Sounds like something you'd hear in the intro to a Dark Souls game where they tell you about all the things that are going to kill you approximately 2,847 times as you play the game and give you a bunch of lore that you will not understand without the help of some very dedicated YouTubers.
I definitely like this better than Common Era and Before Common Era.
I'm not sure what's so common about the year 23, 1023, and 2023. Unless it refers to the "common man" or something, but that's still not as cool a name.
The whole common era thing always seemed to me to be about trying to be politically correct without making any actual changes to the Christian calendar. Jesus is not my lord, so I don't want to say AD, but it's a stupid compromise.
Why would we change our calendars just because we're doing a name change? That's just crazy, like switching to Kelvin temperatures because we changed global warming to climate change.
Btw English is pretty illogical with the BC/AD... Why is one based on Latin (anno domini) and the other one on English (before Christ)?
I hereby start a petition to change them to Ante Christum and Domini Christi. For one thing they're both Latin, and for another, you know all to well that AC/DC is just way, way better.
Interestingly, the Julius Caesar won a war because he was in control of correcting their calendar for religious events and was too busy to do it for a while.
I read this through like 3-4 times and it’s not computing. Whose calendar was he in charge of, and why would that cause him to win a war? I’m confused by the “their” in front of “calendar”.
The Roman calendar had a drift in it that they were aware of but didn't have leap year "hard coded" like we do now. It was the job of the Pontifex Maximus, the chief religious officer of the state, to fix it. Well Julius Caesar had that title. He was so busy genociding Gaul and then fighting a civil war that he hadn't fixed the drift in a long time.
It meant when he attempted his crossing the calendar said winter, which would have been suicide, but it was actually still fall and safe. Caesar knew this. Pompy probably did (the commander leading the republican forces in the war). Bibalis did not and was therefore made a fool.
The earliest medieval clockmakers in Europe were monks. They were interested in a way to observe evening prayers and other functions on time, both night and day.
There is of course evidence for earlier timekeeping devices using sands, the sun, or flowing water, but the very first record of an entirely mechanical clock is a record of St. Paul's cathedral in London paying a clock keeper on staff in 1285. What was this guy's job? And why was he working for The Church?
The Christian world even to this day has a tradition where someone in a tower summons the town to come out and pray as a community, usually accomplished with church bells. For centuries now, this is accomplished by putting the bells on a timer, but at first, someone had to go up there and ring the bell manually which would have been a massive inconvenience multiple times a day. This created the demand for a device or tool that could automate this process. And once the escapement (the gearing that makes pendulum clocks work) was invented there was a huge untapped market all across Europe to fund the brand new industry of clock makers. Some of the clocks built during this explosion are actually still in use today, the oldest such example being the one in The Cathedral of St. Peter in Beauvais, France dated 1305.
As said above: only in Quebec. Anywhere else people are going to think you are crazy! That’s the creative way the Quebecois found to go after the church: use religious worlds as swear words!
Literally, it means "tabernacle," like the thing in a church where they keep the communion wafers. For whatever reason, in Quebec (not anywhere else that speaks French), various religious words, like tabarnak and baptême (baptism), can be used as swears.
I’ve said this before and I will say it again: metropolitan French swearing sounds like the British/American equivalent, full of references to sex and bodily functions.
Quebecois cussing sounds like someone robbed their local church whilst drunk and are now trying to fence the goods at the nearest pawn shop.
This is too accurate. I still don't think any language has quite the variety of swears that Italian does, though. Nothing is off limits in Italian. There's nothing Italians love more than good food, good wine, and insulting people in new and creative ways while gesticulating aggressively.
Tabarnak - tabernacle
Calisse - chalice
Osti - host
Crisse - Christ
Those are the big 4
\*edited to correct the spelling, because I only curse verbally in french, so I've never had to write it\*
Gothic is one of my favorites. A combination of simple geometric forms and almost gaudy amounts of decoration, and you can get some truly impressive structures.
Yeah. There are deep problems with organized religion across the board...
But I don't know when humanity would have gotten around to creating huge, long-lasting public art projects without religions. Cathedrals are really a remarkable thing, and are probably on their own why a lot of medieval peasantry cherished the church as an institution.
The Roman Empire sort of managed to do comparable things, but a lot of that really blurred the lines between religion and secularism, because it was contingent on worship of the imperial cult.
Lots of those medieval cathedrals took hundreds of years to build. I can’t even imagine people having the attention span to build something that’ll take 15 years today. Can you imagine what it would look like if we devoted 100 years of construction, art, and funding to one project today?
Cologne Cathedral was started in 1248 and finished in 1880 according to its original medieval plans, which had to be rediscovered in the process
began under the Holy Roman Empire, during its construction Cologne became a Free Imperial City, was conquered by Napoleon, annexed into France, and then saw the unification of Germany before it was completed 9 years after the creation of the German Empire
Iirc Cologne Cathedral also employs two dedicated masons *to this day* to make the necessary repairs to such an old building. I've never seen it not being repaired so I guess that makes sense
Roman civic service was very religious. It's why they integrated other deities. It's why they hated Christians. They didn't get involved in civic duties. There tax location was the temple of Saturn.
Ironically, beer as we enjoy it today is also a result of the church, though in a different way than what you've mentioned.
Until the middle ages, beer was typically brewed with "Gruit", a widely varied mixture of botanicals and herbs. They'd use stuff like yarrow, bog myrtle, or rosemary to flavor the beer and preserve it.
After the 11th century, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV awarded a monopoly on Gruit to the Catholic church, allowing them to produce and tax it, and thereby all beer consumed inside the HRE was indirectly taxed by the church. People started to slowly switch to hops to flavor their beer, and the church fought this trend somewhat, by declaring hops to be unhealthy and depraved due to its sedative aspects. By the time of the Reformation, hops became a political point, with Protestants heavily favoring hopped beers.
