I find it hard to believe any suicide bombers would blow them selves up if they had regular exposure to greasy all-girl action.
Apart from your sexist tripe, you seem to have conveniently forgotten two important facts.
First off, the 9 / 11 hijackers had "regular exposure to lots of " greasy all-girl action " as you so eloquently put it.
From all reports they whooped it up in the days and weeks preceeding their murderous deeds. Evidence proffered to investigators showed that many of the hijackers visited brothels, strip joints, bars etc so all this exposure to sex didn't stop them.
Why ?
Because such " greasy all-girl action " is what is promised to every Islamic youth who dies in the cause of Islam. Sex has long been the forgotten sales pitch used by muslim clerics to drive home the promise of the good life.
Yes, in the original language. And among other things it is a scathing condemnation of many members of the church.
Of the Church, but not of Christianity. Luther and Calvin had "scathing commentaries" of the Church, but not Christianity. The two are not necessarily synonmous, at least not in Protestant thinking.
Well, you were talking about the "Church history", that's all.
I did co-mingle (comingle?) the two didn't I.
My reference to Dante's Inferno (which I have only read in English ) was to his attitude (for lack of a better word at the moment) that Greco thought and the rise of Rome were part of the handiwork of God.
Interesting points and I agree with most of what you say, except laying so much at the door of separation of Church and State. You can separate the institutions, but the state will always have religion.The State will answer to either God or Man, and where it answers is what is worships.
Communism ( social Science ) laid claim to answering to the unswerving logic of science..as did the nazi's...
That aside, I take your point regarding the seperation of state & church.
However, another point occured to me, and this aspect of thhe model would be difficult for Islam to repeat as it was so unique.
namely the rise of Descartian logic, and thhe seperation of mind and matter. It in itself provided another major impetus, to the development of science as we know it today.
No Descarte no Science.
Paradaoxically, it is strange ( and somewhat perplexing ) to us to think that Islam ( and not christianity ) encouraged the early flowering of science and mathematics.
As history tells us, the internal dynamics of the era eventually saw such explorations sidelined or actively discouraged as reactionary fundamentalism took hold. ( a sort of living in the past mentality )
One wonders if the more openly outward branches of Islam had won the day, where we in the west would be now..( a backward tribe of gypsies perhaps )
Tripe? How can you call tripe sexist? Organ meats are very nutritious, women should get more organ meat in their diets.
But as to the rest, I think you're wrong, because despite their exposure, they brought to it a different attitude, a psycho-pathology if you will, one that comes from a deeper embedded thought process, a process that allows for the seemingly discordant deepening of their hatred of western vice out of their present enjoyment of the self same vices.
All the great homicidal cases seem to offer it into evidence. If you take a serial killer/rapist, especially crimes targetted specifically at women, you see it. Here we've mingled politics, but the dynamics, however paradoxically, don't support you. Arab boys have no relationship to sexual vice. I have seen this first hand, they simply cannot negotiate it
But on to Goldstien,
You present a plausible, yet not so curiously discordant view than the standard outlook -- no problems for me, the standard outlook is deeply invested in looking at the entire history of humanities as a triumph of "western" stewardship, and humanists will more often than not embrace the church (even when they disagree with everything else) as a pillar of cultural preservation.
But you have company, good company, in the rejections of the monastery presented by French essayists. So, it shocks even me, when I scoff at you in spite of myself, but...
you have skimmed a neccessary bit of logistics. The monasteries operated more in the mode of outposts, the people they reached, initially, were well behind the development curve of a Greece and Rome and especially most all of the middle east. While the church may have taken it's sweet time doing more than lip service to "education" it was first staked most deeply in surpressing it's native (European) paganism.
They did have a sort of ossifying effect on knowledge, but by then they had reformed most of Europe into a state that could produce a renaissance... and done a great deal to "re-eduacte" change the course of pagan europe. A big job, that requires a somewhat paranoid approach. In a sense Europe had to develop twice before it could flourish. The middle east went the opposite way during that whole time, gradually slowing and beginning a rapid regression by the time the European renaissance had begun.
