When Jesus said "ask them," Jesus was, in essence, refusing to give first-hand testimony.

And listening to fucking Republicans rant about any kind of "age of reason" is like listening to homeopath be upset about the high costs of health care.

"And if you remember, Mister Speaker, the high priest said to Jesus..."

The lowest point in American government discourse has been attained.

Jesus also invented the electric lightbulb. It's true, ask the Jews.

Aw, I was hoping for Stephen King.

Somebody doesn't know about the Inquisition.

HISTORIAN RANT

The Visigoths who sacked Rome were Christian. In fact, the leader, Alaric, was a Roman general. So the Roman Christians sacked the Christian Rome. Alaric himself brought the Visigoths there at the behest of the Bishop of Rome (later the Pope) and saw the sacking as his greatest failure.

Rome was an anti-intellectual society. They suppressed and killed innovative thinkers, for example Jesus and Archimedes. It's also worth remembering that, while the Greeks produced Socrates, they also killed him.

The Christians in Rome in fact damaged and destroyed a lot of knowledge, since it was associated with the former pagan order. Most of this damage was due to the collapse of central authority in the West, Christians in the East weren't so hung up about it since things weren't so bad where they were and therefore didn't think God was angry at them for some reason.

The monasteries in northern Europe and Ireland which did preserve leaning were outside the old border of the Roman empire and therefore were not Catholic, but rather 'Celtic Christian', centered in Ireland. This is a bit of a nebulous term, but it remains true that St. Patrick didn't convert pagans, he converted Irish Celtic Christians to Roman Catholic Christianity.

Martin Luther didn't think there was more than one way to be a Christian. He was convinced that anyone who read the Bible in their own language would come to the same conclusions that he did. He in fact had a terrible argument with the Swiss Reformation leader Ulrich Zwingli because of this.

Monasteries were centers of learning, but great advances in literacy and learning were more often pushed by kings and emperors like Charlemagne, who often butted heads with the Church. Historical works like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example, were written without any input from the Latin Church and in the native language. These same monasteries were brought in-line with Rome following Norman Conquest and the appointment of Norman abbots.

And I don't need to mention the knowledge preserved by the Islamic world. Well, until Al-Ghazali fucked it up...

Rome is a terrible blight on Western history. It was an empire of staggering inequality, intellectual poverty, an innumerable slave population, and it celebrated this. The best thing it ever did was die, and the worst thing it ever did was create the office of the Papacy. And we're still sucking the Roman Cultural Cock more than a thousand years later.

It's kind of cool to watch someone make a totally fantasy out of bits of real history. A lot of creativity went into totally miss-educating this poor guy.

The description is spot on. I bet Jesus would love all these fabulous invocations of his teachings in completely inappropriate and incorrect ways.