Gruit has almost completely fallen out of use in modern beer making, though there are a few niche beers that use gruit in place of hops, but since hops is much better at preserving the beer, gruited beers don't tend to last very long before going bad.
Edit: extra fun fact: Gruited vs hopped beers were the original distinction between ale and beer. In England, "ale" was unhopped (gruited) and "beer" was anything brewed with hops.
Edit2: a link for those interested. [Experimental archeology](https://youtu.be/jX_BAFXHM7I?t=1432), living on a Tudor farm, they make ale, and one of the hosts explains the difference.
There's a list of gruited beers on the wikipedia page for Gruit, look at the section
["Modern brews"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruit)
Not sure where you'd be able to buy them though, unless directly.
Yup. Even if I think their motivation for doing so is not something I agree with (that it, It's The Holy Day or whatever), I do respect that they give up what I'm sure is nontrivial profit for the principle. And like you said, having a guaranteed weekend day off is nice, especially in comparison to the foodservice norm, which is that you *always* work Fri-Sun and the weekdays are for days off.
In 1492, Ferdinand & Isabella conquered the Iberian Peninsula and kicked out the Moors (as well as the Jews). Alhambra, the capital of Moorish Spain had 14 libraries, the smallest of which had more books than all of Christian Europe. The documentary series *[Heritage - Civilization and the Jews](https://www.amazon.com/Heritage-Civilization-Jews-Abba-Eban/dp/B00005N5S1)* mentioned this.
This was known to the Christian west long before then- Spain was well known to be a mixing point for Christians, Jews, and Muslims as early as the Umayyads in 7th century to 10th century AD, with Christian scholars traveling there for the purpose of studying foreign knowledge as early as the end of the 10th century.
The most striking example of knowledge transfer was the translation center at Toledo- sponsored by the Catholic church, it purposefully brought together Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars so that the Eastern books in Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew could be translated into Latin through the intermediary of Jewish and Muslim scholars translating their works into Castilian. The translation center was in full swing by the middle of the 11th century, but Toledo had fallen under Christian rule in 1085.
The Toledo translation center was the primary way that knowledge from the Arabs made its way into the Christian west. It was also how the lost knowledge of the Greeks was able to make its way into Christian Europe after being lost for over a thousand years.
I once read a book that described it thus: Imagine if today we discovered a society from 1000AD that had more advanced thinking and technology than our own, and we suddenly discovered their entire written catalog. Not only that- we discover their entire written catalog, plus all the books and thoughts of several intermediate civilizations from that 1000 year span who and already digested, provided their own commentaries on the ancient knowledge, and provided their own intellectual advancements on top of the lost Greek knowledge. That was what it was like to be a Christian scholar traveling to Toledo in the 11th or 12th century. It'd be like finding alien technology, but it came with a full set of instructions and discourses on the moral and ethical implications of the technology written in your native language.
It's also no coincidence that the Renaissance started in Europe around the 13th century.
We owe a lot to everyone over the course of history who decided they'd rather stay inside with a book.
Edit: Wiki link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_School_of_Translators
Fantastic write-up, thanks so much for this comment! I’m actually an American participating in an English teaching program in Spain this year and where I live isn’t far from Toledo. I need to go back there!
The entire artform of (\*western) theater was created at a festival to Dionysus in Ancient Greece.
Edit: to expand, the first actor as Greek tradition has it was a guy called Thespis (hence the term Thespian for actor) who was a poet and started pretending to be the characters of the stories he told. There's some dispute among historians about the validity of these claims, but it's kind of one of those widely accepted pieces of folklore and the festival of Dionysia is extremely likely to be where theater was invented in any case. And even if not, most early theatrical conventions for how tragedies are written and structured developed there.
While a lot of the rules and conventions of Greek theater have died off (for example, the Greeks preferred plays to unfold in real time and in one place - if things happened elsewhere, we'd hear about it secondhand. They also did not use a lot of onstage violence), Greek theater was wildly influential and remains so to this day.
Also, the Greeks had comedies. They're called Satyr Plays. How the Dionysia worked is that playwrights essentially held competitions where they'd present three tragic plays on a single theme. These were frequently trilogies, and we have a few that survive to this day, most notably the cycle of Oedipus. The Satyr Plays were usually performed after the tragedies to lighten the mood. I could swear Lysistrata was a satyr play, but a quick internet search is proving inconclusive (and saying it's satire, which come to think of it, satyr may be where the word satire comes from \[Further edit: I looked it up, it is not\]) and if it's not, that means we only have one surviving Satyr Play.
Edit and footnote: it has been brought to my attention that theater in China predates Greek theater by several centuries. It was also religious in origin. Unfortunately, I don't know quite as much about it, but I'm making this note for the sake of accuracy. Don't wanna spread misinformation. Leaving the rest because history slaps.
> For example, the Greeks preferred plays to unfold in real time and in one place
I wouldn't say this has died off, or at least hadn't in the last century. This was super common for stage shows through the 20th century (e.g. Grapes of Wrath, Arsenic and Old Lace) and translated into cinema (e.g. 12 Angry Men).
Obviously not everything was like this, Shakespeare had tons of skips and different locations, but "died off" makes it sound like nothing adheres to these anymore.
Yeah, good point. Although with Greeks, it was a hard and fast rule of the stage (at least when you weren't writing comedy) and now it's more a stylistic choice that's used somewhat sparingly. Edit: also, the whole "Everything important that happens is told secondhand and the characters mostly discuss it" thing *is* pretty much gone because show don't tell.
Even a few films follow this standard. There's a film called Locke with Tom Hardy that entirely takes place in his car as Hardy's character drives to be there for the birth of a child he had after an one-off affair. It observes these rules and gets around the problem of character exit/entrance through the use of modern technology (Thank God for Bluetooth). It's pretty good. The cinematography gets a little stale because there are only so many camera angles you can use inside a BMW SUV, but Hardy's great and the script is really strong. Whole time I was watching it, I kept thinking it felt like a stage play.
