God is a particularly effective threat precisely because He sees everything even when the rest of us might not. This is one obvious suggestion for the switch from having no gods (or, perhaps, having many little gods only interested in receiving offerings at their shrines) to having a single omniscient, all-powerful Moralizing High God who takes an active interest in human affairs and punishes those who step out of line. One study used a standard cross-cultural sample of ethnographic and historical societies that contained over a thousand variables to test whether this suggestion really worked. It seemed that having a Moralizing High God did make it more likely that the members of a society would be socially compliant in terms of willingness to pay taxes, lend money to each other and accept the presence of a police force and other secular means of sanctioning backsliders. There was, however, no evidence that a belief in a Moralizing High God was associated with the size of the tribe as a whole or the size of the community in which individuals typically lived (that is, the village or hunting camp), or with the level of conflict either with external neighbours or within the community itself – something that others have suggested might be the case.
Yorum
Hristiyanlığın Pagan Gelenekleri Üstüne Kurulması
The word Easter as used in the Roman (as opposed to Greek Orthodox) tradition, for example, derives from the Old English Eostre, the month dedicated to the Germanic goddess of that name – herself an ancient Indo-European goddess of dawn who, given the spring date associated with her, may well have been a fertility goddess. The date chosen for Christmas (25 December) conveniently coincided with the date of the winter solstice and the rather drunken Roman festivities of Saturnalia that celebrated the god Saturn at this point in the year. It seems that the early Christian Church adopted a number of existing pagan festivals for their major celebrations, perhaps to distract their new converts from their previous religious adherences. The point is – and this is something I shall come back to later – new forms of religion don’t usually sweep away older forms, but rather are grafted onto them precisely because the older forms are so deeply engrained into people’s psyche that they are difficult to erase.
Vikinglerin Krallığa Geçişiyle Ticaretin Güvenleşmesi
with the formation of real kingdoms in Scandinavia, the new kings had enough power to begin to control the currency in their territories. Because this is also the time when slow, bulk-carrying cargo ships appear, suggesting that the seas were safe enough that it no longer was as necessary to transport trade goods in warships full of warriors, we might guess that they were also able to control violence, at least to some degree.
Too Much Slave = Less Teknolojik Gelişme
It is tempting to say that the Greco-Roman world failed to develop technologically because there were too many slaves, and that medieval and Renaissance Europe produced notable technological developments in reaction to the scarcity of labor caused by epidemics. But the factors at play were much more numerous and complex. What has been mentioned here, albeit briefly, regarding mental attitudes and aspirations should serve to warn against easy explanations, though it does not pretend to offer alternative solutions.
Decline of Spain
Venedikli elçi diyor ki “Spain cannot exist unless relieved by others, nor can the rest of the world exist without the money of Spain.” İspanya krallığı amerika kolonilerinden gelen altın ve gümüşle parasal olarak zenginleşiyor. Ama üretim yok, bu yüzden zenginleşen soylu ispanyollar lüks ihtiyaçlarını ingiliz, hollanda ve fransız üreticilerinden karşılıyor. İspanya parası dışarıya kaçıyor. Para ispanya iç ekonomisinde dönmüyor, düşmanlarını zengin ediyor. Toprakları da aşırı verimli değil, artisanları çok yok. “Riches of the Americas provided Spain with purchasing power but ultimately they stimulated the development of Holland, England, France and other European countries.”
Crusade ve hristiyanlık inancıyla akdenizde Osmanlıya karşı, kuzeyde Low Countries’de protestanlara karşı olan mücadelede askeri harcamalar aşırı arttı. Bu harcamaların ekonomik olarak geri kazanımı olmadı.
“Moreover, this artificial prosperity had induced many to abandon the land; schools had multiplied, but they had served mostly to produce a half-educated intellectual proletariat who scorned productive industry and manual labor and found positions in the clergy and in the bloated state bureaucracy, both of which served above all to disguise unemployment. Spain in the seventeenth century was heavily in debt and lacked entrepreneurs and artisans but had an overabundance of bureaucrats, lawyers, priests, beggars and bandits. And the country sank into a dispirited decline.”
William Blake’in Sanayi Şehirlerine Yorumu
Industrial zones developed around certain cities, rather than being more dispersed in the countryside. These cities grew at an amazing rate, but they lacked enough housing, clean water, or sanitation services, so that diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis spread easily. Their intensive use of coal made them even more filthy, and many visitors were appalled; the English poet William Blake, for example, wrote in 1805 of “dark Satanic mills” that had replaced “England’s green and pleasant land.”
Viking Townların Organik Değil Planlamayla Büyümesine Kanıt
Most Scandinavian trade towns were laid out in regular lots, with straight streets organized on a grid system. This suggests that they did not come about spontaneously or grow organically but rather were established and controlled by a governing authority.
Charlemagne Döneminin Vikinglere Taraflı Yaklaşımı
Yet, Charlemagne’s exploits are generally presented in a positive, almost triumphal light in medieval sources, as well as in modern accounts. Charlemagne was the victorious, strong emperor, who has now even become the symbol of the European Union, which has borrowed his name for a huge office building in Brussels. Almost all the medieval sources for his exploits, however, were produced by his subjects, some of the same writers who were greatly dismayed by the violence of the Vikings. The difference is one of perspective. As long as the violence was directed outwards, Frankish writers did not mind it, but when the Franks themselves became the victims of violence, they protested loudly. The same may be said about others who suffered Viking aggression. Since Scandinavians did not have much of a written culture in the Viking Age, the perspective of their victims on the Continent has dominated the modern view of the period, inspiring an understanding of Viking violence as unique and extraordinary.
Kierkegaard’a Göre Tanrı
In his Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard once compared God to a king who wished to win the love of a common woman. If he approached her in his capacity as king, she would be too awed by him to be able to offer him the kind of love spontaneously exchanged between equals. She could also be attracted only to his wealth and power, or could simply fear to refuse the king’s desire. For these reasons, the king approached the common woman in the guise of a commoner. Only then would he be able to elicit her sincere love, and only then would he be able to know that her love for him was truly genuine. This, says Kierkegaard, is what God does when He is born into the world as Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. He seeks out our love not by overwhelming us with the majesty and awe of the beatific vision (which is not available to us in this world, only in the world to come) but by condescending to interact with us on our level, adopting a human nature and taking human flesh.
Saint Thomas’a Göre Tanrının Varlığı
Every cause of a given effect itself demands a cause in order to account for its own existence; this cause in turn requires a cause, and so on. If we have an infinite series on our hands, in which each cause itself requires a cause, then nothing could ever have come into existence. Saint Thomas explains that there must, therefore, be an Uncaused Cause—a cause that is not itself in need of a cause. This first cause can therefore begin the sequence of causes. This first cause, Saint Thomas says, is God. God is the one self-existing being whose existence is part of His very essence. No human being must exist; there was a time before each one came into existence, and the world will continue to exist after each one perishes. Existence is not part of the essence of any human being. But God is different. He cannot not exist. And He depends on nothing prior to Himself in order to account for His existence.