Preachers- Heretics?- Zane Duke
Hello wonderful Honors friends. your friendly neighborhood wishes-he-was-some-kind-of-superhero here speaking on certain matters pertaining to some pretty messed up stuff. And quite honestly, a lot of it makes sense and can even be seen in modern times.
Erasmus is almost like an angry tenth-century Socrates. This man is totally and utterly fed up with the absolute ridiculousness of what "Christianity" (quotations because it is really not Christianity) has become and how it has been milked into....like.... milk that's been spoiled for three months. And stinky. Real stinky.
One of the most interesting things about Erasmus is how outspoken he is about the insane things happening with clergymen at that time. Wouldn't he be crudely disrespected for this considering that the clergymen were probably more popular than him because of their beliefs? Or are the common people even capable of understanding what's going on in this moment? This whole situation that Erasmus talks about is wild, but yet it sounds very relatable to modern times.
In The Abbot and the Learned Lady, we get this hypocritical and insanely stupid (but kinda relatable) dude. Antronius is offensive, irresponsible, pleasure-seeking, shallow and careless. All of these attributes can be seen in his words. For instance, we see his carelessness for knowledge when the Learned Lady says" This: understanding that a man is not happy without the goods of the mind; the wealth, honours, noble birth make him neither happier nor better." To which Antronius says: "Away with that wisdom!". HE IS LITERALLY SCARED OF WISDOM PEOPLE. This guy is big-headed and small-minded, not to mention rude. This is relatable to a lot of people today who go around preaching the beliefs they hear on the news or on the radio and agree with, but have absolutely no evidence to back it up. Not to mention the fact that they preach to others about certain things and make like a moral relativist when his feelings get hurt. When they are challenged by strong reason and legitimate thought, they shun it away as if it were some terrible thing to say and become extremely offended. Sounds like Atronius has been cloned a whole bunch of times.
There are people today who call themselves Christians but have non-Christian beliefs and stand firm AGAINST God and find actual biblical standpoints to be wrong when the Bible is literally the written Word of God. I find a lot of problems with that, but I know that in order to avoid argument, I need to forever hold my peace.
I need some chocolate milk.
Farewell, friends.
I commented on Kaye and Annakate's posts.
Let's all be honest and say that we typically end up acting more like Antronius than Magdalia. It's easy to play the fool. Wisdom is hard and time-consuming. In the end, wisdom gives greater rewards than anything on earth could bring. Sometimes wisdom looks like saying nothing at all, other times it means speaking truth. The important thing to remember about biblical wisdom is that you can only get the real thing from reading the Bible. What an idea, right?
ReplyDelete“Man is not happy without the goods of the mind”… That statement, though. That would explain a lot of the outrage culture we see today where, as you said, people fixated on a belief to rage over and only become angrier if you try and give them a reason why it’s not worth being angry about. They’re deeply invested in their emotions, but they aren’t actually THINKING about the issue. Can they find happiness at all in such a state? Evidently not, they just seem to be irritable.
ReplyDeleteAntronius is quite the oxymoron. The Learned Lady, Magdalia, would definitely put emphasis on the latter half. He finds it best to be comfortable swine as long as everyone else is below him. He doesn’t aspire to be better than himself, and chastises those who do. It’s easier to chase after the physical temporal affections as opposed to the higher affections that are better in the long term, like wisdom.
ReplyDelete