[ExI] For the sake of argument

[Stathis Papaioannou]

2009/9/22 Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com>:

> I'm not so sure Christian faith held back the world.
>
> The reigning faiths elsewhere were very likely less
> "irrational", but what good did it do them?

The tragic thing about Christianity is that it displaced the culture
of ancient Greece, which had been allowed to continue under the more
practical and less philosophically inclined Romans, albeit not at the
incredible intensity of creativity it reached in Athens at around the
time of Pericles. It wouldn't have been so bad if there had been
nothing of intellectual worth before Christianity. When the Christian
Emperor Theodosius ordered the destruction of pagan temples in 391,
the Library of Alexandria was considered a pagan temple. It was not
until the later Middle Ages that rationalism started to resurface, for
example with Thomas Aquinas' rediscovery of Aristotle and attempt at a
quasi-rational theology.



-- 
Stathis Papaioannou