Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
Leaving the rest of your dubious claims aside, why exactly were the popes powerful enough to do any political and economic manipulation if not because of their religious authority? No God = no pope = no call to Crusade = no crusades.
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You cannot distill it down to such a ridiculously simple explanation and then explicate and blame the whole upon the common denominator. Papal authority of course is religiously derived but we are arguing from two points of the same side of the argument.
If you have ever studied the history of Europe you would know that the root causes of the crusades are countless. Due to political and economic stabilization of Europe, there was a large yet lay warrior class that had nothing to do. Furthermore, the eastern Byzantium empire was facing territorial expansion by Muslim armies. With this large force of restless soldiers and the political and military threat of Islamic expanion, this was a good opportunity to vent that building frustration as well as to take advantage of a large swelling up of religious fervor as a further motivating factor for both peasant class soldiers to perform a pillgrimage and find a livelihood and for landless nobles to make a name for themselves and hopefully be rewarded with land and property upon their return.
You are arguing that religious inspiration or pious motivation are completely the causes and to be blamed for the Crusades. I'm pointing out that your explanation is too simple and ignoring many facts of history. Religion was the justification and motivation for many but politics and economical reasons are always chief among the arbiters of human endeavor, especially among those in power.
If you want to convince someone to question the validity of religion, challenge the core tenets of their faith, not point out examples of how people historically behaved or did things (at the core, this is just the nazi argument, find something bad associated with something and then pin it all on that). As much as religion needs to get out of the dark ages, people need to stop pointing to the dark ages as criticism of contemporary religion.