Let's Travel Back In Time!

Who doesn't like time travel?  Okay, so let's go back.  Oh, I don't know, to the middle ages.  It's hard to believe that such a thing as imagination exists, but this is the twenty first century!  So there you are standing beneath a torch lit village path.  Merchants crowd the dusty streets, it hasn't rained in weeks.  The produce shows it.  Everything in this market is wilted and withered.  Smoke pours from an open fire, where an elderly woman, hunched over, prepares a soup for the children who have hardly been eating.  All of a sudden, a commotion begins to stir, rounding the corner with pomp, a well dressed man sets down a velvet cushion, elevates himself and cries out,

"Indulgences are the most precious and sublime of God's gifts; this red cross has as much efficacy as the cross of Jesus Christ. Draw near and I will give you letters duly sealed, by which even the sins you shall hereafter desire to commit, shall be all forgiven you. There is no sin so great that indulgence cannot remit. Pay, only pay largely, and you shall be forgiven!"

The crowds push the children out of the way, spilling their bowls, piling over one another to drop what they have in the man's box.  This wasn't just another indulgence apparently.  It had the signet seal of Leo X!   

You are not fooled though.  You know better than to buy into such superstition!  After all, you're from the United States of America!  You don't trust anything that cannot be empirically verifiable.  I guess you'd seen enough.  Let's get back before dinner.  That soup looked pretty wretched anyhow...

Ahhh, finally, a warm shower and some TV.  Yet, you can't shake the episode you witnessed earlier.  Why were people whipped into such a frenzy to have their sins forgiven?  Shouldn't they have known better than to not simply buy into what was being sold to them?  

You reach for your laptop, wander over to Wikipedia and start reading up on the middle ages.  Things like, Transubstantiation, purgatory, and other weird superstitions populate your search results.  After some research on the Papacy, however, it starts to make more sense.  The Roman Catholic Church was the supreme power in Europe at the time.  Come to think of it, you didn't even get the name of the place while you were visiting, but it must have been Europe!  In fact, the man with the velvet cushion, his name was Tetzel!

Immediately, the unfortunate truth sinks in.  These people's thoughts and lives were dictated and dominated by the Papacy.  From cradle to grave, all they were educated to know was that they were impenitent sinners in need of the pardon of the church.  "Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Matrimony, Last Rites..."  It all sounded a lot more complicated then what you see the TV preachers talk about, "Justification by faith", but that's irrelevant.

You won't be fooled like those people.  You are thankful for the separation of church and state!  You are free from the Papacy!  They cannot dictate your moral perspectives or your eternal destiny!  No one believes in sin anymore so why should you?  Ahh, it feels good to live in a land where our ruling officials block any origin, meaning, morality, or destiny taught by any religious organization.  We must only have the facts!  Well, the facts they give us.  We must fit them into the acceptable theories!  We don't have all the answers yet, but it's all relative right?!  That's what makes this country great!  Truth is in the eye of the beholder, or at least that's what they let us believe.  Tolerance is key, as long as your intolerant of whatever is deemed intolerant.  Let's just say we believe what they tell us.  After all, we must be politically correct!

That's enough fantasy play for now.  Go to bed.  Your head is spinning...