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Basic factual error - confuses population *of cities* with population. 95% of medieval people lived in the countryside. It some places the urban population may have gone as high as 10%. But towns of more than 10,000 people were quite rare across the whole of Europe. Second, the population of a town can fall by 2/3rds in a plague, without 2/3rds dying from that plague. People run from plagues. Cities were much more dangerous than the countryside - though many in the countryside died as well.
The black plague may have killed as much as a third of the population of central Europe - but not half or two thirds. Also, it was around for a long time, recurring in waves, each hitting various cities or areas, after the first main onset. It was not the first major plague either.
"The Church had taught for ten centuries that all events, natural, political, and social must follow the Bible and all knowledge is revealed there."
Basic factual error - the medieval church was not literalist. Teaching authority resided in the church hierarchy, not in a book. That hierarchy taught an elaborate doctrine in which reason, authority, tradition, and revelation were all thought of sources of truth. Revelation was not equated with the bible, but was considered ongoing in the lives of saints.
The bible did not exist in the vernacular, and most people could not read anything, let alone the necessary church latin. Most clergy used small selections - psalters and brevaries - rather than the entire bible. There were claims to infalliability in medieval times, but they were raised by popes, not scholars, about edicts and decrees, not books.
The central role of the bible comes in only with Protestantism. Rejecting the existing hierarchy, they needed some other authority to appeal to. They needed something placed above popes, before which popes could appear to be in the wrong. For Luther, this was at first the doctrine of salvation by grace without regard to works, and later, literalism. Catholics also increased the importance they ascribed to the bible during the reformation. The bible was widely translated into the vernacular, and printed. Men could read what it said without having to ask a trained priest - which was entirely new.
So, it is simple false to claim that the church around 1350 taught that all knowledge is biblical. Moreover, it overlooks a central period in the history of reason, the so called first renaissance of the high middle ages, the time of Dante and Acquinas. This period saw the reintroduction of Aristotlean philosophy into Christendom. Principles of reasoning and philosophy were eagerly learned, notably at the university of Paris.
"So millions stopped planting crops, stopped planning for the future, and awaited salvation"
This is pure bumcomb. Certainly there were places were the plague disrupted normal life and trade, and as for "planning for the future", it was not everyone's highest priority when many expected to die before the end of the year. This phenomenon is in no way tied to Christianity. Thucydides describes the same reaction to a plague in pagan Athens during the Peloponnesian war, in the lifetime of Socrates.
"made worse by famine, political chaos, and war."
All of which, along with disease, were endemic. And still are.
"who is Satan?" they would ask.
Always a popular sport, certainly. According to books published in the last 15 years, the UN, Masons, Catholic Church, US, Islam, Trilateral Commission, Bildeburgers, Elders of Zion... A popular answer in the high middle ages was the Church, and not just among incipient protestants. Joachim of Flora was hailed for his interpretations of revelations in which he predicted an antichrist would become pope before the second coming. Unbelievable as it may seem to modern ideological sensibilities, this idea was enthusiastically backed by the church, though a debate over whether Joachim's teachings were heretical ensued. This was a century before the black plague - he predicted the world would end in 1260.
So what is wrong with the basic picture the author is presenting here? First, he gives the plague a centrality in medieval life it did not possess. He does so essentially so science's progress in understanding disease - much, much later - can be constrasted with medieval thinking. Fine as far as it goes. But then he also projects back into medieval times, modern ideological modes of thought that are fundamentally alien to that time.
In the 14th century, for instance, far from a monolith medieval society was crumbling. There were three rival popes at one time. Heresies led to secession of entire provinces. At least one was condemned not because it failed to predict an end to the world but because it threatened practically to bring one about - by forbidding marriage. The church in France had to fight literal military campaigns against celibacy. Modern ideological lenses simply and utterly fail to understand what was going on.
He also presents cleanliness as a supposed cure for plague in Islamic countries (or Jewish quarters), when they suffered from plagues as well. There was medical science of a sort in that day, it just didn't know very much. It is not like the church was mad and the doctors were brilliant. The doctors bled plague victims with leeches, and prescribed various poisons as "purgatives". Fine, we all know that we would not enjoy medieval medical care.
