Alex sent this article to us and I thought I would post it and our responses. This quote is a part of the amazon editorial review of one of his books and will prepare you for what's ahead.
'Theologically, however, Crocker is so eager to depict the church in a positive light that he's all but blind to its flaws.'
Enjoy!
Monasteries and Madrassas: Five Myths About Christianity, Islam, and the Middle AgesBy
H. W. Crocker IIIDoes Islam need a Reformation? Not unless you think it would benefit from additional dollops of Puritanism; further encouragement to smash altars, stained glass, and other forms of “idolatry”; prodding to ban riotous celebrations like Christmas and Easter; and support for fundamentalist Islamic schools that insist on sola Korana and sola Sunnah . Indeed, it would seem that Islam has already had its reformers. Railing against the corruption of the West (let's call it “Rome” for short) have been such modern Islamic Luthers as the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the cave-dwelling Osama bin Laden, the voice of young Islam—the Taliban (literally, the Islamic students)—and the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia, which is most assuredly modern as it was not even founded until the 18th century, the age of the Enlightenment.
What would a Reformation bring to Islam that it does not already have? The Calvinists imposed stiff penalties for infringements of dress codes and behavior, but these rules don't go beyond the sharia law of Saudi Arabia. Luther denied the divine right of the pope and affirmed the divine right of princes (uniting church and state, which were previously separate), but that doctrine is already well-established in Islam, where mosque and state are meant to be united. The Protestant reformers repudiated the Catholic Church for dallying too much with classical thinkers and decadent artists (like Raphael); many of them condemned the Catholic doctrine of free will (believing, as do the Muslims, in a kind of fatalism); and they damned Catholics for putting too much emphasis on Thomistic logic and reason, and not enough on the literal interpretation of the Scriptures.
No one accuses Islam of such sins. When it comes to taking Islam back to its pure, uncorrupted form, as embodied by the Prophet himself—an assassination-approving † , polygamous leader of jihads—it would be hard to outdo bin Laden and his fellow reformers.
Granted, the West is not what it once was. Rather than Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, we have Andres Serrano and his infamous Piss Christ . Instead of the optimism of the Renaissance, we have the modern (pagan) pessimism that sees Nature's gods plotting their revenge on over-populating, polluting humanity. Instead of a confident West seizing its imperial mission to spread peace, commerce, and Christian charity and morality, the modern West is ambivalent about asserting its own values. There are even some in the West—including its Muslim converts—who think the Mohammedans' stronger strictures against abortion, homosexuality, and secularism (if not Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, et al .) give them a certain moral superiority over such as the Dutch and liberals everywhere. Still, this remains, I trust, a minority view.
But let it suffice that clearly Islam does not need a Reformation. If the printing press, as it is often said, fanned the Protestant revolt against united Christendom, the Internet has just as surely fanned the Islamist revolt against the West. We've had quite enough jihadists posting their “I protest” theses on the Internet, thank you very much.
But if Islam doesn't need a Reformation, it would definitely benefit from a Counter-Reformation. Just think of it. Wouldn't it be wonderful if Kabul were to become a center of baroque art, if the street corners of Tehran were dotted with choral groups singing the hymns of Palestrina, if the vibrant artists' quarter of Islamabad were full of painters dabbling in the style of Rubens, Caravaggio, and Poussin? Ah, yes, if only. Alas, few expect this to happen within our lifetimes—or ever.
Despite the alleged glories of Islam's past, we're told that militant Islam is now stuck in the Middle Ages. But Islam is no more stuck in the Middle Ages than it is stuck in the Renaissance or the Counter-Reformation. As Margaret Thatcher's official biographer (and Catholic convert) Charles Moore has written, “‘ Mediaeval' should not be a synonym for ‘barbarous.' Ely Cathedral and trial by jury and Giotto are mediaeval.” So, indeed, are the Magna Carta, Chaucer, and Dante. So are the great monastic orders, the invention of the university, and the development of science. So are chivalry, capitalism, and the idea of progress. We don't associate any of these things with modern (or for that matter, historical) Islam.
Granted, the Middle Ages represent a thousand years of history, and the early Middle Ages (roughly 500 to 1000 A.D.), sometimes known as the Dark Ages, certainly had their chiaroscuro moments. The rough playfulness of the Vikings was not universally admired. If you were a pope between the waning days of the ninth century and the opening of the eleventh, you had about a one in three chance of being murdered in office, and survivors could be exiled or deposed. And aside from a variety of barbarians, Magyars, and Mongols, there were the Muslims who in this period jihaded their way over half of Christendom, and were only kept from completely swamping the West by the valiant Charles Martel, who defeated them at the Battle of Tours (and at subsequent battles).
But chiaroscuro is both light and dark, and there was light in the early Middle Ages. It shone most brightly in the monasteries, which not only—and famously—preserved classical learning, but also led the West in innovation in agriculture, technology, and trade. The Church provided schools, charitable houses, and the theological rationale for abolishing slavery (as it was abolished in the medieval West, while flourishing in Islam, which was then enjoying its alleged “Golden Age”). Being still Roman, the Church took on many of Rome's administrative governmental duties as well.
The achievements of the “Dark Ages” were monumental. As the historian Christopher Dawson noted, “In reality that age witnessed changes as momentous as any in the history of European civilization; indeed, as I suggest in [ The Making of Europe ] it was the most creative age of all, since it created not this or that manifestation of culture, but the very culture itself—the root and ground of all the subsequent culture achievements [of Europe].” Here, as Dawson adds, the Catholic historian has the advantage because he can better understand that these were “not dark ages so much as ages of dawn, for they witnessed the conversion of the West, the foundation of Christian civilization, and the creation of Christian art and Catholic liturgy.”