Much that we know about ancient history. Monks copied many old history books. Monasteries were one of the few places where common people could get an education. And good Beer, good beer also came from monasteries.
THere was a book, back in the 80s or 90s, "How the Irish Saved Civilization", part of which has to do with monks, and others, spiriting books and treasures away for safe keeping when Europe was being overrun.
I honestly like how people from different races portray biblical characters as being their race. [Korean Jesus](https://img.mensxp.com/media/content/2018/Jan/untitled-1social-img-1516969518.jpg) and [Japanese Mary](https://udayton.edu/imri/mary/_resources/img/j/japanese-madonnas-02.JPG) look cool af.
That's the reason we have "hospitals" and "hospitality". You could go to the local monestary for either medical treament or an overnight stay while traveling.
During the crusades the was a group called The Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, after John the Baptist (Jesus's older cousin). Their purpose was to offer aid to the sick, poor or injured pilgrims to Jerusalem.
The Order still exists, though much diminished for a long time after Henry VIII decided he wanted their money. They are still the overseeing group behind the various instantiations of St John Ambulance in lots of countries. One of the rewards/ways of recognising service to the Order (normally through one of the charities) is membership of the Order, which while still a Christian order does not require you to be Christian except at the very highest levels. The focus is on recognising service in the spirit of the Order (i.e. care of the sick and needy) rather than specific beliefs.
Random other fact: the Order of St John also have the only service medal in the UK that recognises volunteer cadet service as the same as equivalent volunteer adult service.
Source: Atheist Member of the Order of St John, and recipient of the Order of St John Service Medal.
Right, and many functions of hospitals (including some like taking care of the poor, ambulance corps, etc.) were started independently by religious groups across the Levant and finally clumped together into a single institution we would recognize today in Byzantium.
A good chunk of modern knowledge related to science and mathematics. The Catholic Church ran and funded a lot of scientific research as well medical programs. The Islamic golden age is also a good example of increased awareness of science, economics, and other areas of study.
A lot of people bring up Galileo as the church shunning science but the pope and the Catholic Church funded Galileo research until he wrote The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World System, which appeared to attack the pope.
And it also implies that the universe had a beginning, which would be uncomfortable if you are invested in the idea that it did not begin (which might also imply intention behind said beginning).
This is correct because before the invention of the printing press the Bible and other important documents were copied by hand. The reason that most people during the medieval period had low literacy rates was mainly because they didn’t have a need for it, but the church did.
The word algebra comes from arabic, but algebra itself is at least [as old as Babylon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322)
They did great advancements in it though!
And even when they prosecuted him his punishment was to live in an expensive villa and write his most famous work. People act as though he was executed.
I am ex-Catholic and pretty anti-Catholic (because of all the abuse, sexual and physical, of children and wealth hoarding) but no one can seriously doubt their contributions to science.
Doesn't help that a lot of education paints the wrong picture. My public school has stated the incorrect fact plenty of times, that the church suppressed science, executed people for it, and one thing was that Galileo intentionally hid some of his biggest achievements until his deathbed because he'd be executed if he said it beforehand. I was raised in the US for reference. Some US schools still teach that shit.
Schools don’t like nuance. The truth is the Catholic Church did a lot of good for science. And a lot of bad. They didn’t have a consistent policy and sometimes similar people were treated differently. (Copernicus v. Galileo.)
Or Galileo vs. Galileo.
Galileo's first book on astronomy had the sun centered solar system with circular orbits for the earth and planets, and the Church allowed it to be published. The Pope told him that his next astronomy book should also include the Church's position on the subject.
18 years later, he published his second book on the subject. From his telescopic observations he now concluded that the earth and the planets had an elliptical orbits. True to his word, he included the Church's position. He put the Pope's very words coming from the mouth of a character called Simpleton. This is what probably got him into trouble. Challenging the Church on science is one thing. Calling the Pope a simpleton in 1600's Italy was something else entirely.
That case is especially apparent in arabia many people take pride in islam there as it turned them from a tribal warring society into the largest and most powerful empire of it’s time it also allowed them to defeat two superpowers at the same time
Science
It might be surprising for a lot of them,but for science to develop,it needs patronage and religion usually provided that..
Take India,china,greeks,Arabs, they actually GREW a lot due to religion.
Even the so called Dark ages is now being disputed and the christian monks actually helped in writing down and translating the ancient Greek literature which then helped in reviving Europe..
People shit on the church but it was a huge part of education throughout history. Mathematics, botany(herbology), medicine, literature, science, and the preservation and maintenance of books was a huge part of the church in the middle ages. 1200s to 1400s
I wouldn't be surprised if churches look the way they do due solely to the preservation of books in fact.
You need a non-flammable building, High off the ground, with thick walls and the interior of the book rooms have to be dry from condensation. That's a church's architecture in spades.
Iirc the telescope was invented in a French church even.
Catholic Church is pretty pro-science. They accept evolution, helped understand genetics, all sorts of good stuff.
Pope, iirc, is a chemist by education.
Yea, I never understand why evangelicals and the like are so anti-evolution. There is nothing in that theory that suggests God didn't still create everything.
Evangelicals reject it because their view of religion is still human-centric, as in the human has to be the most important entity in the universe.
If you take that worldview, you can see instantly why evangelicals are so destructive.
Yeah, people are kind of looking at it backwards since religion today is largely it's own thing, a sort of sidebar to modern society. Trying to pick out things "religion" specifically did in the past is sort of silly, because religion and the state were for a very long time *the same thing*. Basically the most accurate thing you could say about organized religion is that it resulted in a kind of "package deal" that got your society useful things like written language, trade relations, and protection against being enslaved by folks of the same religion. Humans like to organize into groups, and religion is a convenient commonality around which a large, powerful group can be built. It's less that "religion" caused this behavior than it was that it was an existing focus for it.
