By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The Prince of Wales, in aiming to be the end of democracy, may yet be the end of the monarchy. Notwithstanding that Europe’s most climate-skeptical party had just come top in the recent UK elections for the European Parliament, he intervened tendentiously in politics – as he now all too frequently does – to demand no less than an end to capitalism as we know it in the name of Saving The Planet from global warming that has not happened for a decade and a half.
The Prince told a meeting of the overpaid and overfed in London that a “fundamental transformation of global capitalism” was necessary in order to halt “dangerously accelerating climate change” that would “bring us to our own destruction”.
That won’t do. Even if “climate change” were “dangerously accelerating” (which it is not, for nearly all the key global indicators – temperature, sea ice, droughts, floods, hurricanes, rainfall, sunshine – show no exceptional trend), an essential duty of a future constitutional monarch is that on all matters of politics he should, as the ancient Greeks used to put it, keep absolute and holy silence.
All parties represented in the UK Parliament are already squandering tens of billions on addressing a non-problem with expensive non-solutions, such as windmills that cause greater CO2 emissions than they abate, and subsidies to all manner of unnecessary, diamond-encrusted boondoggles to make non-existent global warming go away, and madcap proposals such as the multi-billion-dollar deployment of 1500 Flettner-rigged trimarans with Thom fences on the rotating sail cylinders and power from the twin propellers driving atomizers to turn seawater into cloud condensation nuclei and fling them half a mile into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space.
Beam me up, Scotty.
It is not the place of the monarchy to take sides in political debates. A monarchy that allows itself to shuffle, mumbling and whining, down into the political arena and to indulge in advocacy for global totalitarianism on the basis of a flimsy and discredited pseudo-scientific pretext is a monarchy that has forfeited its right to rule.
Charles must go. His future, along with that of the thousand-year monarchy, is in the past. It used to be said there would soon be only five kings in the world: spades, hearts, clubs, diamonds, and England. Scrub that last one.
Charles’ latest speech, whether he knew it or not, was part of a concerted campaign on the part of the international classe politique to persuade the world, with the active assistance of the sycophantic Marxstream media, to agree to a binding treaty by which sovereign nations would abandon their right to set their own environmental policy and allow a vast, entirely unelected international bureaucracy to rule them all.
To all who love democracy, this prospect is terrifying. The increasing brazenness and frequency of the lies being told about the climate, from Prince Charles’ more than usually ridiculous speech to the daftly hysterical climate assessments recently issued by Mr Obama and by Britain’s oldest taxpayer-funded pressure-group, the Royal Society, shows how desperate the totalitarians are to persuade the world to let them establish for the first time a global regime of absolute power wielded by supranational institutions entirely beyond the reach of any electorate.
The Founding Fathers of the United States foresaw many things when, in that long, hot Philadelphia summer, they drew up the Constitution. But they did not foresee that the United States, like many other nations, would come to be governed by people whose personal ambitions lay far beyond her shores, for they are global ambitions.
These global ambitions are not to extend nobly in the international sphere the athletic democracy that is their nation’s great gift to itself and to humanity, but instead to use the motive power of speciously-generated fear and the artifice of international treaty-making with like-minded totalitarians in other nations to bind their successors, and to bind the elected Congress in perpetuity without regard to the changing science or to the changing will of any future electorate.
The draft global climate treaty that failed in Copenhagen in 2009 failed in no small part because details of the draft had become public scant weeks before the conference began. There was a justifiable public outcry against it.
At the Durban climate conference in 2011 a further attempt at introducing a ruthless, intrusive and pernickety regime of global control was made, but again it was exposed publicly, exclusively, and in detail here at WattsUpWithThat. That posting became the most widely-read of some 500,000 on WordPress worldwide on the day of publication.
The junta that furtively directs the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change saw from these examples that conducting its affairs in public, as it is mandated to do, would prevent it from establishing its intended regime of absolute control. For if the mere people knew what it was up to they would not endure it.
