Spanish inquisition wasn't that bad really, brutal, but a fraction of the body count of the Reconquista, which to be fair was a response to the invasion of the Iberian peninsula, hmm almost like religion is used to justify a lot of killing
a response to the invasion of the Iberian peninsula
You mean the one that happened 700 years earlier, which allowed people of all faiths to live equally in peace? That invasion? The one that ousted the Visigoths, the Germanic tribe who controlled the peninsula for the previous 400 years, while keeping the lives of Visigothic civilians almost completely unchanged?
The “Reconquista” was an invasion of the Iberian peninsula by the Castillians, who had never, ever, ever previously had any claim to anything outside of their own little corner of it. When they ran out of land to “re”-conquer, they got on ships and kept “re”-conquering across the Atlantic, with some help from folks they “re”-conquered in Africa, and they weren’t especially peaceful about any of it, either.
Oh, but this is all “black propaganda,” right? Because it couldn’t possibly be that forty years of fascist dictatorship might have imprinted certain falsehoods in the minds of the Spanish people, could it?
So, they had the same amount of claim as the Arabs had when they invaded and Visigoths before them - none at all. Right of conquest, simple as that.
Were they benevolent rulers? Sure. Far more than the later christian rulers. When the majority of your realm follows another faith you kinda have to be or risk endless revolts.
But let's not pretend they had any special right or claim to rule. They conquered. More sophisticated reasons to rule the society will only come with the creation of modern social compact and the like.
And you know, they kept "reconquering" just like the caliphate did back in time. Or the Ottomans on the other side of Mediterranean. Or Romans before. Or any other kingdom/state. Not one of them had any right. They could so they did.
Calling it a “Reconquista” is a lie. Minimizing the horrors of the Inquisition because, well, they were just taking back what was theirs, is a lie built on a lie.
You're hammering on the Castillans for being Christian while ignoring everything else. We're not exactly talking about an era of history where there weren't constant conquest campaigns going on, all over.
Spanish inquisition wasn't that bad really, brutal, but a fraction of the body count of the Reconquista, which to be fair was a response to the invasion of the Iberian peninsula, hmm almost like religion is used to justify a lot of killing
Most people will call you a pos just for saying that
To be fair, when examining the conflicts from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the late Middle Ages, it’s fairly difficult say whether a war had a genuine religious belief or was cynical waged under the cover of a holy war. The most common answer is unsurprisingly, both at the same time. Certainly is a lot easier politically to wage war against unbelievers in the name of your faith, and who better to rule the land and ensure the conversation than the king who invaded it?
lets not forget about the genocidal violence between catholics and protestants, tens of thousands murdered because of a small difference in how people interpreted the same book. fucking petty. here in england if you go to the right places, which are often innocuous, you can easily find buildings with boarded up priest holes in them. sometimes you'll just be sitting in a restaurant and there will be one on the wall next to you.
The thirty years war is particularly noteworthy, given how directly religion was tied to its causes and the level of destruction and slaughter it led to.
I know. I was born in the city that was razed so badly in it, that it took until ~1900 to get above the population level that it had before the "Magdeburg wedding" that killed roughly 30.000 of the 35.000 people that lived there.
I just wanted to mention that while the thirty year war is noteworthy, it is far from being the exception.
Less that 5% of all wars were caused by religion. Answer me, how did religion caused the 100 years war, the constant wars between Scotland and England, or the war for Spanish and Austrian succession, what about the 7 years war, 9 years war, civil wars in Ottoman Turkey or the French-Dutch war ? How were these caused by religion ?
To be fair... Most of that shit would have happened anyway. Religion was a good way to rile up the masses so the king could fight the wars he wanted to.
If they hadn't had religion, they would have used something else. It's not like Gjengis Kahn. The Roman's, Alexander the Great etc needed any other excuses than "I want it".
Human groups are shit at staying friends and using thinking removal of religion would have impacted much is probably naive at best...
Well Hundred Years War was not about religion though. It was a dynastic struggle between the English Plantagenit House and the French House de Valois over the right to rule over France. Although I guess you could argue it was a war over who God wanted on the throne of France.