The effects of the press, as you note, were profound.
Monasteries may have held on a touch too long, but they did not stifle relative to the older centers of the world, they started at a much more basic point, and had much to do just to catch up. Once they did, they stagnated, but the mark of their success, and the rootedness of the changes they initiated, is that they could not stop the progress they initiated.
Tripe? How can you call tripe sexist? Organ meats are very nutritious, women should get more organ meat in their diets.
But as to the rest, I think you're wrong, because despite their exposure, they brought to it a different attitude, a psycho-pathology if you will, one that comes from a deeper embedded thought process, a process that allows for the seemingly discordant deepening of their hatred of western vice out of their present enjoyment of the self same vices.
All the great homicidal cases seem to offer it into evidence. If you take a serial killer/rapist, especially crimes targetted specifically at women, you see it. Here we've mingled politics, but the dynamics, however paradoxically, don't support you. Arab boys have no relationship to sexual vice. I have seen this first hand, they simply cannot negotiate it
But on to Goldstien,
You present a plausible, yet not so curiously discordant view than the standard outlook -- no problems for me, the standard outlook is deeply invested in looking at the entire history of humanities as a triumph of "western" stewardship, and humanists will more often than not embrace the church (even when they disagree with everything else) as a pillar of cultural preservation.
But you have company, good company, in the rejections of the monastery presented by French essayists. So, it shocks even me, when I scoff at you in spite of myself, but...
you have skimmed a neccessary bit of logistics. The monasteries operated more in the mode of outposts, the people they reached, initially, were well behind the development curve of a Greece and Rome and especially most all of the middle east. While the church may have taken it's sweet time doing more than lip service to "education" it was first staked most deeply in surpressing it's native (European) paganism.
They did have a sort of ossifying effect on knowledge, but by then they had reformed most of Europe into a state that could produce a renaissance... and done a great deal to "re-eduacte" change the course of pagan europe. A big job, that requires a somewhat paranoid approach. In a sense Europe had to develop twice before it could flourish. The middle east went the opposite way during that whole time, gradually slowing and beginning a rapid regression by the time the European renaissance had begun.
The effects of the press, as you note, were profound.
Monasteries may have held on a touch too long, but they did not stifle relative to the older centers of the world, they started at a much more basic point, and had much to do just to catch up. Once they did, they stagnated, but the mark of their success, and the rootedness of the changes they initiated, is that they could not stop the progress they initiated.
Off on yet another tangent to this thread, the monastic orders did actually grow out of Greco/Roman ascetic thinking. You would be hard pressed to find a "monkish" example in scripture. John the Baptist maybe, but he was unique in many respects.
And I think you made a good point: Most of what is know considered Western Europe now was completely ignorant of Greek/Roman culture even when Rome fell.
What this has to do with Islamic condemnation of homosexuality, I have no idea.
You present a plausible, yet not so curiously discordant view than the standard outlook -- no problems for me, the standard outlook is deeply invested in looking at the entire history of humanities as a triumph of "western" stewardship, and humanists will more often than not embrace the church (even when they disagree with everything else) as a pillar of cultural preservation.
The entire history of humanities began earlier than the 1500s. The time during which the West rose to global prominence and thus could perhaps be loosely termed as ?triumph of ?western? stewardship? is roughly between 1500 and 2000.
Quote:
But you have company, good company, in the rejections of the monastery presented by French essayists. So, it shocks even me, when I scoff at you in spite of myself, but...
I suppose I expressed myself less than clearly earlier, as I don't share in these French essayists rejection of the contribution of the monastic orders. Following the crumbling of the Empire of Occident, the chaos of the earlier barbaric kingdoms, and the decline of trade and communications, monasteries fulfilled an important task in preserving and transmitting whatever remained of ancient knowledge. However, while much more of that knowledge was better preserved and developed outside Western Christendom, as long as the Church exerted overbearing control over the fields education and publication, that knowledge remained indeed mostly outside the boundaries of the West. And much of what remained was lost through a meticulous work of selection according to what could accomodate doctrine.
