Funny anti-religious Internet pics

[Kulindahr]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

I'm not sure what this is making fun of, but it's hilarious:

House Republicans?

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

Priceless!


I got the mental image of God turning to the driver and asking, "Was that as good for you as it was for Me?"

 

[belamyi]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

Talk about revisionism....

Where do you get that "the Church... had ... opposed everything in the old system, science and healthy habits of every time included"? I've taken three different courses that covered the collapse of Rome, and never ran into any indication of that.

Not a lot of technology from Rome was lost. The problem was that the integration of that technology was lost, the application to a widespread system. The Church was instrumental in preserving a great deal of it; the problem was that they weren't interested in spreading it around or restoring it where it had been lost. The part of the Church that preserved it, and even advanced it, was the monastic arm -- but for a long time they tended to keep it, including their innovations, to themselves. Overall, the technology level only dipped briefly after Rome collapsed; what dipped was the universality of the availability of the technology. But that's historically true any time an empire collapses, of technology not directly available to individuals: what takes organization gets lost.

"Never ran into any indication of" book burning, closing of centers of learning, demonization of anything related with the body care, like baths, or even codemnation of mere nudity? And you talk about revisionism...

There is a myth about the Church preserving and even "advancing" learning: the church was as closed in itself as could be, taking its authoritative syllabus of fairy tales as their only guide in all the rich and challenging world that they tried to deny (as far as the bellies and even lower parts of their proud and righteous leaders allowed) and only took a couple (virtually literally a couple) of Latin authors manipulated so that they could serve the purpose of teaching rhetoric without the danger of being set as an example of pagan "values". Whatever was recovered and "advanced" came from either foregin peoples (like the Greek or Arabic-speaking world) or from those whom they considered heretics and devils. When they couldn't fight the reality of Creation any more, the "C"hurch just followed that trend and tide, as keeps doing it today, admitting and adhering what once fervently opposed in the past because not fitting in the procustean bed of the "S"criptures.

What we understand as "technology" in society is precisely the general usage and availability of it that gives it some purpose: otherwise it is not technology, just an item of luxury or a mere oddity. Rome had been sinking from the IIIth century under its own weight (as we have the privilege of witnessing since a few decades in our own civilization), but the bully and narrow-minded intolerance of the Christian churches of the era didn't help precisely in the opposite direction, let alone in sustaining anything that might have been left after the demise.

Some interesting data about those myths relating the transition from Late Antiquity to... what came after can be found in Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization: I said "data", not "brilliant book".

 

[bankside]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

Yes, belamo. I've heard the same argument recently also. "But the church existed during the enlightenment! Therefore it was responsible for it!"

Similarly the Politburo existed during the time of Solidarność. Surely we don't assume the politburo is responsible for that. It makes no more sense to give credit to the church for the advances of the enlightenment than it does to give credit to Louis XVI for masterminding the French Revolution.

 

[belamyi]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

So you're reaffirming your clinging to falsehoods?

What are falsehoods ONLY according to the falsehoods to which you cling is what I propose to discuss... but you seem too afraid to get away from your own falsehoods. The "preservation and revival of learning" did not come through the Catholic church but through the Greek heretic Christian or Arab pagans miscreants: we had it IN SPITE of the Catholic church, but that the church actually preserved and "advanced" even a small amount of that heritage is a lie repeated so many times that too many people accept it as a matter of faith without caring to examine the truth of it, and they consider that you are the liar if you deny and attack them for telling simply the truth that is there for anyone to read and understand. I wrote above what was actually that supposed "preservation" and "fostering".

No, Liberation Theology is considered heretical because it tends to start with premises other than the Bible.

Theology is the examination of the teaching of religion. Religion with theology is claptrap.

No, Liberation Theology is considered heretical because it tends to show that Catholic "truths" and dogmas are NOT Bible-based.

And have you?