The result was that Europe blossomed in the high and late Middle Ages (1000 to 1500). Wealth and learning spread, and in place of the ruins of Rome, medieval man created a society that was far more humane, far more respectful of women, far more elevating of the individual, far more bourgeois (that is, with a far larger middle class), and far more inventive than the glorious civilizations of the Classical world. The Middle Ages were a wonderful bloom of their own even before they flowered into the Renaissance.
Islam, it should be clear, is not stuck in any previous incarnation of the West, and it is certainly not stuck in the Middle Ages, the Catholic “Age of Faith,” when monks, priests, farmers, merchants, kings, bishops, and knights created the dynamic civilization—the admixture of Classical, Catholic, and Germanic culture—that is the West. Even in his humblest estate, as a peasant, medieval man was not Taliban man. His assumptions were wildly different. He believed in a suffering Christ who came into the world as a helpless babe and died on the cross, rather than in a conquering prophet who thought it blasphemous to believe God would lower Himself to such indignities. Medieval man believed in honoring God and making merry and for this world gave not a cherry, to paraphrase the poet (and priest) William Dunbar, “the Chaucer of Scotland.” While medieval man loved feasts, celebrations, gay colors, and merrymaking, he also believed that service, labor, and commerce were honorable; that self-improvement and progress were possible; and that God had created a world that every man could understand through reason, so that every common farmer—no matter his vassalage to his feudal lord—could find ways to improve his agricultural techniques, improvements that benefited himself as well as his lord, because every man was entitled to his own rightful share of his labors.
He was, as we are, Western man, with everything that assumes. As the popular medieval scholar Morris Bishop put it, even today (or in 1968, when he was writing), “A highland farmer in Macedonia, a shepherd in the Auvergne mountains, live a life more medieval than modern. An American pioneer of the last century, setting out with oxcart, axe, plow, and spade to clear a forest farm, was closer to the Middle Ages than to modern times. He was self-sufficient, doctoring himself and his family with herbs, raising his own food, pounding his own grain, bartering with rare peddlers, rejoicing in occasional barn dances for all the world like medieval karoles.” The American pioneer and the medieval peasant were us, and we were them, and neither one of us is Muslim. And for some of us, the idea of conversing with a man from the Middle Ages (or from the American frontier) is a much more attractive prospect than the thought of trying to converse with an iPod-attached, text-messaging 20-something whose life is lived in the aptly named “blogosphere.”
The myth of the barbarous Middle Ages is part of the ignorance of our age. Protestants originally propounded the myth, secularists have promoted it, and the facts deny it. So let us sally forth like medieval knights to lance five of the biggest myths about the Middle Ages.
Myth One: Medieval Christendom was barbarous, while Islam was refined .
Since we've been talking about the Mussulmen, let's start with the myth that in the Middle Ages, Christendom was barbarous, while Islam was refined. Here's a simple test: Have you ever heard and enjoyed Gregorian chant? If you're lucky, you've done more than that; you've actually heard the work of medieval composers performed on period instruments. Both the music and the instruments are recognizably our own. It bridges naturally to what most people generically call “classical music.” (Our system of
musical notation dates from the Middle Ages, coming from the monasteries, and most especially from the eleventh-century Benedictine monk Guido D'Arezzo.) Mohammed, on the other hand, like his Talibanic followers, prohibited music. Allah, he said, commanded him to abolish musical instruments, and warned that “Allah will pour molten lead into the ears of whoever sits listening to a songstress”—or, needless to say, a medieval troubadour.
Thanks to Danish cartoonists, we're all pretty familiar with Islamic attitudes about drawing or painting a likeness of Allah or his Prophet. The Prophet himself, however, actually forbade to his people any visual art that represented any form of fauna, from men to cattle, which puts rather a crimp on artistic freedom—freedom that was widely enjoyed in the Middle Ages, let alone the Renaissance. While Islamic architecture is rather attractive—to my taste, anyway—it is not often noted that it took its inspiration from Byzantium, and in some cases was even built by Byzantine workers. Islamic literature—aside from The Thousand and One Nights and a handful of other poems or stories—is paltry compared with the Western stuff; and unlike the Western stuff, it is largely the work of dissenters and heretics. It seems that Muslim literateurs have always tended to play the role of Salman Rushdie to the reigning imams.
As for science, mathematics, and technology, the Muslims were quite good at preserving and adopting the Classical heritage of the Christians (and the achievements of the Zoroastrian Persians and Hindus) whom they conquered. They were rather less good at going beyond it, which is one very large reason why the West made progress and Islam did not. The other big reason is that while Western medieval churchmen taught natural law and that God had created a rational and orderly universe, Islamic theologians countered that nothing—certainly not reason—could limit the power of Allah; he was beyond all such constraints; and Muslim leaders were contemptuous of the West. In the twelfth century, Muslim philosophers emphatically turned against the pagan Classics. Practical Western man, on the other hand, cared not for Muslim religion, but he was certainly willing to accept and advance on Islamic learning, just as he accepted and advanced on Classical learning. The West's adoption of Arabic numerals (and the zero, which the Mussulmen got from the Hindus) is one striking example. Another is that when the Islamic philosopher Averroes wrote his glosses on Aristotle, they were more influential in the West than they were in the Islamic world. And the much-maligned Crusaders were no bigots—they happily adopted Eastern foods and dress and trade.
It was not medieval man whose civilization faced a millennium of marching into the darkness; it was the Mussulman. By the end of the Dark Ages, Islam's “Golden Age” was just about finished. As Norman Cantor, the celebrated scholar of the Middle Ages, has written, “The Islamic world had not yet entered its deep decline in 1050…but by and large the greatest days of Islam had ended…. In the year 1050, in every country in western Europe, there were groups of people engrossed in some kind of novel enterprise. Europe no longer lagged far behind Byzantium and Islam in any way, and in some respects it had surpassed the greatest achievements of the two civilizations with which the Latin-speaking peoples now competed for hegemony in the Mediterranean.” The West was always inventive—even in the Dark Ages. It is part of our spirit, just as the supremacy of the Koran before all else is part of the spirit of Islam.
