This article was originally published on Fortress of the Mind.
We take it for granted today that we should be able to think and speak as we wish. It is very easy to forget that this right has been the exception, and not the rule, for most of recorded history. It is a quite recent development. At one stage of history, the struggle to assert freedom of thought was bound up with the fight for freedom of religion: that is, the idea that a person should be able to worship as he pleased.
At later stages of history, the fight to assert freedom of thought and speech was bound up with political and social struggles. Whatever form it took, the quest was always the same: the desire to be free from retaliation while asserting one’s personal rights.
It will be useful to draw a general sketch on how freedom of thought developed. It is very important that we do this. For it will enable us to appreciate our current situation much better, and show us how it was the end result of a long, and even bloody, struggle.
Our story must begin with the ancient Greeks of the Ionian islands. For it was they who first bequeathed to history this most precious gift. There were many societies more ancient than they: Egyptians, Cretans, Assyrians, Chinese, Indians, and a few others. But in all of these societies–without exception, as it turns out–intellectual activity was kept firmly in the hands of the priestly classes, or in the hands of the monarchy.
Egypt presents a typical case. Only priests were taught the secret of reading and writing; we note that hieroglyphic writing died out so thoroughly because knowledge of it was in the hands of so few. The same situation existed in Assyria and India as well. In China, entry into the privileged classes was controlled by a formidable examination system. These societies were also rigidly stratified. No one outside the clergies or royal courts had much time or inclination for intellectual activity.
But something miraculous happened in early Greece. Perhaps it had something to do with the climate, the geography, or the fact that the Greeks had frequent contact with other cultures: Phoenicians, Persians, Cretans, and barbarians. Perhaps this intercourse stimulated them and caused them to question everything. Or maybe it was the fact that they were a trading and commercial people, who rebelled against the idea of control by despots.
Whatever the cause, it was a real and lasting development for European history. Philosophy and natural science (the two were one at this time) took shape with thinkers like Democritus, Thales of Miletus, Heraclitus, Anaximander, and many others. We know little more than the names of most of them. Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers contains many stories and short summaries of most of the pre-Socratic philosophers. It is well worth reading.
What matters is that these thinkers did something no one (as far as we know) had done before. They had the courage to question the established and inherited wisdom. They had the vision to ask “why?” about nearly everything. Nothing was forbidden: government, human relations, material substances, spiritualism, the existence of God, anything.
No central government or divine sovereign sought to muzzle them, except in very rare cases (that of Socrates being one). Reason and speech were truly free, and the result was the greatest explosion of creative activity the world had yet seen. Art, literature, music, drama, science, and mathematics flourished.
With the advent of Rome, this situation generally persisted. The spark of independence went out with Rome’s conquest of Greece in 146 B.C., but for the most part, scholars and philosophers were left alone as long as they paid lip service fealty to the emperors in Rome. The Romans were actually quite tolerant of religious diversity. All over the empire, a myriad of cults and religions could be found: the Oriental “mystery” religions of Serapis, Isis, and Mithras were just few of a great many. All the emperors asked was that communities pay their tributes and erect a statue of the emperor as a sign of loyalty.
Things began to change with the advent of Christianity, however. It upset the tacit agreement of religious tolerance in the Empire. It was different from all the other religions, in fact. To the Romans, it was deeply subversive: it preached that the “end of the world” was at hand; that Christians should refuse military service; and, most crucially, that theirs was the only true religion. It was profoundly intolerant of other religions. And this was something new.
At first the Romans looked up on the Christians as harmless fanatics, as just another obscure offshoot sect of the perpetually rebellious Jews. The Jews were also looked upon by the Romans with suspicion for refusing to accept emperor-worship; but for the most part, the Jews kept to themselves, and were content to preserve their customs and traditions in peace. But the Christians were different. They proselytized aggressively, and this made them dangerous.
It is almost amusing to read the Roman official Pliny the Younger’s frustrations in dealing with the Christian fanatics that came before him. They would not cooperate with Rome. They were recalcitrant and unyielding. And in his letters to the Emperor Trajan, he gave vent to his anger at these upstarts.
When Christianity finally inherited the Empire, its victory was complete. It became the sole official religion, and promptly banned all others. “Religious toleration” as we know it today did not exist then. Pagan temples were closed; heretical beliefs were persecuted; and the Platonic Academy in Athens, operating for many centuries, was finally closed. The emperor Julian the Apostate’s feeble attempt to revive paganism during his reign was ineffective and doomed.
Reason would sleep for a thousand years. To understand why this was so, we must appreciate what Europe was like at the dawn of the Middle Ages (i.e., in late antiquity). Men had lived through chaos and disorder, and were profoundly disillusioned. The great empire of Rome, in existence for many hundreds of years, was shattered. Stability and prosperity gave way to violence and chaos. Men had little time for speculative activity or books. They preferred certainty and comfort to the fresh air of reason. And a highly structured religion (Christianity) gave this to them.
Human thought made little progress in the Middle Ages. Scientific inquiry that might contradict Christian theology was discouraged, even dangerous. But the stirrings of the Renaissance in fifteenth century Italy changed everything. Scholars rediscovered the glories of classical antiquity, and the brilliant classical spirit of questioning received knowledge. Greek and Latin manuscripts (some hidden for centuries) came to light which fired men’s imaginations.
Although the Italian humanists had a gentleman’s agreement with the Holy See not to attack Christian doctrines openly, there could be no going back to the old ways once the new discoveries had been made. The Inquisition in Spain and Italy could keep a lid on “deviant” thought for some time, but ultimately it was a losing battle.
But the modern concepts of “freedom of speech” and “freedom of thought” were the outgrowth of two historical periods: (1) the European religious wars following the Reformation, and (2) the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. They both had a profound significance on history.
The major lesson of the religious wars, as we can see in the agreement that ended the Thirty Years’ War (the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) was religious tolerance. Neither Protestants nor Catholics could exterminate each other, or forcibly convert each other; so they must learn to live with each other. Europe was exhausted, and had no other choice. But this realization came at a horrendous price in blood and treasure.
With the Enlightenment, which burned most brightly in France, official Church doctrine finally came under direct attack. The growth of scientific, geographical, and astronomical knowledge made this inevitable. Man began to realize that he was part of a vast world, that extended across many continents and nations; and if he looked at the sky, he discovered that his world was only one of countless millions in space. Biblical teachings came to be seen more as allegory than as literal fact as biblical textual criticism began to take shape. What was once considered infallible now came to be appreciated as a literary work of man.
And yet, as ecclesiastical authority waned, the power of the modern nation-state grew. In many cases, it just stepped into the Church’s shoes as the unquestioned authority. It became the new overlord. Control of printing, books, newspapers, and magazines became an important part of keeping the public under a firm hand.
The societies that some permitted freedom of thought (e.g., Holland and England) seemed to be better at innovating that those that did not. The connection between these two things (freedom of thought and economic success) could not be denied. As Spain and Italy declined in economic power, so rose England and Holland.
This lesson–that innovation and vitality is impossible without freedom of speech and thought–is what we must conclude from this brief overview. As John Stuart Mill has noted, the societies that permit it do well; and those that do not, stagnate and shrivel up.
It goes without saying that I think freedom of speech is something we should all be interested in. For me personally, the topic matters a great deal. Attorneys who practice law and represent clients are confronted almost daily by examples of injustice and abuses of power. In some situations, these abuses can shock the conscience of any fair-minded man. The attorney must then do his best to give his client a chance at justice, even when the client is an unpopular one. And as writer, I believe writers should be able to express their opinions without fear of retaliation, whether such retaliation is direct or indirect.
The enemies of freedom of thought and speech are two: fear and laziness. Most people are naturally lazy and refuse to exert any mental effort that imposes demands on them. Fear is an even more insidious evil. People instinctively recoil in fear when confronted with ideas that challenge their own. They see such new ideas as threats to themselves personally. It is an irrational response, but we should at least be aware that it exists.
The writer Roosh Valizadeh (who is also a friend of mine) has just released an important book called Free Speech Isn’t Free. The book chronicles the story of his efforts to give a series of totally innocuous lectures in Canada last year, and relates the hysterical responses he received in opposition. I hope you will read it. His experience hammers home the point that freedom of thought is something that must be fought for.
Those who pull the levers of power in modern societies have all sorts of underhanded ways of suppressing or discouraging such freedom. It is our responsibility to be ever vigilant to such encroachments on our hard-won rights, and to call to account those who seek to abridge such freedoms.
It is supremely relevant for all of us, because in today’s world we will be confronted with those who lack any sense of justice, and who will wish to prevent us from expressing ourselves. To understand how such forces are emboldened and encouraged, we must learn from the example of others. Today it was Roosh Valizadeh; tomorrow, it could be anyone else. We have no excuse for not learning from history.
Freedom of thought is something worth fighting for. When we exercise this right, we finally begin to feel the intellectual bonds we share with those who came before us in history, and whom I have discussed above. Whether you agree with his opinions is irrelevant. The larger message is what matters; it resonates for anyone who seeks to advance a point of view in the marketplace of ideas without fear of violence or intimidation.
