[ExI] libertarian ideas ATTN: HENRY

[William Flynn Wallace]

If everybody has been paying attention, they know that history is my
weakest subject.  All I wanted to say:  the influence of Christianity on
governments waned significantly in the last thousand years. Can I get away
with that?   bill w

On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 7:03 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Aug 23, 2021, at 4:11 PM, Anton Sherwood via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> > > On Aug 23, 2021, at 6:52 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
> > >> [...]  In Western civilization
> > >> Christianity got put in its place, so to speak and does not have
> > >> anywhere near the influence it had before the Renaissance.  I do wish
> > >> that would happen to Islam     bill w
> >
> > On 2021-8-23 08:59, Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote:
> > > I believe it’s way more complicated than that, and the Renaissance
> > > (which one? the Italian one?) was not really the watershed some make
> > > it to be. In fact, with Europe it’s really the wars of religion that
> > > came in the wake of the Reformation that lead to secularization. [...]
> >
> > Whatever was before the Renaissance was also before the Reformation,
> > so Bill's not wrong :P
>
> I think a case can be made that the Reformation’s immediate outcome was
> not a lessening of religious influence but rather its increase. It wasn’t
> until after the wars of religion and then the Enlightenment that the
> influence went into Sharon decline. Now you can argue that long after that
> a hundred years or more later is still after, but it seemed to me his using
> the Renaissance in there wasn’t just an arbitrary marker — like ‘after the
> invention the telescope, men landed on the Moon.’ Of course, he can chime
> in here to elaborate why he used the Renaissance (and which one he meant).
>
> Think, too, of the various post-Medieval inquisitions, such as the
> infamous and long lasting Spanish Inquisition. It’s thought to have been
> far more pernicious because it was not under papal control. But (see below)
> lessening papal authority doesn’t mean lessening the influence of religion,
> no?
>
> (If one’s looking for a watershed here, too, it might be more the ride of
> printing, which led to publishing works of dissent. One immediate effect of
> this was governments clamping down on publishing. But the longer run effect
> was undermine traditional authority. But recall works like the Malleus
> Maleficarum were printed works too, and in this particular case, which it
> might led to diminished clerical power (the Church even condemned it) — as
> anyone who could read it might use it to start a witch hunt (which is
> exactly what happened) — I don’t think that’s a good example of a decline
> of religious influence.)
>
> Regards,
>
> Dan
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20210823/3716eb04/attachment.htm>