100 people in the world who truly hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they perceive to be the Catholic Church." (Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, 1895-1979)

tzor wrote:Really I can do the same thing with the United States.

You fail on reading comprehension. Reread my first two paragraphs. The United States IS an evil organisation.

PL your technique of dismissing all good and higlighting all evil is fun and easy to do.

It's a scale thing. Lets see. You have presented what, a monk who failed to deliver poverty relief to one god damn village and had to fight the church tooth and nail to manage (or rather, not manage) that. You've presented a guy who's vague musings about thought MIGHT be influential to some other guy about a million years later.

Meanwhile in the last half century alone the Catholic Church is responsible for millions and millions of horrible deaths by means of its favoured diseases and sponsored violent oppressors. And this is at the by far the weak and inferior tail end of their power.

Wait, Tzor - why the fuck would we want something to be an alternative to Utilitarianism? Utilitarianism is the basis of our legal system and is fucking awesome!

I don't need some half baked apologetics to reconcile utilitarian goals with biblical prescriptive morality, because biblical prescriptive morality is evil, and it's so much easier to just reject it out of hand. There's no paradox between the fact that doing what the bible tells you to do won't produce the best results and wanting to produce the best results - there's no reason to do anything the bible tells you to do!

If I want to make a graven image, mix fibers in fabric, or work on Saturday, there's othing wrong with that.

-Username17

Frank, you were talking about vicious frogs right? Not fogs.

At least, I hope so. The idea of the Romans having a wizard corps casting Acid Fog as an execution method is pretty grim. Mostly since the Romans weren't able to find any other use for their wizards.

Tzor, I think that PL and Frank want to look at things in the balance. If weighed, the Catholic Church's heart is not lighter than a feather.

I mean, how many other religions had burning people alive, for people whose ideas they didn't like, as a common form of execution?

Real crimes like torture and murder or even downright royal treason got a somewhat more humane punishment, beheading.

The burning is meant as a terror-tactic, not only do you make a big fucking spectacle of the execution, and you get tons and tons of screams out of your victim, but you also have scared the shit out of anyone that watches from ever talking aloud about the sorts of ideas that the just auto-da-fe'd person was talking about.

I mean, Galilieo decided to recant than face the fires.

Treason was often punishing by drawing and quartering, actually. Not mere beheading.

Also, if PL and Frank are interested in any kind of balanced judgment, damning it as the worst institution since the birth of human insitutions doesn't sound like it.

tzor wrote: "There are not more than 100 people in the world who truly hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they perceive to be the Catholic Church." (Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, 1895-1979)

You see that's a ridiculous "'we're misunderstood" quote. It's like have senior Nazi or a member of NAMBLA saying "sure people may percieve us as bad but what of the good things we've done?"

I doubt that there is anything that the Catholic church (nor many other christian organizations) is doing now that is good (which I will concede they do do some good things; just don't ask me to cite examples) that isn't being done better by someone else.

Sure there are lots of really nice Catholics out there who seek to do virtuous things, I imagine many parishes are loving caring communities that enrich their congregation's lives. I know there are people who draw strength from their faith, but that doesn't make up for all the fucked up stuff that they the Church has done and continues to do.

I can't rape someone and then be forgiven because I did some charity work on the side. That is what the Catholic church has done to the world for the better part of 2 millenia. I think our perception of the Catholic Church is pretty fucking accurate.

PS: I just came back from the Philippines which is majority catholic and most were super nice yet they do shit like this to themselves in the name of God. Seriously WTF

PPS: This Frontline report is a good example of how the Catholic Church is still committed to doing the wrong thing.

It's practically Aztec:



-Username17

ckafrica wrote:I imagine many parishes are loving caring communities that enrich their congregation's lives.

Those sound suspiciously like commie mutant traitors, er, I mean "Leftist Modernist Communists". But don't worry, Opus Dei and Ratzinger are on the case. Those communities WILL be crushed. Their leaders in the college of Cardinals have already been purged, their last Pope blatantly assassinated, their priests regularly betrayed to mass murdering regimes, they will never again gain a tiny foothold in the Papacy.