Book burning in Christianity...

[angellous_evangellous]

I've seen a few folks on RF say that Christians did much to stifle learning in ancient times.

As a student of history, I continually see that as a general rule people do not act outside of their historical contexts.

That is, it is rare to see a group of people or a person do something outstanding that has no historical precedence.

If Christians burned books as a means to control knowledge and intellectual exploration, there almost certainly is a pattern of it in the cultures that practiced this...

So I found this article today, available on JSTOR.

"Bookburning and Censorship in Ancient Rome: A Chapter from the History of Freedom of Speech"

Frederick H. Cramer
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Apr., 1945), pp. 157-196
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

 

[ancalimon]

Byzantine Iconoclasm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Iconoclasm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Iconoclasm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think book burning is just a small part of cleansing the land of other potential political entities.
I think all the people on Earth pass through the same intellectual enlightenment.
I think there is no other explanation to the fact that religion in Meso-America was very similar in many concepts to religion in Middle Asia. Even the holy cross (a + sign inside a circle) can be found all around Middle Asia and Meso-America. Too much coincidence.

 

[Oberon]

I've seen a few folks on RF say that Christians did much to stifle learning in ancient times.

As a student of history, I continually see that as a general rule people do not act outside of their historical contexts.

That is, it is rare to see a group of people or a person do something outstanding that has no historical precedence.

If Christians burned books as a means to control knowledge and intellectual exploration, there almost certainly is a pattern of it in the cultures that practiced this...

So I found this article today, available on JSTOR.

"Bookburning and Censorship in Ancient Rome: A Chapter from the History of Freedom of Speech"

Frederick H. Cramer
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Apr., 1945), pp. 157-196
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

On a similar note, when I was wiccan, I constantly heard others refer to the "burning times" of christianity. What was really remarkable, however, was that for many centuries, christians actually stopped the killing of suspected witches in other cultures (e.g. the goths). Additionally, while the total number of executed witches throughout all of europe over several centuries was about 50 or 60 thousand, the two largest trials/executions of witches ever occured in pre-christian rome, where apprx. 2000 witches were killed during one, and 3,000 the next. Killing witches was the norm. That christians did eventually is no suprise. What is suprising was how long it took them to do so.

 

[Madhuri]

There were Chistians who burned a stack of Harry Potter books a few years ago. I'm sure they contributed only to Rowling's fortune.

 

[Smoke]

I'm not proud of it, but in 1988 I was on Greek tv standing next to a bishop while he anathematized Nikos Kazantzakis. I thought it was silly even at the time, but I didn't have the moral fiber to take off my stikharion and walk away.

 

[The Neo Nerd]

I saw this and couldn't help but like it.