Comment by Curosinono
5 hours ago
What do you mean?
There is a clear phase in our history which was long and no progress was made "Dark age". In that time religion already existed right?
So what was the speciality of christianity apparently bootstrapping everything else? You could only be religious if you had resources to do so. Could have been filled with something else instead.
Napoleon wrote somewere (i read that in a museum) that education is ncessary to fight religion.
We do not know if it hold us back or not, but it also didn't push us through phases like the dark age.
But religion is primarily for control of the people. Thats why you see a lot of rules in the bible. Like paying 5 silver for raping a woman and having to take her as abride.
The allegedly lack of progress during the "Dark ages" is a narrative constructed later on, during the Illustration/Enlightenment era. Just to mention an example, alchemical research was verly prolific in that time, and it was the basis for what we now call chemistry and pharmacology.
And agricultural practices which enabled the future flourishing of Europe.
> religion is primarily for control of the people. Thats why you see a lot of rules in the bible.
thank God the world has moved past this kind of 2010s New Atheism.
Oh, the irony.
Yes, it does feed a spiritual need but is's absolutely about control. The current US administration is guided by Project 2025 which wants God to govern (so to speak).
I spend a lot of time thinking about religion, and most of that is anger/fear over the religious zealots who want to control everybody else.
There is a control dimension, because humans require some degree of limitations in order to thrive. Ultra-individualism breaks down entirely the moment you think about actual society (like actually considering children) rather than utopian fantasies about how some people want society to work.
That being said, the way anti-religion ppl talk about "control" is so profoundly sloppy and underdefined that it's entirely meaningless. If I try to stop someone from shooting me, am I trying to control them? If I change the the youtube algorithm, did I control them? If I spread a bunch of malaria-resistent mosquitos around, did I control them?
Christianity is evangelical because it believes what it's doing is good and should be shared. If you can only conceptualize this as "control", then I feel sorry that you've internalized the worst and most misery-inducing parts of the last 100 years of western philosophy.
This evangelical quality is a feature of many world religions, including the ones that don't normally get called religion, like the New Atheism movement.
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Does western music lack value because it was forced to settle on 440 Hz? Is punk un-redeemable because there is a nazi punk offshoot?
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Historians are nowadays equivocal in saying that the "dark ages" is really a misnomer. It's the middle ages and it was more marred (in Europe) by several powers warring with each other than by any religious "darkening".
> But religion is primarily for control of the people. Thats why you see a lot of rules in the bible. Like paying 5 silver for raping a woman and having to take her as abride.
well, now you're just revealing that you don't understand the religion of Christianity at all
Christians seek to control even non christians
> There is a clear phase in our history which was long and no progress was made "Dark age".
The Dark Ages are kind of a myth. The Eastern Roman Empire (aka. Byzantine Empire) existed through the whole time period up to the beginning of the Renaissance. And while some parts of Western Europe were "dark" (mainly due to Viking and Islamic invasions), Western Europe wasn't and isn't the whole world.
The Dark Ages are dark, because they lack surviving written record; ironically due to advancements in writing technology, where people would begin writing on hides instead of papyrus or chisel stone; this made writing a lot faster, but also had a far shorter life span, particularly because people could wipe the hide clean (after the text was of no use), and then rewrite on it.
Conversely, a lot of the writings of the Antiquity are preserved, in large part due to Middle Eastern scholars. The Dark Ages aren't a myth, but rather what is meant by "dark" is misunderstood.
No, the whole thing is some sort of revisonist history gambit. The Dark Ages were "dark" because they represented a massive and lasting decline in social organization, trade, and yes, literacy. These are all extremely well documented. You can see it in basically any field you want -
The invention of the "dark ages" is really interesting, and afaik it was created in order to create a "this time it's different" sense of ahistoricity. Very similar to the "year zero" idea in communism, and even the current AI hype cycle.