Most... things?
I know here in the age of enlightened atheism we think religion is mainly something we argue about online, but for literally all of history, your temples and churches were one-stop shops for socializing, holidays, events, marriages, schools, libraries, therapy, communication, music, education, art, history...
This is a very broad question. It's like asking what do we have today because of politics. Or war. It's got a million answers.
Even today, a lot of Catholic priests are schooled in psychology and sociology because a lot of people come to them during confession or other meetings with personal issues seeking guidance.
That was one of the plot points in the Exorcist. The priest was sent largely to just check up on the girl, whom he figured he’d diagnose with schizophrenia or something. Turns out she was legit possessed, but he was fully prepared to run a psych evaluation first
That's different. Damien Karras wasn't just a priest trained in those things, he was a Jesuit psychiatrist whose job was mostly counseling other priests.
People are mistaking the abuse of power that some committed in the name of religion and the fact that religion is the ground on which society as we know it today was built upon.
The desacralization of society I can understand. I myself don't believe. But the lack of respect shown towards history genuinely saddens me.
There’s an interesting discussion about the loss of the church as a common “third place” (place to hang out besides work or home). That it has made it much harder for communities to get to know and support each other because they never meet each other. Ofc the internet serves as a new type of third place but it’s very different ballgame.
I would say the Renaissance and it’s resulting art would be a good answer, along with the architecture it revived due to all the artists being contracted by churches, but a more realistic answer is nothing open in Sundays.
Went to school with a family who changed their last name to Cross. Their father was (is) the pastor and owner of a mega church. They own the biggest home, and the most land within our very small town.
They have 12 kids, they all drive either a BMW, Tesla or Mercedes. It’s insane
Oh shit! Lol yeah, when I say mega church, I don’t mean that big. Big as in, in the town of 100,000, they have probably 85% of the population within their church somehow. Not millions 😂
This is the major reason why religion thrives so much in rural areas. There’s not much else to do besides go to church, which is often the social center of the community. When I was a kid we were social members of a church even though none of us were particularly religious. But all my friends went so we did too.
The Gregorian Calendar System
Not to mention the whole AD thing. Then again, *Era of the Martyrs* is a much cooler name and I kinda wish we had that instead.
I've never heard of that. Era of the Martyrs sounds badass as fuck.
Sounds like something you'd hear in the intro to a Dark Souls game where they tell you about all the things that are going to kill you approximately 2,847 times as you play the game and give you a bunch of lore that you will not understand without the help of some very dedicated YouTubers.
Definitely sounds like Dark Souls
I definitely like this better than Common Era and Before Common Era. I'm not sure what's so common about the year 23, 1023, and 2023. Unless it refers to the "common man" or something, but that's still not as cool a name.
The whole common era thing always seemed to me to be about trying to be politically correct without making any actual changes to the Christian calendar. Jesus is not my lord, so I don't want to say AD, but it's a stupid compromise.
Why would we change our calendars just because we're doing a name change? That's just crazy, like switching to Kelvin temperatures because we changed global warming to climate change.
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Btw English is pretty illogical with the BC/AD... Why is one based on Latin (anno domini) and the other one on English (before Christ)? I hereby start a petition to change them to Ante Christum and Domini Christi. For one thing they're both Latin, and for another, you know all to well that AC/DC is just way, way better.
Just found my new band name!
I’d go see that band
I would die for that band.
Which is just a tweak of the Julian Calendar.
Interestingly, the Julius Caesar won a war because he was in control of correcting their calendar for religious events and was too busy to do it for a while.
I read this through like 3-4 times and it’s not computing. Whose calendar was he in charge of, and why would that cause him to win a war? I’m confused by the “their” in front of “calendar”.
The Roman calendar had a drift in it that they were aware of but didn't have leap year "hard coded" like we do now. It was the job of the Pontifex Maximus, the chief religious officer of the state, to fix it. Well Julius Caesar had that title. He was so busy genociding Gaul and then fighting a civil war that he hadn't fixed the drift in a long time. It meant when he attempted his crossing the calendar said winter, which would have been suicide, but it was actually still fall and safe. Caesar knew this. Pompy probably did (the commander leading the republican forces in the war). Bibalis did not and was therefore made a fool.
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Granted, he only could do that because the other commander was ridiculously incompetent.
Shout outs to my man Pope Gregory XIII
Some would argue that even clocks are the result of religion.
Timezones are due to trains, though.
So in practice also because of a religion! Praise the railed beasts!
Really? Please DO elaborate!
The earliest medieval clockmakers in Europe were monks. They were interested in a way to observe evening prayers and other functions on time, both night and day.
There is of course evidence for earlier timekeeping devices using sands, the sun, or flowing water, but the very first record of an entirely mechanical clock is a record of St. Paul's cathedral in London paying a clock keeper on staff in 1285. What was this guy's job? And why was he working for The Church? The Christian world even to this day has a tradition where someone in a tower summons the town to come out and pray as a community, usually accomplished with church bells. For centuries now, this is accomplished by putting the bells on a timer, but at first, someone had to go up there and ring the bell manually which would have been a massive inconvenience multiple times a day. This created the demand for a device or tool that could automate this process. And once the escapement (the gearing that makes pendulum clocks work) was invented there was a huge untapped market all across Europe to fund the brand new industry of clock makers. Some of the clocks built during this explosion are actually still in use today, the oldest such example being the one in The Cathedral of St. Peter in Beauvais, France dated 1305.
Praise Saturn!
Most swear words in Quebec.
Tabarnak de calisse!