The West has been more succesful than its competitors the last 500 years, not becuase it was more religious than them but because it was less.
Quote:
The monasteries operated more in the mode of outposts, the people they reached, initially, were well behind the development curve of a Greece and Rome and especially most all of the middle east.
That may have been true about latter-empire Batavia and Britannia, but the Roman provinces Gaul, Iberia, and (northern) Africa were as literate, urbanised, and as advanced as Italy, Greece, Egypt or Syria in those days. By 600, however, Rome, along with the rest of the Empire of Occident, was indeed in tatters.
Quote:
While the church may have taken it's sweet time doing more than lip service to "education" it was first staked most deeply in surpressing it's native (European) paganism.
The same also ,occured in the Eastern Empire, or Byzantium. The Muslim invaders were as primitive as the Germanic chieftains, however the lands they conquered kept thriving.
Quote:
The middle east went the opposite way during that whole time, gradually slowing and beginning a rapid regression by the time the European renaissance had begun.
During all that time (the Middle-Ages), the Middle-East, as well as Central Asia, South Asia, and East Asia, were the major centres of culture, and were still much so in 1400 despite having been seriously ravaged by the Mongolian invasions (which had a much smaller impact on Europe) some centuries earlier.
By 1500, those centres of culture began stagnation and through a slow process found themselves seriously lagging behind by 1800.
Quote:
The effects of the press, as you note, were profound.
Monasteries may have held on a touch too long, but they did not stifle relative to the older centers of the world, they started at a much more basic point, and had much to do just to catch up.
If the Church (not just the monasteries) had been more premeable to foreign influences (whether from the Mahometan heathens or the Byzantine heretics) Europe could possibly have caught up much earier than circa 1600.
Quote:
Once they did, they stagnated, but the mark of their success, and the rootedness of the changes they initiated, is that they could not stop the progress they initiated.
Some of the seeds of that progress can be found notably in the encounter with the Levant during the Crusades. Here you had these backward, unwashed semi-barbaric knights, barons, kings, and their accompanying friars, finding out about much more cultured, sophisticated, libertine, and literate societies, where much more of the ancient knowledge was accessible.
At aboiut the same time, the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, conquered from the Muslims and the Byzantines, rather than expelling the heathens, welcomed them to stay, seeking to rival with Al-Andalus; and for a short time Sicily was a beacon of culture, in which the official languages were the then four idioms of classical culture: Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Venice, which in its earlier days was under Byzantine protection, was by then a maritime empire and part of that more enlightened world and would also act as intermediary between it and the West, still mired in the Dark Ages.
By the 1400s, or Quattrocento as they call it, in the small city-states of Italy, the vernacular rose to the status of a cultured and literary language, science was becoming bolder in searching and experimenting, and the arts were discarding the Gothic models for the re-discovered joys of Graeco-Roman legacy. As the Papacy itself became more lax, it allowed much of that to happen in its own states, to the dismay of many purists.
The shattering of the old certainties on science, the new discoveries, explorations, and the very challenges to the Church by the various reform movements, completely undermind its control. That's where the actual ?rise of the West? begins, not a thousand years earlier.
The Church rose as Rome was falling, and Western civilisation rose as the Church was losing its grip over it.
It was argued that the West began rising with the Church as Rome was falling (years 300~500 of your era), the West actually began rising a thousand years later.
The Islamic world, seems to be mired in the same morass in which Western Europe was roughly between the years 500 and 1500.
Remember, if we were all homos, the human race would cease to exist. Speaking pluralistically, one of the litmus tests of a legitimate lifestyle is how well it scales across a culture. Homosexuality does not scale.
I know where you are coming from. "Socially consistent behavior" is a heckuva thing.
But our society (and the economy, more importantly) has evolved to a level where there is enough excess wealth to support decadent lifestyles of many kinds. Sure, if we were all back to living in caves then your argument would be borne out in society daily. But we have a standard of living now, due to industrialization and the development of civilization, that makes some things viable, socially, and long term, which were not viable before.
