Re: Larry Niven: Terrorize Latinos to Solve Health Care Crisis

On Mon, 05 May 2008 03:10:17 +0000, Mike Schilling wrote:

> John Schilling wrote:
> 
>> ...wait a minute, the Dark Age of the seventh and eighth centuries 
>> was
>> one continent over.  The miserable Arabs, etc, seem to have skipped
>> that part.  Never Mind.
> 
> In fact, if you believe Pirenne (which I tend to), Islam was a major 
> cause of the Dark Ages in Europe.  Not because it's Evil, but because 
> the Islamic conquest of the Middle East and North Africa and the 
> consequent domination of the Mediterranean destroyed the trade 
> patterns which dated from the Roman Republic (and even before). It 
> took centuries for the new Europe based in the northwest of the 
> continent rather than its south to emerge.

I tend to blame the Christian Conquest of the Roman Empire, via a campaign
of urban mob-violence, with its burnings of libraries, destructions of the
philosophical schools, murders of the philosophers, and in the end
outright and continuing warfare against non-priestly (and, later,
non-Gothic-aristocratic) literacy and non-Christian literature in general,
myself.

But that eruption of and collapse into barbarism long before the Goths
and the Moslems came on the scene may not have had anything to do with it,
I guess.

-- 

It is dominion that we are after.  Not just a voice.
It is dominion we are after.  Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after.  Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.  World conquest.
That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish.
 
< American Christian Theocratic author George Grant