Archive for the Middle Ages, Category

Fundamentalism, An Ungodly Fixation

Posted in agnoticism, Atheism, Atheist, belief, Bible, Christianity, culture, faith, history, humanity, life, Middle Ages,, random, religion, thoughts with tags , , , , , , on May 16, 2010 by chouck017894

Back in the Middle Ages the Crusades became the big religious pastime in European circles.  Christians were called by Catholic fundamentalists to mount an offensive drive against the evil “Moors,” and the unquestioning believers dutifully sallied forth to slay hundreds of thousands of “heretics” for the glory of god.  In the 1800s the popular sport of the British Protestant fundamentalists was to indulge themselves in terrorism against the Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland.  More recently, when Iran was taken over by Muslim fundamentalists in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, thousands of unbelievers were heartlessly killed.  In India on October 31,1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot to death by a Sikh fundamentalist.  The Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot to death in 1995 by a Jewish fundamentalist.  And in our present-day epidemic of that mental affliction, one brand of Muslim fundamentalism indulges itself in the hit-or-miss slaughtering anywhere of anyone whom they regard as an infidel.

In the United States today the fever of Christian fundamentalism has managed to infect and pervert the workings of democracy.  As usual with any fundamentalists, the delusions of righteousness and holy exclusiveness that they suffer is detectable by their addiction to unclean hatreds.  In the affliction of fundamentalism it is not really their specific faith that is at fault; it is the delusion that they and they alone know what is true and right in the sight of god.  In their fever they fail to recognize that the “truths” they credit to god are actually ego judgments fashioned by man’s fear of the unknown.  Ego does not like any contrariness, and once ego fashions an emotional fortress (faith) around itself, it will rarely respond to rational examination. 

Karl Marx made the insightful observation that religion is the opiate of the masses.  As with drug addiction, the quest of the religious fundies is the feel-good high they get from their indulgence.  And they will defend without scruples that indulgence of “faith” against any rational examination.  The lust for god’s imagined favoritism commonly drives them into unholy behavior such as name-calling, half-truths, outright lying, and even killing anyone considered a threat to their imagined spiritual status.  So contaminated are they that they cannot see their spiritual insincerity when they judge other people to be “lost,” “devil’s advocate,” or “demon possessed” and unconcernedly go about disrupting every facet of social structure for the majority.  They never explain why god, if he is omniscient, has to rely on them to clean up the spiritual confusion in regard to himself. 

Fundamental Christians hold that the Bible is man’s sole authority.  This is despite the many contradictions that the narrative collection holds.  There is a fact that would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic, but the average fundamentalists have not and do not actually read the Bible themselves—it is so much easier to listen to some overzealous interpreter who cherry picks verses from the “good book” to inflame others with their unfounded concepts.  The common response to weaving out-of-context verses into emotional rhetoric is to focus on some  imagined revulsion that god finds within the intentional diversity of life that he is said to have created.  Hatred for the differences that make up life is so easy to arouse, and accusation of others indulging in sin are so easy to assert—especially if any of those “sins” are not one of their own favorites.  Such pretense of uptight “faith” may give each other a sense of exclusivity, but it does not fool the power that creates.  And that attitude certainly was not a message in anything that Jesus is portrayed as having taught.  Indeed, Jesus was depicted as actually standing up to the fundamentalists of his day.  He was radical in that he praised compassion, forgiveness, and being non-judgmental.  In the book of Matthew, for example, Jesus even commented on fundamentalists.  It might be wise if the fundamentalists of today would abandon their self-centeredness and actually read the book they claim to live by.  Of the fundamentalists Jesus is quoted as referring to them as “…whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

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Echoes Through History

Posted in Atheist, Christianity, culture, faith, history, humanity, Middle Ages,, politics, random, religion with tags , , , , on August 9, 2009 by chouck017894

Over the passage of time, history has a way of duplicating events—not exactly the repetition of events but giving forth variations on a plot line with a different setting.

