Church Rules!

Once again the most interesting topic from this section had to do with religion. I have always believed that religion is something very personal and nobody should be allowed to tell you how to experience it and live it. In the Middle Ages religion was imposed in a horrible way. It was the perfect tool to keep people under control and benefited political interests. You weren’t allowed to question it, so people would simply believe what they were told for fear of being hurt. When people began to show more interest in education, the church wasn’t happy because the more intellectual people became, the more they started questioning their beliefs. The rise of popular Heresies was the reading I was waiting for. After reading all those documents about how religion was developing in the ancient and middle ages, I was thinking: “when will people start questioning “the revealed truth”!!!!”
The rise of anti-clericalism is totally understandable. People started to get more educated what led to more research and examination of the “revealed truth”. From all that research there were some documents written by scholars that made people curious about questioning their beliefs. Also, in those times the Church was deeply involved with politics, Church was way stronger than any other form of government. The Church’s political interests led to inciting civil wars in countries like Germany, what caused a lot of suffering to their people. People also realized that churches were spending a lot of money in their buildings instead of helping the poor, and their main focus was on the wealthy people instead of on those that needed more economic help.
Church didn’t focus in the spiritual side, for me Church seemed to be just another political party that took possession of the government. When people realized all of that they began to think for themselves and changed their beliefs. Could it be possible that nowadays Church’s interests are similar but they are approaching people in different way?

Humanity

I enjoyed reading the 12th century Renaissance. It seemed that in this century people of all classes started to be more concerned about there human side and began to care about growing in every way. If we analyze what was going on at that time, we will be able to see how the changes in the government, education and religion influenced each other.
“Christianity was the matrix of medieval time” (Lectures on Ancient and Medieval European History). Every single aspect of everyday life was influenced by the religion. And in the 12th century Christianity was more oriented towards men, it became more human. I believe that one of the reasons why religion became more human was because people became more intellectual and instead of just believing what they were told to believe they started to analyze their beliefs. For this reason they became more optimistic towards their way of experiencing religion and wouldn’t believe or accept that half of the world would be damned forever. People were ready to have a more personal and intense religion experience.
The government had significant changes as well. People began to be concerned about justice. Before they would trust mainly in divine justice and rule society by God’s laws. The change in religion influenced people to believe that there should be a more efficient justice system. People started to be more concerned about safety and the solution of legal issues. There was also a growing desire for learning. Thousands of men and women were eager to expand their knowledge, which didn’t make the Church very happy. But the Church couldn’t do anything about it and there were a constantly increasing number of students. Because the old monastic and cathedral schools couldn’t absorb all of them, the students move to different places to find education. This is how the universities of Oxford, Paris and Bologna were founded.
In the 12th century people were very interested in bettering themselves. The most interesting part is that material riches weren’t their main goal, it was the spiritual and intellectual enrichment that mattered.

Vikings

From this period the most interesting culture for me was the Vikings. Because of television and movies, I used to have the idea that Vikings were drunken men with long beards and funny hats always sailing in the sea in big boats. But the truth is that they were much more than that. The first thing that surprised me was the fact that their culture lasted over 300 hundred years. By terrorizing places that were not well defended, they were able to subdue an area and settle down with their own people. They would remain in that area sometimes for several years and sometimes forever. They always targeted places that were full of riches and at the same time were weak and easy to conquer. They ended up conquering and settling down in places from Kievan Russia, Iceland, Greenland, Ireland, Scotland, England and France.
The Vikings were polytheist in the beginning, but once their royalty began to convert into Christianity, most of them became Christian. Once again, Christianity was so powerful that could take over a strong culture like the Vikings. My question is, did the Vikings change their ways of conquering and terrorizing people once they became Christian? Or was Christianity just a new shield to protect their culture?

WIKIPEDIA 2

This article talks about Pepin the Short, also called Pepin III and Pepin the Young. It describes how his father Charles Mantel divided the rule of the Frankish kingdom, between Pepin and his elder brother Carloman, when he died. The brothers pass the power to Childeric who then was taken off the power when Pepin was named king. It also talks about the expansion of the Frankish realm and this article shows a chart of Pepin’s family.

1. Article is 1,600 words.
2. Search term: Pepin Article name: Pepin the short.
3. No disambiguation link.
4. In the discussion I found a couple people trying to get the name Pepin changed to Pippin, which is the actual name in German. And they also mentioned that the title “the short” is a mistranslation.
5. There are 500 changes, the earliest on 2/3/2006 and the latest on 5/4/2008.
6. No external links provided.
7. No references.
8. No further reading.

I would recommend this article to people that just want basic information about Pepin the Short. But I wouldn’t recommend it for a serious research because there weren’t any references and that makes the article’s information a little hard to trust.

Religion

Once again in this part of history we can see how much the religion and church influenced changes and conquest of empires. Charles was trying to impose Christianity all over west Europe. The rejection of Christianity by the Saxons was his reason to begin a war and destroy their culture. He forced them to convert to Christianity. Charles founded monasteries and villages and filled them with Franks. He destroyed their pagan temples, just like he did before in other cultures, and removed the Saxon peasants.
Then he wanted to conquer Spain because it was mostly Muslim at the time, and wanted to impose his Christianity as well.
All the different forms of government he structured had a representative from the church as well. All the important decisions taken in the empire were highly influenced by the church.
Religion at that time seemed to be the weapon used to conquer. It didn’t have a lot of the meaning it has nowadays. It wasn’t focused that much on spirituality or on the recognition of good and evil. Church was a political institution that ruled with fear and violence.

Religion shouldn't creat borders....

My favorite reading from this week was the one about Islam and Muslims. It was great to understand a little bit more about this religion and culture. It is always very important to acquire knowledge about cultures that surround us, and the Muslim culture, especially in the USA, is growing rapidly.
The media always gives us an idea about Muslims that it is not completely true. We usually rely our understanding on information we get from movies, TV and newspapers. It was until I came to the USA to college that I had an opportunity to be close to Muslims and I learned more about the Islam.
It was only after de attack from 9/11 that me (and probably lots of other people) paid more attention to the Muslims. Before that all I’ve heard was that: Arabs = Muslims, Arabs ride camels and have magic carpets, and Islam is a crazy wronged religion.
When I met Muslim people I learned that the Islam and the Catholicism have a lot in common. Both religions talk about the angel Gabriel bringing knowledge about God to a very important icon within the religion. In Islam it was to Muhammad and in Catholicism it was to Virgin Mary. Both religions also believe in Jesus Christ, for Catholics they believe he was God’s son, and in Islam they believe he was a prophet. Overall both religions are about following God’s rules, preaching God’s word, daily praying and help people in need.
If people cared more about learning about other religions, they would find out that all of them in the end have the same purpose, to be a good human being. Each person lives their religion in their own particular way, some are more passionate and some like to keep it private, but as long as outcome is to be a good person and help and respect others, then who cares which God you believe in or what religion you like?