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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 22dca7b | Immodesty' in dress was outlawed. A woman was jailed for arranging her hair at an 'immoral height'. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 5fba570 | What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews?' Luther offered seven actions. First, to set fire to their synagogues and schools . . . Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach hence.. | Rodney Stark | ||
| a6cc32e | Christianity was oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the superiority of the past. At least in principle, if not always in fact, Christian doctrines could always be modified in the name of progress as demonstrated by reason. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 507c17c | The only common feature of the three successful Reformations was their rejection of papal authority; otherwise they were quite at odds. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 22a4cca | The only plausible common basis for all these events is to celebrate the rise of Protestantism. This raises an even more important matter: that so many of the achievements attributed to Protestantism are entirely mythical and some of the actual results of the rise of Protestantism were quite unfortunate. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 3a6570d | There is an additional and compelling question that probably also will go unaddressed: what is a Protestant? In this brief Introduction I will demonstrate that the category 'Protestant' includes so much variation on such important matters as to be essentially meaningless, except when used very narrowly. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 27d840a | About all that Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans and Anabaptists agreed upon was the divinity of Jesus and the wickedness of the pope. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 2c83442 | there is at least as much, and probably much more, variation on these matters among the Protestants of various types included in these merged 'Protestant' groups, than between the 'average' Protestants and the Catholics | Rodney Stark | ||
| 87fae4c | Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) was among the first to express deep regrets over the rise of individualism, which he traced back to the Protestant Reformation. Tocqueville is, of course, famous for his two-volume work Democracy in America, based on his perceptive nine-month tour of the nation in 1831. He had much praise for the young republic, but he feared it suffered from excessive individualism. Among his concerns was that individualism .. | Rodney Stark | ||
| bc04e7a | The image of medieval piety, of churches filled with devout peasants, has no historical basis. | Rodney Stark | ||
| ffb804d | Even if they hated going to church and knew very little of Christianity, Europeans in the era of the Reformations were not irreligious. But, as Gerald Strauss put it, they 'practiced their own brand of religion, which was a rich compound of ancient rituals, time-bound customs, a sort of unreconstructable folk Catholicism, and a large portion of magic to help them in their daily lives for survival'. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 6eafe6b | Today, little has changed in European religious life. State churches still dominate all of Europe's 'Protestant' nations, with the negative consequences that will be seen in the next chapter. Church attendance remains low everywhere. And magic is still widely embraced! | Rodney Stark | ||
| b4ee62c | Thus it was that, beginning in about the ninth century, the growing monastic estates came to resemble well-organized and stable firms that pursued complex commercial activities within a relatively free market, investing in productive activities involving a hired workforce, guided by anticipated and actual returns. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 80c30db | The need for loans often was so great and so widespread that Italian banks opened branches all across the Continent. Although many bishops, monastic orders and even the Roman hierarchy ignored the ban on usury, opposition to interest lingered. As late as the Second Lateran Council in 1139, the Church 'declared the unrepentant usurer condemned by the Old and New Testaments alike and, therefore, unworthy of ecclesiastical consolations and Chr.. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 66a8873 | 39 It was the same in the other great houses. And all of this was possible because the great monasteries began to utilize a hired labour force, who not only were more productive than the monks had been,40 but also more productive than tenants required to provide periods of compulsory labour. Indeed, these tenants had long since been satisfying their labour obligations by money payments. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 9c734b3 | Once the Lutheran churches were secure, Luther, like most other leaders of the Reformations, believed in freedom of conscience only for those who agreed with him. | Rodney Stark | ||
| d7840ce | does not ensure that power will be used wisely or humanely. | Rodney Stark | ||
| d0de3b8 | In his magisterial The Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch was quite correct that 'Luther's writing of 1543 is a blueprint for the Nazi's Kristallnacht of 1938', | Rodney Stark | ||
| 7efa49b | the Reformations resulted in state churches that were even more repressive of individuals than the Catholic Church ever attempted to be. The Reformations did not contribute anything to religious freedom and tolerance; to the contrary. Finally, Martin Luther's vicious anti-Semitism played a significant role in legitimating the Holocaust, just as William Shirer claimed. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 2545909 | Recalling his days as a student in Paris from about 1205 to 1210, Cardinal Jacques de Vitry wrote: "Simple fornication was held to be no sin. Everywhere, publicly, close to their brothels, prostitutes attracted the students who were walking by on the streets and squares of the city with immodest and aggressive invitations."31 It was, of course, against regulations for students to accept such invitations. But many students flouted those and .. | Rodney Stark | ||
| c6c71a3 | Humans will tend to adopt and retain those elements of culture that appear to produce "better" results, while those that appear to be less rewarding will tend to be discarded." | Rodney Stark | ||