"The Inquisition worked day and night to root out Satan"
Presents it as directed against the plague, which is simply false. It began as a weapon against heretics, used by the hierarchy centered in Rome. But it was small in extent until the Spanish monarchy picked it up again, and turned it into a political and cultural weapon. This was a hundred years after the plague, though, so his story has rather unraveled. The Spanish kept it going, persecuting newly acquired subjects as they took Spain from the Muslims. Then later still, it got a broader field of application again during the counter-reformation, when Spanish Jesuits spread its use to Protestant enemies.
But none of this has anything to do with biblical literalism, waiting for apoclypse, or trying to explain plagues. It had everything to do with persecuting religious minorities for disagreeing with the majority, for political popularity, and for coercive control of subject populations by states. Bad politics is not bad science; both being bad and neither being good science does not suffice to make them equivalent.
"It wasn't witches (there is no such thing as witches, just those who think they are)"
At least slightly confused. There are, first of all, people who consider themselves witches. And there were in the middle ages. There are, second, people who think others are witches, when those others do not think they are. Neither has any magical ability to cast spells. The first are deluded and think they do, and have other religious beliefs that in the middle ages were considered heretical. They have been persecuted for long periods of time, sometimes by those who believe them, but also by those who do not, but did consider them heretics. As well as wrong, which they obviously were and are.
There was an entire medieval underworld of surviving pagan and local beliefs, religious and magical, that defied the existing religious hierarchy. And indulged at least as much wild magical thinking as the mainstream church, and far more than learned theology. (Augustine was refuting astrological and magical thinking as inconsistent with empirical evidence a thousand years before Bacon was a gleam in his mother's eye).
But the author wants to lump all unreason into one camp. He does not want to acknowledge that sometimes theology was a rationalizing force. It clearly was. None of which is meant to excuse violent persecutions; error is not crime, and they did not understand that principle. But sometimes those they persecuted were the ones in error, obviously. The rise of such scares in the late middle ages and early modern times goes along with the stirrings of the reformation and its precursors.
Religious doctrine was fragmenting, not monolithic. Unjust force was applied trying to keep it together, unsuccessfully.
Politically the main result, in this period (14th century) anyway, was to empower nations at the expense of the centralized institutions, papacy and emperor. This was the time when Gallicanism arose in France (subordination of a nation's clergy to its king, while staying catholic), when at the Council of Constance the votes were by national delegations. (The preceeding century had been dominated by the struggle between pope and emperor, rather than nations).
"Jan Hus of Bohemia (1372-1415) openly accused the church of conspiracy and gets burned at the stake for his trouble."
Misleading context. Hus was a proto-protestant, not someone who simply blamed the church for plague. He echoed Joachim's prophecies and claimed the church was now controlled by the antichrist. He was supported by some nationalist separatists, and by reformers scandalized by the state of the church (venality, disorder - as mentioned, 3 rival popes at a time, etc).
"This led to the Husite Rebellion under Jon Milic (d. 1574) archdeacon of Prague."
Whoops, just skipped 200 years there. Hus is a proto-reformation figure. He died long before the reformation. The Husite rebellion was part of the reformation. They appealed back to some things Hus had said, hence the name. But also from the rest of protestantism, which boiled over at this time.
Not of lick of which, incidentally, had anything to do with science or rationalism. None of the protestant reformers were rationalists in any modern sense. Erasmus was, but he advocated reform from within the Church. There were later rationalists who were also protestants - Francis Bacon e.g. - but they led nothing, religiously speaking. The protestants were stumping for literalism and the bible rather than an interpreting hierarchy and the pope. Not for rationalism against literalism.
"Catholics and Protestant heretics alike engaged in an orgy of murder and brutality that lasted long after the plaque" (sic). Again this idiocy about connecting the reformation to a plague 300 years earlier. They had nothing to do with one another. Yes an orgy of brutality and murder killed a third of the population of central Europe in the 30 years war (1618-1648). Which was the tail end of the counterreformation, not the reformation period itself. That started a hundred years earlier. In led to endemic conflict, but was also just "played" by great powers for nationalist and monarchical reasons.
"the plaques subsided, and Europe's population would not recover until the 18th century."
