One fact of History states that Modern Western civilization grew up out of Roman civilization. It undoubtedly received many other influences in the course of its development, and it naturally changed. and modified the cultural inheritance of Rome in more than one aspect. But the fact remains that all that is real today in Western present ethics if being founded with democracy of no ethical standards and within the democratic world-view(s) can be directly traceable to the old Roman civilization. As the intellectual and social atmosphere of ancient Rome was utterly utilitarian and anti-religious -in fact by its nature, if not by open admission so is the atmosphere of the modern West at the present time .It also seems that it happens without having the proof against transcendental religion, and without even admitting the need of such a proof, modern Western thought, while tolerating and sometimes even emphasizing religion as of being a collateral and a social convention,where it generally leaves transcendental ethics out of the range of any practical and/or applied consideration. Western civilization does not strictly deny God, but it has simply no further room and no use for God-self in its present intellectual closed model of thinking and/or believing system especially in collateral dimension(s): Justice, social life, behavior, politics and even in connection to factual scientific discoveries which the Holy Qur'an had certainly highlighted. It all have made a virtue out of an intellectual difficulty of man -his inability to grasp the totality of life. Thus, the modern Occidental is likely to attribute practical importance only to such ideas as lie within the sole scope of their empirical sciences, or, at least, are expected to influence men's social relations in a tangible way. And as the question of the existence of God does not belong prima facie to either of these two categories, the Western mind is, on principle, inclined to exclude God from the sphere of the practical - especially the collateral educational, cultural, sociopolitical and justice-legislative considerations.
The question here which may arise: how such an attitude, can be compatible with the present Christian way of thinking? Is not Christianity -which is supposed to be the spiritual fountainhead of Western civilization - a faith based on transcendental ethics? Of course it is. But, then, there is certainly no greater error than to consider Western civilization as being an outcome of true Christianity, where Paul takes his own questionable deviation into Europe. The real intellectual foundations of the modern West are, as had been already mentioned, to be found solely in the old Roman conception about life as a purely utilitarian proposition without any transcendental considerations especially in human religious individualistic and in humanity collateral lives..!
It can also be expressed as following: "Since we do not know anything definite -that is, provable by means of scientific materialistic experiments and its exact empirical calculations - as for example - about the origin of human life and its destiny after the death of human body, it is therefore better to concentrate all our " western" energies, research and production upon the development of our material and intellectual possibilities solely within the physical Field of knowledge and life without allowing ourselves further to be anymore hampered by any transcendental ethics and/or any related moral postulates based upon these assumptions which defy scientific proof." There can be no doubt that this attitude, so characteristic of modern Western civilization(s), is as unacceptable to Christianity as it is to Islam or any other religion, because it is certainly irreligious in its very essence. To ascribe, therefore, the practical achievements of modern Western civilization to the supposed efficiency of the Christian teachings is extremely considered ridiculous. Christianity has contributed very little to the powerful scientific and material development in which the present civilization of the West excels all others." Indeed, those achievements emerged out of Europe's age-long intellectual fight against the Christian Church and its outlook upon life.
Throughout such long centuries, the Psychomoral Spirit of Europe was deeply oppressed by this questionable underdeveloped religious system which was embodying some sort of contempt to the human nature (intellect and psychomoral existence and knowledge integration) in its reality where the human moralo-psycho-intellectual balance and processes were deeply disrupted and/or eradicated. The note of asceticism which pervades the Gospels from one end to the other, the demand to submit passively to wrong inflicted and to "turn the other cheek" , the denigration of sex as something based on the fall of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the "original sin" and its atonement through Christ's crucifixion; all of these examples lead to an interpretation of human life not as a positive stage but almost as a necessary evil -as an "educative" obstacle on the path of true psychomoral and ethical progress. It is clear that such a belief does not seem to favour the energetic endeavours concerning worldly knowledge and the improvement of the conditions of earthly life. And, indeed, for a very long time the intellectual man's life of Europe and the following rest of such a Christian World were subdued by this gloomy conception regarding human knowledge and/or existence. During the Middle Ages, when the Church was omnipotent, Europe had no vitality and no role what soever in the realm of scientific research. It lost even all its real connection with the philosophical achievements of Rome and Greece out of which European culture had once originated. Man's intellect revolted more than once; but it was beaten down by the Church again and again. The history of the Middle Ages is full of such a recorded bitter struggle between the genius, the scientists and the progressive intellectuals of Europe versus the questionable underdeveloped spirit of the Church.