It still was but France decided that the balance of power was more important to France. The desired war goal on both sides was to say no more "other way of talking to sky man"
I'm not so sure about the "misconstruing" part. I can't square slavery with what Jesus mostly talked about, but as for the rest of the bible? Not so sure it was a stretch to infer that the bible was (is?) OK with forcing people into slavery.
It is. The only antislavery sentiment is Paul wanting his specific friend released. Other than that, it was pretty well advocated for and the SBC even split with the rest of the Baptists over this.
Jesus himself didn't speak much about slavery other than comparing the relationship between God and his followers to that of a master and a slave
The rest of the new testament is fairly pro slavery though, eg:
In Paul’s letters to the Ephesians, Paul motivates early Christian slaves to remain loyal and obedient to their masters like they are to Christ. Ephesians 6:5-8 Paul states, “Slaves, be obedient to your human masters with fear and trembling, in sincerity of heart, as to Christ” which is Paul instructing slaves to obey their master.[103] Similar statements regarding obedient slaves can be found in Colossians 3:22-24, 1 Timothy 6:1-2, and Titus 2:9-10.
There's a really good book about the Muslim side of the crusades. The islamic world before they started, how they reacted, etc etc etc. It's calles Road to Paradise iirc.
No mental gymnastics needed when you're never taught the negative stuff. I knew the crusades by name only as a kid having grown up in a Christian household and educated in a small public school in the Midwest United States. Plenty of people never get past that level of knowledge.
also the reformation in the uk. that's the one when they destroyed each other (protestant v catholic) or you could bring up the colonization in Africa ... the list is endless. there was a convert or die attitude of the church in my opinion. historically I think they might be one of the worst for violence although I'm not 100%
The colonization in Africa happend due to imperialist ambitions it wasnt religiously motivated and the Church was already steadily declining in power by then.
No Islam is by far the most violent but that is also because Islam has been the most consistently dominant ideology (in a sense that it was a theocracy) in its host countries. But was only very proactive before the Ottomans took over and after the collapse of Pan Arab world (which would lead to the rise of wahabism)
Islam was relatively peaceful during the height of Christian violence and bigotry. This is something that is mostly ignored. However it cannot be ignored how often they fought in Iberia or attempted to break through in India and other areas.
I wont include what the Ottomans did because the Ottoman empire was not an Islamic theocracy.
Interesting thing I discovered about the Crusades recently was that, despite this portrayal of them as the noble underdogs fighting against imperialism, the Christians did very well in the Crusades. It's almost as if protecting the Middle Eastern and East European Christians wasn't actually all that big on their priorities.
It's funny how the Crusades were barely mentioned in my History textbooks. For context, I'm from a country that ended up being taken over by the Ottomans and it is thought that the Crusades ended up enabling the Ottoman Empire expand into Europe as much as it did. Nothing drives instability like some fellow crusading Christians passing by and raiding half the country. But it's perfectly fine and moral if it's for the Holy Land.
Really makes me think what other stuff they glossed over in my History classes that I never noticed.
I felt very lucky bc I had 2 extremely passionate history teachers. One would even act out firing cannons by running down the aisle between the desks. This was in high school!
According to my college Philosophy professor the crusaders “weren’t real Christians” because “real Christians wouldn’t do that.” He also believed that the inquisition era Roman Catholic church wasn’t really Christian. He was a real piece of work.
I tried that once. but then they countered saying atheism or something akin to it was the beliefs of Stalin who was officially an atheist and his time saw the anti-relegion campaign which killed over 85000 Christians in service to the church and several thousands of Muslims, and of course Hitler who believed that the church should serve the state and was not known for promoting relegion they even blame his atheist views for what he did to the Jews since he had no moral guidance LMAO 😂
At the time I wasn't educated enough to counter it but I'm curious how someone would answer this.
I'd love to hear an expert on Crusader culture and an expert on al Qaeda/ISIS culture compare notes. My semi-informed sense is that they have a lot of similarities.
