Dr. Rodney Stark pt 1

I first heard of Dr. Stark a few years ago (probably around 20 or so apparently) when he wrote an article that said that Mormonism was possibly a rising new world religion.  Of course that article caused people who were against Mormonism to discount his projections, and Mormons to make a great deal of it.  Dr. Stark put the article in a book called Latter-day Saint Social Life:Social Research on LDS Church and its Memebers.  I bought the book basically because Dr. Starks article was included with a postscript.  I bought the book because of that.  Dr. Stark's article was interesting but not much else in the book was.  (By the way it looks like it's now online if anyone is interested.)  Dr. Stark in his postscript talks about how he is aware of people who were critical of his methodology, he covers many of the problems and handles them.  Basically he says that he stands by his statements and projections and thinks the Mormon Church will continue to meet them.  In fact in the year that he wrote the postscript 1994 the church growth was 10% above his high projection.  In other words the church was well on the way to being 256,000,000 members by 2080.

A few years ago I was on Amazon and discovered that Dr. Stark has written a number of books, as all good academicians should.  One was called "God's Battalions."  Luckily I was able to find that book in the library.  It was a good book.  Dr. Stark debunked a bunch of ideas about the Crusades, such as that it was not a chance for excess sons of the nobility to go to the Middle East and come back rich.  In fact most families that sent people to the east at a great cost to the families.  In fact he talks about one family that had to mortgage its land.  It was very interesting and eye opening.  Some of the stuff that he talked about were comments that came from Muslims that were under the Crusaders who wrote that things were better under the Crusaders than under Muslims.  I later listened to a set of lectures on the Crusades from the Great Courses.  Nothing in the lectures disputed what was said and much of what was said reinforced what was said by Dr. Stark.  This has really shown to me that any event in history has two sides to it.  Now I'm embarrassed to admit that I've always thought the crusades were an assault on the Moslems by the Christians.  In fact at one time I heard a General Authority say something about Islam that I disagreed with because I'd been brainwashed, and I thought the GA was misinformed.

After reading that book I decided that I needed to read more of what Dr. Stark had to say.  He has a Trilogy consisting of "For the Glory of God", "The One True God" and "The Victory of Reason."  I read them, and they were interesting.  In one of those books he talks about how at one time sociologists thought that they could learn about ancient religious beliefs by studying very primitive peoples religions.  People like the aborigines of Australia.  Unfortunately instead of finding animistic beliefs like projected in "The Golden Bough" they found very sophisticated beliefs about a Monotheistic God, and so they dropped that source of study.  So actually Polytheism is a digression from Monotheism not a progression from animism or spiritualism.  

I do know in his book One True God he talked about the different monotheistic religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  This was the first real introduction to Islam that I'd ever had.  He talked about Mohammad as bandit and murderer, and said that Muslims don't shy away from any of these stories about Mohammed but celebrate them.  Only Western Apologists try to cover up for Mohammed and try to portray him as a religious person in the Western tradition.  That was eye opening for me, I'd never heard anyone talk about Mohammed that way before.  I did some research on my own, and turns out everything Dr. Stark said about Mohammed was true.  He did lead caravan raids.  He did massacre people.  He did marry women on the same day he'd killed their husbands.  He was a very bad person by Christian standards, and Muslims accept this.  The scary thing is they consider Mohammed as the perfect man worthy of emulation in every way.

One thing that Dr. Stark mentioned in these books is that Christianity developed capitalism and science.  He mentioned that the monasteries almost had to develop capitalism as a response for all the capitol they were amassing.  He talked about some of these things, and was going to develop them in the final book The Victory of Reason.  I didn't read the final book then because the library didn't have it.  As I thought about what he said i could see the truth of it and thought a lot about it.  In fact I thought about it so much that I emailed Dr. Stark and said that I agreed with his ideas about Christianity and that I thought it would only be Western Christianity that would have led to Science and Capitalism that Eastern Christianity would not have.  He actually emailed me back and said that he agreed with me.  I emailed him again and he didn't email me back.  He lives in Corrales during the summer and I think I wrote that I lived near him so he probably thought that I was stalking him.