.....our society (and the economy, more importantly) has evolved to a level where there is enough excess wealth to support decadent lifestyles of many kinds. .......we have a standard of living now, due to industrialization and the development of civilization, that makes some things viable, socially, and long term, which were not viable before.
I still wonder whether or not the underlying assumption that wealth, produces decandance & an increase in homosexuality is actually an assumption borne out by history.
Or are we jumping to conclusions?
After all a lot of the " historical tracts" that speak of a rise in homosexual behaviour in relation to cultures, do so from biased religious or socio-political perspectives.
I am not condoning or condemming, merely reflecting on the ultimate sources of our so called historical " evidence "
there is also some [alleged] cross-pollination between Greek and Jewish thought (pre Christianity)
"Greek-Jew is Jew-Greek" - - James Joyce
You all talk as if to say the 'greeks' is to say something that is unified and consistent . . . but there are different eras of Greek thought and different schools that went head to head and who's ideas still resonate, and still go head to head . . . and its not just Platonism versus Aristotileanism . . . .
by the way . . . I just got here . . and its great to read these posts . .
I especially apreciate IG pointing out the West's contact with the Levant . . very contrary to popular unhistorical opinion where the west were not the barbarians . ..
It might also be pointed out that many who came into contact during the Crusades were obliged to dissimulate what they learned as they brought it back, some even formed semi-secret societies of the knowledgable. . . some were thought of, by the church, as having conspired with 'Baphomet' (distortion of 'Mohamet' into a satanic figure) and were burned at the stake. The Hospitallers, for instance (from which we get the origin of Hospitals) was a group that originally started to give lodging to pilgrims and crusaders . . also the Knights Templar
But this is obscure and debatable history . . . anyway
Comments
Originally posted by Matsu
I find it hard to believe any suicide bombers would blow them selves up if they had regular exposure to greasy all-girl action.
Apart from your sexist tripe, you seem to have conveniently forgotten two important facts.
First off, the 9 / 11 hijackers had "regular exposure to lots of " greasy all-girl action " as you so eloquently put it.
From all reports they whooped it up in the days and weeks preceeding their murderous deeds. Evidence proffered to investigators showed that many of the hijackers visited brothels, strip joints, bars etc so all this exposure to sex didn't stop them.
Why ?
Because such " greasy all-girl action " is what is promised to every Islamic youth who dies in the cause of Islam. Sex has long been the forgotten sales pitch used by muslim clerics to drive home the promise of the good life.
" All the greasy pole action you can handle "
No wonder so many men flocked to its call...
pity about the women tho
Originally posted by Fangorn
Ah, but you have to have a standard that you believe holds to all of mankind, not just people in the West. What is the basis for such a standard?
My opinion.
Originally posted by aquafire
...the 9 / 11 hijackers had "regular exposure to lots of " greasy all-girl action " as you so eloquently put it.
From all reports they whooped it up in the days and weeks preceeding their murderous deeds.
But they were much older than just a few days and weeks....
Originally posted by bunge
Yes, in the original language. And among other things it is a scathing condemnation of many members of the church.
Of the Church, but not of Christianity. Luther and Calvin had "scathing commentaries" of the Church, but not Christianity. The two are not necessarily synonmous, at least not in Protestant thinking.
Originally posted by shetline
My opinion.
Originally posted by Fangorn
Of the Church, but not of Christianity.
Well, you were talking about the "Church history", that's all.
Originally posted by bunge
Well, you were talking about the "Church history", that's all.
I did co-mingle (comingle?) the two didn't I.
My reference to Dante's Inferno (which I have only read in English
Originally posted by Fangorn
Interesting points and I agree with most of what you say, except laying so much at the door of separation of Church and State. You can separate the institutions, but the state will always have religion.The State will answer to either God or Man, and where it answers is what is worships.
Communism ( social Science ) laid claim to answering to the unswerving logic of science..as did the nazi's...
That aside, I take your point regarding the seperation of state & church.
However, another point occured to me, and this aspect of thhe model would be difficult for Islam to repeat as it was so unique.
namely the rise of Descartian logic, and thhe seperation of mind and matter. It in itself provided another major impetus, to the development of science as we know it today.
