Just a brief note again, since I've got only two more days to work (at software!) this year, and I've been insanely busy trying to get things in order before I leave for home Friday afternoon. I still find time for Arts & Letters Daily, which leads me to sites I'd never visit on my own. Today it took me to beliefnet and through links there to an interview with biologist Richard Dawkins. When asked, he said he couldn't think of anything good, however minor, to have come from religion, and there followed this exchange:
Not even something like the Sistine Chapel?
That's not religion; it's just because the church had the money. Great artists like Michelangelo or Bach and Beethoven would have done whatever they were told to do. Michelangelo painted what his sponsors told him to paint.
I thought I was a hardliner on money and the arts.
Interestingly enough, another article linked recently at Arts & Letters Daily claims that Western Christianity is responsible for the European technical and economic explosion during the Middle Ages, but not for the reasons you might expect to be behind such a claim: the Church was instrumental in the development of technology and capitalism, Rodney Stark argues, because of its insistence that reason was the principal path to truth and because it had the money.
7:17:22 PM 
|
|