Um, WW I was the first war in human history in which more people were killed in combat than were killed by disease. And if you include the worldwide flu epidemic afterward, that one was about a draw. It didn't fully change until WW II. As for European population, he is referring to the decline occasioned by the 30 years war, which ended in 1648, not to the black plague, which was 300 years earlier.
He gives the entirely false impression that European population declined for 350 years, when actually it fell sharply during a major war in the first half the the 17th century, and then recovered, but only passed its 1618 level again in the early 1700s. Meaning 30 years of decline that took 50 odd years to recover from - and not in the middle ages, and not related to the black plague.
It is just a kind of stream of consciousness or of associations history, skipping merrily over missing centuries, blithely conflating entirely unrelated processes separated by hundreds of years and sea changes in culture, whose fundamental moral is simply, "formally all the world was mad, but now we have antibiotics and public hygiene".
Which has what to do with witches and cats and the Inquisition and the black plague and John Hus? Not a gosh darn thing, actually. Nobody has ever disagreed with antibiotics. You can't find the slightest trace of it. Nobody knew about them, then somebody discovered some, and everybody thought it was great.
The insinuation, of course, is that those whacky religious people prevented us from discovering everything for ages. Um, the pope didn't stop Averroes or Maimonides from discovering penicillin. But they didn't. Christianity did not stop Hippocrates or Galen from discovering the germ theory of disease. But they didn't.
You can be as rational as you like and still be ignorant of important facts about how the world works. It is, in fact, the natural state of mankind, at all times and in all places, regardless of cultural principles or religious beliefs.
Moreover, as will come up later, one can be as big an opponent of the usual historical bete noirs as they come, and still succumb to wild magical thinking and superstition, rather than rationalism. Superstition or wild magical thinking and religious orthodoxy are at right angles to each other, they are not synonyms. Ask an alchemist, or a palm reader. Or, on the other side, William of Occam or Moses Maimonides. They can, but need not, coincide. All four possible combination boxes are populated.
"From 400 AD to the late 1500s Europe had progressed little in science and all learning/inquiry was relegated to religious dogma. Reason never had a chance."
The former is largely true, the latter is not. Albert the Great and Roger Bacon would dispute the claim as to science, but by the standards of later accomplishment they were standing still. There was little learning to start with.
The western Roman empire was conquered by blood stained warlords who could not read their own edicts. For 500 years, essentially the only people in Europe who could read or write were monks or clergymen. It is like asking about scientific progress in central Africa today. There wasn't a university anywhere on earth. The closest thing in the west were the monastic houses. Medicine consisted in rough surgery performed by barbers and the home remedies of quacks.
Leading natural "scientists" were nearly all alchemists or astrologers. (Astrology was the standard profession of mathematicians well into the 17th century. Kepler was a court astrologer. Newton was made master of the British mint because he was one of Britain's leading alchemists). It is not that no such men existed or that they only thought about theology. Instead they wasted themselves in barren intellectual dead ends.
"It is just a part of nature that today can be combated with vaccines."
Actually, practically no one is vaccinated against bubonic plague. It is rare but still endemic in some parts of the world, and can be treated by antibiotics after infection occurs. Vaccines dealt with things like measels and smallpox. But disease as a widespread killer fell with the spread of urban sanitation, which itself was made possible by rising wealth, long before modern medicine. Modern medicine has managed to do more in the last century, but its impact is quite recent. Life expectancies were still around 50 years in 1900.
"By the dawn of the 19th century science and the scientific method would disentangle itself from superstition and dogma."
Superstition was endemic to "science", not an outside imposition or import, into early modern times. It is still present in the thought of the founders of modern science. Theology has been waging war on popular superstitions at least since the time of the Church fathers in the later Roman empire. Dogma, on the other hand, was certainly prominent in medieval thought. It was hardly less prominent in reformation thought and the early modern period.
Significant freedom of thought actually entered through the principle of religious tolerance, still struggling in the course of the 17th century. E.g. Milton arguing for freedom of speech, was championing a puritan position against Anglican comformity. Pennsylvannia was the first state on earth founded explicitly on the principle of freedom of conscience, because it was founded by Quakers (whom Massachusetts was still hanging as heretics in the late 1600s). Religious dissenters founded Rhode Island because Massachusetts was too Calvinist and dogmatic.
