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aerandir:

--- Citaat ---Laodicea schreef op 04 augustus 2006 om 21:35:quote:Het is vrij typisch, als de welvaart héél erg toeneemt, dan keert men zich tegen de bron waar men het aan te danken heeft, past overigens goed in de Christelijke wereldvisie.
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O het Christendom geeft welvaart.....toe maar.... bullshit

quote:In dat andere topic heb ik je al voor de zoveelste keer wat argumenten voorgeschotelt, maar jij ontwijkt ze steeds.
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help me even dan weet niet over wat je het hebt
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Laodicea:
quote:aerandir schreef op 04 augustus 2006 om 22:21:
O het Christendom geeft welvaart.....toe maar.... bullshit

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Ken je historie, een aardige boekbespreking:quote:THE VICTORY OF REASON
by Rodney Stark
(Random House, 2005, 281pp, hardback, $49.95. Available from AD Books)

Many Western nations today are anxious to distance themselves from their Christian heritage and ever-eager to apologise for Christianity's alleged crimes or excesses of the past. The European constitution - fortunately rejected by France and Holland to date and still languishing - makes no mention of Europe's Christian roots, despite John Paul II's efforts in the years before his death in 2005.

In many countries in Europe, North America and Oceania, Christianity has been increasingly marginalised from the public square to the realm of private religious practice.

The present book, The Victory of Reason, by Rodney Stark, an American university professor of social sciences and Berkeley graduate, comes as a breath of fresh air, setting the historical record straight and overturning a host of myths that have grown up in recent decades regarding Christianity as an enemy of progress in past centuries.

Not surprisingly the book has been attacked in the United States and elsewhere by the upholders of political correctness averse to letting facts get in the way of a good story.

This difficult-to-put-down book examines the success of the West and how it was able to leave the rest of the world behind by the time of the Middle Ages. The key factor was that faith in reason, integral to Christianity's commitment to this understanding of the world.

Breakthroughs
Professor Stark advances the revolutionary, controversial and long overdue idea that Christianity and its related institutions were directly responsible for the most significant intellectual, political, scientific and economic breakthroughs of the past millennium.

Christian theology, says Stark, is the very font of reason. While the world's other great belief systems emphasised mystery, obedience or introspection, Christianity alone embraced logic and deductive thinking as the path towards enlightenment, freedom and progress.

There were no Dark Ages, he argues, as this period was the incubator of the West's future glories. Encouraged by the Scholastics and embodied in the great medieval universities founded by the Church, faith in the power of reason permeated Western culture, stimulating the pursuit of science and the evolution of democratic theory and practice. The rise of capitalism was, says Stark, "also a victory for church-inspired reason, since capitalism is in essence the systematic and sustained application of reason to commerce - something that first took place within the great monastic estates."

Myths that Muslim Arab civilisation kept the flames of civilisation burning while Europe languished in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages are put to bed. While Islamic scholars kept ancient Greek and Roman learning alive, their culture did nothing with it.

Stark reminds us that during the "Dark Ages", there were such key inventions as clocks and bells to tell the time and deep-earth ploughs that revolutionised agriculture. European "round" ships, and compasses to tell direction at sea, enabled international transport, communication and travel to occur at an increasing rate.

At the same time, Christian ideas about personal freedom and individual rights led to the abolition of slavery and the enshrining of property rights in the Magna Carta.

The long-held belief that the Protestant work ethic was responsible for kick-starting capitalism in England and Holland is debunked. In fact the medieval Catholics of Venice, Genoa and other Italian city-states invented capitalism and representative government centuries before England and Holland.

There is much more in this fascinating, thought-provoking book.

In his conclusion Stark notes that many in China - which is now embracing the West's capitalism, if not its democratic institutions as yet - have been converting to Christianity. According to a leading Chinese scholar, among other things, it is because Christianity is inseparable from modernity - something no other world religion or secular creed can claim.

"In the past 20 years", he says, "we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this."

It is ironic that belated recognition of Christianity's link with world progress is coming from outside the West, just when the West has developed a hatred of its proud past.

