(November 19, 2023 at 6:42 am)TimOneill Wrote:(November 19, 2023 at 6:19 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: So they didn't need to be educated. If you say so. Great educator.
No, most people didn't need education. In pre-modern societies, most people had no need for literacy. So it wasn't that "the Church" somehow kept them from being educated. They had no need of it any more than their Greek or Roman Era ancestors did. The need for widespread literacy rose much later. Understand?
It should be noted that kings and princes used divine right to justify their rule over peasants. It just so happens that those same kings and princes had sway in who could and could not be educated beyond, say, knowing when to plant crops. That the Catholic Church supported many of these European nobles in their practice of fiefdom does indeed say something about the influence of Christianity on Western civilization, and not all to the good.
Put shortly, who decided who needed education or not? Kings and princes supported by religious authorities, in a large part. It should also be noted that the Church had a fairly hostile attitude to scientific learning in general, meaning to me that even it isn't directly culpable in misunderstanding geosphericity or heliocentricity, it's still guilty in part of retarding learning. That comes with punishing scientists for learning.