"A product of the Enlightenment, the scientific method would produce..."
Um, the method itself is usually traced to Galileo, Descartes, and Francis Bacon, and as such stems from the 17th century. The Enlightenment wasn't until 100 years later.
Roasting straw men is apparently still a popular sport. It doesn't show anything, but is fine as far as it goes. Of course unqualified literalists are committed to positions that are simply silly.
"falling into a bottomless pit of mediocrity"
Not a happy mixture of metaphor and claim. Ignorance might be bottomless, stupidity perhaps, but mediocrity? Surely the merely mediocre is a flat level expanse without significant features, not anything "bottomless". A quibble.
"many people just don't have the knowledge to understand what separates issues of faith and humanity from the natural world."
It is unsurprising that not only many, but most people, would lack any given special form of knowledge. Ignorance is the natural state of man. The idea that there are some matters of such great importance that a few simple points about them need to be learned by everyone, by heart, to avoid this, is called - (wait for it) - dogma.
Which is what the fellow is actually offering, though I am sure he would dislike the diagnosis. He could have offered the serious study of history in place of the above cartoons, for example. But he doesn't. It is enough if the cartoon version conveys a few basic lessons he considers essential, even if strictly speaking what he has said isn't true.
Quibbling with his errors should not detract, he will want to say, from the central importance of his message, which is that the dark ages were dark and we do not want to go back to them. So they were, and so we don't. But they were also religious, so we don't want that. Non sequitor, of the particular form post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Who came up with these compendiums of fallacies, that allow us to recognize such errors in basic reasoning? Why, the despised schoolmen and their scholastic philosophy. About astronomy they were clearly wrong (as was Maimonides, Aristotle, etc). About reason, nothing of the kind has been shown.
"Both reject the modern world and the use of science and logic."
This is largely true of the critters he is diagnosing. But just notice the conflating going on here. Clearly, one can embrace the modern world and the results of science without being particularly logical. One can just say, "antibiotics, yay" and leave it at that.
It should be just as clear that plenty of people in the past were logical, without their logicality leading them to modern science full blown. Logic does not establish the conclusions. It can't, and still remain a method for thinking about anything. It establishes soundness of reasoning and can help detect certain errors. There are whole classes of other errors (of fact rather than reasoning) it does not help with. Not a criticism, it does what it does. What it doesn't do it tell us what to think.
I also want to illustrate a phenomenon that happens in the long history of human ignorance and learning. The better arguments are not always on the side of the truth. The truth, and a good argument, are two different things. Good arguments are better than bad ones, and may tend to arrive at the truth more often. But they do not assure it. Through no ill will, the crucial piece may simply be missing. An example -
Aristarchus of Samos had the idea of putting the sun at the center of the solar system and having the earth revolve around it through the seasons, rotating on its axis as well to produce day and night. This was a fine idea. Then he had to argue in favor of it, against the objections of those who accepted the second (rotation) but not the first (revolution). And he had to argue from evidence actually available in his time.
Now, the main objection was that his model predicts parallax, and parallax was not observed. Parallax is the shift in apparent position of a star over the course of the seasons, as the earth revolves around the sun. From one side of the sun, the angle to the star is such. Move over to the other side, 6 months later, and you've changed the base of a triangle, and the angle to the star should have changed, too. They looked, they saw no change, they concluded "the revolution theory is wrong, it does not fit the evidence".
Now, Aristarchus heard this objection, and came up with an ingenious argument against the objection. He said, imagine the stars are infinitely far away. Then the angle difference will be zero. That is absurd, his opponents countered. He was not so lucky as to have hit on the argument, "just really large" - though even that would have been unobservable. He said infinite, and that made it quite a poor argument for quite a true position, and he lost his debate. Parallax was not observed empirically until decent telescopes allowed it, in the 19th century.
What were his opponents supposed to do? He committed a scientific method faux pas - he posited the existence of an unobservable to explain away a difference between what his model predicts and the actual available data. Worse, he posited such an unobservable as an infinite quantity, to make any possible observation (attempt to find parallax below this sensitivity or fineness) compatible with his theory. He made it empirically unfalsifiable, when observations disagreed with it.