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bron
En nog een:
quote:In his new book, 'How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization', Thomas E. Woods Jr has assembled a multitude of areas of everyday life where the Church has played a key role, one widely overlooked or rejected in secular circles today.

The following is part of the conclusion to the book published with the author's permission.

The Catholic Church did not merely contribute to Western civilisation - the Church built that civilisation. The Church borrowed from the ancient world, to be sure, but she typically did so in a way that transformed the classical tradition for the better. There was hardly a human enterprise of the Early Middle Ages to which the monasteries did not contribute.

The Scientific Revolution took root in a Western Europe whose theological and philosophical foundations, Catholic at their very core, proved fertile soil for the development of the scientific enterprise. The mature idea of international law emerged from the Late Scholastics, as did concepts central to the emergence of economics as a distinct discipline.

These latter two contributions emerged from the European universities, a creation of the High Middle Ages that occurred under the auspices of the Church. Unlike the academies of ancient Greece, each of which tended to be dominated by a single school of thought, the universities of medieval Europe were places of intense intellectual debate and exchange.

David Lindberg explains: "t must be emphatically stated that within this educational system the medieval master had a great deal of freedom. The stereotype of the Middle Ages pictures the professor as spineless and subservient, a slavish follower of Aristotle and the church fathers (exactly how one could be a slavish follower of both, the stereotype does not explain), fearful of departing one iota from the demands of authority. There were broad theological limits, of course, but within those limits the medieval master had remarkable freedom of thought and expression; there was almost no doctrine, philosophical or theological, that was not submitted to minute scrutiny and criticism by scholars in the medieval university."

The Catholic Scholastics' eagerness to search for the truth, to study and employ a great diversity of sources, and treat objections to their positions with precision and care, endowed the medieval intellectual tradition - and by extension the universities in which that tradition developed and matured - with a vitality of which the West may rightly boast.

All of these areas: economic thought, international law, science, university life, charity, religious ideas, art, morality - these are the very foundations of a civilisation, and in the West every single one of them emerged from the heart of the Catholic Church.

Paradox
Paradoxically, the importance of the Church to Western civilisation has sometimes become clearer as its influence has waned. During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the Church's privileged position and the respect it was traditionally accorded were both called into serious question, to an extent without precedent in the history of Catholicism.

The nineteenth century saw more attacks on Catholicism, particularly with the German Kulturkampf and the anticlericalism of the Italian nationalists. France secularised its school system in 1905. Although the Church flourished in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attacks on the Church's liberty elsewhere in the West did untold damage.

The world of art provides perhaps the most dramatic and visible evidence of the consequences of the Church's partial eclipse in the modern world. Jude Dougherty, dean emeritus of the School of Philosophy at Catholic University, has spoken of a connection "between the impoverished anti-metaphysical philosophy of our day and its debilitating effect on the arts."

According to Dougherty, there is a link between a civilisation's art and its belief in and consciousness of the transcendent. "Without a metaphysical recognition of the transcendent, without the recognition of a divine intellect at once the source of nature's order and the fulfilment of human aspiration, reality is construed in purely materialistic terms. Man himself becomes the measure, unaccountable to an objective order. Life itself is empty and without purpose. That aridity finds its expression in the perverseness and sterility of modern art, from Bauhaus to Cubism to post-modernism."

Professor Dougherty's claim is more than plausible; it is positively compelling. When people believe that life has no purpose and is the result of random chance, guided by no greater force or principle, who can be surprised when that sense of meaninglessness is reflected in their art?

A sense of meaninglessness and disorder had been growing since the nineteenth century. In Joyful Wisdom, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "At last the horizon lies free before us, even granted that it is not bright; at least the sea, our sea, lies open before us. Perhaps there has never been so open a sea." That is to say, there is no order or meaning to the universe apart from what man himself, in the most supreme and unfettered act of will of all, chooses to bestow upon it.

Frederick Copleston, the great historian of philosophy, summed up the Nietzschean point of view: "The rejection of the idea that the world has been created by God for a purpose or that it is the self- manifestation of the absolute Idea or Spirit sets man free to give to life the meaning which he wills to give it. And it has no other meaning."