At the 2012 climate conference in Doha, when I tried to obtain a draft of the Chairman’s conclusions – an always revealing document previously available at every conference but never reported on by journalists – a smirking clerk told me that no such document existed. The UNFCCC, twice before humiliated when its plans for world domination had been exposed, had scuttled, cockroach-like, underground.
Monckton of Arabia, Doha, 2012. The camel is the one on the right.
So now it is a race between the slow, inexorable emergence of the truth that the weather does not and will not change at the predicted rate or to the predicted degree and the vast army of princes, potentates, plutocrats, paper-pushers and pusillanimous panty-waists who have long wearied of democracy and have been quietly misusing the treaty-making power and abusing the scientific method with the undeclared but undeniable aim of eradicating all but the appearance of democracy, worldwide.
The day before yesterday, one nation might adopt Fascism, another Socialism, another Communism, another theocracy, another democracy. The systems competed, and democracy prevailed. The day after tomorrow, if the unholy alliance prevails, there will be one system, and no competition.
While competition existed, the totalitarians were seen off. Like it or not, the Berlin Wall came down. Yet they did not accept their defeat. They took over Greenpeace and other environmental groups and turned them into what have become, in all but name, totalitarian front groups whose real aim is not environmental but political.
That aim is the worldwide annihilation of the democratic and capitalist system that, for all its faults, has delivered more happiness and more benefit – in economic terms, more utility – to more people than any other political or economic disposition the world has known.
The Prince of Wales has morphed into just one more dirigiste, etatiste contre-capitaliste. His speech was framed as a warning – and it is just that: a warning that he and his ilk are intending over the next 18 months to bully or badger or bribe the world into ceding all political power by treaty to them and to those whom they approve. Ballot-box? What’s that? Never heard of it.
Consider the following sentence:
“Over the next 18 months, and bearing in mind the urgency of the situation confronting us, the world faces what is probably the last effective window of opportunity to vacate the insidious lure of the ‘last chance saloon’ in order to agree an ambitious, equitable and far-sighted multilateral settlement in the context of the post-2015 sustainable development goals and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
Sometimes, mixed metaphors are entertaining. This one is merely leaden. We face (but do not pass through) a window of opportunity, then we vacate a lure (this is entirely without meaning), then we do not call in at the last-chance saloon (surely the Prince’s intention was to visit the last-chance saloon rather than missing the bus and failing to catch the tide?).
His is the bloodless, alien tongue of those who have conceived so total a contempt for democracy that they cannot wait to stifle it under a mountain of treaties and carbon controls and reporting requirements and quotas and taxes and subsidies and regulations and restrictions and Thou-Shalt-Nots.
And the Press will not come to the aid of the people. Before the Second World War, they near-unanimously fawned upon Hitler. After it, they near-unanimously fawned upon Stalin.
Now, they near-unanimously fawn upon the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the European Union, and a Lernaean Hydra of pampered, me-too, supranational bureaucracies whose defining characteristic is that not one of them is answerable either via the ballot-box to any electorate or via the courts to any jurisdiction.
Patrick Henry
This is a dangerous moment. All that the Founding Fathers of the United States had sought to achieve may very soon be set at naught. The irony is that in the plot to repudiate and repeal freedom and democracy and the cheerful chaos of the market-place the current leadership in the United States has enthusiastically made common cause with the very monarchy that the American Revolution so vigorously sought to supplant.
The year before that great Revolution, in St. John’s Church, Virginia, Patrick Henry cried, “Give me liberty or give me death!” In the coming months, unless we are very careful and very vigilant, it will not be the former.
cd says: June 3, 2014 at 2:41 am
Again, even when the very physical evidence of the Chruch’s patronage of the sciences (Cathedrals, Palaces, Monasteries) are there for all to see.
___________________________________
You think the construction of a cathedral or monastery represent evidence for patronage of the sciences?? What a bizarre argument.