That's another reason I have little to do with the kind of churches I mentioned: their idea of "using" Greek and Hebrew is to read their English, look at what some guide says the Hebrew or Greek mean, and stir that into what they were going to say anyway; I was taught that you're not using Greek and Hebrew until you're consulting contemporary sources in those languages, not just looking at the original and referring to your English translation.

It's so much more fun that way, anyway -- there are rather profound things in those original languages that no one has ever translated and published. Though it's rather anticlimactic to take a facsimile of a recently uncovered ancient document and start working on it only to realize it's a servant's task list for the day -- insightful for daily life at the time, but disappointing.

Finished the Greek part, starting over on it, and using my Easter vacation period to start the Hebrew part and test what are my profitings from the Hebrew handbooks I have been cramming the past few months. So far I have only gathered a few "interesting" points in translation here and there across the bibliography I use as a translator and translating geek.
Get back on me for next Christmas (provided we are still around) if you ever are actually interested in my progress with all that.

Religion is a claptrap in itself, whether alone or on the rocks.

 

[belamyi]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

Yes, belamo. I've heard the same argument recently also. "But the church existed during the enlightenment! Therefore it was responsible for it!"

Similarly the Politburo existed during the time of Solidarność. Surely we don't assume the politburo is responsible for that. It makes no more sense to give credit to the church for the advances of the enlightenment than it does to give credit to Louis XVI for masterminding the French Revolution.

If Reagan, Blessed John Paul II and the fly on the horse's head were responsible for the demise of communism and the race of the carriage then...

 

[bort138]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

You'd better follow your own teachings and get reading, bro. If it wasn't about me stating anything, then tombastep had no point to begin with, since his entire argument revolved around the alleged "baiting" that particular statement he quoted of mine was designed to do.

Fail on reading comprehension.

He did have a point.
He linked to two other of your threads to show it.

Try again.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

No, the Bible clearly states that slavery is OK (depending on who it is) and male homosexuality is not.

Go hang out with the other fundamentalists. If you don't know how to read a whole book, it's not worth the effort of trying to communicate with you. YUou insist on doing the very thing that you deride in others: pick and choose.

When you've done as Belamy recommends -- learn Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, so you can actually read the thing -- get back to me.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

"Never ran into any indication of" book burning, closing of centers of learning, demonization of anything related with the body care, like baths, or even codemnation of mere nudity? And you talk about revisionism...

There is a myth about the Church preserving and even "advancing" learning: the church was as closed in itself as could be, taking its authoritative syllabus of fairy tales as their only guide in all the rich and challenging world that they tried to deny (as far as the bellies and even lower parts of their proud and righteous leaders allowed) and only took a couple (virtually literally a couple) of Latin authors manipulated so that they could serve the purpose of teaching rhetoric without the danger of being set as an example of pagan "values". Whatever was recovered and "advanced" came from either foregin peoples (like the Greek or Arabic-speaking world) or from those whom they considered heretics and devils. When they couldn't fight the reality of Creation any more, the "C"hurch just followed that trend and tide, as keeps doing it today, admitting and adhering what once fervently opposed in the past because not fitting in the procustean bed of the "S"criptures.

What we understand as "technology" in society is precisely the general usage and availability of it that gives it some purpose: otherwise it is not technology, just an item of luxury or a mere oddity. Rome had been sinking from the IIIth century under its own weight (as we have the privilege of witnessing since a few decades in our own civilization), but the bully and narrow-minded intolerance of the Christian churches of the era didn't help precisely in the opposite direction, let alone in sustaining anything that might have been left after the demise.

Some interesting data about those myths relating the transition from Late Antiquity to... what came after can be found in Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization: I said "data", not "brilliant book".

So you jump five or six centuries later to describe what happened when Rome came apart? That's really sloppy procedure.

You're also making the error of treating the Church as a monolithic entity with a modern sort of control over all its parts. That's far, far from the truth. As the middle ages progressed, monasteries, often not even under the control of anyone but their own Father General (or whoever), did as they darned well pleased. The monks didn't appreciate hard labor more than anyone else, and so they pursued innovation and invention. Especially by the time you reference, when burnings of heretics was going on, the level of their creativity had gotten quite impressive.

BTW, the Church had all that authority precisely because at the time of one of the last sackings of Rome a very wealthy Christian stepped forward and used up his own fortune trying to keep things running. The pope took over the program, and ended up effectively as king of a great deal of Italy. Until the Franks showed up, he was pretty much the heaviest secular power in the old Western Empire; it was his authority backed with actual armies that established his "spiritual" power (along with some tidily forged documents).

And whether or not something is technology has nothing to do with how widely it's available. If some monk in northern Scotland had come up with radio to talk with some other monk in Ireland, it would have been technology even if no one knew anything about it. It wouldn't have benefited anyone, is the only trouble, and that's where the myth of a technological slump in the "Dark Ages" comes from: the technology was still around and even improving, but only isolated communities had it for use.

they should really be called the "Dim Ages", both because the technology that could have lifted some of the dark wasn't spread around to do so, and because the authorities who made people afraid to spread it around were pretty dim in their policies.

 

[belamyi]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

Oh, by the way, I am (finally!) using the crappy 1984 edition of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia that I bought from these people over a couple of years ago now

So there goes more time to waste from my sorry loser life

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

Yes, belamo. I've heard the same argument recently also. "But the church existed during the enlightenment! Therefore it was responsible for it!"

Similarly the Politburo existed during the time of Solidarność. Surely we don't assume the politburo is responsible for that. It makes no more sense to give credit to the church for the advances of the enlightenment than it does to give credit to Louis XVI for masterminding the French Revolution.

You're the only one stating any such argument.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

What are falsehoods ONLY according to the falsehoods to which you cling is what I propose to discuss... but you seem too afraid to get away from your own falsehoods.

You said something like the Bible is a mass of contradictions. That's false.
The only defense of your position on the Bible that's been made is Fundamentalist picking and choosing, refusing to read it as a whole book.

My "falsehoods" are called "reading the whole book" and using scholarship.

The "preservation and revival of learning" did not come through the Catholic church but through the Greek heretic Christian or Arab pagans miscreants:

Good at changing the subject, aren't you?

Your original assertion was that the Church destroyed technology and learning. That's false -- it preserved it, via the monasteries mostly. You keep jumping away from what you asserted to entirely later events.

Your assertion covered the collapse of Rome, so stick to the centuries between 300 and 700.

BTW, Western monasteries never stopped exchanging scholarship with their Eastern counterparts -- they were rather independent, that way.

we had it IN SPITE of the Catholic church, but that the church actually preserved and "advanced" even a small amount of that heritage is a lie repeated so many times that too many people accept it as a matter of faith without caring to examine the truth of it, and they consider that you are the liar if you deny and attack them for telling simply the truth that is there for anyone to read and understand. I wrote above what was actually that supposed "preservation" and "fostering".

LOL

I used to believe the fable you do. Then I ran into some books about medieval technology and invention, that had nothing to do with the Church -- except that consistently throughout, the places that those were preserved and improved were monasteries, which happen to be part of the Church. It doesn't really matter what the hierarchy and the asswipe in Rome were doing; the monasteries just kept improving what the Romans had and coming up with ideas of their own.

Interestingly, there's another theme running through that: a great deal of technological advancement in those monasteries had to do making wine and beer.

No, Liberation Theology is considered heretical because it tends to show that Catholic "truths" and dogmas are NOT Bible-based.

Hmm. I've read a few thousand pages of liberation theology, and they have a habit of referencing Marx and others quite frequently. Those figures aren't relevant to theology, and building theology relying on them is by definition heterodox at the least.

Finished the Greek part, starting over on it, and using my Easter vacation period to start the Hebrew part and test what are my profitings from the Hebrew handbooks I have been cramming the past few months. So far I have only gathered a few "interesting" points in translation here and there across the bibliography I use as a translator and translating geek.
Get back on me for next Christmas (provided we are still around) if you ever are actually interested in my progress with all that.