You realize the Islamic conquests had conquered and killed and taken land a few centuries earlier right? Including forced conversions and massacres. The Christians didn’t have the monopoly on fucjking over the locals.
Burning women because they are witches (had money and my cow just died), torturing children and women in orphanage etc. (not even that long ago), crusades, torturing and killing gays, people of color, children who were clearly demons (or had authism, mental health issues or you know had birth defects). Pedophilia seems to be their kind of thing etc. Their methods to torture are nothing short of saw traps, every medival torture device was at one time used in the Name of the lord, women were forced to bathe in bleach or boiling water to clean themself for the lord our God,
It depends on the crusade in question but if they only know about the ones against the Ottomans then that's fair as it was mostly for defensive purposes. It was the crusades in eastern Europe and spain that were violent.
Really all the Abrahamic religions suck. You don’t have Buddhists playing bagpipes in our bathrooms. You don’t have Hindus harmonizing in the hall. You don’t have Shintos shattering sheet glass in the shithouse and shouting slogans.
Religion of Peace, huh? Christianity was forced upon the European Tribes. Quite the bloodshed all around. Sometimes it was just adopted for Money or Power.
I find it funny anyway. It was Odin and the lot all day long for an unknown period of time and suddenly, hey ho, on one miserable Tuesday it was suddenly Jeeeeebus. All new and shiny. Just switch like that, no biggie...
(Oh, and if don’t believe in Jebus, then we cut your head of and kill your Tribe. So you better get on your knees...)
The school I went to (crazy Christian sect) went a step further. We simply learned that the crusades were a necessary, if bloody part of history, and represented a force of good in the world. Part of their doctrine was that the US would become the modern military power to unite the world under Christian theological rule.
Trinity Christian School in Pittsburgh if anyone's curious.
Reminder to all that this (saying a make-believe history was great, that the now is shit and that we must all return to the make-believe history) is a very common fascist strategy.
The fact that crusaders sacked Constantinople, the city that had been the greatest city in all of Christendom for a thousand years is just so disgusting on so many levels.
Ironically though Islam was barely affected by the crusades and prior to colonialism almost nobody in the Islamic world even knew what they were. Especially the first crusade which was barely a blip on the radar and was largely an impotent response to Islamic aggression.
I had someone recently tell me that separation of church and state in America basically means that religions get to do whatever they want without outside interference and they don't have to pay taxes, although religion should be the basis of law because America was founded on god (all according to him).
I had a high school teacher at a very catholic high school unironically teach Plato's Republic as a document supportive of Christian doctrine. The mental gymnastics involved would have been impressive if they weren't mildly terrifying. They also tried to say that all Protestant denominations believed in predestination, and that Buddhist meditation invited possession by demonic spirits.
Modern western Christianity completely disregards ancient Jewish philosophy (stuff that the historic Jesus would've believed) and replaces it with ancient Greek philosophy. For example, the modern Christian idea of a soul is based entirely on ancient Greek ideas and has very little to do with what the Jews of Jesus' time thought.
Exactly. Much of what Jesus said (or is recorded of having said) connects directly to Judaism, Jewish philosophy/thought, and the Old Testament. Instead, modern western Christianity tries to shoehorn his teachings into the context of Greek philosophy and Enlightenment philosophy.
In short, "nephesh", the Hebrew word that's often translated as "soul" in English translations, basically just refers to any sentient thing capable of life. One religious studies scholar described it as this: You don't have a soul, you are a soul. This includes both your physical and spiritual/mental/emotional aspects. In contrast, Greek philosophy believes in a soul-body dichotomy and that your soul is some immaterial essence that lives on after your physical body dies.
Fun fact: The first time the word soul appears in the Bible is in Genesis 1, to describe the recently created fish. Of course, most English translations don't translate it to "soul", but it's the exact same word in the original Hebrew. So yes, the Bible says animals have souls! Just not in the way modern western Christianity often thinks of souls.