| 5ccfd11 | Sad to say, it is no surprise that the massacre of Antioch is barely reported in many recent Western histories of the Crusades. Steven Runciman gave it eight lines, 30 Hans Eberhard Mayer gave it one, 31 and Christopher Tyerman, who devoted several pages to lurid details of the massacre of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, dismissed the massacre of Antioch in four words.32 | Rodney Stark | ||
| c258807 | The Church never endorsed the notion of the divine right of kings. That was first proclaimed by James I of England (1566-1625), a Protestant after whom the King James Version of the Bible is named. Instead, the Catholic Church always asserted that its authority was greater than that of monarchs. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 9bc06cb | This is not to say that the Muslims were more brutal or less tolerant than were Christians or Jews, for it was a brutal and intolerant age. It is to say that efforts to portray Muslims as enlightened supporters of multiculturalism are at best ignorant. | Rodney Stark | ||
| f310fa3 | Sociologist Rodney Stark states: "Early Christianity was primarily an urban movement. The original meaning of the word pagan (paganus) was 'rural person,' or more colloquially 'country hick.' It came to have religious meaning because after Christianity had triumphed in the cities, most of the rural people remained unconverted." | Stephen T. Um | ||
| 10c9113 | To sum up: the Reformations resulted in state churches that were even more repressive of individuals than the Catholic Church ever attempted to be. The Reformations did not contribute anything to religious freedom | Rodney Stark | ||
| 1b6a0bf | This 'shocking realism'52 has often surprised and upset Augustine's readers. But, given the immense authority of the writer, this view shaped Christian political sensibilities ever after: Christian writers could not condemn suggestions for liberalizing the state, or even for dispensing with monarchies. Moreover, by affirming the secularity of kingship the Church made it possible to examine the basis for worldly power and the interplay of ri.. | Rodney Stark | ||
| e082eb6 | It all began with the French Revolution. Prior to that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries European warfare had involved very small professional armies, fighting very circumscribed campaigns having almost no impact on civilian life. In 1643, the entire Prussian army consisted of 5,500 professional soldiers. A century later the fierce Prussian army commanded by Frederick the Great numbered only 90,000 and still triumphed in the Seve.. | Rodney Stark | ||
| c5822ec | Weber's thesis is now more than a century old and nearly all of the introductory sociology textbooks (but not mine) take it to be a settled fact that the rise of industrial capitalism took place initially in predominantly Protestant countries and that within nations having both Protestants and Catholics, the Protestants dominated the capitalist economy. Moreover, a number of sociologists have attempted to account for the modernization of va.. | Rodney Stark | ||
| a172d4f | Rachfahl noted that the Protestant Ethic thesis was contradicted by the geography of the rise of industrial capitalism. For example, Amsterdam and Antwerp developed industrial capitalism very early when both were Catholic cities, while the Protestant Scandinavian cities were very late to develop industrial capitalism. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 947b3d2 | Lujo Brentano (1844-1931), who correctly noted that industrial capitalism originated in southern Europe long before the German Reformation and was taken north mainly by Catholic banking firms. | Rodney Stark | ||
| dc787a8 | Tawney added an additional twist by suggesting that 'nascent capitalism . . . [shaped] Calvinism's attitude to enterprise and the accumulation of wealth, not vice versa'. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 38e1929 | Then they calculated the relationship between Protestantism and these measures of industrial capitalism. The results were zero: Catholic and Protestant nations did not differ! | Rodney Stark | ||
| 46f3701 | Nationalism' has become a much overused term, subject to far too many and often muddled definitions. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 95591b1 | capitalism was a very Catholic invention: it first appeared in the great monastic estates, way back in the ninth century. | Rodney Stark | ||
| b04fee9 | As suggested by this definition, not all nations are states and not all states are nations. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 4c7228a | Coins and precious metals, food, slaves, and luxury goods flowed to Rome; little came back except tax collectors and soldiers. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 8450ef4 | As for the fall of the Spanish Empire, ironically, perhaps no monarchs in history were more conscientious, honest, or hardworking than Charles V and his son Philip II. Between them they carefully built the Spanish Empire and ruled it for more than eighty years. Nearly every day they rose early and worked diligently at administering this sprawling entity. Had they been wastrels or playboys, they might have done much less damage to the econom.. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 93f05c1 | As for doctrine, Luther asserted the absolute authority of Holy Scripture and that each human must discover the meaning of scripture and establish his or her own, personal relationship with God. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 12956d9 | When William the Conqueror had the Domesday Book compiled in 1086, this forerunner of the modern census reported at least 6,500 water-powered mills operating in England, or one for about every fifty families. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 4863d11 | To put it plainly, women enjoyed higher status and more autonomy among Christians than among pagans, and could expect better treatment from their husbands. Pagan Roman women were "three times as likely as Christians to have married before age 13," according to the sociologist Rodney Stark.3 Christian women also exercised far more choice in whom they wed, and were less likely to be forced into an abortion (a frequent cause of death for women.. | Vincent Carroll | ||
| 45b0b37 | By the late twelfth century Europe was so crowded with windmills that owners began to file lawsuits against one another for blocking their wind. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 3954c19 | Given these attitudes and lack of attendance, it is hardly surprising that the German masses (and most Europeans) were ignorant of even basic Christian facts. | Rodney Stark | ||
| 06f1ebf | When the Bishop of Gloucester systematically tested Church of England diocesan clergy in 1551, of 311 pastors, 171 could not repeat the Ten Commandments, and 27 did not know the author of the Lord's Prayer. | Rodney Stark |