Middle Ages Criticism Going Down
More and more people are beginning to realize that the Middle Ages weren't dark at all. It's comforting, and the evidence will keep accumulating (because it's a fact) and get published. Yet in ten years, yahoos everywhere will continue to refer to the "Middle Ages" pejoratively.
"The Dark Ages have finally been recognized as a hoax perpetrated by anti-religious and bitterly anti-Catholic, 18th-century intellectuals who were determined to assert their cultural superiority and who boosted their claim by denigrating the Christian past. ... This always should have been obvious since by the end of the so-called Dark Ages, European science and technology had far exceeded that of Rome and Greece, and all the rest of the world, for that matter. . . .
"Perhaps the most revealing instance involves the 'story' that in order to gain backing for his great voyage west, Columbus had to struggle against ignorant and superstitious churchmen who were certain that the earth was flat.
"Truth was that all educated Europeans, including bishops and cardinals, knew the earth was round. What produced church opposition to the Columbus voyage was that Columbus believed the circumference of the earth was only about one-fifth of its actual distance. Thus, the church scholars who opposed him did so because they knew that he and his sailors were bound to perish at sea. And they would have done so had the Western Hemisphere not been there to replenish their food and water."
Rodney Stark, author of The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, interviewed by Marvin Olasky in the Dec. 3 issue of World .
See Thomas Woods' excellent book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (link to the right).
