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Originally Posted by Robin
One problem I have with the story of the apostasy is it basically (for most LDS) writes off nearlly 2000 years of spiritual and religious thought with one turn of a phrase.
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Kudos to Robin. You posted what I was going to say but didn't have the energy. I find the whole notion of a "Great Apostacy" soooo vexing. To be blunt, it breeds untold blindness to history. This type of ignorance is particularly unfortunate becasue if you kiss off he last 2,000 years you turn a blind eye to discovering who you really are, i.e., the cultural and intellectual events that made your mind and your world view.
Within the alleged period of "Great Apostacy" you have Constantinople/Byzantium which continued to fourish culturally and intellectually, and along with it many contiguous areas including Arab kindgdoms. Indeed, the whole concept of a "fall of Rome" and ensuing "Dark Ages" is a Western conceit. The case can be made that Rome didn't really "fall" until about 1400 A.D., with the fall of Byzantium. Indeed, Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" goes on describing another nearly 1,000 years of history after the Western half of the Empire became "extinct" in 476. It could be said that Rome simply changed the seat of its Empire. And by 1400 the Rennaisance was ready to take off, closely followed by the Enlightenment, which led to re-emergence of Republican ideals and the founding of the United States. Western Christians during the time of the Crusades originally sacked Byzantium (there's an irony) and recently scholars have started to say that what the Crusaders learned on their Eastern odysses was critical to the re-emergence of the West as dominant.
The Rennaisance was led by Catholics (yes, Rafael, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, et al. took their faith very seriously), and the Enlightnment was led primarily by atheists and agnostics, or people who almost by definition rejected the Judeo-Christian concept of God. The primary source of the inspiration for these latter two movements was most emphatically not the Protestant Reformation (which was a backlash against them, at its core), as is often suggested by Church "scolars," but a re-discovery of Classical values, preserved, paradoxically, by diligent Catholic monks. Thus, as T.S. Eliot once noted, a case could be made that Rome never fell, and we're still Roman citizens.
non-sequitor says he'd consider coming back into the fold if the beer ban were repealed. For me a big step in the right direction would be expunging this "Great Apostacy" nonsense from Church doctrine.