James & Tess Arendt
Introduction by James: To all you former COG / FOL / Family / TFI members who believe the earth is flat: Our beloved shepherd David taught that it was the Roman Catholic Church that taught that, and something that he said was false. Please read paragraph 55.
49. IN THE 400s UNDER THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH THE WORLD WENT INTO THE DARK NIGHT OF THE DARK AGES, THE MIDDLE AGES. Rome had ruled already for approximately 1000 years under the Romans, the heathen kings. But by this time when the Catholic Church took power, it ruled another thousand years through the Popes and through the church, and the Pope actually became known as the head of the Holy Roman Empire, which succeeded the original Roman Empire. And those were the dark Dark Ages of Europe.
50. ISN'T IT SAD TO THINK THAT IT WAS SO-CALLED CHRISTIANITY--ACTUALLY CHURCHIANITY--WHICH BROUGHT THE WORST DARKNESS and BACKWARDNESS TO EUROPE? They went backward in time under so-called "Christianity," it's pitiful! It was only actually then through sailors, scientists and writers that it began to pull out of that darkness, men who got fed-up even with the church, and as a result because they were fed up with the church, they got fed up with Christianity and even with God!--Can you blame them? They figured, "If that's God, if that's Christianity, I don't want anything of it! I'm going to look for something better!"
51. SO THEY BEGAN TO TRAVEL and THEY BEGAN TO DISCOVER THINGS and THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT DAWNED, which is called what? (Fam: The Renaissance.)--A French word meaning "rebirth"!--The rebirth of the World after the Dark Ages of total Roman Catholic domination! Didn't they ever teach you that? (Fam: No!) You went to Catholic school, didn't you!--Ha! This is a revelation to some of these Catholics!
52. WELL, THIS IS THE WAY THEY TEACH HISTORY IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL, not just Protestant, but public school, and it's supposedly the true story of history. Of course, the enlightened and the scientists and the people who have now taken over the World, they hated the Roman church because it kept them in darkness so long, therefore they turned on God and the modern World today is totally secular!--Anti-God, anti-Christ and anti-church.--Maybe not totally, but I mean predominantly. Those in power are anti-Christ, against the church.
53. THE RUSSIANS and THE COMMUNIST NATIONS GOT FED UP WITH THE CHURCH THE SOONEST, sad to say, because the Orthodox Church became very corrupt and very rich, and they were Nobles and Barons just about like the politicians, they had slaves and serfs and all the rest. So they got fed up and declared themselves Communists and threw out the church and God and everything, including their former political government, the Czarist regime.
54. THE WEST HAS DONE THE SAME THING, ONLY NOT OFFICIALLY. They haven't officially become anti-Church, anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-religion, but they have in effect, largely through their educational system, and through, believe it or not, the Renaissance, the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment. They began to discover a lot of things that were true in the World and places and whatnot that the church hadn't told them about, and doctrines and things about Creation and the World and Space and the Solar System which contradicted some of the false doctrines of the Catholic Church!
55. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ORIGINALLY TAUGHT THAT THE WORLD WAS FLAT and HAD FOUR CORNERS!--Taking some of the Scriptures out of context and twisting them to say that the World had to be flat. And they taught that the Sun went around the Earth, because they said it was obvious, you could just see it, and the Bible said so! They'd take Scriptures from the Bible in which God's Word uses language which is, you might say poetic, not necessarily scientific, and by apparent language that fits the appearances of what happens. It looks like the Sun goes around the World, doesn't it?--But it doesn't. Copernicus, Galileo and a few other guys discovered that the Earth was revolving around the Sun!
56. BUT THE CHURCH STUCK TO ITS GUNS ABOUT THESE OLD RIDICULOUS DOCTRINES DISPROVEN BY SCIENCE and based on a false interpretation of Scriptures.--Because the Scripture just uses simple language based on what things look like regarding some of these scientific things. Because how could they tell people that the Earth was going around the Sun when nobody had found that out yet? I can give you Scriptures, but I won't take time to do it now, where it says all of that very plainly, and even says that the Earth is round! But the church had overlooked some of those Scriptures.
57. SO FINALLY THOSE WITH ENQUIRING MINDS and OPEN MINDS and FED UP WITH THE CHURCH--and thereby fed up with God too and Christianity as well--began to discover things that contradicted church doctrine. So they got away from the church, God, Christ and threw out the whole works! They threw out the baby with the bath water! When you give a baby a bath in a little tub, when you throw out the dirty water, you don't throw the baby out with it, do you?--No! But that's what the secular World did then, because they found out that a lot of the water that the church was immersed in was dirty and false and false doctrine, so they threw out the whole thing!--Church, God, Christ, the works, including the Bible!
58. SO THEN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT DAWNED, THE REBIRTH, THE RENAISSANCE, largely through education and science and discovery and travellers like Marco Polo. The Dark Ages began, you might say, with the fall of Rome when the Catholic Church took over full blast about the 400s. If you just remember the round figures, that's better than nothing. And what was the midnight of the Dark Ages? (Fam: 1000.) And when did the World, or at least Europe, begin to pull out of it? (Fam: 1200s.)--In the late 1200s. Marco Polo began his journeys in the late 1200s. You can say 1300s if you want to, but I always begin it about there, late 1200s with Marco Polo when they began to travel and discover a lot of things, and by his travels and others', discover that the Earth was round, and some of them were trying to prove it!
59. MARCO POLO DISCOVERED THESE GREAT CIVILISATIONS WITH MORE EDUCATION, more knowledge of mathematics, more knowledge of science!--The inventors of gun powder in China and all the rest of it, and in Arabic countries they had a better grasp of astronomy and mathematics than Europe, and so did China! So the Europeans were way behind! They were backward, Dark Ages, undeveloped nations. There were much greater civilisations and more developed and more educated, more scientific and had invented more things than had Europe, like the Chinese and the Arabs. But Europe began to discover these things and began to get educated by the Arabs and the Orientals, believe it or not!
My name is James Arendt. I was raised in the Hegewisch neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, served in the USAF from 1970 to 1974, and became a full-time missionary for Christ living 40 years in Japan, 3.5 years in Russia, and a few months in other countries such as Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China where I also served the King of Kings, Jesus, as an Ambassador for His Kingdom. My full bio.
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