Western Europe Religion Change and Continuity over Time free essay sample

During the time period from the beginning of the Roman Empire to the Crusades, there were changes and continuities in religion. After Christianity became the main religion in the Roman Empire, it slowly changed as time went on and in some areas remained the same. At the beginning of the Roman Empire the Romans were a polytheistic people. They believed in many gods, which they adopted from the Greeks in Southern Italy. The Romans copied many of the Greek gods and myths but gave them different names, for example, Jupiter was the Greek god Zeus and Mars was the god Greek god Ares. People began to worship emperors during the reign of Emperor Augustus, the first emperor. Augustus didn’t demand it but the people did it anyway. Emperor Caligula was the emperor to demand to be worshipped. A cult of the living emperor was developed as a way to increase the loyalty of the people. We will write a custom essay sample on Western Europe Religion Change and Continuity over Time or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Christianity developed in a small Roman province called Judea by a man named Jesus, a carpenter from Galilee. He preached for about 3 years before the Jewish leaders brought him to the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate. Jesus was imprisoned, condemned, and executed by crucifixion. Three days after his death, he rose up again. His followers, the Apostles, began to spread his word among the Jews trying to convince that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God and that he was resurrected. A man named, Paul of Tarsus, persecuted the Christian church at first but when Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus, he began to believe. Paul became the greatest Christian missionary in the world. He preached to the mainly to the Gentiles and many people believed. For more than two centuries, the Christian Church grew slowly but steadily. Many of the first believers were poor people, women and slaves. As the church grew and prospered, they developed a hierarchy of priests and bishops. Christians were forbidden to worship other gods. So, many early Christians were persecuted by Roman officials, who regarded their refusal to worship the Emperor as disloyalty. Despite the occasional government sponsored persecution, for example feeding them to hungry lions in arenas, and spontaneous mob attacks. The religion continued to gain strength and attract converts. By the late third century, Christians were a sizable minority within the Roman Empire and many held posts in local and imperial governments. The persecution finally stopped with the Edict of Milan in 312, when Emperor Constantine saw the vision of the cross before a major battle. He believed that the Christian God helped him and so he made Christianity the Empires official religion. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Roman nobles lost control of the papacy –office of the pope- and it became a powerful international power after the tenth century. Councils of bishops became increasingly responsive to papal direction. Regional disagreements over church regulations, difficult communications, a shortage of trained clergy and political disorder formed formidable obstacles to unifying the church. Church problems also included lingering polytheism, nepotism and simony. The church decided to unify the church by combing polytheism and heretical beliefs. For example, December 25th, the day Jesus was born, was a Pagan holiday associated with the Winter Solstice, and had significance in many local belief systems. They also built churches on sacred sites. In politically fragmented Western Europe, the pope need allies so he created the Holy Roman Empire and crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor in 962. Fights between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperors were common and they were mostly about who had more power over bishops in imperial lands. This is called investiture controversy. This was somewhat resolved in 1122 with the Concordat of Worms. The Emperor renounced his right to choose bishops and abbots or bestow spiritual symbols on them. The Pope permitted the emperor to invest papally appointed bishops and abbots. Monasticism was prominent in the religious life of almost all medieval Christian lands. People who lived in the religious communities were devoted to continual prayer, chastity, obedience and poverty. Monasteries were primary centers of learning and literacy in medieval Europe. The Crusades were from 1095 to 1204. They were armed pilgrimages to the Holy Land by Christians determined to recover Jerusalem from Muslim rule. The reforming leaders of the Latin Church, sought to soften the warlike tone society, so they created The Truce of God. This limited fighting between Christian lords by specifying the truce, such as during Lent (forty days before Easter) and Sundays. Many people made pilgrimages to the Holy Land for many different reasons, even though Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria were under Muslim control, the pilgrims were generally tolerated and protected. Despite the differences between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus asked the pope and western European rulers to help him confront the Muslim threat and reconquer what the Christians termed as the Holy Land. At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II addressed a huge crowd and told them to stop fighting amongst themselves and go to the Holy Land to fight the Muslims. So people cut cloth into crosses and sewed them unto their shirts to symbolize their willingness to march to Jerusalem. This became known as the first Crusade. The Pope Urban promised to free crusaders who had committed sins from their normal penance, the usual reward for peaceful pilgrims to Jerusalem. The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099, which was the only successful crusade. The Muslims recaptured Jerusalem in 1187. By the time of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the original religious enthusiasm had diminished to a point where the Crusaders agreed to sack Constantinople to help pay the cost of transporting the army by ship. In conclusion, there still is a pope in Rome today who stills yields a lot of power. Christianity is the most practiced religion in the world, Islam being the second. You can still find monks and nuns living in monasteries today as well.

