Alex > Recent Status Updates

"In 1580, a slightly embarrassed Valignano wrote to his superior. He had, he confessed, accidentally become the owner of Nagasaki. In an act remembered as the ‘Donation of Bartholomew’, the zealous Lord Ōmura had handed a huddle of fishing hamlets and the neighbouring district of Mogi over to the Jesuits."

"The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas thought the nature of God could be grasped only by listing what He was not."
That is not true, Saint Aquinas argued against that notion. Among other arguments, he pointed out that when we say "God is good", we don't merely mean that He is not bad. Simply put, we have knowledge of His positive attributes, albeit they're imperfect.

Still, very good book.

After briefly thinking that maybe Henry VIII was a big but not an exceedingly big bastard, I am now convinced the size of his bastardness was immense.

Also, interesting the word "papist" was directly coined by his propagandists.

"The importance that goods have for us and which we call value is merely imputed. Basically, only satisfactions have importance for us, because the maintenance of our lives and well-being depend on them. But we logically impute this importance to the goods on whose availability we are conscious of being dependent for these satisfaction."

Henry VIII had actual theological concerns about his first marriage, stemming from Leviticus 18:16.

Seems the Ottomans were generally very tolerant, but treated Catholics and Shiites with hostility.

Interesting details about the persecution of the Trotskyists.

"The policy of the regime favored the city dwellers. They were subject to fewer taxes and had no forced labor requirement like the peasants in the timar provinces. This situation created an incentive to immigrate to the cities, contributing to their rapid growth in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Because the regime depended on the timar army, it could not permit mass emigration from the countryside."