How many years of Greek? Have you gotten to where you can pick up Aesop's Fables or something by Aristotle and just read?

"Translator and translator geek"?

Religion is a claptrap in itself, whether alone or on the rocks.

The vast majority of the world, including many very educated and intelligent people, disagree with you.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

Okay, for the sake of argument....How would you explain away the fact that there is a very large boat lodged high up in the crevices of Mt Ararat in Modern day Turkey, and that it very much fits the measurements as in the Book of Genesis?

Mikey . . . .

Which claim is this? I've seen three.

 

[belamyi]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

So you jump five or six centuries later to describe what happened when Rome came apart? That's really sloppy procedure.

No, I summarize what happened and where it came from: it's far less sloppy that simply saying something is sloppy, without actually indicating what is that is being called "sloppy", and with only what sloppy reference to "jump five or six centuries later"... from what?

You're also making the error of treating the Church as a monolithic entity with a modern sort of control over all its parts. That's far, far from the truth. As the middle ages progressed, monasteries, often not even under the control of anyone but their own Father General (or whoever), did as they darned well pleased. The monks didn't appreciate hard labor more than anyone else, and so they pursued innovation and invention. Especially by the time you reference, when burnings of heretics was going on, the level of their creativity had gotten quite impressive.

Not even when I take it from your own monolithic reference to the church (notice that I wrote above about the "heretic" Greeks, you know, monophisism and all that crap). As the Middle Ages progressed, they progressed in the direction I exposed above, but not even then did "the monks" take as many liberties as you pretend. Apart from some truly rigorous logical thinking that later came to be despised by secular and seglar asses alike, the "impressive" "level of creativity" you refer to must ber of the kind of the Summa Theologica, I assume?

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

Oh, by the way, I am (finally!) using the crappy 1984 edition of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia that I bought from these people over a couple of years ago now

So there goes more time to waste from my sorry loser life

Some "helper" put mine in storage when I was relocating a few years ago, and I haven't seen it since. As Jockboy could attest, my Hebrew is deteriorating rapidly.

BTW, have you got the one with the introduction(s) in German, in Latin, or both?

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

No, I summarize what happened and where it came from: it's far less sloppy that simply saying something is sloppy, without actually indicating what is that is being called "sloppy", and with only what sloppy reference to "jump five or six centuries later"... from what?

Not even when I take it from your own monolithic reference to the church (notice that I wrote above about the "heretic" Greeks, you know, monophisism and all that crap). As the Middle Ages progressed, they progressed in the direction I exposed above, but not even then did "the monks" take as many liberties as you pretend. Apart from some truly rigorous logical thinking that later came to be despised by secular and seglar asses alike, the "impressive" "level of creativity" you refer to must ber of the kind of the Summa Theologica, I assume?

The monks, especially the Cistercians, took a lot of liberties technologically -- that order along accounted for a couple of hundred inventions, all in the direction of making being a monk an easier life and having better brew to enjoy it with. But they and others also preserved Roman building techniques (too bad they didn't manage to keep the recipe for Roman mortar).

There's also evidence that a lot of classical manuscripts survived in various monasteries, until the time of Ignatius Loyola and then the Inquisition -- damn them.

As for the intellectual gymnastics of the Summa... Aquinas has never impressed me. I barely consider him a theologian, because he sets up Aristotelian above his source material, the Bible.

 

[belamyi]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

BTW, the Church had all that authority precisely because at the time of one of the last sackings of Rome a very wealthy Christian stepped forward and used up his own fortune trying to keep things running. The pope took over the program, and ended up effectively as king of a great deal of Italy. Until the Franks showed up, he was pretty much the heaviest secular power in the old Western Empire; it was his authority backed with actual armies that established his "spiritual" power (along with some tidily forged documents).