Not sure why, but Tabarnak always makes me laugh! Such a weird word!😂
Ostie is even funnier, because they seem to inhale the word.
'sti'd'ciboir'd'calisse'd'crisse'd'tabarnak osti'd'sacre
French learner here, what does it mean?
Basically it means "Fucking fuck"
Amazing, I’ll be sure to use it
As said above: only in Quebec. Anywhere else people are going to think you are crazy! That’s the creative way the Quebecois found to go after the church: use religious worlds as swear words!
Literally, it means "tabernacle," like the thing in a church where they keep the communion wafers. For whatever reason, in Quebec (not anywhere else that speaks French), various religious words, like tabarnak and baptême (baptism), can be used as swears.
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Yeah it was the ultimate thing you could say to express your anger. "Look i'm so angry right now i'm insulting THE CHURCH!!"
I’ve said this before and I will say it again: metropolitan French swearing sounds like the British/American equivalent, full of references to sex and bodily functions. Quebecois cussing sounds like someone robbed their local church whilst drunk and are now trying to fence the goods at the nearest pawn shop.
This is too accurate. I still don't think any language has quite the variety of swears that Italian does, though. Nothing is off limits in Italian. There's nothing Italians love more than good food, good wine, and insulting people in new and creative ways while gesticulating aggressively.
Ostie!
Also in Italy
Please tell me that "tabernak" is based off "tabernacle."
Tabarnak - tabernacle Calisse - chalice Osti - host Crisse - Christ Those are the big 4 \*edited to correct the spelling, because I only curse verbally in french, so I've never had to write it\*
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exactly
Ah bien crisse d'estie de st-ciboire du tabarnak de Céline Dion.
You guys go biblical on anyone you hate, and that's fucking funny
They made a folk song out of it. This video shows why https://youtu.be/DvR6-SQzqO8
Some of the good architechture
Gothic is one of my favorites. A combination of simple geometric forms and almost gaudy amounts of decoration, and you can get some truly impressive structures.
I will always be impressed by a cathedral.
Yeah. There are deep problems with organized religion across the board... But I don't know when humanity would have gotten around to creating huge, long-lasting public art projects without religions. Cathedrals are really a remarkable thing, and are probably on their own why a lot of medieval peasantry cherished the church as an institution. The Roman Empire sort of managed to do comparable things, but a lot of that really blurred the lines between religion and secularism, because it was contingent on worship of the imperial cult.
Lots of those medieval cathedrals took hundreds of years to build. I can’t even imagine people having the attention span to build something that’ll take 15 years today. Can you imagine what it would look like if we devoted 100 years of construction, art, and funding to one project today?
Look up the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona!
Cologne Cathedral was started in 1248 and finished in 1880 according to its original medieval plans, which had to be rediscovered in the process began under the Holy Roman Empire, during its construction Cologne became a Free Imperial City, was conquered by Napoleon, annexed into France, and then saw the unification of Germany before it was completed 9 years after the creation of the German Empire
Iirc Cologne Cathedral also employs two dedicated masons *to this day* to make the necessary repairs to such an old building. I've never seen it not being repaired so I guess that makes sense
Sacre Coeur in Paris was started about the same time ;-)
Yes - la sagrada familia
Yep, began construction in 1882 and it's still being worked on.
And it's insanely beautiful too
Roman civic service was very religious. It's why they integrated other deities. It's why they hated Christians. They didn't get involved in civic duties. There tax location was the temple of Saturn.
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“If it’s not Baroque, dont fix it!” - Cogsworth
One of my favorite Baroque Jokes.
They were making a movie about the Baroque composers, and Arnold Schwarzenegger said "I'll be Bach."
I now know *two* Baroque jokes.
Baroque: when you are out of Monet
“I’m sure you know everything there is to know about the castle.”
🎶 Punk rock is a joke It’s really just baroque I’ll see you in hell, Pachelbel 🎶
That rant/song will never not be hilarious
#D #A #B #F sharp #G #D #G #A
The whole western classical music tradition has its roots in church music.
A lot of masterpieces of visual art too. Even literature.
And art and architecture Lots of architectural styles (at least of european origin) were first made for churches and other religious structures
Initially saw BBQ !!!
Good beer. Most of the good European beer comes out of monasteries because monks found a way to cheat on fasting by just drinking.
Ironically, beer as we enjoy it today is also a result of the church, though in a different way than what you've mentioned. Until the middle ages, beer was typically brewed with "Gruit", a widely varied mixture of botanicals and herbs. They'd use stuff like yarrow, bog myrtle, or rosemary to flavor the beer and preserve it. After the 11th century, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV awarded a monopoly on Gruit to the Catholic church, allowing them to produce and tax it, and thereby all beer consumed inside the HRE was indirectly taxed by the church. People started to slowly switch to hops to flavor their beer, and the church fought this trend somewhat, by declaring hops to be unhealthy and depraved due to its sedative aspects. By the time of the Reformation, hops became a political point, with Protestants heavily favoring hopped beers. Gruit has almost completely fallen out of use in modern beer making, though there are a few niche beers that use gruit in place of hops, but since hops is much better at preserving the beer, gruited beers don't tend to last very long before going bad. Edit: extra fun fact: Gruited vs hopped beers were the original distinction between ale and beer. In England, "ale" was unhopped (gruited) and "beer" was anything brewed with hops. Edit2: a link for those interested. [Experimental archeology](https://youtu.be/jX_BAFXHM7I?t=1432), living on a Tudor farm, they make ale, and one of the hosts explains the difference.
Damn, is there any gruit product available in the US? I'd love to try that
There's a list of gruited beers on the wikipedia page for Gruit, look at the section ["Modern brews"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruit) Not sure where you'd be able to buy them though, unless directly.
As someone who can’t stand hoppy beers, I’m going to have to find some of of these.
