Because its true? The early Christian Catholic-State was a bunch of self serving aholes that wanted to keep the masses down and profit for themselves.
No,
because it is ignorant anti-Roman Catholic kool-aid. And protestant and then anti-clerical political propaganda.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am not a Roman Catholic and, in fact, consider the
office of the Roman Pope to be but one instance of an anti-christ. So, not exactly a Roman apologist here. But I am interested in facts and getting things right, especially in the face of laughable and laughably easy to debunk propaganda.
Let us get a few things in order.
1. The Christian church did not go around destroying non-Christian works as policy in antiquity, the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, or Renaissance. The Christian church had its beginnings in the Levant and spread throughout the Mediterranean first and incorporated pagan philosophers where it saw fit. Plato and Aristotle top among the pagans. See Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas for some serious chewing on pagan philosophy as applied to the early and Medieval Church. The very existence of these men, their works, and the thread that connects them across roughly 1000 years debunks your assertions.
2. During and after the fall of the western Roman empire, fluency and literacy in languages outside of the vernacular and church Latin declined. The last translation of pagan Greek writers into Latin done in the West for centuries was done in the late 6th century AD. Those served the Dark Age & Medieval church for centuries...and were
known to be originally written by non-Christians. Those following would not have known a non-Christian book written in Greek from a Christian book written in Greek.
Because they could not read Greek. If it wasn't in Latin, they likely could not read it.
3. Many Pagan and Christian books were lost during the fall of western Rome and the Dark Ages. Primarily due to:
a. Declining prosperity that reduced population, literacy, and the infrastructure necessary to support luxuries like private libraries.
b. Deliberate destruction by PAGAN raiders sacking monasteries for treasure and destroying what they could not put to use. Like pretty much all of the books.
c. Aforementioned decline in literacy in Greek and other tongues leading to not knowing the value of not losing some books.
4. Muslims were not the primary keepers of non-Latin Western knowledge during the Dark Ages. That was done mostly by the Eastern Roman Empire / the Byzantine Empire / Constantinople. Constantinople held on until the 1400s and became a go-to destination when those in the lands of the former western empire recovered enough to be curious about more than living hand-to-mouth, starting in the AD1000s and really picking up steam in the AD1200s. Those nasty Roman Catholics set sail to Constantinople, learned Greek and other foreign tongues, and brought them back to the West. Yes, there were some copies gleaned from the Muslims, but the better ones and more came from "The Greeks" as the Byzantines were known. Also, libraries in the West were raided for books that had somehow managed to survive. That (re-discovery of forgotten books) happened several times and allowed later Renaissance writers to shamelessly plagiarize earlier writers and claim the innovations as their own.
5. There was no "Christian Catholic-State." Yes, Christianity became approved state religion for the Western Roman Empire after Constantine, but ecclesiastical governance was mostly separate from state gov't, leading to friction between them. And the developing Christian states in the West had no unified state gov't. Also, the Great Schism happened in AD1054, which separated Roman Catholicism from Eastern Rite / upper case "O" Orthodox Church. Thus: the largest, longest-lived, and most closely aligned with the state church was not the Roman church, but the Easter Rite church. The one that never forgot Greek and preserved the books of the pagan writers through antiquity, the Dark Ages, and the Middle Ages through into the Renaissance.
6. It was intellectual innovation in the Middle Age Roman Church that laid the foundation for modern science. Again, beginning in the AD1000s and accelerating in the AD1200s. The primary intellectual revolution and paradigm shift was performed by
theologians, as theology was the ultimate course of study and the best minds went into theology. They allied their understanding of God, God's creation, and God's Laws with early pagan logic/reason, science and philosophy and made modernity
literally thinkable.
7. The lands conquered by Islam had an inverse intellectual arc from the West. The lands they conquered many times had great intellectual traditions and communities: Bagdad, Damascus, the Levant, Spain, etc. For a while, the tumult generated much intellectual ferment as these established and somewhat moribund communities were infused with intellectually curious Muslim go-getters. This, however, did not last and the more Islamicised a city became, the more squashed its intellectual life. Those that managed to stay out of the drive for Muslim orthodoxy held out the longest. Still, it was a downward arc, just as the West was recovering.
8. The fathers of the Reformation (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) were, more or less, concerned with getting Christianity right. After they died and folk separated out, follow-on Protestants with other motives took up the printing press and used propaganda to make political hay, partly by turning the RC church into an anti-intellectual monster. And the RCs wrote similar things about the Protestants.
9. The anti-clerical sorts from the Renaissance onward used those talking points and expanded on them even unto this day.
10. The Renaissance was a
reactionary movement against
too much reason and logic in the RC church and intellectual life. The Medieval RC Church took pagan logic and philosophy books, went all Spinal Tap(1), and turned the Logic Amps up to "11." Besides, rigorous logic is
hard.
===================================================
A fine resource is Hannen's
God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (
http://www.amazon.com/Gods-Philosophers-Medieval-Foundations-Science-ebook/dp/B003B02OJQ/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1428589896&sr=8-3&keywords=foundations+of+modern+science )
A nice review/overview can be found here:
http://www.strangenotions.com/gods-philosophers/Hannen was not the first to document all this, but he is the most readable. I have read several of the earlier works he relied on and they were informative but a bit dry. They are mentioned in Hannen's bibliography and the review linked above. Hannen is quite enjoyable to read.
(1)
Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.