And whether or not something is technology has nothing to do with how widely it's available. If some monk in northern Scotland had come up with radio to talk with some other monk in Ireland, it would have been technology even if no one knew anything about it. It wouldn't have benefited anyone, is the only trouble, and that's where the myth of a technological slump in the "Dark Ages" comes from: the technology was still around and even improving, but only isolated communities had it for use.

they should really be called the "Dim Ages", both because the technology that could have lifted some of the dark wasn't spread around to do so, and because the authorities who made people afraid to spread it around were pretty dim in their policies.

What time of the "last sackings of Rome", the "time" of nearly four hundred and fifty years between 1084 and 1527? or 846? 546? 455? 410? those were the last" ones after the one around 390 BC. What "wealthy Christian": Cassiodorus?
With your appreciation of what a technological era actually is, you are using, whether in good or bad faith, the fallcious justification using a swallow to make a summer. Technology does not make sense unless a purpose and, most importantly, an economic and social system is supporting it to propose and impose it instead of another sort of technology... or any technology at all. Compare the car or the computer industry and technology, in Watt's or Babbage's time, respectively, and what we had after WWII.
Those "Dim Ages", if you want to call them that way, are like what we can see in more "tradionally living" parts of Africa or Asia.

How many years of Greek? Have you gotten to where you can pick up Aesop's Fables or something by Aristotle and just read?

"Translator and translator geek"?

I started like nineteen years ago, but I do not count my Greek per years or semesters. However, while coursing French philology studies at the UAB I took as many Greek and Latin courses as optional subjects as I could, so that seventeen years ago I was being asked to translate Thucydides at first sight.
In any case, that is FAR more than you need to get through and into that Simple Greek for Dummies that is the New Testament.

Read again: "translator" (status, profession) and "translating" (activity).

BTW, the Church had all that authority precisely because at the time of one of the last sackings of Rome a very wealthy Christian stepped forward and used up his own fortune trying to keep things running. The pope took over the program, and ended up effectively as king of a great deal of Italy. Until the Franks showed up, he was pretty much the heaviest secular power in the old Western Empire; it was his authority backed with actual armies that established his "spiritual" power (along with some tidily forged documents).

And whether or not something is technology has nothing to do with how widely it's available. If some monk in northern Scotland had come up with radio to talk with some other monk in Ireland, it would have been technology even if no one knew anything about it. It wouldn't have benefited anyone, is the only trouble, and that's where the myth of a technological slump in the "Dark Ages" comes from: the technology was still around and even improving, but only isolated communities had it for use.

they should really be called the "Dim Ages", both because the technology that could have lifted some of the dark wasn't spread around to do so, and because the authorities who made people afraid to spread it around were pretty dim in their policies.

The vast majority of the world, including many very educated and intelligent people, disagree with you.

That may be because, as in my comment above about what is understood as "church", educated and intelligent people are unawarely siding with those who do not actually have their same intelligence and education, but who purport to represent and defend the same beliefs from the institution they rule to claptrap "very educated and intelligent people" who are not aware of that nominalist sort of claptrap.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics

Those "Dim Ages", if you want to call them that way, are like what we can see in more "tradionally living" parts of Africa or Asia.

The difference being that when things finally open up, the Cistercians and others had technology to immediately share and spread... and those "traditionally living" people don't.

I started like nineteen years ago, but I do not count my Greek per years or semesters. However, while coursing French philology studies at the UAB I took as many Greek and Latin courses as optional subjects as I could, so that seventeen years ago I was being asked to translate Thucydides at first sight.
In any case, that is FAR more than you need to get through and into that Simple Greek for Dummies that is the New Testament.

The NT is hardly "Simple Greek for Dummies" -- it has a wide range of 'types', if you want to call them that, from the near-classical of Hebrews to the run-on sentences of Paul (who, even in Greek, writes a sentence more than a page long?!), to the elegant simplicity of John, to the rustic "street Greek" of Mark.

It's been my experience that only people who can read Xenephon can actually deal with the whole NT.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Funny anti-religious Internet pics