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{"id":5950,"date":"2009-08-20T00:09:30","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T05:09:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/community\/jesuscreed\/2009\/08\/20\/atheist-delusions-6\/"},"modified":"2009-08-20T00:09:30","modified_gmt":"2009-08-20T05:09:30","slug":"atheist-delusions-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2009\/08\/20\/atheist-delusions-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Atheist Delusions 6"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"Imagine.jpg\"$ <\/span>David Bentley Hart, a historian of ideas, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies<\/a> $\"\"$
\n<\/strong><\/em>, examines \u201cfaith and reason\u201d to provide historical context for what has happened with New Atheists. The New Atheists, he contends, propagate a myth in telling the story of (Western) civilization. Namely, that the Age of Faith was an age of superstition and the Age of Reason one of enlightenment, and the former is to be applauded for putting the former into the past. In fact, if all were so reasonable, our society would be improved. Hart thinks this is nonsense in a number of ways.<\/p>\n

How often do we hear the story that the medieval age was the \u201cdark\u201d ages? That the \u201cdark\u201d ages ended when classical civilization was rediscovered in the Italian renaissance? That the church was to blame for that age being \u201cdark\u201d? Can we not see that when the Faith was growing, it was committed more to the Faith than to Plato and Aristotle? But that during that same time folks like Boethius in the West was doing what he could to keep the classics alive? That during this time the East was absorbing and reading the greats of Western civilization? And who is to say that the classics were always humane?<\/b><\/p>\n

In chp 6 he takes on Jonathan Kirsch <\/a>one more time, and Kirsch is a much-published critic of the Bible and history and religion. Kirsch is not match for Hart when it comes to comprehending the history of the Church. Kirsch describes the \u201cDark Ages\u201d as do other myth-makers: \u201can era of obscurantism, stagnation, and terror in the service of true belief\u201d (49).\u00a0 <\/p>\n

\n
Hart traces the Christian, both Western and Eastern (which Kirsch either doesn\u2019t know or conveniently ignores), response to classical civilization and demonstrates compellingly that Kirsch\u2019s theories are unfounded. Hart sees Kirsch\u2019s claims to be a \u201ccrude burlesque of medieval history\u201d (52). \u201cTalk of medieval Christian civlization being \u2018quick to burn\u2019 the writings of ancient pagans, moreover, is tantamount to a confession of an almost total ignorance of that civilization\u201d (52). To be sure, both pagan and Christian emperors destroyed the books of those who worried them.<\/p>\n

But as Hart sees it: \u201cthe precedent, in point of fact, was set by Augustus Caesar, who according to Suetonius destroyed thousands of rival prophetic books before sealing the Sibylline books themselves away from public scrutiny in the Palatine temple of Apollo\u201d (54).<\/p>\n

Of Kirsch: \u201cSlovenly scholarship is a sin, perhaps, but bad scholars might also be forgiven for believing what they have always been told\u201d (54).\u00a0 But, \u201cthere is no intelligible sense in which the rise of Christianity can be held responsible for the decline of late Roman culture, some supposed triumph of dogma over reason, or the retardation of science\u201d (54-55). <\/p>\n

Indeed, \u201cit was the church\u2019s monasteries alone that saved classical civilization from the total eclipse it would otherwise have suffered\u201d (55). And especially in the East.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"