The Current West and its Origins

I think that you are correct....... this would make a good topic.

Your theology and a Basic Minimum Income?

I believe that The American Revolutionary War and the separation of The United States from the British Commonwealth had a lot to do with the issue of money and BigBanking.

https://www.michaeljournal.org/arti...story-of-banking-control-in-the-united-states

 

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, Will, or how it is relevant to the persistence of Classical heritage in the West after the fall of Rome in the 5th Century AD.

The Roman Catholic Church's role in preserving Classical knowledge and Roman administration in the aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire had nothing to do with military force. The former had to do with the fact that many if not most of the educated elite in Western Europe were clerics and that many of these clerics had the luxury of engaging in scholarly pursuits. The latter had to do with Church officials stepping into positions that had been previously held by imperial officials. For example, Church bishops became the mayors in many cities/towns because they were amongst the few men who were capable of replacing the Roman officials who had previously performed those duties. These clerics were educated, experienced and were members of the Roman aristocracy and ruling elite themselves, and they helped provide a measure of order and stability during a time of great violence and anarchy.

 

The monasteries were probably the most prominent and well known institutional example.

 

I am not aware that they made much of an effort to preserve classical texts. Quite the opposite, in fact.

 

It's true that the Holy Roman Empire had things to offer, such as stability. In fact, one can identify autocrats in other countries who provided stability and order, too. One might notice that strong religious control in Iran, starting in ancient times has led to lasting periods of internal stability in a perpetually challenging region.

But, internal stability is not the only measure, and you have to recognize the papal wars, the several inquisitions, and other turmoil that resulted from the notion that government should be controlled by a single religious empire, especially when not everybody accepts that religion.

Our founders were well educated and knew the history of western government and it's progression toward dividing the church (regardless of religious variant) from governmental power.

 

It wasn't just the monasteries, there were Church libraries such as the one where Petrarch famously discovered Cicero's letters to Atticus

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=4731

Of course, the preservation and translation of Classical manuscripts was going on long before Petrarch was around to search for them, and this helped produce the various renaissances of the Middle Ages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_renaissances

To be honest with you, I was surprised to find how much of this was going on when I started reading the works of Medievalists such as the late Brian Tierney (Professor Emeritus at Cornell University), who revealed that the Middle Ages weren't the intellectual wasteland that they were once commonly portrayed to be. HIs book The Idea of Natural Rights was a real eye opener, where one sees how obscure studies into the concepts and language in Roman Law by Catholic canon lawyers and decretists in the 12th Century gave birth to the individual rights doctrines that were once thought to have developed centuries later.

 

Holy Roman Empire?

The HRE and the Western (and Eastern) Roman Empire were two entirely different things:

Holy Roman Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire

And one might notice the strong atheist control in the USSR or Red China that provided stability and order....

Who said internal stability is the only measure, and you have to recognize the wars, the Terrors, executions and persecutions and other turmoil that resulted from the notion that a people and their government should be controlled by a single atheist party/state/empire, especially when everybody doesn't accept their ideology. Gulags and Guillotines....

Yes, and our founders were well educated and familiar with the history and agenda of proto-socialist/communist movements in England, such as the Diggers, whose leader Gerrard Winstanley was memorialized by the Soviets on an obelisk in Moscow, and they knew how the arc of history and human evolution were towards individual freedom and sovereignty, not socialism/communism and hierarchal government control:

"The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and in our government, unconstitutional”
— Samuel Adams

A lot of people in our country haven't figured that out yet.

 

I mentioned internal stability, because that was a claim made in the post I responded to.

After that paragraph, I don't really see how your comments pertain to the separation of government and religion.

 

As did I.

My comments had everything to do with the separation of religion from government, and society, for that matter.

It's been my observation that the extremists on both the theocratic and atheist side have been the bane of humanity, and there're really no point in either side selectively criticizing the other while overlooking its own faults and crimes.

 

There have been all sorts of bad governments, no doubt.

But, that's not an excuse for ignoring why various formulations are horrible.

For example, communism isn't bad because the cases we know didn't have enough Christians doing it. Communism is bad, for other very clear reasons. Besides, the cases we know pretty much enforced a religious view that was not shared by the whole population - which is the same situation as in early western governments where one religion was enforced by law and war.

So, our founders were smart enough to recognize that having a state religion is a bad idea and that government should stay OUT of the religion business.

 

The traditional view is that the West was born in ancient Greece, the birthplace of philosophy and democracy (the small city-state of Athens was very powerful and influential at one point), which was spread to the rest of the world first under Alexander, and then brought to Europe through the Roman Empire. But also the West was in some ways based on Christianity, which in turn had its origins in Judaism, and maybe to some extent all those ancient cultures that once dominated the Middle East (for example, Persian Zoroastrianism, dividing the worldview into good and evil). The center of the "West" has continued to move over time. And then the development of democracy in Britain, the U.S., and France was an important one.

 

Or, the West is Jerusalem + Athens + Rome + London

 

+ Philadelphia, perhaps?

 

Well yes. The thread is about the current West.

 

Actually even Paris played a big role at one point (mostly in the area of sexual and social liberalism that progressives embrace so much, although some could argue that began even before then in Venice with the whole "renaissance" thing).

 

And our communist/socialist/collectivist/"progressive" friends would probably want to include Paris on the list because many consider the French Revolution the birthplace of the Modern Left. Long before Marx was prattling his pseudo-intellectual drivel, François-Noël Babeuf was babbling about how "Nature has given to every man the right to the enjoyment of an equal share in all property" and how he was perfectly fine with millions of people dying in order to make his utopian fantasies come true.