In argument and method terms, he deserved to lose his debate. But his original proposition did not. The crucial piece, that parallax is real and observable, just way below the size they could detect yet, was missing. Which was nobody's fault. That is just how it sometimes goes, in the natural state of ignorance we all start from.
"a way to escape the bad things in life, a certainty that they can cheat death and misfortune. They can't."
A certainty or a possibility? It is easy enough to object to someone seeing certainty where it isn't. But since outside of mathematics, logic, and a few similar purely formal disciplines, certainty is not to be had, it is something of a straw man. What is really involved in such hopes is not certainty, but possibility. Some people cling to the possibility that e.g. death might not be final, or that bad things happening to good people will always come right in the end (perhaps the former is a particular case of the latter).
And this is not irrational. Sorry, it simply isn't. I know the world would be a lot less messy, intellectually, if it were always irrational even to hope (without claiming any false certainty) for some things without having evidence for them - or much evidence, or good evidence. But hope isn't like that, and neither is evidence. Wishful thinking is an acknowledged fallacy. Wanting something does not make it so. But the fact that something would fufill a wish, even combined with no evidence in favor of it, does not show that it isn't so, either.
Maybe Aristarchus wished stars were so far away that his theory would hold up. He put that wish badly, and it wasn't evidence, and it did not produce a good argument, and his wishing or finding the world would look more comprehensible if he it were so - even all combined - did not suffice to make him wrong. He just happened to be standing where the truth actually was - even if his counter to the objection was only an approximation, and a self-serving one.
"Like the Christians of 1358, they are on a great Satan hunt."
Is anyone in this thread on a hunt for a class of dangerous, deviant thoughts? Hmm. Are fundamentalists this fellow's candidate and entry in the great Satan hunt? Literalists are clearly wrong, it can be shown to anyone who is not a literalist in scads of ways, it is as easy as breathing. It can't be shown to any literalist unless he opens his mind, and departs however slightly from his literalism. But error is not crime. Freely offer them instruction. If they aren't interested, let them be and freely offer instruction to those around them. Simple. No Satan hunts. Ignorance is natural, it does not stem from Satan.
I haven't time to go through the rest yet, this must suffice for now. It is long enough as it is.
Rational society -- and public schooling -- collapsed in the '60s and '70, and since then we've had two generations of teachers educated in the same failing schools, making it even worse.
I'm still maintaining hope for computer-based education. You can now get complete college classes on the Internet for $30 plus the cost of the textbook. This may just be a new way of marketing textbooks, but it promises to torpedo $35,000 tuitions in a hurry, and may provide the lifeline this society needs to regain competitiveness in a global economy.
This thread-article 'is' all garbage!!
LOL,.....during the 'cold-war',....it was the pagan-internationalist-scientific-EVolutionists-U.N.-allies that set 'their'.....DOOMSDAY-CLOCK...!!!!!!!!
LOL,....this thread-article 'is'....'junk'...!!!
I don't know if any of the potato farmers in Klamath Falls, OR are Irish, or not... But If John F'n Kerry could have had his way, they'd have been stripped of their property rights all over again.
Rush told today about how Kerry tried to have Karl Rove investigated for trying to help those farmers get water they have every right to and the investigator told Kerry to "Buzz Off!"
Does that include murderous fundamentalist Muslim madmen like Osama, Alqueda and the Taliban? Or monsters like Stalin, Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, or Hitler? How 'bout Jim Jones, et al?
And evolution doesn't deal any deathblow to Christianity because most reasonable Christians (excludes fundamentalists) see the Old Testament as symbolic and reject Mosaic Law as done away with Jesus. I know several very strong church-going Christians who have no problem with evolution. Many fundamentalists today follow a cult known as Christian Reconstructionism that does away with Jesus (they refer to Jesus/Jews and their God as Satan) and prefer the Old Testament as the Law and themselves as the new chosen people. Followers of Jesus who actually believe in Him have no problem with evolution.
There are a lot of Jews out there who "prefer the Old Testament as the Law" and still believe in evolution.
Really????
The wind and the rain formed Mounts Everest and Hood, the Matterhorn and all the rest??
And this guy is calling Christians ignorant?????????
The author testifies to his own intelligence.
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