The fact of the matter is that one of the first scientific institutions was the Musseion at Alaexandria. It was from here that Heron of Alexandria invented the steam turbine in the 1st century AD, and the trick jugs that were used by JC at the wedding in Cana.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musaeum
http://himedo.net/TheHopkinThomasProject/TimeLine/Wales/Steam/URochesterCollection/Hero/section50.html
http://himedo.net/TheHopkinThomasProject/TimeLine/Wales/Steam/URochesterCollection/Hero/section8.html
But the Musseion was destroyed by the Christian Church under Emperor Theodosius in AD 391, and then destroyed again by Caliph Omar in the 7th century:
http://www.bede.org.uk/library.htm
The next great scientific institution to arise was the Royal Society, in 1660. And it was only able to be founded in England at this time because Oliver Cromwell had destroyed the Catholic Church. (And in 1690 William, the Prince of Orange, would ensure that the Catholic Church never returned.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society
The facts are clear. The self-righteous and oppressive Catholic Church had neutered science and civilisation for more than 1,000 years.
R
and also in France, the celtic city of Alesia , it is still a problem no resolve
Richard says:
June 2, 2014 at 2:56 pm
“I have never heard of Greek scientific works being translated from Hebrew to Latin, but as for the claim that “A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines” – it is false.”
=====================================
Arguing with Richard is like arguing with a warmist. Yes, Richard, many classical works survived by way of Hebrew, mainly from Spain. And many more survived by way of Arabic. I don’t have an exact tally, but I’ll leave it to you to assign some percentage to “large.”
Just about everything you have said is pure nonsense, particularly the claim that the Islamic Enlightenment was not Islamic (first you say it was heretical, now Christian).
Richard says:
June 2, 2014 at 9:24 pm
“If you had cared to read the next sentence from your quote above “Western Arab translations of Greek works (found in Iberia and Sicily) originates in the Greek sources preserved by the Byzantines.”
==============================================
Let me explain: no, the Arabs did not invent these texts; they got them from the Greeks (the Byzantines). And they translated them like crazy. But not all texts survive, in Greek or Arabic. Many that did not survive in Greek did survive in Arabic, and some in Hebrew. And most of these texts were then translated to Latin. How little you know. –AGF
ralfellis says:
June 3, 2014 at 2:54 am
“The guy is a one-man disseminator of discord.”
====================================================
The definition of a contrarian–sort of like Galileo.
ralfellis at 3:19 says
“…the…Catholic church had neutered science and civilization for more than a 1,000 years.”
=================================================================
More half-witted bigotry. Those texts which did survive in Greek survived in monasteries. So we have one dimwit arguing that Islam contributed nothing to Western Civilization, and another dimwit saying the Church contributed nothing. How then, did Western Civilization survive?
The answer, by way of the clergy. The clerical, that is, the literate. Latin, the language of science, literature, and theology, was kept alive by the Church. The reason I write this in Roman letters is the Church. It is only ignoramuses who discount the role of religion is civilization–only with the European Enlightenment did Church and science part their ways. In every primitive society religion and science were one, and controlled by the state. –AGF
agfosterjr says:
June 3, 2014 at 6:24 am
“Just about everything you have said is pure nonsense, particularly the claim that the Islamic Enlightenment was not Islamic (first you say it was heretical, now Christian).”
I never said that “Islamic” Enlightenment was either “heretical” or Christian, though heretical it may have been. You seem to struggle with comprehension. I said it had nothing to do with Islam, i.e. the teachings of the Quran or the Hadiths. Its inspiration didn’t spring from these sources, but rather from the pagan Greeks and free thought of intelligent people independent of these teachings. And much of the translations were carried out by Christians, who knew Greek as well as Arabic.
Much the same can be said of the Catholic Church. If Catholic monasteries preserved the pagan Greek classics or indulged in science, the credit does not go to Catholicism. Nothing in the Catholic creed demands that Aristotle or the other pagan Greek scientists or science should be venerated, in fact quite the opposite. When science comes up with evidence that is contrary to the scriptures then as has been proven time and again religious people either reject the evidence or struggle to find some new interpretation of the scriptures while preserving their belief in the scriptures. Galileo is a prime example.
@CD “Copernicus was a canon of the Church for God’s sake.” So was Martin Luther. But that’s not the point he didn’t publish his book till just before his death. Being a canon of the Church would not have spared him from being burnt at the stake.
agfosterjr – “Let me explain: no, the Arabs did not invent these texts; they got them from the Greeks (the Byzantines).”
Indeed, then explain this in the light of your explanation “A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines”
The fact of the matter is the Arabic contribution to preserving the Greek scientific works is overblown. The claim that Arabs kept the flame of enlightenment burning without which Europe would have been extinguished in darkness is rubbish. They are ones that destroyed the civilisations in the first place and if you were to study Greek classics would you not want to translate them from the original rather than from translations wherever possible.
Richard at 1:10 says
“Indeed, then explain this in the [sic] light of your explanation ‘A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines'”
====================================
We have to spell out the most minute details for the likes of Richard. Say 100,000 texts are extant, and each text has an average half life of 300 years. The texts have to be hand copied faster than they wear out or are destroyed. Even if most texts are copied every century or two, some will not be, and the original and copies will be lost. So, the Byzantines will have preserved them, but not long enough to survive till the Renaissance. Get it? They are preserved (for a while) but not preserved (for a long enough while). And Islam took up some of the slack. Jeez.
As for the Islamic contribution being “overblown,” I’m afraid you haven’t convinced me you’re an authority on the subject. Rather you have shown you don’t have the slightest notion what you are talking about. You are wasting everyone’s time here. –AGF
agfosterjr says:
June 3, 2014 at 2:34 pm
“So, the Byzantines will have preserved them, but not long enough to survive till the Renaissance. Get it? They are preserved (for a while) but not preserved (for a long enough while). And Islam took up some of the slack. Jeez.”
I’m afraid I dont get it. What you said was “A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines, but by Arab and Jewish scholars.
From this I understand that the Byzantines did not preserve most of the Greek scientific works, the Arabs and the Jews did.
But in explaining this you said “Let me explain: no, the Arabs did not invent these texts; they got them from the Greeks (the Byzantines).”
How could they have got it from the Byzantines when the Byzantines didn’t preserve them?
Then you go on further to say ” So, the Byzantines will have preserved them, but not long enough to survive till the Renaissance. Get it? They are preserved (for a while) but not preserved (for a long enough while). And Islam took up some of the slack. Jeez.
Firstly you seem to have some trouble distinguishing between Islam and Muslims, as the Catholics here between Catholics and Catholicism. One are individual humans and the other a creed, belief system or ideology. Islam could have taken up the slack if so commanded by the Quran or the Hadiths. You will have to show me the particular passage which says so.
By your passage above I understand that the Byzantines were trying their level best to preserve the documents but the poor chaps couldn’t keep up, so the kindly Arabs and the Jews stepped in to help out, on the command of Islam, and thus saved the day for the poor ignorant western Europeans who would have otherwise been wandering around with wooden clubs.
But didn’t the Muslims, (on the direct command of Islam), destroy the Byzantine civilisation in the first place? So the poor scribes who were going hell for leather copying these manuscripts were possibly interrupted in their endeavors by having their heads sliced off by Muslims following Islam? Just conjecture on my part – you will have to fill me in.
Or could it be, to put in your words “Just about everything you have said is pure nonsense”?
agfosterjr says: June 3, 2014 at 2:34 pm
So, the Byzantines will have preserved them, but not long enough to survive till the Renaissance. Get it? They are preserved (for a while) but not preserved (for a long enough while). And Islam took up some of the slack. Jeez.
________________________________
But you are completely wrong.
The Arab Muslims could not speak Greek, so it was the Syriac Christians who did the translating and preserving, because they spoke Greek, Aramaic and Arabic.
You also seem to forget that during the Golden Age of Islam, the majority of the population in each region was Christian or Jewish, not Muslim. Arabic Muslims only represented a controlling elite in these regions for many centuries, and so all the administration and donkey work was done by either Christians or Jews.
R
ralfellis says:
June 3, 2014 at 4:36 pm
It’s just amazing how much you know. You have access to an ancient census providing population statistics by religion, languages spoken, ethnicity, you name it. All Christians were trilingual; all Moslems were monolingual. And your definition of Islamic culture? Is it by religion, language, or ethnicity? Everything you write is hopelessly parochial and idiosyncratic. How can one communicate with such an autodidact of so little learning?
When we speak of the Islamic Golden Age we’re talking about the common culture of the Islamic world, defined as the area of Islamic political hegemony where Arabic is at least the language of the elite, if not of the populace. It is true that a comparatively small band of Arabs conquered a huge part of the globe, but the fact is that their language, and an inordinate share of their Y chromosomes, as well as their religion, in the span of about a century spread from Arabia to Mesopotamia, North Africa, Iberia, and later to Anatolia and over to Europe, Indonesia, India and China. The Caliphate sponsored the arts and sciences like no other place in the Western world of the age.
It’s quite true that in some fields Islam added little to Greek, Indian and Persian learning. In other fields they added a great deal. Now I dug out my Charles Singer (“A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900”), and I will pound you with history till doomsday or until you give up all your ridiculous notions about Arabs who couldn’t translate from Greek, or about Arab Christians who still spoke Greek (just when do you think Greek fell out of use?). Because ultimately you are a bigot, and your thinking and writing has much in common with certain other bigots of Aryan infamy. It is shallow, narrow, uninformed, irrational, and worthy of contempt. You have certainly earned mine. –AGF
ralfellis:
June 3, 2014 at 4:36 pm
“It is true that a comparatively small band of Arabs conquered a huge part of the globe”
My god even you know that? Then possibly they were in a small minority among the conquered territories don’t you think O clever one?
“Now I dug out my Charles Singer (“A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900″)” You actually read a book? Good you dug it out as that seems to be your sole source of wisdom and you must be a bit rusty having to dig it out – from where? The mounds of manure you keep?
Have you heard of the Pact of Umar? Which enabled Christians in the Middle east specially to keep their religion?
“After the rapid expansion of the Muslim dominion in the 7th century, Muslims leaders were required to work out a way of dealing with Non-Muslims, who remained in the majority in many areas for centuries. The solution was to develop the notion of the “dhimma”, or “protected person”. The Dhimmi were required to pay an extra tax, but usually they were unmolested. This compares well with the treatment meted out to non-Christians in Christian Europe. The Pact of Umar is supposed to have been the peace accord offered by the Caliph Umar to the Christians of Syria, a “pact” which formed the patter of later interaction.”
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/pact-umar.asp
Your great admiration for the Arabs seems to stem in a large part in their sharing a large part of their Y chromosomes. You offered to tell me my ancestry, I think you had better check yours. There is a gene for intelligence and I’m sure there must be one for stupidity also.
Willybamboo:
I write to draw attention to your excellent and factual post at June 3, 2014 at 3:10 am
YES! And the same is true of the ‘Golden Age’ of Islam.
People who like to think will think about the religion, politics and physical realities of the world (i.e. society) in which they live.
Sadly, there are some bigots who post to WUWT to display their views which demonstrate that their religious and political biases prevent them from thinking.
Richard
Willybamboo: Newton’s theological writings are more extensive than his scientific. (so I have read) Michael Faraday was also very devout. The age of exploration coincided with the reformation which coincided scientific inquiry. …It happened because of the Christian religion.
richardscourtney; “YES! And the same is true of the ‘Golden Age’ of Islam.”
The Christian religion antedated the the Renaissance and the age of scientific inquiry. If the Christian religion was the cause why didn’t it happen with the introduction of the Christian religion? A large impetus to the age of scientific inquiry was provided by the thoughts of the pagan Greek scientists. How was the Christian religion instrumental in causing the flowering of ancient Greek science? Or of Indian, Chinese or Persian science?
In truth science has always been a secular endeavour and has always been hindered by religion. The same goes for the Golden age of “Islam”. It had nothing to do with Islam.
True Islam, in other words, the following of the teachings of the Quran and the Hadiths was demonstrated by the Caliph Omar who, when he destroyed the great Library of Alexandria said, “If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.”
There have been religious rulers both of the Catholic Church and Islam who have been patrons of the arts and science, but arts and science suffered after the deaths of these totalitarian despots, to be replaced by totally religious despots who destroyed what was achieved.