Module Review Questions Example

Module Review Questions Example Module Review Questions – Coursework Example Running Head: Speech Recognition Systems. Speech recognition has come with great communication capabilities which include conversion of text to speech, speech to text and even voice recognition. The speech recognition technology can be applied innovatively in many ways for the benefit of our daily lives, business and education. Many persons need assistance and speech recognition technology has come in quite handy in a number of ways. It can aid some individuals understand or produce spoken works; the ASL translator and Model talk are useful on this end. The technology is able to aid individuals also understand and produce language in written form (speech to text) such as Rex and Timo Stories. Speech technologies are able to replace otherwise expensive human experts in the school and hospital settings through depression diagnosis, English X-Change, guided speech and many other innovations. The technologies can also be useful in improving clumsy difficult graphical user interfaces than ks to innovations like VoiceBox navigation and can also be employed in business environments. Given the continued development and continued application of speech recognition systems in our day to day lives I think the future is coming when they will eventually replace humans in common phone interactions. A sales person in the field or in a supermarket for instance can innovatively convert text on a machine remotely into speech when conversing with a customer on a real-time basis. Healthcare professionals are able also to get accurate information from patients of depression by employing speech recognition as patients talking practitioners may be tempted to give false of information. As such therefore I think speech recognition systems will soon take place the humans in telephone conversations with many benefits to life aspects such as education, communication, business and entertainment. This is good as it saves on costs of hiring experts and tremendously improves lives of many peopl e. It also speeds up the speed and accuracy of doing things in the aspects of business particularly. The only disadvantages is loss of for jobs who would have been employed on the same roles.References.1. George, Marakas and James, O’Brien. (2012). Introduction to Information Systems.

The Cove Movie Review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The Cove - Movie Review Example e cameras were positioned in such a way that Taiji fisherman had no clue about their presence which is wrong concerning it was their country and they should have been given full information before recording their hunting activities by filmmakers. Also, it is argued that much of the information unveiled in the film is edited by the producers in such a way that real facts are left mutilated and twisted. Real information is not conveyed to the world, rather it is edited in a wrong way. Secret filming involving use of high-resolution cameras disguised as rocks and underwater microphones is the cause of conflict between the documentarians and Japanese fishermen. The cameras were in fact so well hidden to capture hunting footage of dolphins that the crewmen themselves had a hard time finding those cameras later. Many have argued about whether the film should even be considered a documentary or not given the fact that certain scenes look heavily staged due to the possible use of choreograph y. The portrayal of dichotomy between the crew and local fishermen in The Cove does not reduce conflict in any possible way. Rather, it has served to create new instances judging by the huge political and national upheaval caused since the film’s release. There is more anger and belligerence now than ever before for the Western media and activists in Japan. Not only they see the movie as a direct breach of their privacy, but they also consider arguments raised by the Western activists as ethnocentric. This is because they are trying to judge the Japanese culture through the lens of their self-created cultural standards. Very defiant behaviour is maintained by Japanese people towards the anti-whaling activists. The film is an effort to force Japan to curb dolphin hunting leaving no room for negotiation. This is a wrong strategy and is responsible for creating new troublesome instances like riots between Taiji fishermen and foreign activists. The Japanese people have openly object ed to