Turkey's Erdogan orders the conversion of Hagia Sophia back into a mosque

[Belacqua]

Bigotry can reach high levels; but this type of bigotry is....cold, brutal. I mean what kind of people are these? 

Yeah, the Anglophone propaganda bubble is amazing in its effectiveness. I suppose I should stop being shocked at these things, but there's something new every day. 

At least by speaking up and saying these things they're proving beyond doubt how ignorant they are. I suspect that the percentage of reasonable, literate, sane people stays fairly constant over time. Every culture has its bigots, and probably always will.

Back to our discussion: I think Christianity inherited the decaying Roman culture for a small while, then sunk into the darkness of the dark ages; which saw little to no advancement in culture. The Christian world only revived when it rejected the bible and overthrew the Church after the French revolution.

This is an interesting subject for me! 

It's certainly true that the Christian culture of Europe adopted and adapted all kinds of things from Greece, from Rome, from the Near East, etc. But that's true of any society. Nothing has ever been pure. 

What you say about the "dark ages," though, is a kind of a trope that is losing support among historians. It is frequently repeated among Western ideologues who want to imagine that Christianity ruined culture, but the truth seems to be different. 

Here's a recent blog post from a very good historian whose main hobby is correcting exactly this kind of misunderstanding:

https://historyforatheists.com/2020/07/s...s-history/

Here he's addressing an Ayn Rand-type college professor who repeats a number of disproved cliches about medieval European history. 

It depends on how we're defining "civilization," but I'm thinking that in history just about every civilization has been based on violence, had a suffering underclass, etc. But there are better times and worse times. 

The Italian Renaissance, for example, is sometimes given as an example of a high point in civilization. It was a violent and chaotic time, but it also reached a peak in other ways, and set a direction for later people. And it was completely soaked in Christianity. You can't imagine the Renaissance without Christianity. The Twelfth Century Renaissance, also, was very Christian. 

The scholars who revived Aristotle, providing the intellectual underpinnings for science, were Christian monks. And the scholars who did experiments and advanced math to prove that Aristotle was wrong about motion were also Christian theologians and clergy. 

So just as I won't accept that Islam is essentially opposed to human advancement, I won't accept similar statements about Christianity. It has contributed at least as much as it has detracted. And imagining a world without it is only idle speculation.