Then as today, fundamentalist Islamic schools drilled their students in rote recitation of the Koran. Catholic schools, then as now, taught religion, philosophy, mathematics (from accounting to higher mathematics), and Latin, among other subjects. It is a common Protestant jab that Catholics don't know Holy Scripture. It's a jab one can't make at a madrassa -educated Muslim.
In the Middle Ages, it is true, most Catholics knew Scripture from what they heard in church or saw represented in stained-glass windows or what they read—or heard recited—from such books as The Heliand , the Saxon Gospel wherein Christ the Champion enters Fort Jerusalem for the last mead-hall feast with His warrior companions. But they accepted the teachings of their authoritative Church and kept themselves busy building breweries, creating intoxicating liquors, laying roads, building towns, and inventing and mass-producing the stirrup, the horse harness, and the water mill (technically, the water mill was invented by the Romans, who made but slight use of it; it came into its own in the Middle Ages). They also created an agricultural revolution with three-field crop rotation and improved agricultural tools and technology, product specialization, land and naval transportation, and the sanctification of commerce.
The sole cultural advance that one might grant Islam over the medieval West is the invention of the harem. Nevertheless, even the male chauvinist might think that the harem rather shortchanges women. The rationalist might add that it creates social pressures that can be rather unhealthy (leaving lots of unattached, untamed men about). The churchman might reasonably add that the celibate monks, nuns, and priests made rather better use of their sexual sacrifice than did the eunuchs who guarded the harems. The Western clothier would suspect that the burkha was invented to hide some of the shortcomings (by Western standards) of the odalisques. And finally, medieval monarchs, like modern Western man, could always get around Church teaching by practicing serial hypocrisy rather than by stockpiling women in special quarters. This monarchical practice has filtered down into business management where overstocked warehouses (harems) have given way to “just-in-time inventory” (serial monogamy), another tribute to Western efficiency.
Myth Two: Medieval women were oppressed.
While we're on the subject of the fairer sex, let's dispense with the feminist idea that the Catholic Middle Ages were an era of oppression against women. That's rather hard to square, on the face of it, with medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary; the medieval invention of courtly, romantic love; the practice of chivalry; and the existence of queens and princesses. In every case, we have men making pledges of loyalty, fidelity, honor, and protection to women—women, it might be noted, with power and favor, whether it be royal, romantic, or divine.
The New Testament has a rather higher estimation of women than does the Koran. Jesus consistently treats women with respect. Christians, from the beginning, did as well. The idea of woman as a “sex object” is profoundly un-Christian in a way that it is not unpagan or un-Islamic. Christianity has no temple prostitutes or harems, no slave girls or houris. The New Testament never recommends scourging women, nor does it compare women to a field to be plowed (as the Koran does). In Islamic law, divorce is a matter of three words (“I divorce you”); women are property, and women have essentially two purposes (you can guess what these are).
In the medieval West, both polygamy and divorce were illegal. Women could govern from thrones or pontificate from the libraries of nunneries, and they could rule the roost of a middle-class home just as any other Western hausfrau has done over the last 2,000 years. Women were free to dress as they liked and could go to the tavern—even brew the beer—if they liked. They held jobs and learned crafts and trades. If peasants, they worked the land with their husbands. They could become saints and lead men into battle (like Joan of Arc). Especially if they were in religious orders, they were well-represented in elementary education, nursing, and the other “caring professions” (as we would call them today). If they were noblewomen, they inherited and wielded property (and received all due feudal obligations), joined their husbands on hunts (or on Crusades), and went to a court school where they were taught art, manners, and household management (everything from medicine to oenology, from sewing to accounting, from gardening to how to handle servants). They were also patrons of the arts. If women were barred from classical schools and universities, which they were, it was less on Christian grounds, strictly speaking, than on classical ones—on the Aristotelian insight that women are the subordinate sex.
Just how “subordinate” women were might be seen in the bawdy—and quite “liberated”—Wife of Bath in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales . She should put paid to any idea that medieval women were oppressed. The Wife of Bath, after all, selects her husbands—five in total—on the basis of money (she boasts of picking the first three clean of cash before they died) or manly chests, including the handsome pallbearer of the fourth. She finds happiness with her fifth (and favorite) husband after trading blows with him and convincing him of her rights. (The fight starts when she angrily rips a page from the book he has been reading aloud, The Book of Wicked Wives .) In all this, she cites Scripture, noting that “I have the power during al my lif / Upon his proper body, and nat he: / Right thus th'Apostle tolde it unto me, / And bad oure husbandes for to love us weel.” Her tale—and life—is rather more hilarious and scandalous than today's “medieval” Islam would allow. In the Western Middle Ages, however, she was a recognized type, as she would be if she were plopped down in your living room today.
Myth Three: Medieval culture was crude and ignorant.
Chaucer brings us face to face with medieval culture, and far from being crude and ignorant, we regard it as being a still-bright feature of our literary heritage. If medieval castles and cathedrals, art, crafts, and music aren't enough; if Beowulf , the Song of Roland , the Poem of the Cid , and the Morte D'Arthur don't speak to you; if Boethius, Boccaccio, Dante, Petrarch, and Machiavelli are as nothing; if you have no respect for St. Anselm, St. Francis, and St. Thomas Aquinas, to select a mere handful of the literary riches of the period, there's really not much more to say.
Myth Four: Medieval politics were despotic.