Even Newton and Kepler were hindered by their religious beliefs. Kepler kept searching for orbits as “perfect” circles and Newton tried to think that “God” sometimes interfered in the physical laws (of gravity), for which he was criticised by Leibniz.
In any case his mathematics and scientific thoughts did not spring from the Bible, but from observations and secular thought.
PS Orthodox Islam eventually asserted itself and extinguished the flowering of science in the Muslim world, whereas secularism triumphed over religion in Europe, causing science to grow from strength to strength.
There is little difference between the Taliban, Boko Haram and Caliph Omar, all followers of orthodox Islam.
agfosterjr says: June 3, 2014 at 7:23 pm
All Christians were trilingual; all Moslems were monolingual. And your definition of Islamic culture? Is it by religion, language, or ethnicity?
_________________________________
No, it is by location. The Syriac Christians lived in Aramaic Assyria, but were sandwiched between Greek west and the Arab east. By nature they spoke all three languages. Its like living in Belgium, where you cannot exist without speaking English, Flemish and Walloon.
And why would the conquering Arabs bother learning Pagan Greek, when Arabic was ‘the language of god’? You seem to misunderstand the entire politics and dynamics of a conquering empire.
.
Richard says: June 3, 2014 at 9:34 pm
Have you heard of the Pact of Umar? Which enabled Christians in the Middle east specially to keep their religion?
___________________________
In Syria it was known as the Covenant of Dhimmitude. A Dhimmi being a serf non-believer governed by his Muslim overlords. Jewish and Christian Dhimmis had defined but very restrictive rights. They could not ride horses, could not join the aristocracy, their evidence was worth only 1/2 that of a Muslim, they could not build or repair churches, and they had to pay the Jizya tax that maintained their Muslim overlords. etc: etc: Many more rules other than this.
.
richardscourtney says: June 4, 2014 at 3:15 am
YES! And the same is true of the ‘Golden Age’ of Islam.
Sadly, there are some bigots who post to WUWT to display their views which demonstrate that their religious and political biases prevent them from thinking.
________________________________
The true bigots are those who have to drop the ‘bigot bomb’ as the only way of winning an argument.
The Reformation had nothing to do with religion – quite the reverse. It was a campaign to rid us of the oppressive Catholic Church, and it succeeded, which is why we had the Age of Enlightenment.
And the prime practitioners of the Enlightenment were not Christian. Isaac Newton, for instance, was an pagan alchemist who was described as the ‘Last of the Great Magicians’.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/sep/11/peopleinscience.guardianweekly
R
Willybamboo: Newton’s theological writings are more extensive than his scientific. It happened because of the Christian religion.
Richard says: June 4, 2014 at 4:56 am
YES! And the same is true of the ‘Golden Age’ of Islam.
________________________________
Rubbish.
Newton was a heretic alchemist in the same mould as Giordanio Bruno. And the Catholic Church burned Bruno alive, as a heretic Pagan. Newton could not have worked under Catholic absolutism and oppression, he would have been burned alive just like the burned Bruno.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
Which is why the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Royal Society, Grand Lodge and the resulting Industrial Revolution were founded and happened AFTER the Catholic Church had been destroyed in Northern Europe.
R
as great alchemist, we had NICOLAS FLAMEL – he was roman catholic too –
Paracelse also, and he encountered many problems
ralfellis says:
June 4, 2014 at 5:10 am
agfosterjr says: June 3, 2014 at 7:23 pm
All Christians were trilingual; all Moslems were monolingual. And your definition of Islamic culture? Is it by religion, language, or ethnicity?
_________________________________
No, it is by location. The Syriac Christians lived in Aramaic Assyria, but were sandwiched between Greek west and the Arab east. By nature they spoke all three languages. Its like living in Belgium, where you cannot exist without speaking English, Flemish and Walloon.
==================================================================
Singer: “The Syriac language had, from the third century, replaced Greek in Western Asia.” He allows: “The classical dialect was not wholly unknown to the educated class” (p.140). Pp.141-2: “As time went on Arabic began to replace Syriac for scientific and medical works. Just as 750 to 850 was the century of translation into Syriac, so 850 to 950 was the century of translation into Arabic.”