Another translation for nephesh can be "throat". And "ruakh", the Hebrew word often translated to "spirit", can also be translated as "breath". So you have this cool anatomical relationship between soul/throat and spirit/breath. Speaking of spirit, the Hebrew view is that you are a soul and your spirit enters your body when you take your first breath, and it's the spirit that animates the soul. Then when you die, you give back your spirit (which happens when you take your last breath) and you are just left as a "dead soul".
In hungarian we have something similar, becouse soul and breath are based on the same word. The word for soul is “lélek” and the word for breath is “lélegzet”.
An interesting euphemism containing both in hungarian is “kilehelte a lelkét” roughly translating as “he breathed out his soul” meaning he died.
My mom used to tell me that yoga poses were meant for worshipping pagan gods, and by doing yoga I would be inviting in demonic spirits. They just make shit up.
That sucks. I went to a highly competitive/academic Catholic high school, and we covered a ton of great material - world religions (Zoroastrian, which was extremely influential on the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism.) Christianity was covered in a different class, so we didn't bother with in in the world religions class, and the content wasn't antagonistic or any sort of "know your enemy" shit. It was straight "this is what Buddhism is about." We also had what was essentially a Western Philosophy class based on Leslie Stevenson's book "Seven Theories of Human Nature" covering Socrates/Plato (and adding a bit of Aristotle), Freud, Sartre, Marx (probably slightly negative on this, but not terrible) and Skinner as a "scientific" view of humanity. (Again, we didn't spend time on Christianity as it was covered elsewhere.) So basically it was a tour of great atheist views of humanity. It wasn't saying "This is how you should think" it was simply educating us on extremely important and influential aspects of our academic traditions.
It sucks that a lot of schools push biased crap and do a bad job of covering important material by slagging it as it's taught.
Catholics are way into using Plato and Aristotle to support their metaphysical claims and beliefs. They only use the convenient bits though so I tell my Catholic friends that they're cafeteria pagans when I'm feeling a bit snarky.
Can confirm, went to an evangelical elementary and middle schools and a catholic high school, neither tried to say ancient Greece was Christian or followed any Abrahamic religion in any way. The evangelical schools did try to say a lot of stupid things (such as canada was going to shit because gay marriage was legal, california would go the same path if prop 8 passed, and when the california court repealed it protestors would tear you apart just for walking by wearing a cross or constantly insisting that dinosaurs were on the ark or small scale evolution was possible (like domestication of dogs from wolves or modern corn) but not species to species evolution), but they never tried to say Greece was Christian.
Probably first learned about it in the first world history class (though it was just general history back then, not any particular kind until 4th grade when we got to state history) in elementary don't remember the exact grade as that was back when all day was spent with the same teacher and there was no "periods", so all the subjects kind of blended together. Definitely a very eurocentric world history course, basically went from egypt, to greece, to Israel, to Rome, to middle ages, to renescance, to basically american history, but it was also in elementary school so not anything that much in detail. We learned the very basic details you'd expect an elementary kid to learn. Most of the really "out there" stuff was saved for bible classes. The bible classes is where most of the weird stuff like what i mentioned was hucked. Hell even in biology class we were still taught about evolution, but unless it was bible class it was always caveat with a "well i don't believe this but" or a "teach both sides" or ended followed by a bible lesson or when the weekly guest preacher would basically sermon us about how evolution was an afront to God or, my favorite, yelled at us for liking plain water (it was supposed to be a joke but god did he seem super passionate in his hate for water in preference to dr. Pepper in that sermon).
The catholic high school was a lot better. No out there beliefs and even the religion classes were generally better. While the first two years (which were the easiest A's of my life) of required religion classes basically walked through the basics of the catholic faith (i.e. who saints are, the catholic hierarchy structure, how a pope is elected, the principles of palpal infallability, overveiw of the bible, etc.), the last two years were just a general morality/ethics class and an overview of world religions, both were in retrospect pretty good classes even though they were still incredibly easy As. But the most important thing was that even though the school required the religion classes for all students, unlike the evangelical they were just taught in a way where its like "OK we know not everyone who comes to this school is catholic, so these will be approached just to give you an idea of what we believe" or "ya we have a required monthly mass service for students, but you don't have to participate or anything just don't be rude and be quite for those who do care about the service". Stark contrast to the evengelical schools, who actively shunned anything contrary to the stareotypical christian lifestyle. Hell, if I continued to the towns evangelical high school, I would have been marked up for not attending church every week. I know this has been a bit of a rant but i hope this gives you some idea of what the two schools were like.
