Post #4023491

2026-07-23 01:06 UTC

The Church for obvious reasons had become the timekeepers of Europe, and keeping track of the passage of time required some understanding of the Solar System. That made the fight between the stale and increasingly clumsy geocentric model (which preserved the sense that Earth was primal and central to cosmic affairs) and the heliocentric model an inevitable and nasty thing. The Church lost the battle for the European mind and destroyed the old idea that the Church was the guardian of all human knowledge and not just a religious organization--a Christian church, soon to become a whole constellation of churches, whose statements and rulings were of importance only to practicing Christians. But Christians have never forgotten how much power and authority they used to have, and thus Christian reactionaries have in modern times waged an ugly, no-quarter battle to regain that old sense of universal authority. (cont'd)

Replies (1)

@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-23 01:11

Ironically they have done so by doubling and trebling down on secularization. It's natural for authoritarian Christians to detest mysticism, which is intrinsically unpredictable and extravagant and a thing which cut against and challenges existing authority. The Catholic Church maintained a little wiggle room within its massive bureaucracy for mystics, e.g. by shunting them into religious orders and away from mainstream Catholic authority. There's a distinction between Catholic priests and Catholic monks and I assume that similar divisions exist in Orthodox churches. But the businesslike Protestants had NO place for mystics at all, and it was such business-minded Protestants (corrupted, of course, by their fixation on worldly power and money-making) who became the worst reactionaries. (cont'd)

Open ##4023571