A professor fired to have showed images of Mohammed to a warned public....

[The Brain]

Protty's forget the bad parts of their history. Takes Catholics or Catholic lites (sheilbh ) to remind them. No one expects the inquisition, but everyone forgets how many witches and warlocks were burned outside of catholic countries, for example.

A lot of the bad part is happening right now.

Elaborate.

[HVC]

Protty's forget the bad parts of their history. Takes Catholics or Catholic lites (sheilbh ) to remind them. No one expects the inquisition, but everyone forgets how many witches and warlocks were burned outside of catholic countries, for example.

A lot of the bad part is happening right now.

Elaborate.

Assume Yi means the US religious right. Are European far right nutters religious, or just secular in their hate?

[The Brain]

Protty's forget the bad parts of their history. Takes Catholics or Catholic lites (sheilbh ) to remind them. No one expects the inquisition, but everyone forgets how many witches and warlocks were burned outside of catholic countries, for example.

A lot of the bad part is happening right now.

Elaborate.

Assume Yi means the US religious right. Are European far right nutters religious, or just secular in their hate?

It doesn't matter. In 17th century Sweden not being Protestant carried the death penalty, and you could (until the 1670s) be executed for witchcraft. Nothing modern protestants in Sweden do could begin to compare.

[HVC]

He didn't say it was worse now, just that bad is being done by Protestant's.

[Admiral Yi]

Assume Yi means the US religious right. Are European far right nutters religious, or just secular in their hate?

Yup.  Prosperity gospel, megachurches.  And that hands in the air trance shit.

[The Brain]

He didn't say it was worse now, just that bad is being done by Protestant's.

He said "A lot of the bad part is happening right now."

[Richard Hakluyt]

People are intolerant bastards, film at 11.

(BTW... there can be few things more nauseating than reading an English 17th century puritan worrying about the destination of his soul    )

Fundamentalists trying to dictate behaviour is really old stuff, the problem with the Hamline story is the cultural lack of confidence in the university administration, they caved in under the slightest pressure.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Didn't the Dutch go a little extra wild with the art smashing calvanism? Or am I misremebering?

You're correct. Those fanatics blazed a trail of destruction through Flanders and the Netherlands. Starting in steenvoorde.

[Sheilbh]

Protty's forget the bad parts of their history. Takes Catholics or Catholic lites (sheilbh ) to remind them. No one expects the inquisition, but everyone forgets how many witches and warlocks were burned outside of catholic countries, for example.

I blame Foxe's Book of Martyrs

But I also think people generally underestimate how radical the Reformation was and how much it transformed people's communities and lives - and how high people believed the stakes were.

I think it's also that "Hollywood films a Medieval village" meme. I think we underestimate not just how colourful Medieval Europe was but also how crowded it was with images and statues tied into confraternities, festivals and people's lives. Possibly because a bit like the "whiteness" of rediscovered classical statues, our taste is still shaped by white-washed, austere Protestant re-design of the world rather than the wildly gaudy and busy world before it. There is, I think, a sense of loss and slight confusion of the world around them in the (few) indications we have of how ordinary people and ordinary clergymen experienced the whole thing. It was revolutionary.

Also, of course, there's a fair bit of overlap between the most iconoclastic, radical and reforming/improving Protestants and the puritans who went to America. People maybe think about it too much in terms of sexual repression and maybe witch trials, but there was lots more going on with them - and I think there is an enduring impact from them (positive and negative).

So maybe this kind of thing is just something that goes along with Abrahamic Religions. Did the Jews ever have some kind of iconoclasm? They are ones who originally made idolatry such a central aspect of these religions after all.

Although I find it interesting that it isn't necessarily the Biblical prohibition on images themselves  that's the issue in Protestant (or Muslim) iconoclasm. It definitely is for Orthodox iconoclasts.

The big fear they had was the threat to monotheism. That images of saints (and especially Mary) or Mohammed would cause people (possibly inadvertently) to worship them instead of God. It's why relics and tombs (of saints and, say, Sufi saints or other Muslim holy men) were also trashed. That the mere existence of the wrong images or spaces could threaten the soul of the unwitting.

[Josquius]

Protty's forget the bad parts of their history. Takes Catholics or Catholic lites (sheilbh ) to remind them. No one expects the inquisition, but everyone forgets how many witches and warlocks were burned outside of catholic countries, for example.

Is this so?
My impression is that its very much the puritans who are known as the evil 'That woman can count to 11. She's a witch.' ones.

[Tamas]

Thing is though, the long list of historical Christian bigots of all denominations causing trouble and suffering is a list of more arguments to not let current bigots of any religion to poison our societies in the present.

[Josquius]

Thing is though, the long list of historical Christian bigots of all denominations causing trouble and suffering is a list of more arguments to not let current bigots of any religion to poison our societies in the present.

Yes.


I find it quite curious to draw analogues between Islam and Christianity. Islam's year 0 being 600 years after the Christian one and the reformation kicking off 500 years ago after some false starts... There does seem to be a bit of an echo. Though yes, this is very much a correlation doesn't equal causation thing.
You often see white bigots talking about how Muslims need to go through a reformation- neglecting that the entire reason Islamic extremism is a problem IS the 'protestant' elements of Islam.
I do hold out hope they will follow a similar pattern to Christianity and this will burn out- certainly the middle east is due for huge changes with the decline in oil's dominance and climate change. Though which way this will lead things....

[Threviel]

Yeah, it wasn't the reformation that did all the good stuff, it was the enlightenment and all that followed from that.

[The Brain]

Yeah it's not like Islam needs a flood of breakaway sects going back to the fundamentals, like the Reformation.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah, it wasn't the reformation that did all the good stuff, it was the enlightenment and all that followed from that.

I think, for me, there's something to that. But I think it's a little apples and oranges because the enlightenment is the big elite level intellectual project, rather than the revolutionary spread of those ideas.

If there's a comparison the enlightenment is more like humanism. It is an elite project - there are ideas of reform and correctly ordered society etc. But it isn't predictive, Erasmus isn't a leading reformer and enthusiasm for the enlightenment doesn't lead to a society imbued with enlightenment values (Prussia, Russia). I think the Reformation is more like the French Revolution (or the Russian Revolution) which was not averse to a bit of iconoclasm and maybe has mixed results/reception.

I think in part it's about when those ideas that go to the core of who we are, like the route to salvation, intrinsic universal rights, citizenship escape the zoo of elite, intellectual writing and go wild. The ideas that people already have about those issues are fundamental to who they are, so they attract real, impassioned defenders or they are transformative in people's ideas so have radical reformers on the other side. When those forces then intersect with political and state power it is always going to be mixed.

I don't think it's super-relevant to Islamic views on iconography - as I say my view is that's largely just about respecting each other's taboos in a society and not really engaged in this Hamline story where I think the college clearly got it wrong and they outsourced their judgement.