You really didn't pay attention in history class did you?
http://forums.myspace.com/t/3928110.aspx?fuseaction=forums.viewthread&PageIndex=10&SortOrder...
Unawriter:
The problem with Bible literacy is that it usually results in overall
illiteracy.
RESPONSE:
That is not the case historically. In Europe the Catholic Church of old
had translated the Bible into the Latin. Over time, people no longer
spoke the ancient Roman language, and so only Priests could understand
the Bible. People often speak of the dark ages and of the Church's
control over people. When you go into a Catholic Church today, and
anyone who has been in a Catholic School system will tell you, they have
the life of Christ in picture form going around the walls of the Church
usually in picture or engraved image form. Back when only 1%% of the
world's population was literate, this is how the Catholic Church told
the story of the Gospel to the simple.
Problem was is pretty soon the Catholic Church was corrupting the story
far beyond a Bishop in Rome separating from the Orthodox Church and
declaring himself the first pope. The picture or ICON format of telling
the Gospel and its story didn't originate with the Catholics, they
simply borrowed and simplified from the Orthodox Church, which pretty
much fell with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the invasion of
the Muslims who converted most of the citizenry by declaring that if you
became Muslim, you didn't have to pay taxes.
The Orthodox Church did continue to have great influence in Greece and
especially Russia, but it was the Catholic Church that dominated Western
and even part of Eastern Europe. So everything you knew about God you
learned from the Priest. It is still that way today in the Catholic
Church. They don't encourage you to read the Bible, because they believe
you are not supposed to Interpret it, because the Catholic Church is the
final authority on the interpretation of the Bible.
Then enter Jonathan Wycliffe
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe) and Jonathan Huss,
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hus) who first tried translating the
Bible into English and were persecuted by the Catholic Church, because
by this time, they had declared the ancient Latin no one spoke to be a
Holy and Spiritual Language, and so they wouldn't allow the Bible to be
translated into another language. To do so would be to commit heresy and
risk being burned at the stake by the Catholic Church. Wycliffe's body
was ordered dug up 43 years after his death in 1384 by Pope Martin V in
1427, and burned, and his ashes dumped in the River Swift outside of
Lutterworth, England.
Jan(Jonathan) Huss followed in Wycliffe's foot steps, and tried to bring
Reform to his the Churches in Bohemia, and for daring to translated the
Bible into the language of his people and for trying to follow the
teachings of the Bible, which were often in conflict with the Catholic
Church, he was excommunicated in 1411 and burned at the stake in 1415 by
the Catholic Church.
Martin Luther was born in 1483. Like his predecessors he too had
translated the Bible into the language of his people. Luther had
actually been a Catholic Priest, but then became disillusioned with the
Church. He entered a mass one day, and up until the 1960s here in
America, Catholic Mass was performed in Latin. Martin Luther came in to
find people who were trying to worship, and he heard two Priests
cracking jokes back and forth in Latin. The Catholic Church had thrown
Luther into jail after he translated the Bible and intended to burn him
at the stake just like Huss, but Luther's friends kidnapped him, hid
him, and protected him.
But Luther had an advantage the previous two translators of the Bible
did not have; the printing press, which was first assembled one year
after his birth. The mass printing of Bibles to people in a language
they could read and comprehend help bring about greater freedom of
thought, and was a major influence upon the Enlightenment in Europe in
the 18th Century, but even more profoundly upon a young Nation in
America with persecuted Protestant Christians of Europe coming to the US
even before 1776 for Religious Freedom, and from which we received great
thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams who helped write the US
Constitution. University Educated men such as Jefferson and Adams would
have had to learn the Bible as part of their undergraduate work, learn
Modern Philosophy (British Empiricism, European Rationalism), as well as
learn Latin and at least two other foreign languages.
Also, you had in the 18th Century the transplant of the mostly lay led
(non-clergy) Sunday School movement that transplanted itself from the
Protestant Movement in England, to the Sunday School mission work in the
United States. At one time Sunday School was separate from the Church,
and more people were attending Sunday School than Church, because you
had an opportunity not only to be educated and taught to read the Bible,
but you had an atmosphere where you could discuss what you had learned.
Many of America's early One Room Schools and Public Libraries sprang
from Sunday Schools and Sunday School Libraries. Later these were merged
into the Local, State, and Federal Public Schools and Library systems,
but there was no problem with a conflict of Church and State, because
the majority of Americans were already Christian to begin with. The
conflicts of Church and state would not come about until you had an
anti-Catholic Supreme Court Justice who came up with the "wall
separation", the early Communist of the early 20th Century and founders
of the ACLU, and then when the ACLU grew powerful enough in 1975 to
began attacking traditional Christian Religion in the United States.
However, back to the Sunday School movement. This is where women were
first allowed to teach men in America in a school setting. Many people
who were illiterate first learned to read from the Bible. As these
Sunday School movements grew and they wrote more and more of their own
literature, they developed libraries and imported other literature from
outside the Bible into these libraries. Much of the modern feminist
movement can be traced to the Sunday School movement which had a
profound influence, with women already in places of leadership in the
Sunday School movement of the 19th Century, to be influential in the
women's suffrage movement of the early 20th century.
With women taught to read and educated from the Bible, it was to have a
profound influence in changing the shape of our Government as we know it
today. It is also no coincidence since by the turn of the 20th century
every member of the US Congress was also a member of the National Sunday
School Board.
Then we receive comments from the Unawriter, who lives in a post Sunday
School Era, who was born on the Edge of the Baby Boomer/Generation X
population right in between, and who has been heavily influenced by a
post counter-culture society, that came about with the Baby Boomers. You
had the Beatniks as a counter culture from WW II but they were not as
populace as the Baby Boomers and their counter culture that became
anti-Christian, anti-family, anti-American culture as they had been
raised in it. Great things we received from the counter culture? STDs
jumping from 4 you could treat with anti-biotics to 128 STDs some of
which have no cure, and some which can kill, such as AIDS (25 million
dead world wide since 1982). A drug culture which helped bring about
crack and meth which destroyed much of inner city Black America in the
80's and 90's and whose influence is still around.
Yep, lack of Biblical literacy amongst the counter culture brought us so
many benefits, now where do we begin?
+++++++++++++++
sm Spiff
http://www.myspace.com/uss_relativity1968g
Now if we assume that the structure is as we have assumed (and unless we
do, we go back to the Socrates), namely, that the teacher himself
provides the learner with the condition, then the object of faith
becomes not the teaching but the teacher, for the essence of the
Socratic is that the learner, because he himself is the truth and has
the condition, can thrust the teacher away. Indeed, assisting people to
be able to do this constituted the Socratic art and heroism. Faith, then
must constantly cling to the teacher. But in order for the teacher to be
able to give the condition, he must be god, and in order to put the
learner in possession of it, he must be man. This contradiction is in
turn the object of faith and is the paradox, the moment. That the god
once and for all has given man the condition that is the eternal
Socratic presupposition, which does not clash inimically with time but
is incommensurable with the categories of temporality. But the
contradiction is that he receives the condition in the moment, and,
since it is a condition for understanding of eternal truth, it is "eo
ipso" - the eternal condition.
- Soren Kierkegaard from PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS Chp. IV