No Descarte no Science.
Paradaoxically, it is strange ( and somewhat perplexing ) to us to think that Islam ( and not christianity ) encouraged the early flowering of science and mathematics.
As history tells us, the internal dynamics of the era eventually saw such explorations sidelined or actively discouraged as reactionary fundamentalism took hold. ( a sort of living in the past mentality )
One wonders if the more openly outward branches of Islam had won the day, where we in the west would be now..( a backward tribe of gypsies perhaps )
who knows...
Originally posted by aquafire
Apart from your sexist tripe...
Tripe? How can you call tripe sexist? Organ meats are very nutritious, women should get more organ meat in their diets.
But as to the rest, I think you're wrong, because despite their exposure, they brought to it a different attitude, a psycho-pathology if you will, one that comes from a deeper embedded thought process, a process that allows for the seemingly discordant deepening of their hatred of western vice out of their present enjoyment of the self same vices.
All the great homicidal cases seem to offer it into evidence. If you take a serial killer/rapist, especially crimes targetted specifically at women, you see it. Here we've mingled politics, but the dynamics, however paradoxically, don't support you. Arab boys have no relationship to sexual vice. I have seen this first hand, they simply cannot negotiate it
But on to Goldstien,
You present a plausible, yet not so curiously discordant view than the standard outlook -- no problems for me, the standard outlook is deeply invested in looking at the entire history of humanities as a triumph of "western" stewardship, and humanists will more often than not embrace the church (even when they disagree with everything else) as a pillar of cultural preservation.
But you have company, good company, in the rejections of the monastery presented by French essayists. So, it shocks even me, when I scoff at you in spite of myself, but...
you have skimmed a neccessary bit of logistics. The monasteries operated more in the mode of outposts, the people they reached, initially, were well behind the development curve of a Greece and Rome and especially most all of the middle east. While the church may have taken it's sweet time doing more than lip service to "education" it was first staked most deeply in surpressing it's native (European) paganism.
They did have a sort of ossifying effect on knowledge, but by then they had reformed most of Europe into a state that could produce a renaissance... and done a great deal to "re-eduacte" change the course of pagan europe. A big job, that requires a somewhat paranoid approach. In a sense Europe had to develop twice before it could flourish. The middle east went the opposite way during that whole time, gradually slowing and beginning a rapid regression by the time the European renaissance had begun.
The effects of the press, as you note, were profound.
Monasteries may have held on a touch too long, but they did not stifle relative to the older centers of the world, they started at a much more basic point, and had much to do just to catch up. Once they did, they stagnated, but the mark of their success, and the rootedness of the changes they initiated, is that they could not stop the progress they initiated.
Originally posted by Matsu
Tripe? How can you call tripe sexist? Organ meats are very nutritious, women should get more organ meat in their diets.
But as to the rest, I think you're wrong, because despite their exposure, they brought to it a different attitude, a psycho-pathology if you will, one that comes from a deeper embedded thought process, a process that allows for the seemingly discordant deepening of their hatred of western vice out of their present enjoyment of the self same vices.
All the great homicidal cases seem to offer it into evidence. If you take a serial killer/rapist, especially crimes targetted specifically at women, you see it. Here we've mingled politics, but the dynamics, however paradoxically, don't support you. Arab boys have no relationship to sexual vice. I have seen this first hand, they simply cannot negotiate it
But on to Goldstien,
You present a plausible, yet not so curiously discordant view than the standard outlook -- no problems for me, the standard outlook is deeply invested in looking at the entire history of humanities as a triumph of "western" stewardship, and humanists will more often than not embrace the church (even when they disagree with everything else) as a pillar of cultural preservation.
But you have company, good company, in the rejections of the monastery presented by French essayists. So, it shocks even me, when I scoff at you in spite of myself, but...
you have skimmed a neccessary bit of logistics. The monasteries operated more in the mode of outposts, the people they reached, initially, were well behind the development curve of a Greece and Rome and especially most all of the middle east. While the church may have taken it's sweet time doing more than lip service to "education" it was first staked most deeply in surpressing it's native (European) paganism.
