Reason and Science in Danger.
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Agreed.
Sorry, but I am peeved by the common habit of using “Dark Ages” and “medieval” pejoratively.
I’m a Terry Jones fan. 🙂
I can believe that in their ideological battle with the obscurantist Roman Catholic Church the ideologists of the rising bourgeoisie exaggerated how bad things were under feudalism. But they had to win that battle and fortunately they did, otherwise socialism would not have become possible.
Technological progress continued during the period, as it always does in human societies as they strive to make it easier to produce what they need. Indeed it was this that laid the basis for the appearance and development of the capitalist mode of production.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2014/08/30/tech-lessons-from-the-dark-ages/amp/
Again, the either/or thing.
I am not championing everything about the Middle Ages. “Heretics” and Jews and homosexuals were burned, just not “witches” (yet).
What I don’t like is the use of “Dark Ages” and “medieval” as pejorative terms, when in fact much that was good and progressive happened, and obscurantism got much worse at a later period.
The “Dark” and “Middle” ages were never static. Capitalism was already developing in the Mediterranean in the 13th century.
The term “Dark Ages” does not in fact refer historically to anything negative, but to the fact that former modern generations knew little about those times; were hence “in the dark” about them.
We still believe a lot of Roman propaganda that has since proven fraudulent, for instance St. Jerome’s description of the “barbarian” sack of Rome – which never happened, and we use words like “barbarian” and “vandal”, when it would be more apt to say of a damaged phone booth or ransacked shop, “It’s been Romanised!”
I don’t think that the whole period of Feudalism can be called a dark age because science and others scientific disciplines continue its development ( the real dark one was the Catholic church ) and many individuals during that period opposed the backward ideas of the catholic church, and Feudalism laid down the basis needed to establish capitalism which was a more advance economical system than Feudalism.
The Renaissance did not emerge as opposition to Feudalism when much famous painting, sculpture, writing emerged during that period of time, Â even Spain who was one of the center of Catholicism, produced many advanced literary works and it was considered as the golden age of Spanish literature.
The concept of dark age did not emerge during that period of time, it emerged in 1930, and today many scholars are reconsidering that conception.
At secondary school, we studied that European economical period and we did not see too many backward conceptions, the backward conception was propagated by the Catholic Church, it was so backward that Protestantism was used as the ideological vehicle for the emerge of British capitalism, even more, Marx said that the expropriation of the catholic church by the Protestants created one the first original accumulation of capital.
Christianity at the very beginning was not a backward religion either, because it was like a working-class movement against classical Roman slavey, and then it became its opposite when  Catholicism took its place.
Engels also used the concept of Barbarian and the US historian and anthropologist Francis Jenning rejected that idea and considered that it was wrong, and I think that Engels should not have repeat the same conception used by Lewis Morgan., there was not any barbarian period in the human society
“We still believe a lot of Roman propaganda that has since proven fraudulent, for instance St. Jerome’s description of the “barbarian” sack of Rome – which never happened, and we use words like “barbarian” and “vandal”, when it would be more apt to say of a damaged phone booth or ransacked shop, “It’s been Romanised!””
I think it might be better to say “Roman Catholic” propaganda as both the Visigoths and the Vandals who “sacked” Rome in the 5th century where Christians but of a different sect.  They lost out in the end and the victors wrote history. If they had won the West might have inherited a genuine monotheistic religion like Islam is instead of the ridiculous and incomprehensible doctrine of a three-headed god called “Trinity”. Of course it would still have been mambo-jumbo.
Other words of contempt inherited from the ruling class of those days showing how they regarded  the peasants they exploited  are “villain” and “churlish”. It is of course to their credit that the villeins and churls of those days earned these descriptions from their opponents in the class struggle.
Some Spanish scholars that said that the worst thing that ever happened in Spain was that many scientific documents left by the moor and the Islamic were destroyed because many scientific knowledge were also cultivated by the Arabs as well many scientific knowledge came thru paganism
The god of three heads or three persons was inherited from the Egyptian paganism and monotheism was also created by an Egyptian ruler  ( falsely called pharaohs) by decree  and it was not created by Judaism or the so called Moses who never existed
The Islamic were not so backward, barbarism and feudalistic as the Catholics and European have propagated about them, even more some scientific ideas interpolated in the Bible were cultivated by the Arabs and they had materialist thinkers
It was the monasteries that were the repositories of learning. Monks gave us the spined book and the “lower case” alphabet. They also separated words in a sentence, where sentences were hitherto constructed in capitals without  spaces between words.
The twelth century renaissance is neglected, but not so much by modern historians. Women had greater influence and freedom than later. True, it was the Church which clamped down on that.
In the Sicily of King Roger the Norman, Muslims, Catholics and Greeks co-operated on the building of beautiful churches. King Alphonse of Navarre and Peter of Aragon presided over courts of inter-faith tolerance (unlike the later Spain), in which Jews, Catholics and Cathars were all welcome. Sephardic culture and Moorish blossomed and enriched southern Europe before the northern-led Albigensian Crusade.The Lutheran revolt of 1517 had a reactionary effect, isolating the German principalities and stifling capitalist development. In England the Protestant Reformation’s foremost achievement was wanton destruction.
The Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella was the first nation-state, crushing Sephardic and Moorish civilization and ending tolerance, expelling all of Spain’s Jews and Muslims and carrying extermination of native peoples in the Americas.
Early Christianity was a fanatical, destructive movement, and was reactionary, depriving us of the vast majority of ancient scientific discoveries (see Sagan on Hypatia). By identifying educated Greeks and Romans as (correctly, but still sad) an elite, holding art and science to themselves, Christianity, long before the Roman Catholic Church came to be in 1054, is comparable to today’s anti-science populist loon movement.
It was medieval Catholicism that civilised it.Villein: tenant farmer.
Churl: pre-feudal English ceorl (man of the country.
It is a misconception that the Jews only believed in one god. They believed they should only worship one god, the Jewish god, but they did not deny the existence of other gods. In fact the Hebrew creation account says the gods created the world (elohim, plural).
Wrong. Early Christianity was a working class movement of the Roman slaves. Â Most religions have been related to a mode of production and they have had materialistic origin
The medieval Church also ran hospitals for all who needed them.
It is widely known that Judaism was a polytheist and pagan religion and it is also known that Moses never existed and that the exodus never took place it is also known that jehovah is the summation of four pagan gods, even more the Rosicrucians confirmed that a long time ago
I think you believe more in semantic and dictionary definitions than in historical facts  Hospitals were first invented by the Essenians and the Rosicrucians who had many doctors due to the fact that medicine emerged in Africa and Egypt
I am not denying materialistic origin. Christianity was a cult which attracted the slaves but their main impetus was hatred. The downtrodden are not always progressive. The loons and neo-Nazis of today are downtrodden proles, but their impulse is hatred and destruction.
And the legacy of the populist Christian destruction of the ancient libraries could likelyean we are over six hundred years behind where we might have been today (see Sagan, Cosmos).
I never said the medieval Church INVENTED hospitals!
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