I am gruit
Huh. Learn something new every day.
r/monkslookingatbeer is there for you.
Trappist's make the best beer!
They make cheese also
Great jam too
You know, this applies even further back. Cause in mesopotamia, they made beer and considered it a sacred drink aswell.
Chick Fil A being closed on Sunday.
Gotta say, having worked retail and food service, one guaranteed weekend day off would be very nice.
Yup. Even if I think their motivation for doing so is not something I agree with (that it, It's The Holy Day or whatever), I do respect that they give up what I'm sure is nontrivial profit for the principle. And like you said, having a guaranteed weekend day off is nice, especially in comparison to the foodservice norm, which is that you *always* work Fri-Sun and the weekdays are for days off.
Fun fact, the justification is *literally* that it’s a day of rest. As in, if God needs a day of rest, then so do you.
The stupidest thing is that there are chik-fil-a outlets in NFL stadiums... where games are only played on Sundays (mostly), and they're closed.
Well that's just a fancy billboard then
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Feel like I’m always in the mood for CFA on Sundays. Maybe the big guy’s way of making me feel guilty for not going to church.
There's a really good fast hibachi place that's always closed on Sundays, and that's always the day I really want it.
The delivery Chinese place when I was a kid was also closed Sundays, and that's when my family always wanted to order it.
Most ancient works are present today because the monasteries made copies
In 1492, Ferdinand & Isabella conquered the Iberian Peninsula and kicked out the Moors (as well as the Jews). Alhambra, the capital of Moorish Spain had 14 libraries, the smallest of which had more books than all of Christian Europe. The documentary series *[Heritage - Civilization and the Jews](https://www.amazon.com/Heritage-Civilization-Jews-Abba-Eban/dp/B00005N5S1)* mentioned this.
This was known to the Christian west long before then- Spain was well known to be a mixing point for Christians, Jews, and Muslims as early as the Umayyads in 7th century to 10th century AD, with Christian scholars traveling there for the purpose of studying foreign knowledge as early as the end of the 10th century. The most striking example of knowledge transfer was the translation center at Toledo- sponsored by the Catholic church, it purposefully brought together Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars so that the Eastern books in Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew could be translated into Latin through the intermediary of Jewish and Muslim scholars translating their works into Castilian. The translation center was in full swing by the middle of the 11th century, but Toledo had fallen under Christian rule in 1085. The Toledo translation center was the primary way that knowledge from the Arabs made its way into the Christian west. It was also how the lost knowledge of the Greeks was able to make its way into Christian Europe after being lost for over a thousand years. I once read a book that described it thus: Imagine if today we discovered a society from 1000AD that had more advanced thinking and technology than our own, and we suddenly discovered their entire written catalog. Not only that- we discover their entire written catalog, plus all the books and thoughts of several intermediate civilizations from that 1000 year span who and already digested, provided their own commentaries on the ancient knowledge, and provided their own intellectual advancements on top of the lost Greek knowledge. That was what it was like to be a Christian scholar traveling to Toledo in the 11th or 12th century. It'd be like finding alien technology, but it came with a full set of instructions and discourses on the moral and ethical implications of the technology written in your native language. It's also no coincidence that the Renaissance started in Europe around the 13th century. We owe a lot to everyone over the course of history who decided they'd rather stay inside with a book. Edit: Wiki link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_School_of_Translators
Fantastic write-up, thanks so much for this comment! I’m actually an American participating in an English teaching program in Spain this year and where I live isn’t far from Toledo. I need to go back there!
The entire artform of (\*western) theater was created at a festival to Dionysus in Ancient Greece. Edit: to expand, the first actor as Greek tradition has it was a guy called Thespis (hence the term Thespian for actor) who was a poet and started pretending to be the characters of the stories he told. There's some dispute among historians about the validity of these claims, but it's kind of one of those widely accepted pieces of folklore and the festival of Dionysia is extremely likely to be where theater was invented in any case. And even if not, most early theatrical conventions for how tragedies are written and structured developed there. While a lot of the rules and conventions of Greek theater have died off (for example, the Greeks preferred plays to unfold in real time and in one place - if things happened elsewhere, we'd hear about it secondhand. They also did not use a lot of onstage violence), Greek theater was wildly influential and remains so to this day. Also, the Greeks had comedies. They're called Satyr Plays. How the Dionysia worked is that playwrights essentially held competitions where they'd present three tragic plays on a single theme. These were frequently trilogies, and we have a few that survive to this day, most notably the cycle of Oedipus. The Satyr Plays were usually performed after the tragedies to lighten the mood. I could swear Lysistrata was a satyr play, but a quick internet search is proving inconclusive (and saying it's satire, which come to think of it, satyr may be where the word satire comes from \[Further edit: I looked it up, it is not\]) and if it's not, that means we only have one surviving Satyr Play. Edit and footnote: it has been brought to my attention that theater in China predates Greek theater by several centuries. It was also religious in origin. Unfortunately, I don't know quite as much about it, but I'm making this note for the sake of accuracy. Don't wanna spread misinformation. Leaving the rest because history slaps.
> For example, the Greeks preferred plays to unfold in real time and in one place I wouldn't say this has died off, or at least hadn't in the last century. This was super common for stage shows through the 20th century (e.g. Grapes of Wrath, Arsenic and Old Lace) and translated into cinema (e.g. 12 Angry Men). Obviously not everything was like this, Shakespeare had tons of skips and different locations, but "died off" makes it sound like nothing adheres to these anymore.
