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

[polymath257]

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.

Indeed; it's a proof of the type of thought they believe in and advocate, so let them talk it out and expose the Trojan horse they use.

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.

I'm interested in the history of medieval Europe too but for different reasons: the warfare and the knights are my main concern. I find it amusing -though brutal- to picture masses of ironed men clashing into each other; the amount of weight in the single  European army at that time was...just amusing.

I read quickly through that link. But I carry a thought that states: the Church didn't make any progress in terms of science, but the Crusades showed the outside world -which was mainly Muslim- to Europeans. Then -after these expeditions- Europe began to catch up and rise from the dark.

Italy was very touched by Islamic civilization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of...hern_Italy

The way I picture it like this:
(Greece & Rome & Persia held science--->Islam conquered them and preserved the science and added tons to it---->the later generations of Rome re-discovered what their civilizations lost from science)

It's a cycle as I see it.

Rather an over simplified view, frankly.

A great deal of Greek knowledge was preserved by the Byzantine empire. This is the source of many of the texts later translated for western Europe.

Islamic civilization didn't *just* preserve that knowledge: it extended that knowledge in many different directions. In particular, a lot of advances were made in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, optics, etc.

Once in Europe, it was primarily the Christian monks that did the translations and the Christian cathedral schools that discussed and promoted the 'new' learning. It was there that many ideas concerning motion, inertia, the nature of the vacuum, and other physical concepts were elucidated. It was a monk that first investigated what we know would call fractional exponents and imagined irrational exponents.

Also, the Christian view partly underlies the very notion of a 'natural law', with the corresponding idea that humans could potentially discover and understand such laws. Much of this discussion serves as the foundation for the much later rise of modern science.