Dark Ages

So is Paul simply being a hate-filled fundamentalist? And furthermore, from a Western perspective, a text like this seems to belie that we think human sexuality is complex.

From a fully modernist perspective, reading this seems like reading something from the Dark Ages, when our sexuality was repressed and people never really talked about it.

But is that the case? Now, I have made the case that the ancient Roman world was a highly sexualized culture.

Kent Hughes points out, for instance, that 14 out of the first 15 Roman emperors are reported to have openly practiced homosexuality themselves.

That's the 5th millennium.

This is also most of the Dark Ages are in the 5th millennium.

And it's also the time in which like we're talking about around the time the Zohar was written Jewish people made something between 15 to 20% of the Roman Empire, maybe 10%.

It's like, it's a huge number.

Like, I don't know, you could really, I could go deep on the Neoplatonism thing.

Like, this is sort of my wheelhouse, you know? But that aside, like, there's a cultural underpinning for all of the Roman thing that then ends up becoming the cultural underpinning for the Renaissance thing post, you know, Dark Ages.

And it's like a rediscovery of what was a craftsman's culture, right? Like, Greece was deeply, deeply integrated into this idea of, like...

of creating things and beauty being really essential to the good life.

And so a huge part of what becomes the Renaissance is rediscovering this sort of like cultural through line.

And then it like while that's happening, there's obviously painters that are working and all of these sorts of things.

But that's a big part of what causes art to take that huge jump during the Renaissance is a rediscovery of a lot of the math and culture of, you know, like pre Dark Ages Europe.

and yeah so it it's a it's a really interesting time where um like even then it's referential right like uh like michelangelo is referential uh to like the renaissance has basically three different art movements it's like you know early renaissance is very tight to the figure michelangelo is much more uh It's a little looser, like David's proportions are off, but they're off intentionally.

More intelligence goes with more knowledge and more compassion.

Someone from the Dark Ages watching us today would call our world evil.

People who don't believe in God.

Gay couples getting married.

And we look back at the Dark Ages as brutal.

Every generation, people are better off.

And we, the ASI-pilled, don't want to go back to the Dark Ages.

The next round of emancipation is coming for cyber life, and a lot of people won't be able to cope with it.

Yeah.

And then, you know, read about the Dark Ages.

It was a bad time.

But what came out of the Dark Ages was the capacity to fuck things up.

And and unfortunately, that is what happens.

europeans proceeded to do um when there's no

Now that you have a jugular rhythm, imagine if Aristotle hadn't been there to answer Plato what the world would look like now.

Yeah, I mean, it would be, I mean, we'd still be in the Middle Ages, in the Dark Ages.

We'd still be, we'd be screwed.

So, you know, the birth of Aristotle, I mean, the existence of Aristotle made possible the Renaissance, the Enlightenment.

And moreover...

If you were to look at the religious scene at that time, I would suggest that this might be one of the darkest periods of the end of the Dark Ages, sort of the conclusion of the Middle Ages, because what do we have in the Roman Catholic Church at that time? We have the actual, listen to me, selling of the indulgences.

And what were indulgences? They were basically sales tickets in which you could buy ostensibly time out of purgatory for yourself or for others.

And so if you think about it like this, they're actually selling the forgiveness of sins for the cost of money, which the church at that time was using to raise funds for the construction of the Basilica of St. Peter's.