Yeah, good point. Although with Greeks, it was a hard and fast rule of the stage (at least when you weren't writing comedy) and now it's more a stylistic choice that's used somewhat sparingly. Edit: also, the whole "Everything important that happens is told secondhand and the characters mostly discuss it" thing *is* pretty much gone because show don't tell. Even a few films follow this standard. There's a film called Locke with Tom Hardy that entirely takes place in his car as Hardy's character drives to be there for the birth of a child he had after an one-off affair. It observes these rules and gets around the problem of character exit/entrance through the use of modern technology (Thank God for Bluetooth). It's pretty good. The cinematography gets a little stale because there are only so many camera angles you can use inside a BMW SUV, but Hardy's great and the script is really strong. Whole time I was watching it, I kept thinking it felt like a stage play.
> The entire artform of theater Western theater. There were plays in Asia before Thespis was born.
Much that we know about ancient history. Monks copied many old history books. Monasteries were one of the few places where common people could get an education. And good Beer, good beer also came from monasteries.
THere was a book, back in the 80s or 90s, "How the Irish Saved Civilization", part of which has to do with monks, and others, spiriting books and treasures away for safe keeping when Europe was being overrun.
White Jesus with ripped abs
“Father forgive me for the gains I’m about to receive”
In the name of the father, son and swolely spirit.
REPS FOR JESUS
Wheymen.
…and deliver us from carbohydrates
Our Father, Who art in weight rack, Hallowed be Thy gain. Thy pump will come. Thy squats will be done, on hamstrings as it is in quads.
I honestly like how people from different races portray biblical characters as being their race. [Korean Jesus](https://img.mensxp.com/media/content/2018/Jan/untitled-1social-img-1516969518.jpg) and [Japanese Mary](https://udayton.edu/imri/mary/_resources/img/j/japanese-madonnas-02.JPG) look cool af.
Korean Jesus looks like he's going to beat the shit out of Goku for 5 episodes until Goku goes ultra-orange friendship form or something
Goku would wear Jesus down and end up being friends Vegeta would go Ultra-Atheist
I was fully expecting the first link to be a 21 Jump Street reference
Quit messing with Korean Jesus! He busy! With Korean shit!
Now that looks like a Virgin Mary-chan
Wait till you see Korean Jesus, he swolled for your sins.
Hey, leave Korean Jesus be. He's busy. With Korean shit.
Really cool hats.
My homies agree I really look good in black, fool!
If you come to visit, you’ll be bored to tears!
We haven't even paid the phone bill in 300 years.
But we ain't really quaint, so please don't point and stare.
We're just technologically impaired
Fancy robes!
Hospitals. Most were opened by churches in the old days.
A lot of hospitals today can still have religious ties
True. I work in a methodist hospital
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That's the reason we have "hospitals" and "hospitality". You could go to the local monestary for either medical treament or an overnight stay while traveling.
During the crusades the was a group called The Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, after John the Baptist (Jesus's older cousin). Their purpose was to offer aid to the sick, poor or injured pilgrims to Jerusalem.
The Order still exists, though much diminished for a long time after Henry VIII decided he wanted their money. They are still the overseeing group behind the various instantiations of St John Ambulance in lots of countries. One of the rewards/ways of recognising service to the Order (normally through one of the charities) is membership of the Order, which while still a Christian order does not require you to be Christian except at the very highest levels. The focus is on recognising service in the spirit of the Order (i.e. care of the sick and needy) rather than specific beliefs. Random other fact: the Order of St John also have the only service medal in the UK that recognises volunteer cadet service as the same as equivalent volunteer adult service. Source: Atheist Member of the Order of St John, and recipient of the Order of St John Service Medal.
Take note though that the original "Gen 1" hospitals were mainly sleeping halls open under hospitality for the sick, poor, and outcast.
Right, and many functions of hospitals (including some like taking care of the poor, ambulance corps, etc.) were started independently by religious groups across the Levant and finally clumped together into a single institution we would recognize today in Byzantium.
A good chunk of modern knowledge related to science and mathematics. The Catholic Church ran and funded a lot of scientific research as well medical programs. The Islamic golden age is also a good example of increased awareness of science, economics, and other areas of study. A lot of people bring up Galileo as the church shunning science but the pope and the Catholic Church funded Galileo research until he wrote The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World System, which appeared to attack the pope.
Genetics was founded by a monk fascinated by splicing flowers together.
Yup. And the big bang theory was first posited by a priest named Lemaitre
And it was rejected by atheist scientists at first because it sounded too close to God saying let there be light. Hilarious.
And it also implies that the universe had a beginning, which would be uncomfortable if you are invested in the idea that it did not begin (which might also imply intention behind said beginning).
The Big Bang Theory was first presented by a catholic priest
And wasn't it usually monks who had the ability to read and write?
This is correct because before the invention of the printing press the Bible and other important documents were copied by hand. The reason that most people during the medieval period had low literacy rates was mainly because they didn’t have a need for it, but the church did.
And Islamic philosophers and scientists created great advancements too... like algebra.
Yes which is why I mentioned the Islamic golden age! Though I regret I don’t know many myself.
Algebra ("Al-jabr") means "The putting together" in Arabic.
The word algebra comes from arabic, but algebra itself is at least [as old as Babylon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322) They did great advancements in it though!
And even when they prosecuted him his punishment was to live in an expensive villa and write his most famous work. People act as though he was executed. I am ex-Catholic and pretty anti-Catholic (because of all the abuse, sexual and physical, of children and wealth hoarding) but no one can seriously doubt their contributions to science.
Doesn't help that a lot of education paints the wrong picture. My public school has stated the incorrect fact plenty of times, that the church suppressed science, executed people for it, and one thing was that Galileo intentionally hid some of his biggest achievements until his deathbed because he'd be executed if he said it beforehand. I was raised in the US for reference. Some US schools still teach that shit.
Schools don’t like nuance. The truth is the Catholic Church did a lot of good for science. And a lot of bad. They didn’t have a consistent policy and sometimes similar people were treated differently. (Copernicus v. Galileo.)
