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Originally Posted by Wilfriback
Sheesh... Himeji... Have you read your History books?
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Certainly I have. Have you?
I happen to study history at university, so I know very well about the Christian Church's many atrocious crimes not only against all non-Christians (crusades and what-not), but also against other Christians, along with severe infighting between the Christian factions, leading to an ever worse terror rule of the Christian church, the Roman Catholics being the worst there, which had its climax of savagery in the Inquisition. Thousands of women were burnt alive at the stake for knowledge about healing plants, or for doing such unholy things as daring to learn read and write. Science and research was greatly hampered by the church. To take the most notable example, take the exclamation "
Eppur si muove!":
"Eppur si muove" is an Italian phrase meaning And yet it moves
purportedly uttered by the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei after being forced to recant in 1633, before the Inquisition, his belief that the Earth moves around the Sun.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wilfriback
In short words, the religion was used as the medium within the story and when time to blame comes the religion ends as the culprit.
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You certainly can't generalise that for all religions. For Christianity however, it is true most times.
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Originally Posted by Wilfriback
What about their leaders and politics?
It's obvious that those feudal lords and the traders disguised as spiritual leaders were behind it.
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More often than not, the local rulers were only pawns by the Christian church to further their own ends and increase their power and influence.
A few tried to decrease the influence of the power-hungry church, like Henry II of England, who released a set of sixteen constitutions on 30 January 1164 aimed at reducing the church's strangle hold, but they never got very far there.
Wars in the Dark Age, again more often than not, had religious backgrounds, where the Pope or other local religious leaders (e.g. Bishops) gave all soldiers participating an "Ego te absolvo", an advance absolution so they could happily slaughter anyone that crossed their way, even though that's actually forbidden by the Ten Commandments.
The church's power and influence only notably started to wane with the French Revolution (1789–1799).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wilfriback
Didn't you guessed why the christianism was only one in the begin and later became separated into several factions later?
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I don't need to guess there because I know why the Christian church split up into several factions. The first split was the Great Schism in 1054, which split the church in the Roman Catholic church in the west and the Eastern Orthodox church in the east. One main point of contention was that the east didn't want to accept the Pope's demand for his universal jurisdiction. Too much greed for power from the side of the pope was the main cause for this first great schism.
Later, the Roman Catholic's greed for power and money had grown that excessively that people were ever less willing to put up with it. There was e.g. a fast flourishing trade with letters of indulgence, where you could buy absolution from whatever sins you had done.
On the boiling point of this development, Luther stepped forward. In 1517, he openly protested against the indulgence sales of the Friar monk Johann Tetzel. Luther then composed his Ninety-Five Theses, outlining the wrongdoings of the Roman Catholics, which he openly nailed at the door of the Castle Church of Wittenburg in Germany.
As this started to gain momentum, Pope Leo X issued a rebuttal in 1520 in his
Exsurge Domine. As Luther still refused to retract this blasphemy, he was excommunicated by the Pope in 1521. Neither had the effect desired by the Pope though, and the Protestant movement couldn't be stopped anymore, even though the Roman Catholic church tried to stomp it in the ground violently whenever and wherever they could.
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Originally Posted by Chaos2Frozen
Oriana's motives are... Well... It's actually an age old problem.
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The Roman Catholic Chruch and "least bloody way"?
Tell your "least bloody way" to the countless victims who were slaughtered in the crusades and all the religious wars, fought with advance absolution by the pope, and the hundres of thousands of innocent people who were burnt alive at the stake for saying something the church didn't like.
So if history has shown one thing, then it's certainly that the Roman Catholic's way to deal with people they don't like (especially non-Christians and other Christian factions) is the *most* bloody way.
And no, the Roman Catholic church is no bit better in the To aru-verse. This was clearly shown in the first arc with the fanaticism of the Catholic nuns, who didn't hesitate a single second to punch out their ear drums, greatly maiming themselves by that, just so they wouldn't be affected by Index' Shoal Fear anymore and could fight on.
So also here it is clear that if the Roman Catholic church should come to power (e.g. by successfully erecting the Croce di Pietro), then it will definitely be anything but the "least bloody way", most likely the very opposite.
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