Those who seek to question the nature of things are part of a proud legacy, one that stretches all the way back to the Ionian shores; one that first began, perhaps, when a bearded Thales of Miletus looked at the world around him and began to ask the daring questions:
Why are things this way? And how did they come to be so?
If you like this article and are concerned about the future of the Western world, check out Roosh’s book Free Speech Isn’t Free. It gives an inside look to how the globalist establishment is attempting to marginalize masculine men with a leftist agenda that promotes censorship, feminism, and sterility. It also shares key knowledge and tools that you can use to defend yourself against social justice attacks. Click here to learn more about the book. Your support will help maintain our operation.
Read More: 7 Deadly Sins Of Manhood
Islam is the new Christianity of old. It is aggressively proselytized. It’s followers are fanatical. It’s followers will die for their religion. And in the west it is viewed as the peaceful religion of the downtrodden. It is gaining more territory and converts than ever.
Modern day Christianity has none of these qualities, we are doomed to be overtaken.
A lot of us have been to the ME and know what it is. I think even after 9-11, most should know better– but they don’t either through ignorance or fear. I don’t think we are doomed, but a long and bloody confrontation will needed to be waged and currently the right people are not in power.
Agreed. This is why I am MGTOW and not MRA. If MRA becomes a force to be reckoned with, which it won’t, the gynocentic authorities will exert force to crush it inside the city walls when it should be expending its strength in stopping the barbarians at the gate.
The collapse of Western civilization is coming due to shrinking native born demographics (weakness within the city walls) and a determined enemy (strength outside the city walls). The only viable strategy is for a man to save himself, hence MGTOW.
The powers inside the city walls have proven themselves to be his enemy. The powers outside the city walls openly proclaim it. I’m open to a different strategy that makes sense, but I don’t believe one exist.
Except, the premise of this article is nonsense.
We’ve always had Freedom of Thought. Even back during Christian times, before the so-called Enlightenment. It’s just that Truth was protected much better back then, and when you allow Error the same protections as Truth, Error will prevail. And this is the real problem with modern society today.
Let’s start with the notion that the Romans saw the Christians as a threat. They did not see them as a threat because they aggressively proselytized. They saw them as a threat because 1) they would not worship either the Emperor as a god (and neither would many Jews), and 2) they were offering a new way of life that was radically different than what the deviant Pagans of Rome were offering, based on Divine Justice as espoused in the Gospels. In a day and age when it was perfectly legal for Roman men to leave unwanted babies to be left in the wilderness to be devoured by wild animals, Christians were taking them in and adopting them. They preached a living faith to a dying society whose mantra was to get all that you want out of life before you die and end up in Hades, which challenged the Pagan notion that the purpose of life is for the pursuit of pleasure, of things, for their own sake. In so doing, they offered hope for a better world, that while this world would end, a new one would take its place, one where death was nonexistent but only if you followed Christ.
Human thought flourished during the Christian Ages. This is because there was plenty of freedom of thought and expression to go around. If you bother to actually do research into this, you’d find that there were raucous debates about theology from those the Church considers saints today. Some, such as St. Catherine of Sienna and St. John of the Cross, and St. John Lateran, were investigated by the Inquisition, and found innocent, as most people who were investigated by Inquisitions were (upwards of 80% accused of heresy or satanic influence were set free by the Inquisitors, and the rest either had to do penance or were handed over to secular authorities). If you were ever accused of heresy, which is to preach a teaching erroneous to Christian teaching in order to gather followers, you prayed for an Inquisitor to show up to hear your case.
If it weren’t for the Catholic Church, we wouldn’t have science or learning as much as we do today. They set up universities and colleges throughout Christian Europe. They preserved the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans, and built upon the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. It would be the Enlightenment which would throw away such philosophy for the sake of Moral Relativism, which at its heart is a rejection of Truth itself, consigning Truth to private opinion. And look around you; you can see the effects of such “philosophy” at work today under the rubric of “freedom.”
You can say that perhaps the “Enlightenment” led to great prosperity in terms of wealth and technology. Well, if that’s so, then why did Spain, France, and then Britain eventually fall in favor of the United States, which is now experiencing a major economic collapse due to insurmountable debt? Spain, you may say, was indeed a Catholic kingdom, but as a nation they took their eyes off of Truth for the pursuit of gold, harvested from the New World, so much so that in the space of a hundred years since Columbus, Madrid went from being a city of over 300,000 people to less than 20,000, as men went to coastal cities and often went to the New World in a vain search for money and the industry that supported that, not wealth, and often to pay off debts they owed to lenders looking for instant money for themselves as well. This leads to economies focused on production for the pursuit of money for its own sake, not for the production of wealth, which are goods and services. The American west is littered with ghost towns, ruins produced by the sheer greed of yanking money, not wealth, out of the ground. In other words, we’re prosperous but at a gigantic cost in debt that may never be repaid, so it’s not real prosperity, especially if you end up working so much harder just to make ends meet, just to survive, while subjected to a situation worse than serfdom, which Christianity worked very hard for over 500 years to end.
Genuine freedom is power, and power must always be guided by Truth in order to yield productive results that helps to prevent you falling into calamity, or worse, Hell. The purpose of Free Thought and Free Speech is the spreading of Truth and knowledge, and if Truth is always subjected to assault by the forces of Error, guided by often misguided human conscience predisposed to temporal pleasure, you will have a debauched society where it becomes illegal to be a saint. At which point, you really don’t have Free Thought or Speech at all. Imagine trying to build a house and ignoring standard measurements, deciding every other day to change what a yard or a foot is, what a pound is, or to ignore sound building principles borne from thousands of years of experimentation and handed down to us through Tradition (which is what Tradition means, to Hand Down). You probably won’t have a very sound house, and if, by some miracle, you do, you won’t know why.
Thank you
Your revisionist take on Christianity is downright laughable. Christianity has largely been a blight on history and the world. No different than the Islamic entity of today.
I wouldn’t go so far to call Christianity a “blight.” On balance, the good that the Church did far outweighed the bad, and I’ve said this many times before. The Church did a lot of good: preserving classical culture, providing a source of spiritual guidance and a moral code, and many other things.
But it is undeniable (and this is where the other commenter, Max Wylde, gets it wrong) that the Church for many centuries did not permit speculative or scientific thought that contradicted official theology. This is a fact.
The level of intolerance varied from country to country and from time to time. But it was there. If you taught or published certain things, you could be jailed or worse. The point of the article is not to attack the Church but to point out the need for freedom of thought.
“he Church for many centuries did not permit speculative or scientific thought that contradicted official theology.” While this may be true, it also sparked an interesting in the system philosophy that would later define the enlightenment.
See, speculative reasoning and philosophy was ok so long as you grounded it in dogma.
The Catholic Church and their strict rules unwittingly laid the foundation for people like Kant and Hegel by creating the need to expand theoretical work to encompass more than just the question at hand.
For the middle ages it was a question of grounding the research in such a way that the church could accept it. But the children of that…Descartes and forward…..learned that they could ground the entire universe back into logic with the same type of thinking.
It is a religion of slaves. In an age where men are trying to regain masculinity they should be turning wholesale on Christianity.
Oddly enough, I don’t feel this way about Catholicism which I see more as an empire with philosophical beliefs.
At the end of the day Christ taught men how to be pitifully weak and that is not going to help an already castrated notion of masculinity find its balls again
I agree, although I was brought up as a Catholic, I find that Christianity undermines the development of strong masculine virtues, like courage, integrity and self reliance.
There is also something so mawkish about the idea of a dying man who represents God that’s nailed to a cross who somehow died for us. Is there not something very narcissistic and weak about this idea of God and what it means to the development of masculine virtues.
It undermines masculinity by design as it is a direct contrast to their Roman masters. The religion is born of fear and impotence.
Catholicism, I believe, makes for a more masculine religion as church dogma seems to play more of a role in the day to day life — the Catholics were emulating the Romans.
“Catholicism, I believe, makes for a more masculine religion as church dogma seems to play more of a role in the day to day life — the Catholics were emulating the Romans” All religion aims to make its followers slaves, that’s why it’s incompatible with freedom of thought, act and mind.
absolutely true. However, there are layers.
As we speak right now, an emerging masculine discourse is reaching heights not seen in millennia. It is only a matter of time before the adherents to Christianity find themselves faced with the spirit of true man in its incarnate form. They will align like lambs polarized on a spit. The return OF MAN will define the religion and not the other way around.
People forget that point. You can suddenly remake the world and hack off the tentacles of former credos that have made fools of us all. The world doesn’t have to be the way it is. Now more than ever it seems people are willing to question the BS of the status quo. What’s actually the worst that can happen. We live but once, make it matter.
Just as there are paths that led onto yet more paths in the New England woods. It’s easy to become lost, but, you’ll never know anything as a man until you’ve experienced that state and know that odd sense of freedom and revelation that comes to you through rejecting the community of the sane, of the believers, of the self content.