Similarly, medieval politics were neither crude and ignorant, nor totalitarian and despotic. Far from it; the Middle Ages—from the start—practiced separation (and conflict) between church and state. It was the Reformation, the desire of the state to absorb the Church, that combined church and state with the creation of state churches. Medieval politics supported a wide dispersion of power, which is what feudalism was, and why England's nobles—led by the Catholic archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton—were able to hold King John accountable with the Magna Carta. Medieval man believed in the great hierarchy of society, where every man and woman had rights and responsibilities and was individually responsible before God.
Medieval man was never threatened by totalitarianism. A totalitarian state was not even possible until the Reformation abolished the Church as a check on state power. Before that, feudalism preserved an extreme form of federalism, where even city-states (like Italy's merchant republics) flourished. In the Middle Ages, not only could a merchant launch his own business, but twelve-year-old enthusiasts could launch their own Crusade (the Children's Crusade), and a failed crusader like St. Francis could launch his own religious movement. The Middle Ages might be torn by war, conquests, political rivalries, knightly jostlings, and wars against the Albigensian heretics or the Muslim infidels. But politically, the Middle Ages were, if anything, a time when the dispersal of secular power was closer to anarchy than despotism, and the Church was generally on the side of political—if not religious—libertarianism in order to protect itself from ambitious monarchs and princes.
Myth Five: The Middle Ages were uniquely violent.
The Middle Ages were certainly violent enough, but they had no Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. The Middle Ages did have its inquisitors, but the various myths surrounding the inquisitions are nowadays pretty well debunked, and anyone who wants to can know from the relevant historical scholarship that the inquisitional courts of the Middle Ages did not strike fear into the people of Western Europe. Their scope was limited, their trials and punishments more lenient than those of their secular counterparts. Inquisitional punishment was often no more than penance, and throughout much of Europe, the inquisition never appeared at all. It was not a major feature of the Middle Ages. From its 13th-century imposition against the Albigensians through the Spanish Inquisition—the most “notorious” inquisition, which operated under a royal rather than a papal charter—the history of inquisitional courts runs over the course of roughly 600 years, expiring in early 19th-century Spain. In the 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition, for which meticulously kept records have been preserved, the grand total of those sentenced to death is perhaps 4,000.
When it comes to body counts, the thousand years of the Middle Ages can't come close to the hecatombs of the enlightened 20th century. If the wars of the Age of Faith are to be regarded as a scandal that discredits Christianity, what are we to surmise from the state-authorized genocides, mass murders, and class eliminations of the pagan national socialists and the atheistic communists, who managed in the course of 70 years, less than one man's lifetime, to kill incomparably more people—by a factor of untold tens upon tens upon tens of millions—than were killed in the entirety of the Middle Ages?
There was fighting aplenty in the Middle Ages. There were outrages on the battlefield, murders in cathedrals, and massacres in cities. But modern man is in no position to sit in judgment on medieval man as his moral inferior. In the Middle Ages, the national socialists would have been denounced as heretical, a papal Crusade would have been called against them, and today we would be reading books about how the Catholic Church violently and unjustly suppressed—through inquisition and Crusade—a “heretical” German movement that only wanted to wear shorts, hike through the forests, sing pagan songs, free the people from Romish superstition, advance secular learning and science, and break the political and religious power of Rome. We've heard that story many times before, as with the romanticization of the Cathars.
But medieval man has had to suffer many such slurs, from the myth that he believed the world was flat (a myth foisted against him by anti-Catholic propagandists in the 19th century) to the myth that Islamist homicide bombers are “stuck in the Middle Ages” rather than part and parcel of 21st-century Islam. The Middle Ages were more glorious and commendable than many seem to know. Medieval man deserves our toasting tankards; better medieval man than MTV or al-Jazeera man. Cheers.
† The original “assassins” were dissident Shiites; the word is Arabic;
Mohammed himself urged his followers to “kill any Jew that falls into your power.”
H. W. Crocker III is the author most recently of
Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church: A 2,000-Year History . His prize-winning comic novel
The Old Limey and his book
Robert E. Lee on Leadership are available in paperback. His latest book,
Don't Tread on Me: A 400-Year History of America at War, from Indian-Fighting to Terrorist-Hunting, will be published this September.
My Response:
I haven’t read the responses to this article yet and I know I’m like 2 months late in responding to it, but I couldn’t sleep tonight and thought I would finally get to this article. I just wanted to let everyone know that this article almost made me sick, like wanting to throw up sick. Alex, remember how you were offended when you hung out with us and Marie’s brother Chris and his friend brad, when we were watching the ufc gracy vs jones fight and they had porn lying all over the apartment, cursed a lot, and talked all night about banging this chick and that chick. Well that’s how much I was offended by reading this article. I was seriously struggling to get through it and thought that I shouldn’t even finish it, but I did and now I will give you my comments.
First off, I want to introduce you to a term I will use throughout this email. It is called a straw man fallacy and is defined as ‘A straw man argument is a logical fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "set up a straw man" or "set up a straw-man argument" is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent. A straw-man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it is in fact misleading, because the opponent's actual argument has not been refuted.’ And I will add that misrepresenting an opponent’s position as inaccurate or weaker than it actually is is also a straw man. Sorry if I repeated myself, but it’s late.
The first thing I noticed about this article was that the author wrote a book called ‘Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church.’ This makes me a little skeptical at first, but I thought I would give him the benefit of the doubt and keep reading and then he confirmed my suspicions in the very first paragraph. Equating Islamic reformers with osama bin laden, wahabism, and khomeni is totally a straw man argument and also a biased sample fallacy (one that is falsely taken to be typical of a population from which it is drawn) it totally ignores people like ibn warraq, nasr, Irshad Manji, and many other true muslim reformers that I have seen and heard over the course of the past few years. I will give more examples of the straw man and biased sample fallacies throughout this article below.
