Martin Luther

[gray_ghost]

So maybe it's because of all the Pope stuff that has been in the news today, but I rented Luther tonight instead of Final Destination I or some other piece of mindless eye candy to keep me occupied while I graded papers.

Also because I know hardly anything about him. And how sad is this - I was baptised Lutheran. Okay, I haven't been to church since my parents stopped dragging me when I was 7 (when they stopped going as well).

And the only reason that I can figure out why I went to church at all is that my dad had a hard time growing up, and I think he viewed going to church regularly as something middle class families do a lot of. So me and my sister were dragged to services for the same reason are vaccinations were always up to date, our teeth were cleaned once every six months, and we had new clothes and supplies everytime another school year started. Anyway, for those who have not had the experience, Lutheran services rank right up there with conferences on new advances in accounting on the excitement-meter. At least the ones I went to. So that shit only lasted about a year before my parents decided we were vaccinated enough with the lord, and properly babtized so there was no danger of burning in hell.

But I digress. Luther is an excellent flick and I highly recommend that anyone reading this go out and rent it.

So Martin Luther was a complete hellraiser, for anyone who doesn't already know this. If he were preaching now, I am pretty certain the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI would be keeping him under active surveillance. I mean check out theses 45 and 46 (which he nailed to the church in Wittenberg):

45. Christians are to be taught that he who sees a man in need, and passes him by, and gives [his money] for pardons, purchases not the indulgences of the pope, but the indignation of God.

46. Christians are to be taught that unless they have more than they need, they are bound to keep back what is necessary for their own families, and by no means to squander it on pardons.

I don't see Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell on TV expressing similar sentiments. No wonder they would have loved to have burned him at the stake. He was messing with the gravy train. I wish I had time to read more about the Reformation, because I'm positive Luther would have been burned if it hadn't been for the printing press which allowed his thoughts to spread all over Germany. Also he wrote everything in Latin (including eventually a German version of the Bible) which inspired a sense of nationalism that wasn't there before (Germany was not really a country at the time, just a loose confederation of small quarrelsome fiefdoms). So if anyone was directly responsible for the Reformation, it was Gutenburg.

If the powers at the time were smarter, they probably would have placed prohibitive taxes on owning printing presses or outlawed them entirely instead of staging book burnings. It would not have stopped the process, but it would have slowed things down a little bit. It's funny how Power has such a hard time seeing the social changes new tech has on society until after the changes have happened. I mean - it's like Abu Ghraib. No one would have ever known what sort of sick depraved shit was going on there because there is no way the military would have ever let the conventional press inside. But most of the soldiers in Iraq are carrying cell phones with digital cameras in them or digital video recorders. Why didn't anyone think of that until after it happened? The military learned a lot from Vietnam on how to control the traditional press and script everything that was going on. But it was soldiers with digital cameras uploading pictures of napalmed civilians onto the Internet that let the world know the US was using napalm when they went into Fallujah. Now anyone can report the news....because of something as innocuous (and when they first came out - even I thought completely useless) invention of cell phones with digital cameras inside.