They did have a sort of ossifying effect on knowledge, but by then they had reformed most of Europe into a state that could produce a renaissance... and done a great deal to "re-eduacte" change the course of pagan europe. A big job, that requires a somewhat paranoid approach. In a sense Europe had to develop twice before it could flourish. The middle east went the opposite way during that whole time, gradually slowing and beginning a rapid regression by the time the European renaissance had begun.
The effects of the press, as you note, were profound.
Monasteries may have held on a touch too long, but they did not stifle relative to the older centers of the world, they started at a much more basic point, and had much to do just to catch up. Once they did, they stagnated, but the mark of their success, and the rootedness of the changes they initiated, is that they could not stop the progress they initiated.
Off on yet another tangent to this thread, the monastic orders did actually grow out of Greco/Roman ascetic thinking. You would be hard pressed to find a "monkish" example in scripture. John the Baptist maybe, but he was unique in many respects.
And I think you made a good point: Most of what is know considered Western Europe now was completely ignorant of Greek/Roman culture even when Rome fell.
What this has to do with Islamic condemnation of homosexuality, I have no idea.
Originally posted by Matsu
You present a plausible, yet not so curiously discordant view than the standard outlook -- no problems for me, the standard outlook is deeply invested in looking at the entire history of humanities as a triumph of "western" stewardship, and humanists will more often than not embrace the church (even when they disagree with everything else) as a pillar of cultural preservation.
The entire history of humanities began earlier than the 1500s. The time during which the West rose to global prominence and thus could perhaps be loosely termed as ?triumph of ?western? stewardship? is roughly between 1500 and 2000.
But you have company, good company, in the rejections of the monastery presented by French essayists. So, it shocks even me, when I scoff at you in spite of myself, but...
I suppose I expressed myself less than clearly earlier, as I don't share in these French essayists rejection of the contribution of the monastic orders. Following the crumbling of the Empire of Occident, the chaos of the earlier barbaric kingdoms, and the decline of trade and communications, monasteries fulfilled an important task in preserving and transmitting whatever remained of ancient knowledge. However, while much more of that knowledge was better preserved and developed outside Western Christendom, as long as the Church exerted overbearing control over the fields education and publication, that knowledge remained indeed mostly outside the boundaries of the West. And much of what remained was lost through a meticulous work of selection according to what could accomodate doctrine.
The West has been more succesful than its competitors the last 500 years, not becuase it was more religious than them but because it was less.
The monasteries operated more in the mode of outposts, the people they reached, initially, were well behind the development curve of a Greece and Rome and especially most all of the middle east.
That may have been true about latter-empire Batavia and Britannia, but the Roman provinces Gaul, Iberia, and (northern) Africa were as literate, urbanised, and as advanced as Italy, Greece, Egypt or Syria in those days. By 600, however, Rome, along with the rest of the Empire of Occident, was indeed in tatters.
While the church may have taken it's sweet time doing more than lip service to "education" it was first staked most deeply in surpressing it's native (European) paganism.
The same also ,occured in the Eastern Empire, or Byzantium. The Muslim invaders were as primitive as the Germanic chieftains, however the lands they conquered kept thriving.
The middle east went the opposite way during that whole time, gradually slowing and beginning a rapid regression by the time the European renaissance had begun.
During all that time (the Middle-Ages), the Middle-East, as well as Central Asia, South Asia, and East Asia, were the major centres of culture, and were still much so in 1400 despite having been seriously ravaged by the Mongolian invasions (which had a much smaller impact on Europe) some centuries earlier.
By 1500, those centres of culture began stagnation and through a slow process found themselves seriously lagging behind by 1800.
The effects of the press, as you note, were profound.
Monasteries may have held on a touch too long, but they did not stifle relative to the older centers of the world, they started at a much more basic point, and had much to do just to catch up.
If the Church (not just the monasteries) had been more premeable to foreign influences (whether from the Mahometan heathens or the Byzantine heretics) Europe could possibly have caught up much earier than circa 1600.
