Bloody Shovel 4

Many years ago, I read Umberto Eco's the Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum.

Foucault's Pendulum is based on a delightful conceit, that all conspiracy theories are ultimately true because they b...

Modernity is supposed to be about Progress, progress being made possible by Science, which discovers the Truth about nature. This is so unlike the obscurantism of the old days, where religion blinded and oppressed humanity with dogma and sheer nastiness. The funny thing is that the intellectual elite of modernity didn't come exclusively out of those opposed to the Church(es). To some extent yes, and traditional Catholics in Europe like to tell the tale of the evil Masonic lodges waging a centuri...