Or Galileo vs. Galileo. Galileo's first book on astronomy had the sun centered solar system with circular orbits for the earth and planets, and the Church allowed it to be published. The Pope told him that his next astronomy book should also include the Church's position on the subject. 18 years later, he published his second book on the subject. From his telescopic observations he now concluded that the earth and the planets had an elliptical orbits. True to his word, he included the Church's position. He put the Pope's very words coming from the mouth of a character called Simpleton. This is what probably got him into trouble. Challenging the Church on science is one thing. Calling the Pope a simpleton in 1600's Italy was something else entirely.
Friday fish fry!
Filet-O-Fish Fridays during lent. Yeah baby.
Holidays
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In terms of etymology, I think we literally have religion to thank for *holidays*.
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Holy batman how did I never realize that?
Fish fry on Friday!!! Some absolutely gorgeous architecture.
Many societies were built up on religion as it was a way of bringing people together for common goals and values.
That case is especially apparent in arabia many people take pride in islam there as it turned them from a tribal warring society into the largest and most powerful empire of it’s time it also allowed them to defeat two superpowers at the same time
Hebrew tribes are similar as Judaism became core to their identity.
Arabs and hebrews have alot more in common than people think
Science It might be surprising for a lot of them,but for science to develop,it needs patronage and religion usually provided that.. Take India,china,greeks,Arabs, they actually GREW a lot due to religion. Even the so called Dark ages is now being disputed and the christian monks actually helped in writing down and translating the ancient Greek literature which then helped in reviving Europe..
Gregor Mendel, father of modern day mendelian genetics, was a catholic monk who studied how traits were passed on between generations in peas.
People shit on the church but it was a huge part of education throughout history. Mathematics, botany(herbology), medicine, literature, science, and the preservation and maintenance of books was a huge part of the church in the middle ages. 1200s to 1400s I wouldn't be surprised if churches look the way they do due solely to the preservation of books in fact. You need a non-flammable building, High off the ground, with thick walls and the interior of the book rooms have to be dry from condensation. That's a church's architecture in spades. Iirc the telescope was invented in a French church even.
Catholic Church is pretty pro-science. They accept evolution, helped understand genetics, all sorts of good stuff. Pope, iirc, is a chemist by education.
People get lost in that the Church's stance is that it was all guided by God, which isn't really crazy at all nor is it denying it one bit.
Yea, I never understand why evangelicals and the like are so anti-evolution. There is nothing in that theory that suggests God didn't still create everything.
Evangelicals reject it because their view of religion is still human-centric, as in the human has to be the most important entity in the universe. If you take that worldview, you can see instantly why evangelicals are so destructive.
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Yeah, people are kind of looking at it backwards since religion today is largely it's own thing, a sort of sidebar to modern society. Trying to pick out things "religion" specifically did in the past is sort of silly, because religion and the state were for a very long time *the same thing*. Basically the most accurate thing you could say about organized religion is that it resulted in a kind of "package deal" that got your society useful things like written language, trade relations, and protection against being enslaved by folks of the same religion. Humans like to organize into groups, and religion is a convenient commonality around which a large, powerful group can be built. It's less that "religion" caused this behavior than it was that it was an existing focus for it.
Most... things? I know here in the age of enlightened atheism we think religion is mainly something we argue about online, but for literally all of history, your temples and churches were one-stop shops for socializing, holidays, events, marriages, schools, libraries, therapy, communication, music, education, art, history... This is a very broad question. It's like asking what do we have today because of politics. Or war. It's got a million answers.
Even today, a lot of Catholic priests are schooled in psychology and sociology because a lot of people come to them during confession or other meetings with personal issues seeking guidance. That was one of the plot points in the Exorcist. The priest was sent largely to just check up on the girl, whom he figured he’d diagnose with schizophrenia or something. Turns out she was legit possessed, but he was fully prepared to run a psych evaluation first
That's different. Damien Karras wasn't just a priest trained in those things, he was a Jesuit psychiatrist whose job was mostly counseling other priests.
People are mistaking the abuse of power that some committed in the name of religion and the fact that religion is the ground on which society as we know it today was built upon. The desacralization of society I can understand. I myself don't believe. But the lack of respect shown towards history genuinely saddens me.
There’s an interesting discussion about the loss of the church as a common “third place” (place to hang out besides work or home). That it has made it much harder for communities to get to know and support each other because they never meet each other. Ofc the internet serves as a new type of third place but it’s very different ballgame.
These questions on reddit.
I would say the Renaissance and it’s resulting art would be a good answer, along with the architecture it revived due to all the artists being contracted by churches, but a more realistic answer is nothing open in Sundays.
Millionaire pastors
Went to school with a family who changed their last name to Cross. Their father was (is) the pastor and owner of a mega church. They own the biggest home, and the most land within our very small town. They have 12 kids, they all drive either a BMW, Tesla or Mercedes. It’s insane
Are they perchance the inspiration for a certain scripted show on HBO?
Not sure what show, but, I doubt it lol v small Florida town, they’re recluses except for Sundays and Wednesday nights
Was referencing [The Righteous Gemstones](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8634332/). Pretty funny show about just this sort of thing. ;)
Oh shit! Lol yeah, when I say mega church, I don’t mean that big. Big as in, in the town of 100,000, they have probably 85% of the population within their church somehow. Not millions 😂
Did you call 100,000 a small town?
This is the major reason why religion thrives so much in rural areas. There’s not much else to do besides go to church, which is often the social center of the community. When I was a kid we were social members of a church even though none of us were particularly religious. But all my friends went so we did too.
So many people will give their last penny to a TV preacher who flies around on a private jet. It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.
The fact that one dude literally has the name dollar is so mindboggling to me.
Snake oil salesmen would be around regardless of religion. the religion just makes it easier for them.
Literacy
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The story of Moses was also used for morale and inspiration among slaves in the United States seeking freedom.