The liberation of the European mind from the intellectual bondage to which the Christian Church had subjugated; it took place in the time of the Renaissance, and was to a very large extent due to the new cultural impulses and the ideas which the Muslim- Arabs had been transmitting to the West for several centuries. Whatever had been best in the culture of ancient Greece and the later Hellenistic period the Muslim-Arabs had cleverly revived in their learning , teachings and discoveries and it had been improved upon in the centuries that followed the establishment of the early Islamic Nation and/or Empire. I do not claim that the absorption of Hellenistic thought was an undisputed benefit to those Arabs and Muslims generally -because it was not. But for all the difficulties which this revived " Hellenistic Culture" may have caused to the Muslims by introducing Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic concepts into the Islamic Philosophic Views mixed with its theology and jurisprudence, it acted, through the Muslim- Arabs, as an immense stimulus to European thought. The Middle Ages had laid waste Europe's productive forces. The sciences were stagnant, superstition reigned supreme, social life was primitive and crude to an extent hardly conceivable today. At that point the cultural and the social influence of the Islamic world -at first through the adventure of the Crusades in the East and the brilliant intellectual achievements of Muslim Spain and Sicily in the West, and later through the growing commercial relations established by the republics of Genoa and Venice with the Near East -began to hammer at the bolted doors of European civilization. Before the dazzled eyes of European scholars and thinkers another civilization appeared -refined, progressive, full of passionate life and in possession of collateral cultural treasures which Europe had long ago missed, lost and even forgotten. What the Muslim-Arabs had done was far more than to revive ancient Greek science. They had created and build an entirely new scientific world of their own and developed hitherto unknown avenues of research and philosophy. All this they communicated.through different channels to the Western world: and it is not too much to say that the modern scientific age in which we are living at present was not inaugurated in the cities of Christian Europe, but in such Islamic centres as Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba, Nishapur, Samarqand.
The effect of these influences upon Europe was tremendously developmental. With these well known approach(es) of the Islamic civilization(s) where shiny intellectual light(s) dawned on the skies related to the West and had infused it with an infusion of refreshing human life and with a thirst momentum for progressing. It is no more than in just appreciation of its value that European historians term that period of regeneration the Renaissance -that is, "re-birth". It was, in fact, a re-birth of Europe as such.
The rejuvenating currents emanating from Islamic culture seems being capable of enabling the best intellectual minds of Europe to fight with their new strength against the dangerous and the disastrous questionable supremacy of the Christian Church. In the beginning this contest had the outward appearance of reform movements which sprang up, almost simultaneously, in, different European countries with the object of adapting the Christian way of thinking to the new exigencies of life. These movements were sound in their own way and, if they had met with real spiritual success, they might have tried to produce some form of reconciliation in between science and religion thoughts in Europe. But, as it happened, the harmful influences being caused by this Church of the Middle Ages had been already too far-reaching to be repaired by mere reform ism which, moreover, quickly degenerated into the recorded political struggle(s) between the interested groups. Instead of being truly reformed, Christianity was merely driven into its defensive attitude and thereafter gradually has been forced towards adopting an apologetic tone upto 300-350 years later on. The Church -whether Catholic or Protestant did not really give up any of its mental acrobatics, its non-comprehensive dogma(s), its world-contempt, its unscrupulous support of the powers-that-be at the expense of those oppressed humanity/people masses: it merely tried to gloss over these grave failings and to explain them away by means of hollow questionable assertions. No wonder then that, as the decades and the centuries progressed, the hold of religious thought grown up weaker and into a downward weakest within the West especially Europe until in the eighteenth century where the predominating Church was definitely swept overboard by the French Revolution and its sociopolitical and cultural influential consequences in the other following countries.. !
Presented by: Sherif Abdel-Kerim and Reviewed by Arna Arifin
Founders Of The International Surecratic Movement
Calgary, Alberta , Canada - published on 2nd May 2011
The question here which may arise: how such an attitude, can be compatible with the present Christian way of thinking? Is not Christianity -which is supposed to be the spiritual fountainhead of Western civilization - a faith based on transcendental ethics? Of course it is. But, then, there is certainly no greater error than to consider Western civilization as being an outcome of true Christianity, where Paul takes his own questionable deviation into Europe. The real intellectual foundations of the modern West are, as had been already mentioned, to be found solely in the old Roman conception about life as a purely utilitarian proposition without any transcendental considerations especially in human religious individualistic and in humanity collateral lives..!
It can also be expressed as following: "Since we do not know anything definite -that is, provable by means of scientific materialistic experiments and its exact empirical calculations - as for example - about the origin of human life and its destiny after the death of human body, it is therefore better to concentrate all our " western" energies, research and production upon the development of our material and intellectual possibilities solely within the physical Field of knowledge and life without allowing ourselves further to be anymore hampered by any transcendental ethics and/or any related moral postulates based upon these assumptions which defy scientific proof." There can be no doubt that this attitude, so characteristic of modern Western civilization(s), is as unacceptable to Christianity as it is to Islam or any other religion, because it is certainly irreligious in its very essence. To ascribe, therefore, the practical achievements of modern Western civilization to the supposed efficiency of the Christian teachings is extremely considered ridiculous. Christianity has contributed very little to the powerful scientific and material development in which the present civilization of the West excels all others." Indeed, those achievements emerged out of Europe's age-long intellectual fight against the Christian Church and its outlook upon life.