You realize Catholicism is a Branch of Christianity. The Greatest nations the world has known practiced Christianity and Read the words of Christ, and they were undefeatable. We live in a time where people live lifestyles contrary and without emphasis to the teachings of Christ, and coincidently the west in this time is beginning to fall apart. To become Undefeatable again, the West should Revere the Words of Christ.
Too bad the pope sold out
I do realize that Catholicism is a type of christianity and feel that it is unique in its character.
I have to say that I think you are partially right. First, nothing is undefeatable. The only certainty we have is that things change.
The second thing is that it is quite clear that Christ advocated what we would call a beta lifestyle here on earth. Granted it was due to the fact that this temporary world has little meaning compared to the kingdom of God. But, if you look at christianity in a historical context it is a religion of slaves who have had their will and self determination undermined by the romans.
Nietzsche sums it up quite beautifully when he explains that those Jews and early christians were fighting a war with the Romans. The Zealots thought to fight the Romans on the Roman’s terms….with sword and shield. This was obviously a bad mistake.
At the time Rome ruled the world. The chance of a small sect within a religious minority winning a typical war against the romans was nil.
What christianity did was fight a different type of war and it did so very successfully. Nietzsche calls this the transvaluation of values. Romans didn’t have a word for “evil.” They had good and bad.
If you asked you average Flavius 6 Pack what good was he would have told you bravery in battle, wealth, physical strength, hunting, fighting, etc. Romans had a warrior ethos.
The comparison is the bird of Prey. To the lamb the falcon is evil because it swoops down and kills it’s babies, but to the falcon the lamb is just food — there isn’t a moral component. In order for the lamb to beat the falcon he has to tame him, make the falcon play by lamb rules. When the falcon sees things from the lambs point of view he stops attacking because he feels it is wrong. However, it is unnatural for a falcon to have the morals of a lamb.
Likewise, the characteristics that the Romans considered bad like meekness, pity, etc christians pushed as good while taking the values that the Romans considered good and making them no “bad” but rather evil.
This was psychological warfare par excellence.
Christians introduced the notion of guilt to the romans at which point the romans empire was eventually conquered.
The image of christ on the cross is a constant reminder that the “savage” hyper masculine ways of the roman warrior ethos are something to feel guilt over.
Nietzsche goes on to point out that there was, as a point of fact, a war between the jews and the Romans. The Romans invaded and conquered Judea. However, if you want to see who won that war simply go today to rome and see to whom the ancestors of the empire what once ruled the world are on their knees bowing to…..3 jews and a jewess.
Not only are modern day Romans bowing before jews but they are still, constantly, begging forgiveness of them.
When things happen on a very long timeline they are sometimes hard to see but it is quite clear that christianity (and those early jews who introduced psychological warfare and guilt into the world) defeated the romans in the end.
Back to the point: the Christian ethos is decidedly anti-masculine, anti-warrior, anti-worldly strength.
That said, you are in fact correct that the greatest nations in the world practiced christianity and that, to a large degree it was the christianity that held them together and Christianity’s defeat by modernism is one of the several primary reasons the world is as it is today (for better or worse, we can talk about that another time).
So how is this seeming contradiction resolved? Quite simply. Once the Romans were defeated by the jews/christians the christians now had the opportunity to rule the world.
Like all revolutions, eventually the idealistic revolutionary who wins becomes the corrupt system he fought against in the first place. The Catholic church essentially operated as an empire with the pope as the emperor.
By bringing together people under a single religion it gave them a sense of belonging to one anyone, brotherhood, and by reintroducing the political structure that served the romans so well Christians were in fact able to rule the world for quite some time.
If you want to revere the words of christ, go do good works. Help the poor. Give away all your possessions and spread the good word. Render unto Caesar what is his and yadda yadda yadda.
I think religion is a tool much like fire. You can use it to survive by cooking food and protecting yourself from the cold or your can burn down your house or your village.
I have to say that pretty much everyone I count as a friend is a man of faith. I don’t have a lot of friends and most of them I only communicate with on line, but every one of them is a man of faith. I find that the structure of religion and the devotion to something larger than the self is a quality that usually comes with other good qualities like decency, honesty, forthrightness and intelligence.
I do not think that only people of faith have these qualities, but I do think that the things I have in common with those people and that I admire in them and try to work on in myself, is something that can be a byproduct of religion.
I also find that religion, just as often, leads to arrogance and a kind of one track thinking and general ignorance and stupidity that I find intolerable. This is the same for atheists as well. Religion yes or no isn’t the one and only deciding factor in my experience, it is one path that can lead to a couple of different places…some good and some bad.
So in some ways I agree with your comment and in other ways I do not regarding the nature of Christianity in general.
I will say that a return to the past and the values of the past as a forward moving plan to fix the present and future is something I do not see at all. You simply can not go back to the way it was. The way it was was a product of it’s time and place in history. Trying to force a 17th, 18th or 19th century paradigm on 21st century america will not just fail it will fail miserably. Even trying to impose a mid 20th century paradigm of values and morality won’t work.
Like Thomas Wolfe says, you can’t go home again.
That said, I am sure that the future will hold something new when the current way of the world collapses in on itself, like all things do eventually. I do believe the next stage will involve more value based culture but to think it will look like something from the past is wrong. The future is always, well, futuristic.
“The return OF MAN will define the religion and not the other way around.”
This is very well said.
I might add also that the evolution of man will herald the evolution of religion.
Nicely done dude.
And yet it’s such a powerful icon.
It’s comforting to think that the personification of God loves you so much that he would sacrifice himself to save your sinner ass.
Christianity will survive the future, it has survived for 2000 years, and has seen the ups and downs of history, proving its endurance and resilience.
Yes, but none of us would be here without sin? Why die for an act that was necessary, besides the pre-Christan (pagan) Greeks for example did not have any notion about what we mean by”sin”. They would have thought it bizarre and weird if one of their Gods did this for humanity, although Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods for mankind is a useful, brave, and heroic act done for our betterment.
I’ve never fully understood the rationale behind the Christan God’s act on the cross. It makes no sense and is completely contradictory on mant levels.
I havent been religious since elementary school. The contradictions are front and centre.
Can’t deny that religion is a powerful force though, and deserves more careful consideration than most modernists give it.
Sometimes I think libs/leftists just cannot comprehend that there are people who fundamentally think differently than they do.
Sell? He is an Jesuit. That little group was on board the red express from way back. I think the whole group are apostates.
“I find that Christianity undermines the development of strong masculine virtues, like courage, integrity and self reliance.”
Not sure about that. When Pope Urban II unleased the First Crusade, those guys were all that and more. Not to mention the internecine wars between catholics and protestants in Europe. I am all for a warrior ethos, but there needs to be a temperance to keep it from going genocidal.
I tend to think that religion, race or whatever differentiates your tribe from mine in a war is largely secondary to the will to conquer, destroy and humiliate the “Other”. This is where the impulse to brutality and genocide comes from, and, all wars can give expression to those weak men who are filled up with years of black resentment and evil in their souls that compels them to act like monsters. Brutal acts are committed by weak, not strong virtuous men.
I don’t know how anti-masculine Christianity is. I think your definition of masculinity is how good a society can conquer, enslave, and impose their will on another people through arms. If that is the case then sure Christianity is not masculine. However if you think that Man is the head of the house, that he should own property to do with it what is good, that virtue is ideal then Christianity is very masculine. I think this debate rather begs the question of what is Masculine? For some people interpret masculinity, to be that of a sociopath’s philosophy, which is that masculinity is about imposing your will on others in order to achieve what benefits you, in essence masculinity is selfishness. Whereas others believe it is to live in accordance with your holy duties, in essence masculinity is selflessness. I think there can be overlap and I think it did overlap a lot in ancient Rome, but this is generally what I see on this sight. On one hand you have those who argue that to be masculinity is to sleep with as many women as possible, make lots of money, have a great body ect. I think in the end this is vanity insomuch that it is self defeating for a society to successfully propagate itself. And in the end the person will get old and these things will no longer fruitful to him and will become like ashes in his mouth, insert metaphor. On the other hand I think if you view masculinity as doing your duty even through great hardship then are you not working for the betterment of society and your progeny? I think that if your life is a struggle to do what is right in the face of adversity then that is a very masculine life regardless of what your kill, notch, money count is. Oh well I think this meandering ramble has gone on long enough.
Actually no I’m not done, there will be more. I thought of a kinda cool example that I just made up to illustrate this point.
Imagine you have two people Rob Gronkowski and Peter Dinklage, I’m using these two as archetypes the facts I will present do not relate to either person. Rob is a badass physical specimen who kicks ass, makes lots of money, and bangs hella chicks. But Rob knows someone on the team is a murderer and doesn’t turn them in because that would make him and the team look bad and inversely reflect on his ability to bang chicks, make money, and go to the hall of fame. Peter is told by hollywood that in order to be accepted in the industry he must play a character in a movie which sells the idea that communism and homosexuality is good. Peter refuses and is blacklisted from the industry, cannot get a job anywhere else because he is a dwarf, and dies in poverty. Who was more of a man?
“–largely secondary to the will to conquer, destroy and humiliate the “Other”. ”
If left unchecked then yes, then it would be that.
“Brutal acts are committed by weak, not strong virtuous men.”
There has been very few strong, virtuous men. Every year between Germany to the Russian steppes they find a new mass grave. Children included. Middle East is the same and they are still filling them. I strong and virtuous leader is needed, but they are far-few-and-in-between.
Which pope? Read Bella Dodd. Or Pinay’s “The Plot Against the Church.” It’s been underway for much longer than you think…
Also, “atheism” is almost invariably a quasi-religion; not just the absence of belief in God, but an active belief in an entire system of postmodernist concepts, in a way that agnosticism is not.
The example of the article on this site last week of Christian Arab girls being burnt to death in a cage because they refused to have sex with ISIS militants is an example of weak, pathetic men who are evil to the core.
Agreed. Anyone who is a pedo should be fed through a wood chipper into a pig farm.
“Back to the point: the Christian ethos is decidedly anti-masculine, anti-warrior, anti-worldly strength.”
I must disagree with this. Although the version of modern “Christianity” (which is not in actuality Christianity) is bending over backwards to appeal to modernism and is deplorable. True Christianity, at it’s core, is very masculine and warrior like. What’s more masculine than overcoming yourself? Overcoming your weaknesses and becoming a better version of yourself? To deny oneself for a greater purpose? At it’s heart it is about self-improvement and seeking freedom from the oppression of the senses.
So the girls were strong enough to stop ISIS fighters raping them, but NOT strong enough to stop ISIS fighters putting them in a cage? I bet alot of western feminist college students and male inmates are happy to find out they can “refuse” rape because only arabs set people on fire for doing that.
“And in the end the person will get old and these things will no longer fruitful to him and will become like ashes in his mouth, ” ecclesiastical or proverbers? My memory is off.
On a side note. I reciently married my woman. And one of my friends, beta but displays dark triad behavioral patterns, told me his goal is to get a bunch of money, and that he is jelouse. He’s not doing too bad, but this is at the expense of pursuing any meaningful relationship for him. I try to explain the point that one has to take what one wants. But, alsa, it is of no avail. All he wants is money, (and the freedom it brings, I guess, though I doubt he could articulate,) but he is not going to fulfill his other desires with that mindset. Ie. He wants more than he wants but cannot understand how to get there. All that I can and do, do is council. To the point: most people do not know what they want and their pursuit of the tangential is harmful for the future.
Your revision of the REVISION of Christianity is laughable.
Christianity despite it’s flaws, ups and downs, trials and tribulations is the reason we can even write history down, it has been humanities saving grace for almost 2000 years.
The lies you are told about the history of Christianity is a BIG pill to swallow, it takes a lot of research and study, most people don’t have the time or the inclination to dig long enough to get an overall realistic perspective of the true story of post antiquity.
They just get taught, Christians bad mmmkay and Crusades
To say that they are no different is as ignorant as a 16 yr old girl going on about the patriarchy.
It’s not turn the other cheek because I am meek, it’s strike me on the left side and you will feel my sword.
You see, the first slap turns your head to the left, the second slap turns your head to the right and with that momentum you draw your sword straight onto your enemy.
It took over 1000 yrs of meddling and treachery to turn Christianity into what it is today.
But yeah we are no different, we can gofundme a ticket for you to your Islamic country of choice? or else you can start by reading some Gibbons, it’s light reading.
“Christianity despite it’s flaws, ups and downs, trials and tribulations is the reason we can even write history down”
I know a certain 4th century BCE fella who might strongly disagree with this. His name Rhymes with Blucydides.
Over the course of the last 2 millennia christianity (especially catholicism) has been responsible for a lot of good and a lot of bad. My bet is that in the end it pretty much evens out and, at this point, Christianity, other than to individuals who have faith in their personal lives, is totally irrelevant.
It’s been brewing for a while, now…
Talking through your arse again.
You are the most annoying twat on this site,
the sneering smug type of anti-intellectual intellectual that is above it all, constantly misdirecting the conversation to yourself or girly nonsense.
You are either a stupid man child or a stupid agent sent here to make sure that no serious conversations ever happens.
When I come here and see your emetic, diarrhea all over the thread misdirecting to yourself, i think what an insecure loser.
It makes it difficult for people who work for a living to get the gist of what everyone is saying, cause you gotta trawl through 100 of your meaningless nihilistic frightened boy bullshit posts. Many girly sites for you to talk shit on.
Fuck off now, the grown ups are trying to talk, you got no dog in this fight anyway, you just wanna fuck and consume like all the other little bitches.
Learn to read, get back to me. I thought you were a professor or something, not that that means anything to me.
Conceited cunt, yeah I don’t know who Thucydides is, only studied the mother fucker in Greek, soon ancient Greek.
The Romans were shit scared of the Cristian’s, that’s why they kept feeding them to the lions for 200 years, moron.
Your bet about it all evening out is the kind of stupid smugness I’m talking about, you speak like a woman.
you feel better now? Got that out?
Christ I hate when ignorance and arrogance meet.
Enjoy your small little world. I am sure it is exactly the way you think it is.
You must hate yourself so much then,
almost every one of your posts is arrogant and the vast majority are ignorant.
Still quoting Nietzsche, kids do that, you are holding on to a version of history that is a complete fabrication of the UNLIT. He was a good boy though, sold out a true Genius friend who fed him and nurtured him.
Why is it that you think you are so smart?
the stuff you write is not smart at all, it’s a boring mish mash of post modernist relativist dribble trying ever so hard to be smart.
Yeah mate I live in a small world,
Hung with any multi billionaires lately?,
Anyone flying you around the world to work for them for decent coin?,
Any billionaire’s head hunting you to leave the one you are working for and to go to another country live on an island paradise and head one of their media operations ?
Done anything that has been seen by hundreds of thousands yet?
Doing a 15 city tour building one of the biggest most cutting edge shows in 2017, running a crew of 30 technicians, perhaps?
Made any impressions or met any famous writers, scientist musicians, people considered living saints by millions, people on the cutting edge of anything in the last couple years?
Are you helping millions of people with your work so that they don’t die from diseases that were wiped out generations ago in the first world? Especially infants and children.
Will execs from warners happily receive your demo or your script?
Helping the Gates foundation spend serious dosh are you?
Am in the middle of the belly of the beast mofo, where you at?
Written, directed, produced any feature films that got banned and caused violence?
Started any off the grid alternative communities that are still going in the last year or so?
Shut down any banks or government building in your spare time?
Started any underground clubsscenes that are still going?
Fucken hell, my friend and his crew just raised $180 million for the DAO platform, launched on the Ethereum blockchain, biggest crowd funding campaign in history.
And that’s just some of the bigger stuff brah
Please tell us, how big is your world, what is the last cool thing that you did that even made it onto the internet media let alone the mainstream?
Or else tell us what was the last thing you did that proves that YOU don’t live in a small little world that is the way you think it is, something that proves that you actually live a manly full adventure life instead of making almost 100 banal look at me how clever I am posts on this site a day.
Have you ever done anything cool or dangerous, anything that would put you In Roosh’s position?
In fact have you ever stood up for anything where there was a chance of getting killed or imprisoned for a while.
On how many government lists would we find you?
Would intelligence agencies have a file on you and ask you to work for them and you said nup?
How many countries would refuse you a visa?
What would cops reaction be if he stopped you and checked his little magic machine and found out who you are?
Last time they sent 4 cops and the head of the gang squad for little ol’ me
I’m 1 or 2 degrees separated from some of the biggest players on this planet, yeah that makes me a bit arrogant, I never even went to university, I’m literally from the gutter but still way out of your league.
If a blanket of condescending smugness is what you need to sleep at night, you go girl.
You got one answer out of me, that’s all you’re going to get.
I’ve got a million things to do.
Again fuck off.
some people are so far behind they think they are ahead.
I know you don’t see it and probably never will, but you are an idiot. It drips off of every word that you vomit. You are, plain and simple, weak, stupid and boring.
I will “fuck off” now.
Good luck jerking off your friend and some billionaires or whatever it is that you are humble bragging about. I would tell you to wake up and give the ole college try to not being such an insufferable moron, but I know it won’t do any good.
The abject worthlessness of your very soul bleeds through the intertubes and is an affront to anyone with any sense.
I won’t bother answering your questions. I wish you good luck in the future. I know you are a very special snow flake in your own mind but one day you will realize that the rest of the world takes you for precisely what you are…..a dumbass.
c-ya l8r alig8r
yeah, nah didn’t think so, fuckwit!
Well I know YOU don’t think so.
Are you done now or do you want to tell me more about all the important movies you are involved in or the billionaires who you sweep up after?
you know, I just re-read some of the nonesense you wrote here. This is usually where I give people “two cents worth of free advice” and suggest they keep their mouths shut and ears open, but I won’t bother.
A useless twat like you is going to be stuck being stupid his whole life.
So let me know if you want to give me some more examples of how fucking awesome you are. I know you are busy doing “a million things” but I’ll just be here rolling my eyes if you need me.
my wife is a devout central american catholic. before we got married her priest told her “remember when you go to the US that feminism is the work of satan and is not a good basis for family life.” she enthusiastically believes this, as she believes that she only gets one marriage and that adultery is a mortal sin, rather than a fun activity for when you’re bored or mad at your husband. despite its sketchy history and many odd beliefs (e.g. transubstantiation and clerical celibacy) i’ll always feel grateful to the church for giving me a woman like her.
As you should and this is why I separate Catholicism out. I feel that the Catholic Church is at least as political and social as it is spiritual in its effect on the world and probably moreso.
That said, your wife could have got those values elsewhere. She didn’t, in your case but it is not impossible to instill those values through a number of different ways.
A blight? Where do you think would we be today without it?
With every right we won, which was good for the individual, we lost our sovereigns and protectors, culture, heritage and cohesiveness.
Enlightenment was a double edged sword but it could have gone Tesla’s way, we’d be planet hopping now.
Philosophy started dying around then and the age of the smart arse for power, money privilege slowly took over leading us directly to the SJW phenomenon we see today.
(((Money privilege)))
The inquisition has been maligned ad nauseum, unfairly. It was greeted with relief to charges of heresy because of the risk of a lynch mob. Torquemada was an example of life, now Protestants accuse him of burning Protestants at a time without them. We live in an overtly Satanist era, with their symbols everywhere, sexual freedom without sex, money debt, indoctrination and amorality. The truth is persecuted as the worst crime, this is the legacy of the Enlightenment.
Galileo’s trial consisted of a science lesson by the Jesuits who were competent astronomers.
“Galileo’s glory rests on discoveries that never did and never achieved feats. Contrary to what is stated in many books, including recent history of science, Galileo not invented the telescope. Neither the microscope. Neither the thermometer. Neither the clock rocker. He did not discover the law of inertia; or sunspots. He did not provide any contribution to theoretical astronomy. Not dropped weights from the top of the Tower of Pisa; and failed to prove the truth of the Copernican system. Was not tortured by the Inquisition, nor excommunicated, he not said “eppur if muove” (though it moves); It was never a martyr of science. “Arthur Koestler, Nobel Prize in” The somnámbulos “(1963).
“The inquisition has been maligned ad nauseum, unfairly”
Exactly. Tens of thousands were executed for witchcraft– almost all in Protestant countries. Why? The Inquisition looked at a few witchcraft cases, and said essentially “This isn’t heresy or blasphemy. It’s superstition, mob hysteria, and people trying to get back at their enemies by starting crazy rumors. Cut it out.”
“Galileo’s trial consisted of a science lesson by the Jesuits who were competent astronomers.”
Dead on again. People who still believe this myth need to look up what Galileo actually believed, and what he did to aggravate the Church.
Why don’t you tell us what Galileo did… if you actually know.
You have built quite a straw man here. Koestler was writing more than 50 years ago and is merely providing an opinion. Who is making these claims he speaks about?
Not straw man, is the truth. Said by many authors, Hispanics and Anglos. For example, Bertolt Brecht, an apologist for Galileo; Brecht said “the most fruitful period of life of Galileo begins with a scam, sold to the Republic of Venice a telescope like self-invention, when in fact it was a copy of another flamenco. Galileo like living in the pleasures and Andres , his disciple tells him:”your hands are dirty” and answers: “better dirty than empty”.
Galileo thanked the priests who defended him and the soft sentence, not spend a single day in jail. He lived several years more and published several books.
The point is, I have never heard these claims that these authors are making. In my classes at school we learned the facts. Actually Galileo was imprisoned during the trial, convicted and sentenced to house arrest for life.
/* Quote:
«We’ve always had Freedom of Thought. Even back during Christian times, before the so-called Enlightenment. It’s just that Truth was protected much better back then, and when you allow Error the same protections as Truth, Error will prevail. And this is the real problem with modern society today»
*/
You know what? That’s exactly the same the Left thinks. Of course, for them the Truth is a different one. But when they limit freedom of speech, they do for the sake of protecting what they think is the Truth and avoid what they think is the Error to prevail.
Freedom of speech is about a FREE MARKET OF THOUGHTS AND IDEAS, and let the Truth arise because it’s the most powerful idea when you don’t limit freedom of speech, not because you impose it.
Swap “Christian” for “Islam” and you pretty much have yourself an ISIS recruiting pitch.
“most people who were investigated by Inquisitions were (upwards of 80% accused of heresy or satanic influence were set free by the Inquisitors”
To put it another way, the total casualties of hundreds of years of the Inquisition would be just a busy morning for the Red Terror under the Bolsheviks.
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Yes I would like to add to this also that the protestant counties of Europe were by no means the free thought idyllic lands the author portraits them as. Just ask the puritans, Quakers, and Amish. who fled to the new world to escape their “freedom of religion.” In fact if I recall correctly England during the same period put far more people to death for religious reasons that were ever killed in the Spanish Inquisition.
The Spanish Inquisition really gets a bad rap, most of what we in the Anglosphere know about the Spanish Inquisition if biased due to the fact that Britain and Spain were enemies at that period in time. Fact is the Spanish inquisition was far different than what we view it as today. It was largely a successful attempt by Isabel and Ferdinand to unify Spain, and to prevent Molusco rebellions. Furthermore it was a lot less bloody than the religious persecutions protestant countries were engaging in at that time. All things considered it served to unify a nation that had been in a state of perpetual war for 800 years a feat that stands on its own merits far higher than many attempts to rectify civil disunity among nations today.
Interesting fact: no Jew was ever put to death during the inquisition.
Cough* Bullshit my ancestors were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Nunez
Sure it was the Portuguese inquisition but they operated the same where it counted.
I got that info from historian Charles A Coulombe. I never said the inquisition treated Jews well, but if you could show me one Jew executed by the Spanish Inquisition I will recant that fact.
6 million?
Yes. One could undoubtedly get away with a lot more freedom of thought in Spain during the Inquisition, than in Cape Cod during the heyday of the Puritans. The Puritans were not in favor of freedom or religion; they were in favor of freedom for their religion.
I don’t believe in freedom of religion, either; but I would not impose Catholicism as the Puritans imposed their creed. I am in favor of the Church having free action in society, of her customs, rites and moral teaching being favored in law, etc., but otherwise letting private persons do as they like within the bounds of Natural Law. No such tolerance is shown to persons in Puritanism or modern leftism.
Your discussion of Spain’s economic collapse is vague as is your discussion of the pursuit of money leading to ruin. What do you mean?
“There were many societies more ancient than they: Egyptians, Cretans, Assyrians, Chinese, Indians, and a few others. But in all of these societies–without exception, as it turns out–intellectual activity was kept firmly in the hands of the priestly classes, or in the hands of the monarchy”
Greece is interesting though perhaps not just because it was the cradle of democracy, but because there seem to have been profound tensions, which in conflict with each other produced such a flowering of debate and philosophical enquiry. The greeks are puzzling: their free thinking produces Pythagoras, Socrates/Plato etc. Yet the Republic so often alluded to on this site condemns democracy and seems to argue for rule by experts and technocrats (labelled philosopher kings). Plato, who seems to argue that men can achieve illumination / enlightenment – or at least that they can be led from the realm of illusion to the realm of light – seems at the same time to argue that only a few will achieve this and be fit to govern. As many have pointed out this potentially leads to totalitarianism – so what then would become of those, amongst the demos who favour free-thinking, and philosophising? This is an ancient debate and one which produces the usual Plato was / wasn’t a totalitarian back and forth, but the point is here there was a strong push at the height of greek civilization for control (and potentially therefore control over speech) by enlightened experts, and this probably goes back to the ancient mystery schools (pythagoras etc) and potentially further back to the ancient priestly castes of the aforementioned less free-thinking societies.
Moving on, the church once it had established itself quickly revealed its pre-disposition towards clamping down on free-thinking and specifically to do so in favour of a priestly class, but then with the infusion of ancient and exotic knowledge from the east you get increasing challenges to orthodoxy, which produce in turn the renaissance, humanism and the reformation. In all cases it is the tension and conflict between competing ideas, that produces all the interesting results. There was no democracy during that period, and free thinkers remained permanently at risk from a charge from church or secular authorities (catholic or later protestant).
Once you get to the enlightenment you get something closer to real freedom of speech as orthodoxy qua orthodoxy is challenged, but still with certain risks of falling foul of blasphemy or obscenity laws. The enlightenment probably correctly managed to present itself as the force for progress and freedom but now that it has almost completely routed the church and the forces of traditional orthodoxy it is has revealed itself as having something of an authoritarian kernel: with the rise of political correctness over the last century (I would trace it back to early leftist / commie efforts to promote and police ideology) it seems more and more as though the enlightenment should in retrospect be seen be as an aspirant but secular priestly class challenging the older order of the traditional priesthood. The enlightenment commitment to freedom of speech was always tenuous, and in large part limited to classical liberals / libertarians on either side of the atlantic: against this there was always that part of the enlightenment which sought only to produce a new priestly class of experts and technocrats who were always going to shut down free speech, and with it freedom itself. It isn’t really that great a distance from Saint Simon to the Bolshevik revolution.
The point of the above is that it seems to me that the legacy of the enlightenment is increasingly more of an authoritarian one rather than that kind of liberte, egalite, fraternite that the french revolution managed to sell itself as. It is the enlightenment, with its claim to have trade-marked progress that threatens freedom everywhere, which underpins everything globalist and new world order, and which promotes ideologically uniform and correct thinking not just for individual societies, but for all societies, for the entire globe, and it’s for that reason that the old style of revolution, the kind that dominated the last three centuries, can no longer be considered revolutionary. It is the old order not the new, and its new order is merely a consolidation of that old order, aided and abetted by the new movements and technologies that serve it.
It is against this backdrop of encroaching fascism on the part of the old enlightenment elites that tiny pockets of resistance are being thrown up against the solidifying but not quite yet set world-order. We have a 250 year old critique that still thinks its cutting edge. I believe that is profoundly mistaken, and due for a rude awakening from the unlikeliest quarters.
“The greeks are puzzling: their free thinking produces Pythagoras, Socrates/Plato etc. Yet the Republic so often alluded to on this site condemns democracy and seems to argue for rule by experts and technocrats (labelled philosopher kings). ”
The problem with the republic is no one bothers reading the whole thing. Plato’s writing lends itself to be sectioned off so you can read this part or that part.
Want to read about why paying your debts isn’t enough? Boom. Want to read how the forms are truth and this material world is just a mimetic bit of bullshit. It’s there.
If you follow the arc though, you realize that the thought experiment that Plato conducts in the Republic, in the end, fails.
So yes, Plato builds a whole analogy of the tripartite soul and has it mirror in the built up republic with the philosopher kings at the top representing the rational mind,nous, truth and wisdom blah blah blah the warrior class next representing the thymos (the passions like like fighting and glory and respect, anger and envy etc) and the craftsmen and merchant and peasant etc at the bottom representing the appetitive side…fucking and eating and wine drinking etc.
But here is the thing, at the end of the Republic, as it turns out, it doesn’t work. The Republic fails.
This is a larger picture on how the mimetic image of the forms on earth may seem to be a solid copy, but in the end, like all things of this world, it simply doesn’t hold up to the universal ideals.
So plato gets a bad rap. You know, all that know your fucking role you craftsman shit and obey your philosophers, oh and the state will take your children and raise them communally and all that….but very few people mention that in the end of Plato’s republic the republic fails.
Fair enough, but has there ever been much agreement about where Plato was coming from or what he was trying to do, even amongst those who have read him closely?
Popper is probably the most famous critic of Plato as totalitarian, as someone seen to be arguing for a closed society rather than the kind of open society that greek democracy is thought to have ushered in. Maybe seeing the republic as a blueprint for a real life utopia is wrong and it is as you say only a thought experiment, an ideal republic-in-speech only. But even as some kind of pedagogical tool for teaching young (presumably aristocratic) men how to become wise leaders /philosopher kings it is always going to tend towards elitism, and even something like communism for the top echelons.
The people on the lower rungs may or may not benefit from being re-oriented towards the good, towards truth and away from error, but they are always by this analysis going to be prey respectively to the passions and appetites you outline. I’m certainly not that well read on Plato but my inclination is to agree that Plato’s primary concern is with the governance of the soul, and that the practical politics comes along after that.
I would also note that the tri-partite soul seems to map quite neatly on to the psychoanalytic categories of id, ego and superego. But if (post-) Freudians argue against repression Plato, as a believer in reason, control of the passions etc, seems to argue in the opposite direction. So there is perhaps a kind of agreement about the nature of the soul, but disagreement about the implications.
Likewise he’s a strange kind of communist / totalitarian. The communism of the twentieth century saw itself as progressive whereas Plato’s system (communist or otherwise) as with the Greeks in general looks backwards. I do wonder whether a lot of the answers are to be found in the mystery schools and then subsequently in the gnostic glosses on Plato. The Plato most people are familiar with seems to involve the material world as a descent from the super-celestial realm of the forms. Yet neo-platonism seems to be interested in returning up the ladder once more.
As you say, I guess we find in Plato whatever it is that we are looking for.
“That kind of liberte, egalite, fraternite that the french revolution managed to sell itself as”
“Sell itself as” are the key words here. What kind of liberté, egalité, fraternité did the French Revolution bring to the Vendée?
Exactly. Many ordinary French people were hoping for a reform movement not bloody revolutionary politics that would leave hundreds of thousands dead. It is simply perverse that such a murderous event should be remembered as an act of liberation
I have precisely 2 words to say on this whole subject.
Read Orwell
And don’t forget that, while much of “1984” was based on Blair’s experience with Communism, the Ministry of Truth was based on his experience working for Britain’s Ministry of Information….
The BBC
I always laugh when people say things like, “Freedom of speech just means that the government can’t arrest you for what you say. It doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences for what you say.”
Uuuhh, no. “Government” suppression of speech or thought is carried out by the initiation of aggression against those who are guilty of wrongthink. The prohibition of this aggression is Constitutional Right or law.
When people in the private sector use the initiation of (sometimes passive) aggression to suppress wrongthink or to eliminate speech that isn’t doubleplus good, they are making themselves a de facto “government” and taking “justice” into their own hands in a social manner.
Either way, the results from the supression of ideas whether public or private, always have dystopian consequences.
Very disappointed by this article. It follows the modernist ideology and highlights a lot of misconceptions about history that have already been debunked a long time ago.
Care to provide evidence of your claim?
See my response to Bucky just above.
Yeah, I was honestly really disappointed in this article.
Quint is on point more often than not.
Everyone has an off day.
email responded to and I went big!
Nice. Read it after the mass I will, you apatheist scum.
glad apatheist is finally catching on. I have been using that term for many a year.
There is some interesting stuff going on in the comments of this article too, worth reading. Some useless twat who is so far behind in the race he thinks he is winning seems to sour it, but there is a lot of good stuff.
Enjoy your mass……mass-turd
…..meanwhile, last night on Crazy Shit News
The Holy Man of Ramadan said ” I will kill you and fuck your corpse”…hahaha
Kids listening to Radiohead’s new album in record store Istanbul
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJMv_XPmvfQ
We need more than the quest for free thought.
We need big fucking spaceships so we can get the fuck outta here or to fight fire with water.
This sponsored post needs more Kratom.
Everything needs more kratom.
Kratom doesn’t need more kratom. That’s how non-oscillating black holes are born, and frankly we don’t need more inescapable singularities.
Yes, it is one of the great paradoxes. Others include the fact that if you squeeze an avocado hard enough to know if it is good or not you will ruin it, a girl who is a 6 looks like an 8 when she plays the fiddle and despite athletic ability black people seem to walk so slowly that just thinking about it is irritating.
All correct. My mind just flipped to a Family-Guy style cut scene on the latter, which indeed irritated the hell out of me. The median makes me think of Lindsey Stirling, who is about as 5-6ey as they come, even lower when she speaks, except when she’s doing her thing.
“Reason would sleep for a thousand years.”
This is just dumb, to claim that there were no intellectual achievements whatsoever in Christian Europe during the middle ages. The author might start by learning about the Carolingian renaissance, or Alfred the Great.
you sir are correct.
the “dark ages” fallacy is a modern invention. I mean, they didn’t have postmates or anything, but to imagine that there was like 3 centuries where nothing was going on is mind-fuckingly ingnorant.
They had postmates and pilgrimage.
It is recent anti-Europe black legend, built on stereotypes from the renaissance. I hear it a lot from new-world leftists. Middle age was not a great time, but intellectual achievements were done, despite black death.
I am very disappointed with Quintus Curtius, here. I did not expect this from him.
Exactly.
Dante basing his vision of hell on Aristotle’s virtues, Christine de Pisan (big fuck you to feminists who say that women were not allowed to intellectual life) , Saint Thomas of Aquinas, Pierre Abelard…
Also, medieval Christianity is the only place in the world in that time, that had full time students in classical philosophy (read Rémi Bragues, the specialist of medieval philosophy).
No Leonardo da Vinci without the drawings of Villard de Honnecourt.
No modern boats without the rudder invented in the XIIIth century.
On a much more mundane technological level, advancements such as the widespread use of wind and water power (as opposed to the Romans’ reliance on slave power), the heavy plow, the moldboard, and the horse collar (allowing the use of more-efficient work horses rather than oxen for heavy work) led to major improvements in agricultural productivity, allowing for more resources to be diverted to other areas.
No, I didn’t say that there were no intellectual achievements. You guys are misunderstanding and misinterpreting me. I’m talking about something very specific here: I’m talking about the ability to question, mock, and contradict established Church dogma. That was not possible during the Middle Ages.
There were many intellectual and scholarly achievements during the Middle Ages, but they were allowed only to go so far. Ultimately, if someone went too far, he could get into serious trouble. And anyone who thinks otherwise really needs to read a good history of the Age of Faith. It wasn’t called that for nothing.
Faith was held to be more important than the advancement of scientific learning. Now we can definitely debate whether they were right about this. Maybe they were. Maybe science is not all it’s cracked up to be. That’s a debate we can have, and should have.
But there’s no way to deny that during the Middle Ages and until the Renaissance, Church doctrine had the final say on most speculative activity. Philosophers (even the innovative ones) had to couch their innovations in such a way that they did not run afoul of the censors or the Inquisition. It was a game they all had to play. Copernicus could not even publish his great work while he was alive, for fear of being hauled into court.
Not believing in hell, God, or even witches could be a criminal offense in many countries.
Everyone had to play the game, or else he would not get published. Only in the 16th century could philosophers (like Hobbes, Descartes, etc.) openly challenge the Church. And even they were afraid of getting arrested.
And one other thing. Lest you guys think I’m playing favorites with anyone, let me say that it was even worse in the lands of Islam. Contradicting Islamic theology could mean prison or execution. Among Jewish communities, faith was also very, very strong. Remember that Spinoza was banished from the Jewish community of Amsterdam for questioning the existence of God.
My ancestor Samuel Nunez Jacked up the inquisition with a great escape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Nunez
Crafty Jew he was.
Lone Wolf”, “Home Grown”, and “Domestic Terrorism” are liberal buzz words for Not Muslim. I find it beyond vile for liberals to work on gun control rather than address the radical Islamic threat. Obama has average nearly one a year since elected:
8. June 2016 Mateen – Kills 49 and wounds 53.
7. December 2015: Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married Pakistani couple, stormed a San Bernardino County government building with combat gear and rifles and opened fire on about 80 employees enjoying an office Christmas party. They killed 14 after pledging loyalty to ISIS. A third Muslim was charged with helping buy weapons.
6. July 2015: Mohammad Abdulazeez opened fire on a military recruiting center and US Navy Reserve in Chattanooga, Tenn., where he shot to death four Marines and a sailor. Obama refused to call it terrorism.
5. May 2015: ISIS-directed Muslims Nadir Soofi and Elton Simpson opened fire on the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, shooting a security guard before police took them down.
4. April 2013: Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Muslim brothers from Chechnya, exploded a pair of pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding more than 260. At least 17 people lost limbs from the shrapnel.
3. September 2012: Terrorists with al Qaeda in the Maghreb attacked the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing the US ambassador, a US Foreign Service officer and two CIA contractors. Obama and then-Secretary of State Clinton misled the American people, blaming the attack on an anti-Muslim video.
2. November 2009: Army Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13. Obama ruled it “workplace violence,” even though Hasan was in contact with an al Qaeda leader before the strikes and praised Allah as he mowed down troops.
1. June 2009: Al Qaeda-trained Abdulhakim Muhammad opened fire on an Army recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark., killing Pvt. William Long and wounding Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula.
Folks these are just the ones we know about, how many have been prevented through no help of Obama and the Democrats?
Nothing says progressive like censorship and propaganda.
>At first the Romans looked up on the Christians as harmless fanatics, as
just another obscure offshoot sect of the perpetually rebellious Jews.
The Jews were also looked upon by the Romans with suspicion for
refusing to accept emperor-worship; but for the most part, the Jews kept
to themselves, and were content to preserve their customs and
traditions in peace.
Whoa whoa whoa there. HOL UP. *smacks lips*
The Jews only “kept to themselves” in so far that they MADE AN ARMY around a false messiah, rebelled against the Romans, and eventually pissed them off so much that Rome DESTROYED JERUSALEM.
Now, contrast that with the Christians who, like the Jews, didn’t accept the polytheistic religion of the Romans, but also kept getting slandered and murdered despite NOT TAKING UP ARMS and forming an army.
The rest of it is based on that simple “Christians hate science!!11” historical revisionism pandered by Christian-hating atheists. http://jameshannam.com/medievalscience.htm
A lot of stuff was lost because Rome fell. That’s what happens when empires and civilizations fall. That was a result of them bringing in barbarian immigrants (the Gauls iirc) and trying to make a “diverse” situation right in Roman lands, instead of letting the nations have their own land and just taking tax money from them.
People have to stop this stupid idea of the “dark ages”, that Medieval Europe was this total wasteland, where nothing was achieved and Reason, has it is said in the post, was gone.
This is false, and it shocks me that some still have this idea, with so much massive access to information and knowledge. We have to liberate ourselves, from the elitist legacy the renaissance and enlightenment intellectuals had about Medieval Europe. The name itself…Middle Ages, is a modern creation by renaissance scholars in the sense that it was nothing more than a time period between them and Classical Antiquity, it was simply in the middle.
The name of the Gothic style was also a invention of that time period, with the aim of describing it as barbarian and rude. However, anyone who as enter in a Gothic Cathedral or look upon a Gothic artistic piece, knows there is nothing barbarian about it, quite the opposite. We are talking of artistic achievements that may not be replicated ever again.
Also, this idea that the end of the Roman Empire, suddenly marks all end of all peace and prosperity is totally false. The two final centuries of roman dominance are of, grosso modo, war and decline. In fact, Christianity, far from being a matter of weakness, is the last factor of unity of a dying empire. For some reason, the Eastern Roman Empire, aka the Byzantine Empire, lasted another 1000 years… and it was Christian to the bones. So, lets also abandon this stupid idea that Christianity weakened the strong roman warrior logic. The roman legions lost the supremacy on the battlefield, simply because the barbarians, like the Visigoths or the Huns, were simply better than them in that period. Things change!
After the collapse of Rome, Europe and the Mediterranean had at least 300 years of turmoil, which is something normal, after so many centuries of such a solid rule, but as stability and organization is achieved, progress and growth were regained, being the Carolingian Empire of Charlemagne the first signal of a new Christian Europe ready to expand itself.
And so it did. Ancient Classical knowledge was revived, guarded sometimes with their own lives, by monks in medieval libraries. Trade grows, as Europe begins to dominate the Mediterranean trade via the Italian City States. In fact, if we look at the most rich and industrialized areas of Western Europe, it is by no coincidence that their are exactly the same as started in Medieval times. Banks and insurance companies are created, big capitalist clans like the Medici appear, the arts flourish, land is gained with spectacular agriculture breakthroughs, population grows, the first Universities are created by the Church, the Reconquista against the moors is full ahead, and expansion in the East, with the Teutonic Order is also a success. Ancient nation states, like Portugal, my nation, are a medieval creation but also countries like England or France begin to build their own national consciousness. National languages develop like Portuguese, Spanish, English and French, Italian and German…
In conclusion, the explosion of Western Civilization in the XV and XVI century, cannot be understood without all the great achievements of the Middle Ages. ROK readers should all begin to learn more about that time period and i would advise and encourage ROK to post informative texts about it. “Dark ages” my ass!
Exactly, I was about to post a similar comment.
You beat me to it. A few pitiful, ugly, primitive products of those pre- reformation “Dark Ages”:
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0SO81Rr22ZXDUMAf.Bx.9w4?p=gothic+cathedral&fr=crmas&fr2=piv-web&psqn=2
And your point about the Eastern Roman Empire/ Byzantine Empire is well taken, too. A whole civilization that is largely ignored in typical history courses (of course, just about all of Western civilization is now ignored in typical history courses, but even in less self-hating times, the Byzantines were neglected). Those primitive savages of the Eastern Roman Empire built this in Constantinople in the early years of the “Dark Ages” (537 AD):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia#/media/File%3AHagia_Sophia_Mars_2013.jpg
What really finished off the Roman Empire, from Visigothic Spain to Constantinople, and threatened all of Europe for a thousand years, of course, was Islam. Good thing we don’t have to worry about that today…
I would like to address some of your points starting with the ignorance of the Eastern Roman Empire by many in the West. Even with the predominance of Greek culture, they saw themselves as Romans until the very end and achieved as you showed remarkable deeds.
However, the most important point you made is truly the colossal effect of the muslim invasion around the Mediterranean. Truly, what separated the North and the South of the roman “mare nostrum” was not the barbarian tribes, that become quickly romanised, but the muslim expansion.
If that was not the case, Portugal would have much more in common with Syria, as Egypt would have been not that different from Italy. Islam broke that cultural, religious and civilizational unity and make no mistakes: Western Civilization would have included today all the Maghreb and the Middle East.
That division still resonates today, with the consequences we are now witnessing with a now again powerful islam financed by the Gulf States and by Western weakness.
Finally, the breathtaking pictures you so wonderfully showed. Every time i go to the sacred ground at the Santa Maria da Vitória Monastery i sarcastically wonder …” so many light for such a “dark” period in human History” .
In the picture, we see King John I, the first monarch of the House of Avis and Philippa of Lancaster…just look at those barbarian tombs!
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9896c0307b52a7db978cf8a59431a29dfb19c661db325fa551ad6ca2389403c9.jpg
I understand all this, and no one said the Middle Ages had no achievements. You’re missing the point. I am aware of the achievements of medieval man.
