Right, now were covering old ground.Cy: "The only thing I know about Thomas Moore is Utopia, which might be the world's first communist manifesto."
Jack: OK. You must know something about him.
Cy: "With regard to the intellectual history of western civilization, it is simply a matter of historical fact that natural philosophy, science, skeptical inquiry was sponsored and promoted by the church from late antiquity through the early modern period" largely as a result of the recovery of Greek thought via Italy and Islamic Al Andalus."
Jack: By 'recovery', you mean after the Church burned all the Books that didn't conform to Church doctrine ... yes, I would agree with that. Hey, what's a 1,000 years.
Cy: "Pagan thought"
Jack: They had their Gods back then. They had their 'Religions'. But Thank You for pointing out why the Ancient Manuscripts were destroyed by the Christians, because they were 'Pagan Thoughts'.
I was the one who already wrote a post about the cultural crimes of the Catholic church, aka destruction of Mayan and Aztec books and cultural artifacts, and the burning of Arian and Nestorian Christian books becasuse they were deemed heretical. The loss of human cultural history because of the zealous actions of the Catholic Church is a dark stain which we condemn in hindsight.
The issue I was addressing was the church's role in the scholarly intellectual development and intellectual history of western civilization.
Ever since the early to high middle ages, the Church and its patrons were generally keen to recover scholarly texts from Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Boethius, Averroes and the Muslim scholars of Al Andalus. We can also recogniz the fact that the establishment of universities and higher education is directly attributable to Christianity.