That is why I excluded those 200 years of the crusades (by the way, Jerusalem was not really "it", it was a failed attempt to stop the advance and spreading of Islam. Jerusalem was only an excuse. Once Europe failed in its attempt to stop Islam (at least until the 16th century, when Spain started reversing the process), Jerusalem went back to its sordid existence.
As for religion, I was always preferring Voltaire's point of view, if "god did not exist, we'd better invent him fast". Not all religions have deity actualization, but if you look at the historic development of religion from paganism on, it is really an attempt to coalesce all we do not know (and fear) into a deity, a long time ago, a deity for each "mystery" and later a unifying deity for "all mysteries". A side effect, the resulting "social order", (and thou shall love your neighbor as you love yourself) is just a codex to make society liveable, ordered and thus "developable", all IMHO.
Zeev |
