” The mainstream Christians would have destroyed all knowledge (they burned the library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of literature in the ancient world because it contained stuff that “was not of God”) The real forces for darkness in this world have been The Roman Empire and Roman Catholic / Protestant Christianity, the Romans because they were control feaks and the Chistians because they knew the value of keeping their congeregation in ignorance.”
What are they teaching them in those schools nowadays?
The Library at Alexandria was burned by Caluiph Omar. The Romans themselves were engineers, and very good ones; but many of the Greek theoretical advances came under Roman rule, since the Romans were sensible enough to encourage them. And the slander against the Church is just obscene: the Church was the font and focus of scholarship in medieval Europe, the founder of universities and the sponsor of monasteries, the only places where scholars could earn bread and board for book-learning. There is unfortunately a popular parody of the Church sprung up from the Galileo case- representative only of a perverse turn in European history, when G. ran afoul of Counter-reformation politics.
And the Inquisition didn’t even exist through most of the Middle Ages.
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venividivici:
Excellent post. To which I would add a recommendation of the works of Bernard-Henri Levy.
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Not mentioned anywhere here is the cataclysim of the 13th Century, or “what have the Muslims done for us lately?”
The first few Islamic centuries did see a certain tole3ration (and occasionally encouragement) of intellectual inquiry, of scholarship and creative art, and some of those individuals have been mentioned above.
But then came Al-Ghazali. Thanks to his work in the 12th Century, “the door was shut” on Muslim scholarship. Henceforward, all knowledge was to be found in Scripture; itjihad or individual inquiry was banned; science and philosophy were snuffed out.
And even those who claim that the Muslim world was responsible for certain advances will have a hard time finding *even a single one* from the last seven centuries.