We would hardly think, for example, that recent events in the United States today would have anything in common with the militaristic religiosity that propelled the Crusades of the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries which brought needless distress to Europe and the Near East.  At that time the western powers (hard-line church politics) cast covetous eyes toward Jerusalem, ostensibly as a point of pilgrimage to the alleged tomb of Jesus.  But the Muslim brand of spiritual understanding, although giving recognition to Jesus, did not relish the idea of foreigners overrunning their territory and digging around for a legendary but unconfirmed burial site.  So the Caliph, al-Hakim, called “the mad” in western cultures, barred further pilgrimage passage through the territory.  Christians were whipped up by the pope and priests to wax indignant, hateful and belligerent (as right-wingers in the U.S. are today), and the barring of access to Jerusalem was assessed by the church and Europeans as “persecution.”

Around the year 1090 profound religious fervor permeated all sections of the European population, the Muslim nations were arming themselves, and countries such as France and Germany were impoverished.  Thus in 1095 Pope Urban II exhorted Christendom to take up arms and march to take Jerusalem by force, and the stage was set for seven bloody Crusades stretching over three centuries.

The motivation for the Crusades was always claimed to be religious, of course, but the results just happened to bring wealth and prestige to the church.  This tended to disenchant many gentle Christians who believed that enriching spiritual understanding was supposed to be the foremost function of the church.

As unalike as these time-separated scenarios may seem to be, there are many incidents of today that parallel the Crusade times—not the least of which is the boisterous religiosity that has increasingly infected the governing of the USA through the last few decades.  Add to this that today the Near East region is disenchanted with foreigners overrunning their territory in pursuit of oil to satisfy the high priests of commercialism.

Like the propaganda-inspired Dark Ages crusades where only the high politicos of the Catholic Church gained materially, today the only ones that really gain anything from the bloody and costly intrusion upon  foreign nations are the high priests of corporate commerce.  Let us hope that their lust for material accumulation does not last for over three centuries as did the Crusades.

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Blind Faith and Expected Bliss

Posted in Atheism, Atheist, belief, Bible, Christianity, culture, faith, history, humanity, Middle Ages,, random, religion with tags , , , on July 21, 2009 by chouck017894

There are those religionists that take every word of their “scriptures” literally.  Inconsistencies and contradictory pronouncements are shrugged off as divine mystery when in truth such things attest to the ineptitude of the human schemers that wrote them.  Avoidance of critical perusal of claimed revealed wisdom does not logically stand as respect to god; in reality that approach to “faith” is simply devotion to brain idleness and the immature expectation that mental laziness will be rewarded with bliss.  Indeed, there is even a slogan for this: Ignorance is Bliss.

Blind faith seems never to be shy of certainty, however; it is too often like the squeaky hinge that demands one’s attention and gets rewarded with a relieving squirt of oil.  An example of priestly unhinged squeaking was provided in 1654 by Dr. John Lightfoot (1602-1675) who declared: “Heaven and earth, centre and circumference were made in the same  instance of time and clouds full of water and man was created by the Trinity on the 26th day of October, 4004 B.C., at 9 o’clock on a Friday morning.”  Another version says Creation took place at 9 o’clock in the  morning  of the 17th of September 4004 B.C., also a Friday.  What’s another month, more or less?  Anyway, Dr. Lightfoot was a member of the Westminster Assembly and was vice-chancellor of  Cambridge University from 1654.  He was also one of the scholars who assisted the noted English authority on the Bible, Brian Walton, in preparation of the six-volume Polyglot Bible (1654-1657).

The renowned Brian Walton, by the way, received his B.A. degree in 1620, his M.A. in 1623, and his D.D. in 1639.  He was ordained in the Church of England in 1623 and culminated his studies by being consecrated as bishop of Chester in December of 1660.  Some versions of his six-volume Polyglot Bible drawn from a Hebrew original of the Old Testament, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and interpretations from other language works are printed in seven languages.  Okay, so he wasn’t ignorant, just unquestioning in his pursuit of what ancient myth-spinners had composed.

Also in 1654 an Irish archbishop, James Ussher, had two volumes published, Annales Veteres et Novi Testamenti, in which he also fixed the date of Creation as having occurred in 4004 BCE.  He was also certain that the return of Christ was imminent.

Well, that was the seventeenth century: dare we say that religious understanding has evolved?