Throughout such long centuries, the Psychomoral Spirit of Europe was deeply oppressed by this questionable underdeveloped religious system which was embodying some sort of contempt to the human nature (intellect and psychomoral existence and knowledge integration) in its reality where the human moralo-psycho-intellectual balance and processes were deeply disrupted and/or eradicated. The note of asceticism which pervades the Gospels from one end to the other, the demand to submit passively to wrong inflicted and to "turn the other cheek" , the denigration of sex as something based on the fall of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the "original sin" and its atonement through Christ's crucifixion; all of these examples lead to an interpretation of human life not as a positive stage but almost as a necessary evil -as an "educative" obstacle on the path of true psychomoral and ethical progress. It is clear that such a belief does not seem to favour the energetic endeavours concerning worldly knowledge and the improvement of the conditions of earthly life. And, indeed, for a very long time the intellectual man's life of Europe and the following rest of such a Christian World were subdued by this gloomy conception regarding human knowledge and/or existence. During the Middle Ages, when the Church was omnipotent, Europe had no vitality and no role what soever in the realm of scientific research. It lost even all its real connection with the philosophical achievements of Rome and Greece out of which European culture had once originated. Man's intellect revolted more than once; but it was beaten down by the Church again and again. The history of the Middle Ages is full of such a recorded bitter struggle between the genius, the scientists and the progressive intellectuals of Europe versus the questionable underdeveloped spirit of the Church.
The liberation of the European mind from the intellectual bondage to which the Christian Church had subjugated; it took place in the time of the Renaissance, and was to a very large extent due to the new cultural impulses and the ideas which the Muslim- Arabs had been transmitting to the West for several centuries. Whatever had been best in the culture of ancient Greece and the later Hellenistic period the Muslim-Arabs had cleverly revived in their learning , teachings and discoveries and it had been improved upon in the centuries that followed the establishment of the early Islamic Nation and/or Empire. I do not claim that the absorption of Hellenistic thought was an undisputed benefit to those Arabs and Muslims generally -because it was not. But for all the difficulties which this revived " Hellenistic Culture" may have caused to the Muslims by introducing Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic concepts into the Islamic Philosophic Views mixed with its theology and jurisprudence, it acted, through the Muslim- Arabs, as an immense stimulus to European thought. The Middle Ages had laid waste Europe's productive forces. The sciences were stagnant, superstition reigned supreme, social life was primitive and crude to an extent hardly conceivable today. At that point the cultural and the social influence of the Islamic world -at first through the adventure of the Crusades in the East and the brilliant intellectual achievements of Muslim Spain and Sicily in the West, and later through the growing commercial relations established by the republics of Genoa and Venice with the Near East -began to hammer at the bolted doors of European civilization. Before the dazzled eyes of European scholars and thinkers another civilization appeared -refined, progressive, full of passionate life and in possession of collateral cultural treasures which Europe had long ago missed, lost and even forgotten. What the Muslim-Arabs had done was far more than to revive ancient Greek science. They had created and build an entirely new scientific world of their own and developed hitherto unknown avenues of research and philosophy. All this they communicated.through different channels to the Western world: and it is not too much to say that the modern scientific age in which we are living at present was not inaugurated in the cities of Christian Europe, but in such Islamic centres as Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba, Nishapur, Samarqand.
The effect of these influences upon Europe was tremendously developmental. With these well known approach(es) of the Islamic civilization(s) where shiny intellectual light(s) dawned on the skies related to the West and had infused it with an infusion of refreshing human life and with a thirst momentum for progressing. It is no more than in just appreciation of its value that European historians term that period of regeneration the Renaissance -that is, "re-birth". It was, in fact, a re-birth of Europe as such.
The rejuvenating currents emanating from Islamic culture seems being capable of enabling the best intellectual minds of Europe to fight with their new strength against the dangerous and the disastrous questionable supremacy of the Christian Church. In the beginning this contest had the outward appearance of reform movements which sprang up, almost simultaneously, in, different European countries with the object of adapting the Christian way of thinking to the new exigencies of life. These movements were sound in their own way and, if they had met with real spiritual success, they might have tried to produce some form of reconciliation in between science and religion thoughts in Europe. But, as it happened, the harmful influences being caused by this Church of the Middle Ages had been already too far-reaching to be repaired by mere reform ism which, moreover, quickly degenerated into the recorded political struggle(s) between the interested groups. Instead of being truly reformed, Christianity was merely driven into its defensive attitude and thereafter gradually has been forced towards adopting an apologetic tone upto 300-350 years later on. The Church -whether Catholic or Protestant did not really give up any of its mental acrobatics, its non-comprehensive dogma(s), its world-contempt, its unscrupulous support of the powers-that-be at the expense of those oppressed humanity/people masses: it merely tried to gloss over these grave failings and to explain them away by means of hollow questionable assertions. No wonder then that, as the decades and the centuries progressed, the hold of religious thought grown up weaker and into a downward weakest within the West especially Europe until in the eighteenth century where the predominating Church was definitely swept overboard by the French Revolution and its sociopolitical and cultural influential consequences in the other following countries.. !
Presented by: Sherif Abdel-Kerim and Reviewed by Arna Arifin
Founders Of The International Surecratic Movement
Calgary, Alberta , Canada - published on 2nd May 2011
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment