(December 28, 2014 at 6:22 pm)abaris Wrote:(December 28, 2014 at 5:25 pm)Crossless1 Wrote: Bingo. And speaking of the Greeks and Romans, a comparison of what they understood by "virtue" as something denoting aspiration and excellence with the debased and morally bankrupt Christian idea of grace and vicarious atonement is all one really needs to know about how low the ancient world sank once these spiritual dwarfs gained power.
Actually it has been a cocktails of reasons that led to the downfall of civilization. The Western part of the Roman empire was overrun by uneducated savages. Combine that with the mental savagery of christianity and you have perfect recipe for stupidness.
It shows best when you look at the city of Rome. It had one million inhabitants at it's height, but around the year 1000 only about 20.000 were left. The reason for this fundamental downfall, these stupid fucks weren't even able or willing to maintain the aqueducts. Add to this the church claiming to have the monopoly on education and you get a world of ignorance, since they didn't educate the people at all and hardly anyone could even write their own name until the dawn of the Rennaissance. Medicine didn't evolve beyond Galen all through the Middle Ages since the church forbid autopsies and anatomic studies.
Of course, you are correct. To clarify, I wasn't addressing the material conditions of the Empire's downfall but the debasement of its intellectual and -- if you will -- spiritual traditions. The church becoming the sieve through which information flowed (when it wasn't being suppressed outright) wasn't the happiest development in Western history.
