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Rowan Williams: Early Christianity and Today

Gresham College
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websnarf Avatar
websnarf
Posts: 2
Posted: 08.09.09, 05:09 AM
Sorry, I don't buy it. The *Christians* were not the first to challenge their government. And they *DIDN'T* throughout the years 300-1300. Democracy was named after an acient greek man named Democritus who predated the existence of Christianity.

Christianity is only responsible for secularism in a negative sense. What people like Peter Abelard, Martin Luther and King Henry the 8th did was cause the christian churches to fragment and divide. Science was given to eurpeans through a recovery of greek texts through the Muslims in Spain. As the Muslim's hold over Spain weakened, people defected to the North and spread the recovered knowledge of the greeks and the new knowledge from the middle east and asia to the rest of europe.

Toward the end of the dark ages the christians had long forgotten that the roman elite had used their knowledge and power against them. So they forgot that knowledge would be like an antidote to the poison of Christianity. They forgot how they burned the greek books in an attempt to destroy their knowledge. So they allowed science, secularism and humanism (all of which in a memetic sense was a *RESPONSE* to Christianity, not an outgrowth from it) to rise.

To make a claim that Christianity was in some way responsible for somehow positiveily influencing the enlightenment, you would have to explain why it so thoroughly failed to do so for the entirety of the dark ages (ca. 300-1300). Why did Christianity sit on its hands for 1000 years? That's a long time to be sitting on that egg. To ignore this and the fact that non-Christian influences were what was primarily responsible for the rise of secularism is pure ignorance. There is merely a question of how willful that ignorance is.

*MODERN* christianity has a problem with sex. Any survey about this (compared directly with atheists, for example) would demonstrate it.

Nonsense. No we could *NOT* do worse than to look backwards to early archaic Christians. We might end up selling undulgences, rather than following the path of freedom for the mind and power through knowledge.
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defaultposition Avatar
defaultposition
Posts: 1
Posted: 08.09.09, 05:45 AM
I cannot workout if the Arch Bishop is ignorant of history or is deliberately misleading his audience.

He cites few references, skirts over great thinkers like Hobbs and Hume, then ignores the great Greek philosophers, whose work was preserved by Arabs from destruction by the Christian church.
It was only when the Catholic church abducted Arab scholars and copies of their translated Greek texts that the Enlightenment began to occur.
The Enlightenment was a continuation of where 'pagan' intellect had left off before the Christian church stamped all over it, leading to the 'dark ages'.

The best the Christian church can claim is that there were some individuals born in Christian cultures who had the courage to defy the Christian church and avoided being executed long enough to complete great works which often defied the church.
Perhaps we would have had the modern sciences and humanities in the 10th century if the Christian church hadn't chocked it for so many centuries.
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Miracle Man Avatar
Miracle Man
Posts: 2
Posted: 11.15.09, 11:24 PM
I hate to break it to you, but the dude had cred from Oxford- either as student teacher or lecturer- that credibility speaks for itself, sirs or madams- they have the most austere and stringent recognition of accreditation and scholarship in the world- they recognise only Cambridge and another college in Italy as even coming to a par with the grace of their skirts.So with due respect, the shoe is on the other foot and you're saying silly things.
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