This week the pond is taking a break from religious fundamentalism. There are plenty of future Sundays to meditate on this folly ...
There's only so much ratbaggery anyone can take, including the current Pope's discovery that all the homosexual priests in the church are actually human, angry Sydney Anglicans using left-handedness as an excuse to berate sinners (Right Must Not Be Left Behind), or fundamentalist Islamics shooting up a mall to prove how fundamentally stupid and cruel they are.
Now you might propose these assorted crimes are not each of the same scale or enormity, but when wandering through the Rijksmuseum recently, the pond came across the painting above, Beeldenstorm in een kerk, by Dirck van Delen, 1630. (may be slow to load)
It's a rare illustration of the iconoclastic storm that swept across Europe in the seventeenth century, infrequently painted - and later covered up by guilty parties - but it shows the way the same fundamentalist puritanism and the urge to violence joins the Calvinists to the Islamics ...
More on iconoclasm at its wiki here, and you can find a brief note on van Delen here, and more of his images here, and you can google even more here.
The pond is thinking of a grant to explore the deviant gene that pushes the religious towards anger, vandalism, puritanism and fundamentalism, or worse the killing fields, but it might prove tricky because it seems it's a gene unfortunately shared by an unhealthy number of secularists and atheists given to ideological fundamentalism. Shssh, please don't mention the Bolter or the Dear Leader ...
Here you go, here's the Taliban at work in Bamiyan:
Dehumanising gays, demonising boat people, berating sinners for their sins, blowing up rival statues, killing people in malls or on the high seas, it's all part of the same hubristic judgmental racket ...
Linking the Protestant Reformation, a giant step in the re-boot of democracy and the overthrowing of the mafia that was and still masquerades under the banner of "Catholic Church", to backward-looking anti-scientific sheepfuckers is the wrong call. Both the Huns and the Allies invaded Europe so you can't ascertain what is right and wrong simply by their actions. The ends justify the means.
ReplyDeleteSorry Jim but claiming the renaissance and democracy for the Protestant reformation is the oldest rhetorical trick in the book.
DeleteYou should spend a little more time looking at the Calvinists, the Lollards, the Knoxians, the Lutherans and the rest of the Puritan pack, and instead of peddling Max Weber, spend a little more time with Oliver Cromwell, exemplar of Puritan values and politics ...
A riot's a riot, the destruction of art of all kinds a needless waste (despite the pond's temptation to destroy all eighteenth century French painting in the Louvre), and if you want examples of sheep fuckers, look no further than the Republicans in the United States who claim to have inherited the Protestant Reformation mantle ...
It turns out that in the dark, all sheep fuckers look the same ...
Dorothy,
DeleteI haven't read or know of Max Weber. What I do know that is that the Protestant Reformation was, as I said, a move away from a world controlled by the mafia that was and is the Catholic Church back towards democracy. Of course the rich merchants only wanted democracy for themselves but they unknowingly let the genie out of the bottle and everyone else wanted it too. That you try to equate all religionists as being as bad as one another it actually isn't the case. What all this should reveal to you is the insidious hold the CC still has over your part of your mind since they brainwashed you as a child.
All today's organised religions should be tossed in a hole and set on fire and I wouldn't waste any of my piss trying to put it out. Scratch any right-wing capitalists who claim to be religious and you'll find that they're just atheistic sociopaths who actually believe in stealing all they can while they're here and don't give a fuck about anyone who might be alive now or after they're gone.
There's nothing wrong with fucking animals as long as its consensual, which I doubt it is for Islamics seeing as they can't even have consensual sex with humans.
And I think you mean the Enlightenment, not the Renaissance, and I'm not making that claim so don't try and build any strawman arguments from what you think I meant, instead read what I wrote.
im, there is some difference in the "means". The Allies were not invading in the same manner that the Nazis invaded; the former's was a defensive action and can be seen in the different manner the Allies treated POWs compared with the Nazis and the Japanese. The Protestant Reformation also began as a defensive action against the oppression and cruelties which mediaeval Catholicism imposed upon people, but the lasting advances were achieved mainly through the Reformation's political and the social thought and the political and religious changes these brought about, rather than the destruction of icons and the atrocities against civilian populations, which were carried out, for example, by Cromwell's army. Cromwell was viewed unfavourably by the Levellers, whose views were much closer to modern notions of democracy, but Cromwell wiped out their supporters. Cromwell believed that the events of the world were determined by god, while Calvin believed in a religious elite. Not all the ends achieved by the Reformation were good because not all the means were justifiable and this is really the point the Pond is making.
ReplyDeleteThanks for showing why I was fortunate NOT to take Modern European History at high school. Lessons for you: invade means invade; I said Huns not Nazis; Dorothy probably doesn't need her arse licked by sozzled old farts like yourself.
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