Secondly, he presents a straw man account of the reformation, church and state were not separate before Luther, that is totally false. In fact, I remember reading an article you sent me about the inquisition which basically equated heresy with treason. So if church and state were separate, please explain to me how a catholic heresy could also be construed as treason against the state if the state and the Vatican weren’t acting as two separate arms of the same body? Your telling me the church, which had the power to raise armies to send to the holy lands and which has been extremely political ever since the council of nicea, was totally separate from the state? I think this guy’s thinking is totally incorrect.
Thirdly, the third paragraph is also a straw man and biased argument, characterizing Mohammed as a ‘an assassination-approving † , polygamous leader of jihads’ is totally not telling the complete story. He talks about not judging medieval man as morally inferior to us modern man and then he does the same thing in his characterization of Mohammed in this way. Can’t you see how totally biased and incomplete, as well as unfair, this characterization is?
Fourthly, he talks about ‘Instead of a confident West seizing its imperial mission to spread peace, commerce, and Christian charity and morality.’ What?!?!? Ask the American Indians, the South American Indians, the Incas, the Iraqis, how they feel about the west’s imperial mission to spread peace, commerce and Christianity? Oh wait, you can’t ask a lot of these people because most of them have been wiped out, eradicated by the very same people who were there to spread Christian charity and morality to them. This guy can’t be serious when he says stuff like this, but he obviously is and this is a main part of the article that made me want to puke. Can’t you see that this is the same rationale that has been used for hundreds of years to subjugate and kill thousands of people the world over and is still being used by politicians to this day? Alex, if this is all the stuff that you read, I really feel like you are being brainwashed if you just accept it at face value and don’t read it as critically as you should. Granted, I’m sure we’ll differ as to where our specific sympathies lie with regards to many parts of this article, but can’t you see how fallacious and biased and literally bullshit so much of this article actually is? Don’t you totally see neocon propaganda in the above statement? I don’t understand how you can’t.
More evidence of his biasness is when he calls Charles Martel valiant. This is totally a value judgement and attributes a positive characteristic to this guy, which an objective, unbiased historian would not do. This is clear, clear evidence of his biasness and unobjectivity right there, calling some people valiant and righteous and others not. This reads more like apologetics and polemics than history.
It also said that the dark ages preserved classical learning. I’m sorry, but that is total and complete crap. Where was the preserved Plato, Aristotle, the presocratics, the Gnostics, pagan mysticism, the science of the Greeks, where was all this preserved during the dark ages? It wasn’t preserved and I think that’s why there was a dark ages in the first place. A Christian emperor shut down Plato’s academy in 586 ad and thousands upon thousands of ancient pagan and Greek texts were burned from about 400-600 ad as heretical by Christians under the watchful eye of the holy roman emperor. The classical literature that was preserved was orthodox Christian literature like augustine, the church father’s, and a semi-heretical mystic like dionysis the aeropagite. If that is what he means by classical literature, then he is correct. That’s not what I mean by classical literature and I think the majority of historians would agree with me.
It also says Europe thrived during the dark ages and then gives no evidence of what this thriving consisted of. No footnotes, bibliography, sources, nothing. If he means some monks learned how to farm better, I will grant him that, but I would like to see more evidence about what exactly constituted this thriving in the dark ages. Likewise, he also states all this stuff about Mohammed and the quran, yet gives no evidence or sources to back up his claims. I read nothing in the quran about abolishing music. It may be in the Sunnah that I haven’t read, but if this guy wants to be taken seriously as a historical scholar and not just a catholic propagandist some works cited would be very helpful.
Another straw man argument is when he states that the Muslims never went beyond the classical literature that they conquered. This is totally false and you should realize this yourself from the play that we did and learning about all those Muslim scholars that did exactly what this man said they didn’t do, go beyond the classical learning that they encountered. What about Avicenna? Was he just some Muslim hack? So Mrs. Makara was lying to us about the whole premise of the play? Again, I can’t believe this guy’s arguments when I have conflicting evidence and facts that directly refute what he says.
He also talks about Catholics not knowing the bible and praises the western universities where science and other subjects were taught, but why didn’t the average layman know the bible? Because the power hungry corrupt Vatican didn’t want the laymen interpreting the bible in such a way that it might loosen their control on the theology and religion that kept them powerful and the laypeople weak. Of course they will tell you it was to protect theological error and all that crap, but come on, they knew once the bible got out to the masses that they would be called out for the hypocrites that they were and their power and authority over people’s lives would be greatly diminished if not gone altogether, which is exactly what happened once the bible was given to the laypeople. This argument is so fallacious and so hypocritical and so propagandist that I don’t see how anybody can take it for serious history. This is apologetics and polemics, and really bad one at that, plain and simple, and will only be swallowed whole by Catholics that already swallow the party line. I would like to think that you are more open minded then your average Sunday catholic Alex and with your interest in history that you wouldn’t buy into this false, biased, fallacious history that this guy is spewing. But you sent the article in the first place so I don’t know what to think.
This man’s bias and totally lack of respect and love for his fellow man, his fellow image of God, his fellow spiritual sibling (see, I can do polemics too) comes to a crescendo when he states that ‘The sole cultural advance that one might grant Islam over the medieval West is the invention of the harem.’ This is so bad that I’m not going to dignify this with a response. But if anybody really believes this is the case, then the whole my argument will fall on deaf ears anyways and nothing I say will matter at all. This is another part of the article that I was sickened and totally, totally offended by, and I don’t offend easily.
It is also totally apologetic for the inquisition stating that the punishment was not more than penance, was it penance for the thousands of people it killed, what about the albigensians, the cathars, the knights templar, what was there penance? What about Galileo and people like that. Was his treatment by the church just penance? I remember once you said to me that the church wouldn’t have gone after him so hard if he were less radical with his ideas. But since he was so radical in his scientific theories, the church had to take action. Don’t you see what is wrong with this? So if I have truth X and totally believe it and promulgate it to the masses completely and utterly and religious institution C doesn’t like it and has the power to censure me because it doesn’t jive with what they think to be the case, that that is somehow ok and it’s my fault for spreading it as aggressively as I did and the church is justified in torturing me until I recant of my belief? You want me to believe that this is somehow acceptable and that it was Galileo’s fault and not the Vatican’s fault?