What we had was displaced Christian scholarly heretics who had settled in Persia and learned Classical Greek, which by that time differed substantially from the Byzantine Greek, and which by then had shrunk to nearly its present boundaries.
You: “And why would the conquering Arabs bother learning Pagan Greek, when Arabic was ‘the language of god’?”
==============================
For the same reason that the Europeans translated from Arabic to Latin: to learn. And when texts were available in both Greek and Arabic, the Arabic versions were preferred for their superiority and intelligibility. Singer (pp.159f):
“The question is often asked why in the Middle Ages the practice was to translate works from the Arabic rather than from the Greek, and why this tendency affected works originally written in Greek. The reasons may be set forth thus:
“(a) Before about 1200 Moslem learning was better organized, more original, more vital than the Byzantine.
“(b) Byzantine Greek is far distant from the classical tongue. The language of Aristotle was incomprehensible to the monastic guardians of his manuscripts. But classical Arabic was intelligible to every well-educated man who spoke and wrote Arabic.
“(c) The whole trend of Byzantine learning was to theology and away from philosophy and science.
“(d) The channels of trade with the West were either direct with Islam or through Western enclaves within the Byzantine Empire.
“(e) In the Middle Ages languages were learned by speaking and not from grammars. Spoken Arabic was moe accessible than spoken Greek.
“(f) Latin Christendom made little progress in occupying Byzantine territory. On the other hand, Islam was in retreat in the West.
“(g) Jewish help could be obtained for Arabic, but seldom for Greek.”
How refreshing it is to read someone who actually knows what he’s talking about. –AGF
ralfellis says:
June 4, 2014 at 5:45 am
Which is why the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Royal Society, Grand Lodge and the resulting Industrial Revolution were founded and happened AFTER the Catholic Church had been destroyed in Northern Europe.
=======================================================================
One would think from reading such ignorant bigots that France played no part in the Enlightenment, or that the likes of Calvin never executed heretics in Switzerland. To help put in context ralfellis’ drivel, consider the late dates at which the Protestant states adopted the Gregorian Calendar. This was a case of rejecting good science because it was associated with the authority of the Church. And Pope Gregory depended on Copernicus and Copernicus depended on the Arab al-Battani’s calculations. –AGF
“The reformation had nothing to do with religion – quite the reverse” I’m astonished you wrote that, R! History has a more nuanced and complex view of “Catholic absolutism and oppression”. The persecuted victims during the reformation were mostly like the Anabaptists in the Spanish Netherlands who had no prince to protect them. They weren’t scientists.
Maybe you can explain away Da Vinci and Aquinas and the other great minds that flourished in medieval Italy and created the basis for the age of inquiry. Those minds obviously arise out of a distinctly Christian milieu. It didn’t happen in China or Istanbul. My guess is the weakness and the diversity of the Roman Catholic monolith, not its oppressive power, made it possible. There is a spark of freedom in the Christian religion that is hard to extinguish: As St. Paul said; Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Independent thinking and inquiry is part of the Jesus package. It was what got him into trouble. BTW, Sir Isaac Newton, disagrees with you characterizing him as a pagan. Read what he wrote. Don’t post articles from the Guardian to prove your point and expect your credibility to rise.
Richard says:
June 3, 2014 at 9:34 pm
ralfellis:
June 3, 2014 at 4:36 pm
========================================
Of course Richard gets the names wrong, but that’s easy for those less confused than he. Anyone who thinks the issue at hand is the scientific authority of the Koran, is best ignored. His arguments are akin to denying the progress of modern Chinese science because of China’s depostic government. –AGF
ralfellis says:
June 4, 2014 at 5:10 am
Newton was not pagan. He was Unitarian, ie he believed that the Christian God was One, not Three Persons, the orthodox Trinitarian article of faith. So he was a secret Christian heretic, not a pagan.
