Especially once people start asking if the Pope can order them to not accept papal authority.
The Christian church has never been unified. And it’s almost impossible to stop a religious movement. You can’t change how people think.
“Protestant” is basically “not Catholic”.
Lutherans, Calvinists, Purists, Church of New Englanders et al. all had differences.
If that were true, there wouldn’t be so many colleges that offered marketing degrees. Of course you can change how people think. And if you decide that’s too much trouble, and aren’t afraid to get your hands bloody, you can squeeze them enough so that they’ll at least shut up about what they think.
No.
You can give people information, but it is ultimately up to them to decide what they believe to be true. If you could change how people thought, then no one would ever break the law/cheat on a spouse/do drugs/etc.
To say you can change a thought by force implies you can control the mind. Impossible. Even if you can shut someone up, you can’t control their logical thought process.
Well, nailing that joker Luther to the door of the cathedral might have had a chilling effect. But you’d have to do that before the joker’s philosophy had spread too far. Once Protestantism is a thing, there’s not much to be done. Can’t kill an idea.
What would you do about the Calvinists? It sounds to me like defecting from the church means you’re willing to die for it, anyway, since it’s about your soul’s salvation and whatnot.
“Guys, it’s right there in the thing, duh! We work for the Pope, we murder people. We’re Vatican assassins. How complicated can it be? What they’re not ready for is guys like you and I and Nails and all the other gnarly gnarlingtons in my life, that we are high priests, Vatican assassin warlocks. Boom. Print that, people. See where that goes.” - Charlie Sheen.
First of all, just because you can change people’s beliefs, doesn’t mean that you can change everyone’s beliefs all the time. You can encourage or discourage certain patterns of behavior, and you can educate and indoctrinate people with certain sets of beliefs and values. Since we’re talking about the Reformation, let my give you a quote from the Jesuit Francis Xavier, who lived during the period “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”.
Secondly, as long as they shut up, who cares what their thought process is? Burn enough Lutherans, outlaw and burn their books, and people with Lutheran tendencies are going to keep it to themselves. Infection contained. Worked with the Cathars, worked with the Bogomils, the Fraticelli.
Besides. I doubt it’ll come to that. Luther’s just an undisciplined monk with too much time on his hands. Let Cajetan slap him down, see to it that somebody slaps Tetzel down for being too enthusiastic, but leave it to the Emperor to take whatever actions are necessary. He can’t be happy with some troublemaker stirring up dissent in the Empire. And like I said, I have bigger problems. I don’t trust the Venetians to honor their alliance, and the Turks are making threatening noises toward Hungary.
I’m confused. Are you arguing with something I said? You can’t change what people think. You can influence their thought process by adding information, but you can’t force people to think your way. Protestantism was a long time coming…a noble virus, if you would.
Adding or restricting information IS changing the way people think. You may not be able to change the thoughts of one individual, but you can change the mind of the population in general.
Plus, an advertiser isn’t giving you information, they are trying to trick you into doing what they want. The last think they want is for you to make up your own mind. They use logical fallacy after logical fallacy. They use emotional manipulation. The one thing they rarely do is just give you straight information.
It is potentially changing the way people think about a subject. It influences how people think. You “change” a mind with persuasion if the receiver is open to it, but you can’t directly control it. There is no way in hell I am ever going to jump ship and believe in Jesus. It doesn’t matter what you tell me.
This is what I mean when I say you can’t change the way people think.
Misinformation is still information, no? I never said advertisers give you *straight *information. I’m saying that every person takes new information, weighs it against what they know and what they feel is likely and then comes up with a solution to the new information. Besides, people are more likely to discard or accept said input when it is beneficial to them.
<sigh> This is getting into semantics now.
No, the Pope couldn’t do anything by the time the theses were nailed to the door. The larger a group gets and the more knowledge they attain, the greater chances for defects and divisions.
By the time the theses, the Lutherans were made up of Luther and a few of his students, and even their ideas weren’t fully formed. It seems like the time to stop a movement is when it’s small and embryonic, right? Nip it in the bud?
If you could prevent the invention of the press or moveable type it would have had an impact.
The printing press made it possible for people to get access to the Bible without relying on Priests and the Latin language to interpret. This contributed to the movement.
R
I just meant that dissent from the Church was an ongoing and constant thing. The Protestant Reformation was a loooooooooooong time coming.
I doubt the Pope could have done aything to stop the reformation,people have the habit of wanting to think for them selves, I think that is why it has been said Atheists know the Bible better than most Christians, because they stop to think of what is read and see the contradictions, where as most Christians just take it for granted that God wrote or inspired the writings of the Bible, yet reject the idea that He would have sent an angel to have Muhammad write a book!
I know many people who go to church but don’t believe a lot of what they are taught there and have their own ideas of what God wants. I even saw some ministers(hide their identity) on TV admit they were Athiests but kept preaching because it was the only job they knew.
What difference would that make? There were still hundreds of thousands of other proto-protestants itching for reform of a church they saw as irredeemably corrupt. If it wasn’t these theses it would have been similar ones. If not Luther then someone else.
The lesson this has for today’s moral majority: the scientists and atheists and gays and artists and protesters aren’t going away. Pretending that the gods think they are all wrong doesn’t gain you anything. Targetting their ‘ringleaders’ is a waste of energy - no-one’s going to suddenly start respecting the church even if Richard Dawkins is exposed as a kitten-eating child abuser with a crystal meth habit funded by defrauding christian charities. Particularly since no-one respects your piety in the first place.
Metal church doors. Ha - try nailing something to that, Luther!
That would only have hastened the invention of refrigerator magnets.
Well-played, sir. I also often tell people that Martin Luther invented the Post-It note.
But in all seriousness, I agree that Protestantism in some form or another was inevitable at that point. If not Luther, someone else. The real question is how Henry VIII’s break with Rome a few short years later would have gone if Rome had managed to properly suppress the Protestant uprising for a few decades longer.
Sure. Then you kill them too. There’s no reason you have to stop repression. It’s inevitable Luther is going to pop up, but if the Catholic Church played its cards right, he’d become another Hus or Wycliffe; a footnote.