Well, I’m just glad that we don’t live in a world like that anymore (although it’s getting back that way everyday) and we live in a country were I can be as heretical and as radical as I want and I don’t have to worry about some pedophile priest torturing and raping me because his boss doesn’t like the stuff that I’m thinking and saying. I know this last part is really, really harsh and totally unfair, but that is totally how I feel and I think that the catholic church and the Vatican needs to get the pedophile rapists dick out of their own eye before they start trying to remove the sawdust from mine. Doesn’t this systematic perversion, covering up, and transferring this people all over the globe that has probably been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years make you question the divineness and sanctity of this supposedly holy institution?
I guess it’s cool if you’re a catholic and you believe the theology and stuff, I know you can separate that from the actions of these people, and Alex, you are probably one of the most pious and devout people I have ever meet and probably the only bit of saving grace when it comes to my views on Catholicism, but doesn’t this systematic perversion and the biasness and closed-heartedness of guy’s like this make you question the institution you have sworn allegiance too? I guess it’s just harder for me to separate the saints from the sinners in Catholicism, I’m guilty of a fallacy too, lumping all these people into one pile and I apologize for that. It’s late and I’m going to bed, but I just wanted to respond to this article, thanks for sending it to me, I guess I would rather have read it and wrote this then not read it at all. Keep the saints in mind and the Vatican out of mind and I think you’ll be alright. But that’s just my opinion, good night all.
Maher said:
For once, i would like to see you sending us articles and quotations from people outside of the catholic denomination. Not just that i agree or disagree with you on what you just sent, but i am talking in general. I did not read what you just sent because the first couple of lines and skimming through the article did not interest me. For all what you support your arguments with or seem to be reading is from catholic leaders/scriptures. I would be impressed if i see you think outside your box and see what others have to say. I and i am sure many others know what catholics think in the general scheme of things, and trust me, no matter how hard catholics try to promote their truth, most people who are not catholics won't agree with it, generally speaking.
This is for you all,
I have been thinking about missionaries lately, and realized that they take advantage of poor people and give them food/shelter in exchange of religious conversions. I think it is sick and manipulative. I think if you need to help others, you should do it without waiting for anything in return. What you all think?
Alex said:
How is it that I send an article trying to dispel some of the misconceptions people have about the Middle Ages and you end up saying that missionaries are manipulative and only help people to get conversions? Even non-Catholic scholars of the Middle Ages will write a completely different story about this supposed "barbaric" and "backwards" period which the popular ideology keeps ramming down people's throats. Your last statement made a sweeping generalization about the motive for missionary work and once again it is completely unfair. First of all, have you actually spoken to people who have been truly helped by missionaries? Probably not, but you still insist on making these grotesque judgments on the motives of men and women who have sacrificed much to help souls. You are right though, charity (or love) does not wait for something in return for it is selfless. It is interesting that you think the way you do. I know a bit about the life of Fr. Damien who was indeed a missionary in the 19th century and who chose to work amongst the lepers in Molokai, Hawaii. It is funny for you take a stance (not a very informed one I am afraid to say) which would be at odds with Mohatma Gandhi's who praised the work of Fr. Damien.
Mahatma Gandhi offered his own defense of Damien's life and work. Gandhi claimed Damien to have been an inspiration for his social campaigns in India that led to the freedom of his people and secured aid for those that needed it. Gandhi wrote, "The political and journalistic world can boast of very few heroes who compare with Father Damien of Moloka'i. It is worthwhile to look for the sources of such heroism."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Damien
Yeah but according to you he probably just "took advantage" of the poor and sick (whom no one wanted to take care of). Sorry but I am increasinly seeing an antagnostic attitude towards religion which is rather "sick and manipulative" myself. It is also intriguing that you imply that I am "narrow-minded" and cannot think "outside the box" whatever that means yet you so easily make unfair criticisms without any basis in reality. You are working within an intellectual framework which is rather "close-minded" even though you think otherwise. Listen, you can disagree with me all you want, but it is one thing to disagree with someone's position but another to use every opportunity to knock down religion in the name of "freedom". You increasinly build up straw men in your arguments and proceed to crush them.....that is not intellectually honest. Just because an individual thinks within a religious framework that does not make them any less "sophisticated" or "modern". You know the more I hear your arguments Maher the more Bishop Sheen's quote comes to life (yes I am quoting another "Catholic leader" as if that is such a crime) who said: "There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church --- which is of course, quite a different thing." Yeah Bishop Sheen though was just another fanatic, backward, blind, irrational, close-minded, zealot who could not see the beauties of "freedom of thought". What a sad thing...
I am sorry Maher. I had no intention of making this into some monumental debate on religion yet you once again see it fit to take another jab at religion.
Maher said:
I would appreciate it if you read my e mail carefully, as you just failed once again, and don't take it personal, get mad and respond really quickly.
Alex said:
You're right about your comment about missionaries as you intended it "for all". I apologize yet would you care to clarify your statement regarding missionaries?
Maher said:
My statement about missionaries was in regard of all missionaries within all religions, not just christianity. "Sick and manipulative" refers to the idea/act of a "mission" that takes advantage of people, not to the missionaries themselves. I think if you truly believe in something and want to express it to others, you are free to do so within limits and for as long as you don't impose it, and don't take advantage of others and their situations. I think what missionaries do is a violation to the human rights.