Unfortunately, there are still fundamentalists who insist that planet Earth is only a little over six thousand years old and is the center of the universe.  And it is holy truth to them that dinosaurs and humans romped together in Eden before being expelled for dietary no-no’s.  Never mind that dinosaurs are not mentioned in scriptures (but whales and fishes are).  Even a female senator from one of the southern states recently addressed the U.S. Senate referring to Creation as having occurred six thousand years ago!   Yes, the Bible told her so.

Let us remember a line from Shakespeare: “In religion what damned error but some  sober brow will bless it, and approve it with a text.”

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The “Original Sin” Scam

Posted in Atheism, Atheist, belief, Bible, Christianity, culture, faith, freethought, history, logic, Middle Ages,, random, religion with tags , , , , , , on July 13, 2009 by chouck017894

Some private response to the article “Born in Sin” (July 10, 2009), a theory which is also alluded to as “Inherited Sin” or “Original Sin,” has prompted a few more notes.  Specifically, attention is drawn to the eighteenth ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church that assembled in Trent, Italy on December 13, 1545.  It was a tiresome affair that lasted intermittently until 1563!  Eighteen years!  Indeed, three pontificates, Paul III, Julius III, and Pius IV would sit upon the papal throne before the council would finally fold up shop.

Hammered out among god’s alleged representatives were such things as disciplinary decrees regarding Episcopal duties, the religious orders of the church, the education of the priesthood, and the censorship of books.  Doctrinal decrees were also issued on the Mass, purgatory, the veneration of “saints,” and the doctrine of indulgences.  Thus the long, dragged-out “council” set the corporate standards of the Roman Catholic faith and for practices that remain to this day.  Of course decisions set in place by that council infected even the religious reformation blocs.

For starters, it was in the fourth session (1546) that sacred tradition was put on a par with Scripture, as were also all the books contained in the Vulgate (edited by “saint” Jerome c. 392).  This version of the scriptural presentation is known as the Vulgate because it employed the language of the common people in Jerome’s time.  It contains not only the sixty-six books of the Authorized Version but also eleven books of the Apocrypha, which the Catholic Church holds as being divinely inspired, but which most Protestants reject as not in keeping with the most ancient authority.  In other words, of doubtful religious significance.

At this overly long ecumenical council, there was much haggling whether the story of Susanna and the Elders belonged in Scripture, for example.  Ultimately it wound up as an apocryphal addition to the book  of Daniel (which happens to be a Hebrew retelling of a Babylonian tale).  The Vulgate was then declared to be “authentic,” and affirmed to be canonical.

Now, back to the main point: it was with this council that the no-escape clause of “Original Sin” was heartily embraced.  Dressed in holy phraseology the council announced, “From the fall of man until the hour of baptism the Devil has full power over him and possesses him.”  What a perfect scam: holding all mankind as hostage as blemished from Adam’s nibbling fruit from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Nothing much has been changed in the assessments made in the Middle Ages by the eighteenth council on what constitutes holy “truth.”  In the nineteenth century things were updated with insertion of clarifying additions: added were two definitions of the Immaculate Conception and the declaration of the infallibility of the pope.  It is on such authority that we are told that we can be cleansed of “sin” (life’s inevitable boo-boos) only by a religious business machine.

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The Stringy Coil of Life

Posted in culture, life, Middle Ages,, nature, prehistory, random, religion, science with tags , , , , , , , , , , on July 1, 2009 by chouck017894

In the distant past, around 300 million years ago, the determinants of life consisted of identical chromosomes carried within an ancestral mammal-like creature.  Then some energy infusion caused the identical chromosomes to mutate and diverge as the X and Y chromosomes.  These were to set the destiny for life-form variations.  In other words, the sex method of creature reproduction evolved.  In biblical myth this is Eve being carved out of the side of Adam.  There is nothing sacred initiated with this mutation of the long, stringy masses of genes that convey heredity information.

In the conception of physical life there is, in a sense, a reenactment in miniature of the continuous action of Creation.  In human development, when the male spermatozoon comes into contact with the female pro-nucleus, they fuse and form a new nucleus that contains both male and female elements.  This nucleus is known as the blastosphere.  The first result of fertilization is the division of the ovum.  These two parts then continue dividing and initiate protoplasm development—the energy-substance from which potential life may collect as form.  A fascinating aspect of this division is that two separate masses of protoplasm are established, each containing a nucleus and with the same energy composition but slightly unequal in size.  The segmentation of each mass of protoplasm then develops differently!