Meanwhile, modernism in literature was busy challenging the pillars of order within the written word - such aspects as giving stories and novels a beginning, middle, and end. They featured bizarre plots in which the main character was forced to contend with a chaotic and irrational universe he was unable to comprehend. Thus Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis begins: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect."

We need hardly point out the degeneration of architecture, which is evident today even among buildings purporting to be Catholic churches.

The point is not necessarily to contend that these works are utterly without merit, but rather to suggest that they reflect an intellectual and cultural milieu at variance with the Catholic belief in an orderly universe that was endowed with ultimate meaning.

Fateful step
By the mid-twentieth century, the time had come to take the final, fateful step: to declare, as did Jean- Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and his school of existentialist thought, that the universe was utterly absurd and life itself completely meaningless. How, then, ought one to live life? By courageously facing the void, frankly acknowledging that all is without meaning and that there are no such things as absolute values. And, of course, by constructing one's own values and living by them (shades of Nietzsche, to be sure).

The visual arts were certain to be affected by such a philosophical milieu. The medieval artist, aware that his role was to communicate something greater than himself, did not typically sign his work. He wished to call attention not to himself but to the subject of his work. A newer conception of the artist, which began to emerge during the Renaissance, reached its full maturity in nineteenth-century Romanticism. A reaction against the cold scientism of the Enlightenment,

Romanticism emphasised feeling, emotion, and spontaneity. Thus the artist's own feelings, struggles, emotions, and idiosyncrasies were to be given expression in his art; art itself became a form of self- expression. The focus of the artist's work began to shift toward depicting his interior disposition. The invention of photography in the late nineteenth century gave added impetus to this trend, since by making the precise reproduction of the natural world an easy task it freed the artist to engage in self-expression.

With the passage of time, this Romantic self-preoccupation degenerated into the simple narcissism and nihilism of modern art. In 1917, French artist Marcel Duchamp shocked the art world when he signed a urinal and placed it on display as a work of art. That a poll of five hundred art experts in 2004 yielded Duchamp's Fountain as the single most influential work of modern art speaks for itself.

Duchamp was a formative influence on London-based artist Tracey Emin. Emin's My Bed, which was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, consisted of an unmade bed complete with bottles of vodka, used prophylactics, and bloodied undergarments. While on display at the Tate Gallery in 1999, the bed was vandalised by two nude men who proceeded to jump on it and drink the vodka. The world of modern art being what it is, everyone at the gallery applauded, assuming that the vandalism was part of the show. Emin is now employed as a professor at the European Graduate School.

These examples symbolise the departure from the Church that many Westerners have undertaken in recent years. The Church, which calls on her children to be generous in the transmission of life, finds even this most fundamental message falling on deaf ears in Western Europe, which is not having enough children even to reproduce itself.

So far has Europe abandoned the faith that built her that the European Union could not bring itself even to acknowledge the continent's Christian heritage in its constitution. Many of the great cathedrals that once testified to the religious convictions of a people have in our own day become like museum pieces, interesting curiosities to an unbelieving world.

The self-imposed historical amnesia of the West today cannot undo the past or the Church's central role in building Western civilisation. "I am not a Catholic," wrote French philosopher Simone Weil, "but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilisation, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded."

That is a lesson that Western civilisation, cut off more and more from its Catholic foundations, is in the process of learning the hard way.
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bronquote:help me even dan weet niet over wat je het hebt
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klik

aerandir:

--- Citaat ---Laodicea schreef op 04 augustus 2006 om 22:46:quote:Ken je historie, een aardige boekbespreking:
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ik ken mijn eigen religie aardig goed

[...]
bron
En nog een:

[...]
bronquote:klik
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Tja maar komt dat daadwerkelijk door het christendom???? bahrein,japan (nr 2 rijkste land ter wereld per inwoner),dubai pm maar een paar voorbeelden te noemen zijn toch niet echt christelijke landen... en die txt heb ik stuk gelezen in inderdaad staat daar "bewijzen" in....vanuit de bijbel..... die geschreven is door mensen
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Nunc:
quote:aerandir schreef op 04 augustus 2006 om 23:17:

ik ken mijn eigen religie aardig goed

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Het ging Laodicea om de geschiedenis in het algemeen van de westerse wereld. Niet om de historie van jouw religie.quote:Tja maar komt dat daadwerkelijk door het christendom???? bahrein,japan (nr 2 rijkste land ter wereld per inwoner),dubai pm maar een paar voorbeelden te noemen zijn toch niet echt christelijke landen...
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Nee, als het zwarte goud (olie) letterlijk naar boven komt borrelen, dan hoef je niet geavanceerd te zijn om er aan te verdienen. Dat was een paar honderd jaar geleden (voordat olie op wereldschaal nodig was om de economie draaiende te houden) wel anders.

quote:en die txt heb ik stuk gelezen in inderdaad staat daar "bewijzen" in....vanuit de bijbel..... die geschreven is door mensen
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Dan heb je de tekst dus niet gelezen. Want anders zou je een dergelijke opmerking niet maken.

De meeste punten die in de tekst worden aangedragen bevatten helemaal geen bijbelteksten maar gewoon geschiedkundige gegevens uit niet-bijbelse bronnen.


hieronder de totale lijst aan bijbelteksten op http://www.tektonics.org/lp/nowayjose.html, en hoe ze gebruikt worden:

quote:1 Cor. 1:18 For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

1 Cor. 15:12-19 Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead,  (.. ) we are of all men most miserable.

John 1:46 And Nathanael said unto him, Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?

Acts 21:39 But Paul said, I am a man which am a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city...

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Teksten zijn als inleiding op punt 1 en 2 gebruikt, niet om iets te bewijzen.quote:Here's how one of our readers put it: Herod Agrippa -- this man was a client king for the Romans over the area surronding Jerusalem -- "was eaten of worms" as Luke reported in Acts 12:20-23. Copies of Acts circulated in the area and were accessible to the public. Had Luke reported falsely, Christianity would have been dismissed as a fraud and would not have "caught on" as a religion. If Luke lied in his reports, Luke probably would have been jailed and/or executed by Agrippa's son, Herod Agrippa II (who held the same position), because that was the fellow Paul testified to in Acts 25-26 (reported by Luke). And Agrippa II was alive and in power after Luke wrote and circulated Acts; indeed he had access to all the needed information and claims ("For the king knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely: for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden in a corner. King Agrippa, believest thou the prophets? I know that thou believest." [Acts 26:26-27] Did Agrippa execute Paul for these statements? No, and he could not have if it was not true. Rather Agrippa told Governor Festus, "This man might have been set at liberty, if he had not appealed unto Caesar." [Acts 26:32])
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in item 7 wordt wat informatie uit Handelingen gebruikt, een boek wat door veel historici gezien wordt als een waardevolle bron aan informatie over het leven in de eerste eeuw.  Ik zie hier niet echt een 'als bewijs gebruiken' in.

quote:The burial -- Byron McCane has written in an article The Shame of Jesus' Burial in which he argues that Joseph of Arimathea had clear motives, even aside from being a disciple of Jesus, to arrange for the burial: It fits the requirement of Deut. 21:22-23 to bury one hung on a tree before sunset, and as a Sanhedrin member Joseph would have this concern and want to makr arrangements. On the other hand, that Jesus was buried in Joseph's tomb -- and not in a tomb belonging to his family -- was itself dishonorable. The lack of mourners for Jesus was also a great dishonor

(..)

At the other end of the letter's theological exposition (15.12), Paul quotes Isaiah 11.10: the Davidic Messiah is the world's true lord, and in him the nations will hope." (page 568-569)

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Niet echt een citaat, maar toch...  (in item 15 en 16)

quote:
Throughout the NT, the apostles encouraged people to check seek proof and verify facts:

1 Thessalonians 5:21 Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

And when fledgling converts heeded this advice, not only did they remain converts (suggesting that the evidence held up under scrutiny), but the apostles described them as "noble" for doing so:

Acts 17:11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.

