The real tradition of the church has been to burn people alive for being intellectuals under heresy laws. There's a rather large pile of intellectual human ashes out there.. Nice tradition..
And this is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.. To someone who is uneducated, that statement is designed to resonate in their mind to hold the church up high.. when in fact it is the polar opposite that is actually true.
If it wasn't for modern day laws, the church would still be burning people alive.
The fact that you say you are working towards a PhD in history and then go and make that statement is a bit peculiar to me.
Though it's not my emphasis, I've studied the middle ages and church history specifically. The fact is, burning at the stake is a much rarer thing than people realize, and much of that reputation came about from anti-Catholic polemics in the Reformation era--a propaganda attack from those in conflict with the church. A lot of it has no basis in fact. A good example, I'm told, is Fox's Book of Martyrs.
I can tell you as an historian that a lot of scholarship debunks the conventional wisdom that the church was out burning heretics left and right and that it was some bastion of ignorance. It's much more complicated and the church comes out looking pretty good, though not lilly white.
Remember, the modern university was preceded by the medieval ones, inevitably linked to the church. Prior to that, the monasteries were the centers of learning, enough so that they essentially preserved western culture through the dark ages after Rome fell. I'm not a medievalist, but that's scholarly consensus. A good read is Thomas Woods' "How the Catholic Church Built Civilization." It presents a reader-friendly tracing of the contributions to art, architecture, science, law, political theory, economics, etc. to western civilization.
You're an engineer. Did it ever occurr to you that Chatres cathedral was built by those that many want to deem a bunch of ignorant rubes? That should alert you to a distortion in popular conceptions of history.
A telling thing right now is that medievalists have been churning out an extraordinary amount of material showing the Catholic intellectual activity in that period. They're own field is at risk when it's asserted that the medieval era was nothing but ignorance. They can show otherwise and have been doing a lot of it lately to make sure their field of study is taken seriously.
You know what I would like to do? I'd like to walk into an inner-city church filled with the local population of African-American's who are doing their prayer thing and stand at the podium like a pasture and start discussing Leviticus 25:44-46.
Ya! Lets have a discussion on how the bible condones slavery as a divine institution. I wonder how that would go over!
It just happens that American slavery is one of my concentration areas. One of the interestig things is how slaves never bought into this and used chrisitanity to forge a resistance to their condition. They saw right through biblical justifications of slavery. Religion became a defense against slavery. It's a fascinating process. The bible also supplied abolitionists with their own weapons, among them loving your neighbor as yourself.