Alex said:
I would agree with you that any person, ANY, that manipulaes and coerces to hold to a certain belief is going against reason. St. Augustine said the same thing. I am not in disagreement with you there however I don't understand your sweeping generalization on missionary work. You are implying that missionary work is intrinsically manipulative and expressly takes advantage of people. There are indeed human rights being violated everyday most notably in repressive regimes, missionary work is the least of our worries Maher. And also you make a judgment based on what experience? I ask again have you spoken to people who have benefited from missionary work? For example, it is true that there were many Catholic missionaries to Africa and I would say (after reading a bit about some missionaries) the people loved these missionaries (provided that these missionaries were fair and just). There was one missionary whom the nation of Gabon praised because of his love for the African people and his tireless work. They even commemorated his work by putting his picture on a stamp. Is this the work of a "manipulative" missionary who violated fundamental rights? I don't quite understand your point of view although I agree with your objection to coercion through manipulation but the question is: Is the very idea of missionary work "manipulative" and contrary to basic human rights?
Maher said:
I did not imply that missionary work is "intrinsically" manipulative, but many of missionary work is indeed manipulative. If you go to poor, and in most cases uneducated people who hold beliefs other than yours and they are poor and in so much need for food and shelter and you provide that to them and you convince them that it is from your God to them, you are taking advantage of them and their situation. Even if you just go there with an intention to set and example for them (hoping that they will follow you in the long run), and try to put them in an illusion that this is how all Christians are, loving, nice and like to help others, you are taking advantage of them. You need to ask yourself this question, will they really convert to my religion if they were not in need of me? The answer is no. Muslim missionaries do the same thing; try to set up an example for others so that others follow them.
I have not spoken to any person who have benefited from missionary work, although i know there are some. But why don't you think about the people who did not benefit from missionary work and they were rather influenced badly by it? As a future history teacher yourself, i am sure you have heard about the missionaries who killed many native americans as they invaded America because Native Americans did not want to follow them, this is just one example.
I speak, however, from a personal experience. The boarding christian school i attended for ten years is a missionary school. I remember often times that the school insisted on holding many of the fun events for kids in church after service or something (the school was over 650 acres and have so many buildings that they could have chosen for such events). I was torn as a child when that happened because i was practicing islam and i hold firmly unto my belief and refused to attend such events. However, most muslim kids did attend church when that happened and regularly on sundays. The school was taking advantage of the non-christian kids who were away from their families and it was indeed manipulative!
Alex said:
I understand your critique, I really do. Missionaries who killed the native population are obviously doing wrong. However let us be clear many of these natives were into some horrific rituals (human sacrifices and in general a very violent way of living) which you and many of the missionaries found abhorrent. I am not going to continue this debate anymore since I work under an entirely different framework than you do. We would just be battling back and forth, lol. I don't want that. Take care.
I said:
I think you are both making fallacious arguments, Maher about the seemingly intrinsic wrongness of missionary work (even if you dont' mean this, it comes off that way, but I will think more about the main point of your argument that 'If you go to poor, and in most cases uneducated people who hold beliefs other than yours and they are poor and in so much need for food and shelter and you provide that to them and you convince them that it is from your God to them, you are taking advantage of them and their situation.') and Alex about the fact that many of these natives were into some horrific rituals (many implies the majority of them were and I think that this is flatly incorrect). My extremely belated two cents.
Alex said:
I meant missionaries who killed the natives for the simple fact of them being natives or who did not want to convert were wrong. However there is such a thing as defending one's own life.
Sara said:
I am just replying to this now because i didn;t have internet access all weekend. I was relaxing in the country. (actually i was visiting my parents who live in a house in the middle of the corn field, but it sounds so much more dramatic to frame it as relaxing in the country).
I agree some with alex and some with maher. Maher, you do seem to have an antagonistic attitude to a lot of things that Alex sends. i am an ex-catholic and have a LOT of problems with the catholic church, but that doesn;t mean that every catholic scholar is incapable of coherent, logical, accurate thought and writing. And yes, Alex's framework and reference point is going to have a lot of catholicism in it because that is his religion, belief system, and probably one of the most(if not most) motivating factors in his life (sorry to seem like i am speaking for you here alex, if i am inaccurate in that please correct me). I would like to see you approach these "catholic" writings with the same open mind you seem to want Alex to have towards everything "non-catholic". I was dismayed when you said that you skimmed the article and found it of no interest (and it seemed more from the writing point of view than from the actual content). I am not saying you need to agree with, or believe everything you read (Maynard!) but I would like to see you read it and not announce you jsut find it of no interest. i definitely don;t mean this as any kind of an attack on you whatsoever, but your email came as really harsh and disapointed me a lot as i like to think of the people on this email as tolerant and open minded. not saying that you aren't, but that you did not come across that way in the email.
Alex, I can kind of see Mahers point, the fact that your reference seems to come completely from a catholic point of view, and maybe it would be nice to see you play devils advocate with yourself once in a while. i am NOT saying to change your views or your beliefs. I firmly believe you are one of the most honorable and faihtful Catholics I have come across, and while i do have my problems with the catholic church, i find nothing wrong with catholicism in general and honorable practitioners of it. (take all of that as a compliment, i meant it sincerely) but it would be nice to see oyu step outside it and see it through other eyes once in a while. always step back and be the faithful person you are, but it might just give you a hint of insight on what others are seeing in the catholic church. and people who insult the catholic church, or find some distaste in it usually aren;t attacking you at all, thought sometimes i know it feels that way, and I am sorry if I ever come across that way (i know I can be very vocal about the church, but my parents and brother are all devoted catholics and i would never insult them or you. my problems with the church are more with the problems i have with religions in general, not the faithful practitioners of)
i am sorry if ANY of this comes across as judgmental because i don;t mean it to, i can just see both of your points, but i love hearing reasoned debate from you two because i respect your opinions and feelings on a great deal of matters and hate it when it degrades into a kind of back and forth thing and seems more personal than intellectual.