The slightly larger cellular mass is more pallid than the other, and after the two cells have subdivided three or four times the rate of cleavage in the cells of the paler mass becomes more rapid than the cells of the other protoplasm mass.  These paler cells have a tendency to spread over and enclose the cells of the other protoplasm mass, and by the ninth or tenth division an external layer of pale cells enclose the mass of slightly smaller, less numerous, more opaque cells.

This is an extremely simplified version of earliest life-form inception, but it shows that the process of fetal development follows the same principles that account for development of everything in Creation.  This energy is the likeness spoken of in Genesis 1:26, “…Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”

That “likeness” is conveyed through 92 different chemical elements and it is through chemical evolution that the multitude of compounds necessary for biological life are generated.  The ineffectual religious interpretation of this is to characterize the defining action that takes place through an amoral chemical process as the “will of God.”  (Amoral does not mean immoral: it is something more akin to indifferent.)

The “soul” and its link to matter-life has been a constant and nagging problem for theologians for over a millennium.  The Roman Catholic Church, for example, reached a theological conclusion that the soul of a human “…is created and united by God to the infant body yet unborn, which union is called passive conception.”  This theological circumvention of elucidation brought the Church “fathers” considerable anguish and perplexity since its medieval time of  institution, for if God unites the soul “to an infant body yet unborn,” then how are they to account for all the infants that the church considers to be “illegitimate”?

The catch-22 to this self-mortifying quandary is that if, as the church insists, God is morally loath to fornication then how is it that he indulges himself in “passive conception” of infants shunned by the church?  This sticky theological puzzle has never been blessed with a sane answer because the religiously disoriented refuse to accept amoral biological facts.  Instead the religious business machines choose to portray this chemical action as the result of some moral being who “passively conceives” in a manner that can only be politely termed as unrestrained.

And because this theologically inspired superstition does not provide any information of just when or at what stage God supposedly unites the soul (self-awareness) to the infant body yet unborn, the church is obliged to condemn abortion of non-conscious energy-substance at any stage of its evolutionary transformation in a chemical base.  So unrealistic is this view of the biological process of life that even preventing conception is condemned!  Of course all this “revealed wisdom” was postulated in the Dark Ages by male-only think-tank members known as the clergy.

The more ancient nature-based faiths were more scientifically astute and positively pro-life than have been the hierarchical, militaristic, and tyrannical religions of the western world through the last two/three millennia.  The degraded and maligned Pagan wisdom understood properly that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm, and all creation principles apply at every level—even in the situations in which individual life forms begin to manifest.   As in the manifestation of other matter-forms throughout the universe, until a definable prototypal form is energized it is simply substance which holds only the potential for matter development.  Human gestation was recognized to mimic these creation principles, so if they pondered over the when or at what stage self-awareness begins to evolve they would be instructed that it is not until the fourth month that a very imprecise awareness as self  is initiated.  It is at this stage of energy involvement, as an example, that sexual polarity is tentatively determined.  Once the developing energy-mass begins to take on unquestionable sexual identity, the will of life can be said to have been taken up.  Even so, the brain, where self-awareness guides the consciousness of life, is not even fully assembled until months after the infant body takes it first breath of life.  Indeed, the brain then grows to half its adult size by the age of six months, and this accelerated brain growth happens only once in life.

See also earlier postings, God Forgot to Say, March 28,2009; The Code of Life, April 1, 2009: RNA/DNA’s Covenant with Life, April 18; What’s in a Name?, April 26.                    The bulk of the above information is taken from The Celestial Scriptures, page 396, regarding lessons of life taught using constellation figures as a subject’s focus.

 

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Art and Religion

Posted in Art, Atheist, Christianity, culture, history, humanity, Middle Ages,, nature, religion with tags , , , , , on June 17, 2009 by chouck017894

“…culture does not grow only out of worship of God.”

This sane observation was made by a member of the Conservative Christian Democrats in Germany back in September 2007.  It was in response to a Roman Catholic cardinal’s sneering assessment of art in the newly opened museum built on the ruins of Cologne’s St. Kolumba Church (Columba, Irish missionary, known as the “Apostle of Caledonia”).   The cardinal, Joachim Meisner, had earlier felt it his holy duty to criticize the artist who had designed the stained glass windows for the Cologne Cathedral.