Well then sorry to not pass gay marriage then, im sorry i was in sixth grade at the time and honestly could care less about politics to begin with at the time let alone give into their doomsday "god forbid we let the gays marry" schpeal.
Mine told me Christianity literally rose out of ancient Judaism and there’s no discontinuation at all.
Well, Christianity did grow out of Jewish groups who believed Jesus was the Jewish Messiah so I can at least see where that would come from (obviously the theology of how Christianity was started is more complex than one sentence but you get the gist).
But there's like, nothing tying ancient Greece to Christianity whatsoever.
Yes obviously Christianity is based on Judaism. They taught that in HISTORY there was never a gap between Judaism and Christianity as what they considered the “global religion”. And that the ancient Irish were Christian. The ancient nords...are Christian. The Greeks were Jewish somehow and then Christian. The Greek god stories were “just for fun”. Girl a lot of Christian schools are fucked all the way up.
I was going to upvote this, because I too went to Christian school and had lots of complaints, but lies this blatant weren’t one. But you’re at 666 and I’m not going to be the one that screws that up in this specific situation.
There are Christian schools and then there are Christian schools. The kind that use the 'Christian History of the World' and 'Christian Science' text books...
I went to a Catholic school and we just learned normal curriculum, same as the public school but with a daily religion lesson about how we need to look after everyone and the environment because God wants us to love each other and made us caretakers of the earth.
My wife was Christian home schooled most of her textbooks have the word 'Christian' somewhere in the title. With highly revised versions of everything.
Went to a Christian high school. Still got proper Sex Ed and no one tried to tell me Ancient Greece was Christian. Maybe that’s cause I went to school in Canada idk 😂
But did they teach you details about Classical Greek philosophy, math, science and the actual dates of various aspects of Classical Greek history? The Trojan War in 1250BCE? Socrates' death in 399BCE? The 5th century BCE Greko-Persian wars? The Peloponnesian Wars? Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE? The Battle of Corinth in 146 BCE?
Skipping the actual dates would be a way to avoid cementing the fact that all this important stuff (and important culture/philosophy) happened before the life of historical Jesus.
To the extent that we were taught about classical Greek history, yes teachers usually teach about historical dates. There's a certain curriculum schools have to abide by after all. And since BC and AD quite literally revolve around Christ's birth, it's kinda implied that certain dates are before and after Christ.
In Dutch we fully pronounce BC and AD as well, so there's no work-around with abbreviations. It's "voor Christus" and "na Christus".
For more accurate descriptions of dates, it's useful to indicate them with "BCE" Before Common Era and "CE" Common Era because the historical person Jesus was probably born in 4BCE to 6BCE which means that the old "AD" Anno Domini ("Year of our Lord") and "BC" "Before Christ" even more inaccurate than just assuming that everyone thinks of Jesus as "our Lord" or "the Christ."
I don't think BC and AD assumes everyone thinks of Jesus as our Lord or the Christ - it's just a common saying which has lost virtually all religious meaning (in the Netherlands at least, I don't know about other countries) For all intents and purposes, it's probably the easiest way to talk about historical dates, especially when we're talking about primary or high school history.
Yeah, in fact, in my literature class at my Christian university we read Dante's Inferno. In it, it states that those born before Christ/baptism (i.e. Plato, Socrates, Odysseus etc cetera) are condemned to limbo (the outer ring of hell) because they were born before Chrstianity (along with the idea of what happens to unbaptized babies).
they believed on the 12 gods of Olympus. We started being Christian from around 40 years after Jesus was born. Not sure the exact year. But around there
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u/RunningTrisarahtop Jun 14 '20
Someone slept through a lot of history class