As for Medieval use of Arabic v. Greek translations, IMO an important reason is that before the Renaissance, Greek manuscripts were rare in the West, & few scholars could read them. By contrast, in places such as Spain & Sicily, there were scholars who knew both Arabic & Latin. Even today, the Maltese language is based upon the Arabic once spoken in Sicily.
After the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, more Greek manuscripts & speakers became available in Western Europe, stimulating the Humanist movement based upon improved classical scholarship. This in fact was an important impetus behind the birth of modern science. Copernicus was able to learn Attic Greek, so could read the newly available works of ancient scientists in their original language.
ralfellis says:
June 4, 2014 at 5:10 am
“The Reformation had nothing to do with religion”
That is wrong. It had everything to do with religion. Christianity was reformed and became more humane and tolerant eventually.
“Isaac Newton, for instance, was an pagan alchemist”
Isaac Newton was a devout Christian, though as described by milodonharlani a “heretic”. All religious people so describe each other who do not subscribe to their compartmentalised beliefs.
agfosterjr says:
June 4, 2014 at 7:59 am
“Anyone who thinks the issue at hand is the scientific authority of the Koran, is best ignored.”
A strawman fallacy is when you construct a falsehood that has never been said by an opponent and then proceed to refute it. Though in your case this is probably not deliberate, but just a failure to understand very simple English and logic.
“..is best ignored.” – Very wise. You are out of your depth. It has at last dawned on you that it is better to keep one’s mouth shut and let people think you’re a fool than to open it and remove all doubt, sadly too late as the damage has been done.
Richard says:
June 2, 2014 at 3:37 pm
“Anything contrary to the Quran is not Islamic and the Quran clearly says that the Sun has a “resting place” for the night 36:37,38: “A token unto them is night. We strip it of the day, and lo! they are in darkness. And the sun runneth on unto a resting-place for him. ,,” and that the “resting place”of the Sun is in the Earth.”
And responds to this: “Anyone who thinks the issue at hand is the scientific authority of the Koran, is best ignored.”
with this:
Richard says:
June 4, 2014 at 11:40 am
“A strawman fallacy is when you construct a falsehood that has never been said by an opponent and then proceed to refute it. Though in your case this is probably not deliberate, but just a failure to understand very simple English and logic.”
So that we are only left to wonder, is he so perfectly witless or so perfectly dishonest to make no connection between the two paragraphs.
And when Richard says:
June 1, 2014 at 11:16 pm
“The Muslim “Golden Age” flowered with their conquests when they conquered and destroyed the flourishing civilisations of Greece, Persia, Egypt and India. When their conquests faltered so did their “Golden Age”.”
..we merely have the rantings and ravings of one of the most intellectual deprived and pathetic commentators to ever grace the pages of WUWT. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. We call these integers Arabic numerals because Islamic Culture did us the favor of learning them from the Hindus and teaching them to the Christians. Even this goes over poor Richard’s head. Poor, poor, Richard.
–AGF
William Abbott says: June 4, 2014 at 7:58 am
Maybe you can explain away Da Vinci and the other great minds that flourished in medieval Italy and created the basis for the age of inquiry.
___________________________
Because his patron was one of the Borgias, and the Borgias were perhaps the most debauched and non-Catholic of all the popes.
R
Richard C, if you think about it (excuse the pun) science should be inquiry outside the parameters of religion or political restrictions or dogma imposed on us. One of analysis, observation and experiment. We can’t see CO2, but we can see the effects of pollution. How can AGWs just look at temperatures to assess the climate? And the causation factors that create climate change. But there have been many instances in history, when scientific rationalizations have been deliberately ignored and suppressed for political or religious agendas. Or exaggerated as there is no other possible explanation. Such as the immaculate conception. Jesus’ resurrection. In fact it was an interesting point put out by one historian, that the Jewish sects were in turmoil amongst one another, and without these mysteries surrounding Jesus’ existence, they would not be understood or believed by the masses. In fact one stipulated the Christian church would not have survived Jesus, a Jew, without St.Paul. Or of course Constantine 1. (He legalized Christianity because it brought in more taxes perhaps but was only baptized on his death bed). All these alarmists are doing is corrupting the data to fit their hypothesis. Nothing new about that.