My point was that scientific and philosophical inquiry at this period in history was not permitted to contradict Church ideology. That is the point, and it is a valid one. Your points are also valid, but they have nothing to do with what I was talking about.
The medieval mind was different from the mind of classical antiquity and the modern era. It thought it had already found truth (in the form of revealed religion) and it had little interest in scientific experimentation.
Your point makes sense, but when you say Reason would disappear for a thousand years, its a very strong statement and a unjust one.
Maybe it was a bit hyperbolic. But one must make some concessions to literary enthusiasm. (!)
I would still say this is too strong, Quintus. I don’t deny that there were times when the power structure of Medieval society responded too aggressively to criticism (as happens in our day, too). But, on the whole, it tolerated this much better than in other societies, and indeed, in the fields of philosophy and theology one cannot say that the Church’s view was simply intransigent and reactionary to criticism. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that the Church fostered a TREMENDOUS amount of free exchange and criticism, and developed her positions out of this intense debate.
The Church, for example, developed several grades of theological certainty in her teachings. These were not arbitrarily assigned to doctrines; the criterion for classifying doctrines into the appropriate grade, was precisely the amount of debate and rigorous criticism that had been applied to theological propositions, recognizing that the certainty of certain doctrines improved only as their connection to other, certain truths emerged. Aquinas’ Summa Theologica is itself an extended airing of all the most popular objections to the Church’s theology, for the purpose of demonstrating the best, logically coherent views. Even in the case of Galileo, St. Robert and the pope were supporting other explorations of the heliocentric theory, and they tried more than once to be fair and lenient with Galileo.
It is really short shrift to the Church, I think, to flatly say that anything that contradicted her was forbidden. After long debate, after a definitive judgment of the Church, persons who obstinately refused to fall in line, more than once, in a spirit of contempt, were often punished. One would much rather have fallen into the hands of the Medieval Church, than find one’s self in the sights of the IRS, SPLC, ACLU, ADF or Gawker in modernity! And all of these claim to believe in “liberty!”
Aside from the gross hyperbole about the Middle Ages (mentioned in other comments) a sound article chronicling the history of freedom of thought.
What is interesting is that it is exclusively Western civilization that has such a legacy, and Western civilization that has seen the most rapid progress.
I think there is a misunderstanding with those who argue for an absolute right to freedom of speech regarding those who argue against the right to propagate error. Most of the former believe that the latter will criminalize the propagation of error because they deny the absolute right to propagate error. However just because something doesn’t have an absolute right does not mean that it is illegal or criminal it is something however that is not protected by the state. I say this in regards to the specious lies propagated against Roosh’s books which would not have the protection as rights that many argue lies have. Furthermore I will add that those who a generation ago argued most ardently for the absolute right of freedom of speech are those today that wish to criminalize freedom of speech. I think the better solution is to establish in power a just authority not to dalliance with the idea that error has a supreme codified protection, because when those who propagate error come to power you will find that the right to truth has not the same protections as error.
Thank you for this, since so many miss the point, which you have accurately identified. It is absolutely crucial, for philosophical and logical reasons, not to accord objective error and evil an objective right to free action in society. It does not therefore follow that there would not be good reasons to tolerate free expression even of erroneous ideas. We are merely saying that it is incoherent and irrational to assert that there is a moral obligation to embrace and protect the flouting of moral obligations.
This is generally a libel against Christendom. Pagan temples didn’t just discuss thing philosophically – the comparison would be to the Thug-gees of India that engaged in ritual murder. Calling it “tolerance” is wrong. The best would be syncretism.
There are books about the Irish (Catholics!) saving civilization. It wasn’t Christians which invaded but barbarians, and if you have a complaint it was that they weren’t sufficiently effective at conversion.
Ask Thomas More if England believed in freedom of conscience.
As any article written by either Aurelius or Quintus, you can’t possibly encapsulate the meaning of the text by skimming it. Do as I do: Print it off. Go buy yourself a nice bottle of brandy ( I prefer wisky on the rocks ) and have a sit-down and read it while taking notes.
Try to understand what the author is putting out there.
Is it the message worth it ?
Ussually it is.
A good context for the question, Quintus, even if the point of view differs in some ways from my own. In particular, I was surprised to hear you say that “reason slept for a thousand years” until the Renaisssance, when I would say that the Renaissance, while being a period of flourishing in the arts, actually represented a profound *diminution* of the clarity and profundity of Western philosophy, which reached a summit with Aquinas and the other Scholastics. (Secular) philosophy has been declining thence ever since.
My own series of articles has been exploring Freedom, Liberty, Liberalism, etc., and I wonder if you are responding in some way to my thoughts. My next two articles will continue to flesh out these themes, and I’ll issue a more rounded and complete form of what I’m getting at, in the second one. But in brief, because it’s relevant to what you say here:
Reason (and the Church) affirm a few, relevant truths to this question. 1) The State exists for the common good – i.e., to maximize the good of society in pursuit of its natural and supernatural ends by providing the people with maximal, authentic liberty and free action in respect to everything conducive to the good; 2) There are many contingent questions that admit of prudential judgment – i.e., on many topics, one can take any number of different views without the involvement of any intrinsic evil; there is great reason to leave people at liberty in such points; 3) There are legitimate and clear moral truths that establish the Right, and rights, and it is by these that we know and appreciate Liberty in the first place, and understand its authentic limits; 4) The common man has many legitimate rights in this context; the State does not exist so much to administer the private lives of citizens, as to produce a social atmosphere in which private persons have as much Liberty and free action for what is good and natural; 5) Thus, there is ample reason why the State should abstain from intrusion and hyper-regulation, erring on the side of tolerating even some abuses of Liberty rather than attempting to make society “perfect,” not only for the sake of the common good but even for the sake of respecting the *legitimate* rights of the individual in his respective sphere of activity; 6) maximizing the free action and speech of citizens of good will, is both a social good, and is proven to benefit society through promoting a fecundity of thought and industry; 7) yet, the free accordance of liberty in matters of prudential judgment, and even the preference for toleration of certain abuses of Liberty, is only coherent and rational when applied on the level of prudential judgment, and with an eye to the common good; 8) this is because it is incoherent to establish, as a *First Principle,* that we either cannot know, or must not promote, the Good; this idea is self-contradictory, as should be obvious, and when applied to society, becomes a kind of void or cancer that hollows out everything good and noble, replacing it instead with an impulse to castrate goodness for the sake of protecting evil as a matter of routine.
Then the usurers and the perverts and the wicked run rough-shod over the good, and even the supposed good of “liberty” will disappear as the vitiated populace becomes less capable of maintaining it and using it in a circumspect and adult manner. We are well into this stage at present.
When one understands the coherence and balance of all those truths, he can easily understand how a just society prefers to promote freedom of speech amongst citizens of good will as a positive social good, while yet insisting that Communists, revolutionaries, usurers, perverts, etc., do not have an absolute right to incite the passions and foment civil unrest through objectively nefarious speech and action. Without drawing a line, without setting a bound, nothing – not even “Liberty” – can take a true form. To shrink from drawing lines where necessary in fear of facing up to the legitimate power and criterion for drawing lines (which may displease us), is the mark of a cowardly and suicidal culture, as the West currently is.
So, absolutely speaking, we would say with pope Pius XII, that “error has no rights.” This is an obvious truth of reason, and the certain doctrine of the Church. Yet, there remains ample room for: 1) tolerance for imperfection; 2) toleration even for some abuses; 3) a real appreciation of freedom of speech; yet none of this is on the grounds of any objective right for error, abuse and immorality (which would be incoherent and irrational), but on the grounds that it is not inherently evil to tolerate errors and abuses and immorality, within limits, as a matter of prudential judgment. Indeed, there is a much greater good in *tolerating* these shortcomings, than there would be in the futile attempt to stamp them out. But the worst evil and stupidity of all, is to assert that evil has objective rights to free action in society.
And this is why the Church in fact did tolerate a great deal of free speech by persons of good will – I mean, St. Thomas questioned essentially the entirety of the Western canon of philosophy and theology! The tales told of the Inquisition, etc., are now seen to be intentional misrepresentations (by later Leftists) of a process, in which the Church actually intervened to protect human rights and establish many of the traditions of due process which guided European courtrooms for centuries (until recently, when “Liberalism” has no use for due process any more), etc. Even in the case of Galileo, the Church was proactively paying and supporting other astronomers who questioned the same teachings; she took her disapproving attitude to Galileo for the vicious and personally abusive approach he adopted.
But all the toleration shown to wrong or even abusive speech and conduct, in no way establishes that error and immorality has an objective right to free action in society. The legitimate authority has the right to punish and prohibit it, and until we rediscover some willingness in this regard, we will find that we cannot preserve even the prudential tolerance of Free Speech and the promotion of authentic Liberty that we would desire to establish as a real good. Indeed, we already see that these things are perishing at the hands of so-called “Liberals,” far more perfectly than they ever suffered at the hands of the Church.