As if the apostles weren't making things hard enough for themselves by making extraordinary and testable claims in a social environment where it was difficult to keep secrets, they increased the odds significantly by actively encouraging people to check out their claims. Encouraging people to verify claims and seek proof is a guaranteed way of ensuring that your fledgling cult is a flop - unless, of course, those claims hold up under the scrutiny that your encouragement will undoubtedly generate

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tja, het zijn citaten, maar ze worden gebruikt ter illustratie van hoe de discipelen handelden. Niet direct als 'bewijs dat het christendom gelijk heeft'.


Dus dat zijn 11 citaten als je een beetje ruim telt. Meer kon ik er niet vinden in het artikel, wat toch wel zo'n 10 tot 15 pagina's A4 is! Daarvan zijn er 4 alleen maar als inleiding gebruikt, en een paar andere ter illustratie. Een beetje makkelijk om dat af te doen met "inderdaad staat daar "bewijzen" in....vanuit de bijbel..... die geschreven is door mensen". Ik mag toch hopen dat dat niet je enige reactie is, op deze verzameling aan geschiedkundige bewijzen?


Uiteraard kun je het ook anders bekijken, en zeggen dat deze bijbelcitaten wel gebruikt worden als bewijs. Maar dat is een flauw woordspel. Nergens zegt de auteur: "het christendom is waar, want het staat in de bijbel, en die is absoluut waar" (wat je een 'bewijs vanuit de bijbel' zou kunnen noemen). Hij gebruikt de bijbelse gegevens alleen maar om te laten zien hoe het vroege christendom was.

Maar misschien vind je dat ook nog te ver gaan? Daarvoor moet je immers nog aannemen, dat wat in de bijbel opgetekend staat, toch op z'n minst nog een beetje historisch klopt? Gelukkig bijkt, dat alles wat we kunnen checken lijkt te kloppen, en bevestigd wordt door bronnen die niet bijbels (en niet christelijk) zijn. Maar je mag best uitleggen, waarom de bijbel niet betrouwbaar zou zijn. (En vergeet niet: alles waar jij in gelooft, is ook opgeschreven door mensen, dus dat soort goedkope argumenten, daar trappen we niet in).


Wellicht kun je in de toekomst nog eens ingaan op enkele van de in het artikel genoemde punten?

Laodicea:
quote:aerandir schreef op 04 augustus 2006 om 23:17:
ik ken mijn eigen religie aardig goed

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Ik had het over historie.quote:Tja maar komt dat daadwerkelijk door het christendom????
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Ja.quote:bahrein
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Daar zit dan ook olie in de grond, die rijkdom is niet bepaald door eigen verdienste gekomen. Als ze niet beschermd werden door de USA, waren ze allang geplunderd.quote:japan (nr 2 rijkste land ter wereld per inwoner)
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Japan is terecht een geval apart, Japan heeft sinds de Meji periode altijd geprobeerd om het westen te kopiëren, dat kopiëren alleen niet genoeg was bewees de smadelijke nederlaag in 1945 wel. Met tyrannie kom je een heel eind, kijk maar naar Nazi Duitsland of naar het Communisme, allebei waren ze aardig succesvol, maar het stort toch op een gegeven moment in. Na WO2 groeide het Christendom weer wat in Japan, maar omdat het daarna erg welvarend werd, bleef de groei van het Christendom langzaam. Vergeet trouwens niet dat Japan haar welvaart van vandaag ook aan de genadevolle houding van de USA heeft te danken.quote:,dubai
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Daar geldt hetzelfde voor als bij Bahrein.quote:pm maar een paar voorbeelden te noemen zijn toch niet echt christelijke landen... en die txt heb ik stuk gelezen in inderdaad staat daar "bewijzen" in....vanuit de bijbel..... die geschreven is door mensen
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Dan heb je het niet goed gelezen, want citeer eens een stuk waar men een cirkelredenering toepast?
En let een beetje op dat quoten, ik moet steeds je post herstellen.

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