now off the personal stuff-missionaries. i can understand your viewpoint maher, and there have definitely been corrupt missionaries, but i don;t think as a whole they are bad in any way. It would be manipulative and evil if they said "say you believe in our god or we won;t give you and your children food today" but i do not think it is wrong for them to share their beliefs while helping the poor, as long as the poor believing isn;t a condition for obtaining the help.
alex, i found this article very interesting. i had a problem with some parts of it (like the part on females in the middle ages. (accurate in fact, i don;t think accurate in spirit) but i did appreciate the way he put the diferent ideas together. and now i am going to take another look at the spanish inquisition to check those facts. i definitely want to know if it wasn;t as bloody and horrible as we were always led to believe! (although i do understand a bloody inquisition definitely holds a students attention better than one where only 12 people a year were killed.)
by the way, a total side note. does everyone know that the guillotine wasn;t actually invented by Dr. guillotine? i jsut heard the mythbusters say it was invented by him and it made me a little mad because i expect accuracy from the mythbusters! :)
David said:
ught the antagonism too, but appreciate it. I too am very antagonistic against the Catholic church for personal reasons as well as ideological reasons dealing with faith and pragmatic issues as well. I am very critical of organized religion, because I believe everyone, including the pope and the entire clergy, is inherently evil just as the rest of mankind. But I do believe Alex is pretty considerate and thoughtful when he offers his views. But as the epitome of the devil’s advocate, I do like those who tend to drift that way too. Not much of that goes on in our discussions. It is usually extreme views with somewhat of a compromise or mutual respect. That is a good thing. But rarely does anyone wander very far from their views. But if we all play the devils advocate, I might get confused. SO do so with caution for my intellectual sake.
Maher said:
Fair enough. That's your opinion Sarah. One thing though, i did not judge missionaries, all i spoke of was in regard of the act of a mission that takes advantage of people. Any yes i do think helping people by taking advantage of their vulnerable situations, even of no force is used, is wrong and just the whole idea is manipulative. Why can't you help them without trying to change their beliefs? It all comes down to the fact that you think you are their savior and better than them and you want to help them. And again, i don't think there is one religion that exists that has the only truth to have the advantage of doing that lawfully.
Regarding the why i did not read the whole article, this is something i talked to jason before about and he also seemed to disagree with me. But if i will read everything i get, i wont have time to do anything else. I got what i wanted from Alex's article, and that was enough for me. I read plenty of similar articles and i know i don't need anymore.
I might sound to be against religion and that's because in the most part i am. I know there is a higher power and all that, but coming down to specific religions that all their objectives seems to belittle other religions and people, is not for me. I might be close minded when it comes to specific religions because being religious and open minded don't go together.
Alex, i am sorry if i came across as harsh on you, i certainly did not mean to do so :).
Alright, off to school now. Talk soon.
David wrote:
Another point I wanted to say was why blast Maher for not reading the whole article. Those of us who converse via email rapidly cannot possibly work, go to school, and read word for word every stinking article. I skim too. If I can’t or don’t have time to read an article, I don’t comment on it. Sometimes I get caught not reading an article very well and make a stupid comment. But you folks are kind enough to call me on it. But who has the time to read every single article? Man, you guys need a life, hobby, or job, or all three.
Sara said:
it wasn;t for not reading it necessarilly, but for announcing it as not necessary to read it. I acknowledge there is never going to be a time when i have read all I want to read, I am going to die with many unfinished texts in my "to read" list. It was for declaring it unnecesary to read it. a completely different thing.
Maher said:
Thank you David :). And yes i announced that it was unnecessary for me to read, i did not say it was the same for you all. The important thing is that i was honest about the fact that i did not read it. I announced that i did not read it because I would be dishonest if i did not tell you i did not read the entire article, not so much that i was trying to ridicule it. However, i got the objectives of the article and i did not agree with them and they did not interest me and many of what i saw was not accurate. I reserve the right to what i want to read. And just to let you know, i don't care about articles that back up their arguments with any religious texts/scholars. If i am catholic and i am writing for a catholic group, then i would support my writing with catholic literature. However, if i am catholic, i can not go to a secular college level class who care less about catholics and try to impress them with catholic literature, same goes with any religion. It just does not work.
Sara said:
but just because they are written by a catholic person, it cannot be automatically assumed that all sources are from catholic writings and sources.
Maher said:
i agree with that!
Alex said, in response to my large response:
I have not finished thinking about your reply (you make some powerful points) but I didn't say I necessarily agree with all Mr. Crocker said (and if I did I retract) and also there might be a problem with the fact that he is not even a trained historian, e.g. absolutely no degree in history etc... Also you are right about the Church and State being united (but distinct) during the Reformation. Only with the Enlightenment and most notably with the French Revolution and beyond (I am pretty sure but I would have to check my facts) has the notion of the separation of Church and State mainly been adopted in Europe. Thomas Madden whom I have mentioned before is a serious historian and not Mr. Crocker so I would always refer you to the former and not the latter.
Another thing I am never/never will/and never intend to be a neo-con supporter and I detect perhaps this author has their sympathies although I cannot say for sure. Quickly I can say that the second to last paragraph of yours is indeed quite unfair "probably been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years" ???? and is fallacious as if the Church (as a divine institution....which I know you would object to) could ever condone pedophilia by these priests and the real and wretched cover up these supposed shepherds (bishops) provided for their priests. Anyway, you are keeping me on my intellectual toes, lol.
Maher said, in response to my large response:
I really enjoyed your response Jason. While i often fail to take the time to respond to these things with an educated feedback like you do, and I often lack the ability to do so, i found what you had to say very enjoyable, fair and worth podering upon. Thanks for taking the time to do this.
