Applied religious technology

By -
Long before Scientology called itself "applied religious technology," there was a predecessor: chivalric romances.

Around 1000 A.D., the problem of "noble violence" was acute. The Church tried to stem this with programs like "The Peace and Truce of God." But it is quite possible that an independent reform program actually did the most good.

The most common authors of chivalric romances were court chaplains, and what they sought to do with them was to re-channel noble violence. They combined elements and values nobles already liked (fighting, adventure, courage, strength) with "Christianizing" influences that directed those preexisting dispositions towards spiritual and benevolent goals, so that adventurers might seek the Holy Grail and a knight would fight to protect the weak from predation. And there is evidence that chivalric ideals had some effect: tournaments, for instance, became notably less violent after the idea of chivalry became popular. (Source: The High Middle Ages, Phillip Daileader.)

Comments

  1. Samson Corwell9:42 AM

    What the hell is "applied religious technology"? I'll admit I readily spent some of my time a few years ago reading Anonymous material about the CoS, but I don't ever recall this popping up in the docs. I mostly only heard about the OT junk.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more