AUGUSTINIAN Pope Leo Mansplains the superiority of a three-headed God to Muslims before mansplaining to women why they are regarded as inferior by all large religions today.
And in related news… Mussolini was a Catholic. Dolfuss was Catholic. Franco was Catholic.
Himmler, head of the SS, was a Catholic. The SS was set up on the Jesuit model. Goebbels was Catholic.
Hoss, the camp commandant of Auschwitz, was a Catholic. Frank,‘ the butcher of Poland ’, was Catholic.
The Croatian police-state of Pavelic's Ustache was Catholic. Pinochet was a Catholic.
Catholics all hate women's healthcare and have a long criminal history of child rape and assault.
- EVERY major call to crusade gave rise to pogroms against Jews.
According to Augustine …
" ...Judaism, since Christ, is a corruption; indeed, Judas is the image of the Jewish people: their understanding of Scripture is carnal; they bear the guilt for the death of the Savior, for through their fathers they have killed Christ...”
The Crusades by Jonathan Smith
". .. they had also turned to scholars for justification of Christian violence and Gregory Vll had found in Anselm of Lucca, a partisan who, through a careful reading of the Fathers, above all Augustine of Hippo, would build a convincing case for Christian violence as something that could be commanded by God, was at the command of the Church and would, when properly used, be an expression of Christian love... "
During the late 300s and early 400s, the Xtian Church went from being persecuted to being a persecutor. The late empire was a totalitarian state, in some ways an oriental despotism.
The Empire used violence against the Donatist heretics, and St. Augustine "became the theorist of persecution; his defences later to be those on which all defences of the Inquisition rested. ... He insisted that the use of force in the pursuit of Christian unity, and indeed total religious conformity, was necessary, efficacious, and wholly justified."
If history has no inherent direction, then phrases like "civilized" and "primitive" cannot adhere to their traditional meaning. So-called "primitive" people are, on an individual basis, just as cognitively complex and well adapted to their environment as we the more "civilized" ones are. Similar considerations apply to other subjective terms of value judgement when applied to entire categories of people.
The ideal society might then be defined as that within which everyone is maximally adapted to their environment. The problem is that we are all in competition with each other, trying to secure access to and control over social resources at each others' expense, so any one state of affairs is inherently dynamic and subject to change. There is no ideal society to strive toward--merely an arena in which the competitive advantage of large scale cooperation ensures that living conditions slowly and incrementally improve for most (though not all) people.
Procedurally, the purpose of social criticism, as practiced today, isn't to propose solutions to anything. It's to point out the way in which the distribution of power protects the status quo and hides itself behind cultural stories. Movies, music, clothing, narrative, aren't inherently *bad* per se, but they do conceal and protect the status quo, including unjust inequalities.