Once they did, they stagnated, but the mark of their success, and the rootedness of the changes they initiated, is that they could not stop the progress they initiated.
Some of the seeds of that progress can be found notably in the encounter with the Levant during the Crusades. Here you had these backward, unwashed semi-barbaric knights, barons, kings, and their accompanying friars, finding out about much more cultured, sophisticated, libertine, and literate societies, where much more of the ancient knowledge was accessible.
At aboiut the same time, the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, conquered from the Muslims and the Byzantines, rather than expelling the heathens, welcomed them to stay, seeking to rival with Al-Andalus; and for a short time Sicily was a beacon of culture, in which the official languages were the then four idioms of classical culture: Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Venice, which in its earlier days was under Byzantine protection, was by then a maritime empire and part of that more enlightened world and would also act as intermediary between it and the West, still mired in the Dark Ages.
By the 1400s, or Quattrocento as they call it, in the small city-states of Italy, the vernacular rose to the status of a cultured and literary language, science was becoming bolder in searching and experimenting, and the arts were discarding the Gothic models for the re-discovered joys of Graeco-Roman legacy. As the Papacy itself became more lax, it allowed much of that to happen in its own states, to the dismay of many purists.
The shattering of the old certainties on science, the new discoveries, explorations, and the very challenges to the Church by the various reform movements, completely undermind its control. That's where the actual ?rise of the West? begins, not a thousand years earlier.
The Church rose as Rome was falling, and Western civilisation rose as the Church was losing its grip over it.
It was argued that the West began rising with the Church as Rome was falling (years 300~500 of your era), the West actually began rising a thousand years later.
The Islamic world, seems to be mired in the same morass in which Western Europe was roughly between the years 500 and 1500.
Originally posted by ena
Remember, if we were all homos, the human race would cease to exist. Speaking pluralistically, one of the litmus tests of a legitimate lifestyle is how well it scales across a culture. Homosexuality does not scale.
I know where you are coming from. "Socially consistent behavior" is a heckuva thing.
But our society (and the economy, more importantly) has evolved to a level where there is enough excess wealth to support decadent lifestyles of many kinds. Sure, if we were all back to living in caves then your argument would be borne out in society daily. But we have a standard of living now, due to industrialization and the development of civilization, that makes some things viable, socially, and long term, which were not viable before.
Originally posted by finboy
.....our society (and the economy, more importantly) has evolved to a level where there is enough excess wealth to support decadent lifestyles of many kinds. .......we have a standard of living now, due to industrialization and the development of civilization, that makes some things viable, socially, and long term, which were not viable before.
I still wonder whether or not the underlying assumption that wealth, produces decandance & an increase in homosexuality is actually an assumption borne out by history.
Or are we jumping to conclusions?
After all a lot of the " historical tracts" that speak of a rise in homosexual behaviour in relation to cultures, do so from biased religious or socio-political perspectives.
I am not condoning or condemming, merely reflecting on the ultimate sources of our so called historical " evidence "
Originally posted by ena
there is also some [alleged] cross-pollination between Greek and Jewish thought (pre Christianity)
"Greek-Jew is Jew-Greek" - - James Joyce
You all talk as if to say the 'greeks' is to say something that is unified and consistent . . . but there are different eras of Greek thought and different schools that went head to head and who's ideas still resonate, and still go head to head . . . and its not just Platonism versus Aristotileanism . . . .
by the way . . . I just got here . . and its great to read these posts . .
I especially apreciate IG pointing out the West's contact with the Levant . . very contrary to popular unhistorical opinion where the west were not the barbarians . ..
It might also be pointed out that many who came into contact during the Crusades were obliged to dissimulate what they learned as they brought it back, some even formed semi-secret societies of the knowledgable. . . some were thought of, by the church, as having conspired with 'Baphomet' (distortion of 'Mohamet' into a satanic figure) and were burned at the stake. The Hospitallers, for instance (from which we get the origin of Hospitals) was a group that originally started to give lodging to pilgrims and crusaders . . also the Knights Templar
But this is obscure and debatable history . . . anyway
..keep on . . .