(November 19, 2023 at 3:19 am)TimOneill Wrote: Pardon? The Church did not "keep them uneducated". On the contrary, the Church was one of the only institutions that provided education for the lower classes at all and one of the few that allowed smart people from that strata to rise to high rank and authority regardless of birth. So that's simply nonsense. Most people were not educated then for the same reason most people were not educated in any period of history before the Industrial Revolution - they didn't need to be and were busy getting on with their lives and work. Same as in Roman times or any other period. So this is nonsense, sorry.
So they didn't need to be educated. If you say so. Great educator.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
