RE: What do invented saints tell us about Christianity?
November 16, 2019 at 10:38 am
(This post was last modified: November 16, 2019 at 10:49 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Owing in part, no less, to people who had a strong tendency to remark "well, plato said.....", in so many other words.
I think that what alot of the religious and their aligned apologists fail to realize is that the issue is not so much that any given group of superstitious nutters was more or less superstitious than any other, but that religions, as social institutions, are necessarily conservative -as- institutions. While the base line for idiocy in any religion is roughly equal, if and when a chance to progress arises, a body whose power is largely determined by adherence and deference to tradition will reject, diminish, or eliminate those bits of progress if feels threeatened by...even when it knows those things are true, or very likely so.
That christian academia was well aware of the earths shape even when others were most emphatically not is not a defense, in this. It's an even stronger condemnation. "Yes, yes yes yes, we know..but you have to stop saying that, or else the people we're farming like so many heads of cattle might start to ask other questions!"
It's only after the fact, when rejection and systematic deception have utterly failed, that they re-imagine themselves, and attempt to rewrite their own histories, as having been the rare champions of that truth in the past. They're pretty successful in this, the new truth becoming a part of the new tradition, the next social institution to reject, diminish, eliminate, and gaslight it's adherents and those who arise from the culture they dominate.
I think that what alot of the religious and their aligned apologists fail to realize is that the issue is not so much that any given group of superstitious nutters was more or less superstitious than any other, but that religions, as social institutions, are necessarily conservative -as- institutions. While the base line for idiocy in any religion is roughly equal, if and when a chance to progress arises, a body whose power is largely determined by adherence and deference to tradition will reject, diminish, or eliminate those bits of progress if feels threeatened by...even when it knows those things are true, or very likely so.
That christian academia was well aware of the earths shape even when others were most emphatically not is not a defense, in this. It's an even stronger condemnation. "Yes, yes yes yes, we know..but you have to stop saying that, or else the people we're farming like so many heads of cattle might start to ask other questions!"
It's only after the fact, when rejection and systematic deception have utterly failed, that they re-imagine themselves, and attempt to rewrite their own histories, as having been the rare champions of that truth in the past. They're pretty successful in this, the new truth becoming a part of the new tradition, the next social institution to reject, diminish, eliminate, and gaslight it's adherents and those who arise from the culture they dominate.
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