Is God a logical contradiction?

[Anomalocaris]

Bit of a misnomer, the dark ages. That’s when the second agricultural revolution occurred.  We made huge leaps in applied tech, and plant and animal breeding.  The world would continue to run on the tools and methods developed then until the advent and deployment of petrochemical ag in the 40’s.  Then, there were the military advancements and everything they entailed.  Food and war, food and war.  A predictable arc for discovery given the political situation over that period.

In any case, advocating for research while threatening the lives of anyone who dared to discover anything that ran contrary to dogma is some weapons grade gaslighting, just as your (and organized religions) penchant for reimagining religious history is.

It's not a misnomer unless we called it the black ages rather than the dark ages.

In any setting where the trappings of civilization collapses, legal systems and tradition fracture and regress,  access to resources and markets become circumscribed, resource utilization becomes inefficient, the population became more impoverished, learnings and skills lost, conflicts increase, productivity decline,  there would still be skills and crafts important to daily survival that would not only be preserved, but adapted, expanded, and improved upon as long some communities remains largely intact to preserve these skills in the first place.   Furthermore, whenever social order collapse and conflict becomes more widespread, a certain set of conflict skills that wasn't necessary or privileged before the collapse will now be pushed to the fore and thus will see disproportionate efforts at their development.   In addition,so long as some community continued, it is unlikely that all previous academic learning, records of traditions and past evens, and works of interest but no immediate application, would be totally lost.


So I think in that sense a black age where literally everything is worse than it was during a past golden age and literally nothing saw any progress and improvement upon the past, and no past pure learning is preserved in parts of the society, is down right impossible so long as humans remain humans.  

So it is against this practical minimum that we must evaluate the time between 600-900AD.    Was this age totally black?   No, that would be almost impossible.   Was is as dark, in terms of fracturing, impoverishment,  loss of learning, lost of cohesion and increase in conflict, as any large region would likely be able to sink to after an extended period of productivity, prosperity, culture and relative security?   That I think it came close.    So I think it was most definitely close to as dark as large, previously long civilized, region can realistically get.   So it was indeed a very dark age, as dark as practically feasible, but not so black that the blackness was downright impossible.

So the fact that the dark ages was not as dark as completely black does not mean it didn't more richly deserve to be called dark than most others.