RE: Is religion the best proven business model for success?
December 7, 2017 at 11:29 am
(This post was last modified: December 7, 2017 at 12:27 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(December 7, 2017 at 11:24 am)Khemikal Wrote: The western world already -had- unifying and preservative influences. These were destroyed by the church as competitors..................not that this influence ever stopped any of them from warring against each other in the first place.
This is too much Edward Gibben.
If you are referring to the western Roman Empire I do not agree it was destroyed as competitor to the church. The church certainly attempted to coopt the institutions and the influences of the Empire for its own advancement, but on the whole the Empire in the West collapsed due to a series of contingent events outside the influence of the church, such as diseaterous military blunder in Andrianopol and the ruinous loss of tax base from North Africa, and would not have been greeted without dismay by the church.
(December 7, 2017 at 11:24 am)Khemikal Wrote: The RCC didn't preserve or promote culture, holding it all for us until the post reformation enlightenment..muslims did. Christians were chiefly engaged in destroying it. Christian monks (and the enitre christian apparatus), all throughout the height of RCC's power... were precisely the sorts of parasites you paint buddhists as. We laud the examples of productive monasticism precisely because they are and were exceptional, not representative. The picture of christian piety had always been the picture of parasitism. A begger in rags eschewing this mortal world and taking no care for the morrow. The story of jesus, after all..is not the story of a hardworking carpenter.
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No. The Roman Catholic Church preserves the Roman heirachy, Roman administrative organization, Latin literacy, as well as significant bodies of classical texts. It was also instrumental in preserving the concept of a universal empire and civilization and forestalled Europe from completely degenerating into illiterate warring tribes to be easily overrun by any major foreign incursion.
These are the foundations a civilization needs to readily assimilate and disseminate aspects of culture later taken from the Byzentines and through the byzentines the Muslims.