The cardinal pontificated in a sermon at the opening of the museum saying that it was dangerous to allow art to break away from religion.  He elaborated that an “indisputable connection” existed between culture (i.e. art) and religion, and if culture was “uncoupled” from worship then both religion and culture would disintegrate.

The cardinal’s choice of words–the word entartete (degenerate) in particular–slashed at painful psychological wounds to many German ears.  In 1937  the Nazi party had jockeyed for its power grab and part of their strategy was to attempt to ban artworks, especially expressionists, that they deemed counter to their objectives—the restructuring of German culture.  The artworks confiscated by the Nazis were declared to be “Entartete Kunst,”  degenerate art.

In spite of Cardinal Meisner’s claim as to what constituted proper art, art was not exactly appreciated by the early molders of the Roman Church.  In the saga of the  church, as the “fathers” floundered about concocting doctrine and dogma, most art representations–except for harshly defined crosses–were spurned.

As noted in Time Frames and Taboo Data, the 13th century saw unwelcome change thrust upon the church.  To quote: “The arts were coming out of hibernation and Nature was being restored with dignity that had been previously thought unworthy.”  (page 276)  But the art that came into church approval somewhat later (14th century) still consisted mainly of stiff, unnatural representations which continued in style until realistic treatment of space was initiated by the Florentine painter Masaccio (1401-1428).

Even then the propaganda value of art continued to be only vaguely understood by the church.  Then c. 1527 (to quote from TFTD), “The church was feeling the pressure of discontent among the masses and a strategy had to be devised to gain broader appeal.  The promotional strategy that was then undertaken (by the church) is well recognized in today’s advertising medium.  The church (under Pope Clement VII) sought to overwhelm the masses in the sensual appeal of art, music, and lavish display.”  (page 312 TDTF)

So Cardinal Meisner’s dismissal of any art display in the cathedral other than that which pleased his religious interpretations deserved the mild rebuke by the German public official.

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Holy Adjustment of Justice

Posted in Atheist, freethought, Middle Ages, with tags , , , , , , , on March 21, 2009 by chouck017894

Seven hundred years is an unholy amount of time to absolve, or at least admit, a holy distortion of justice. But in 2007 a 300 page limited edition of 799 copies was released by the Vatican in which were reproduced entire documents concerning the trumped-up charges against the Knights Templar in the 14th Century–charges which amply benefitted Pope Clement V and King Philip IV or France.

In 1307 King Philip contrived to have English and French members of the Templar order arrested, imprisoned and tortured on fabricated charges of worshipping an idol Baphomet (probably a corruption of the word Mahomet i.e. Muhammad), and accusations that the Templars indulged in homoerotic sins. Fictional testimony had it that the idol was a small stone symbol of a human figure having two heads, male and female, and surrounded with serpents, the sun and moon.

Material greed motivated Philip more than any personal spiritual integrity, for Philip was in debt to the Templar banking system. False accusations and conviction would conveniently cancel out his debt and provide excuse for seizing Templar wealth. In the pope’s favor, Clement decided in 1308 to attempt saving the Templar order, and the document called “Parchment of Chinon,” reproduced in the limited edition in 2007, stands as proof. Indeed, Clement initially absolved the Templars of heresy, but still regarded them as guilty of immorality which he thought could be reformed. Thus many Templar Knights continued to be held in confinement and tortured in France.

But Pope Clement V, himself a Frenchman, soon recognized that conspiracy with Philip might prove profitable. Thus he sent three top cardinals on a long furitive journey to France to interrogate an unstated person. It is known that Jacques de Molay, the military grand master of the Templars, and other Templars were secretly imprisoned in a castle in “Chinon on the Loire.” The document called “Parchment of Chinon” thus indicates the destination of the cardinals sent by Clement.

Whatever caused the pope to reverse his decision and suppress the Templar order can only be speculated. What is known is that the persecution of the Templars dragged on until 1314 when Jacques de Molay was burned to death at the stake. (See Time Frames and Taboo Data, pages 286-287) Perhaps it is just coincidence that the pope acquired Avignon in France and then moved the headquarters of the Catholic Church there in 1309 where it would remain until 1377.

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