Religion

Been pondering religion, self-expression values, capacity, and Martin Luther. Most people have heard of Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Thesis. He was not the first person to make these complaints. They go back to at least the 13th century. But he was successful in causing a revolution of sorts based on individuals having their own interpretations of the way religion should be practiced. Much of his success is credited to the printing press and how it allowed for the rapid spread of ideas. I will not malign this invention but I must make two points related to capacity. First, for there to be a spread of printing presses not in the control of the courts or the church, there must have been enough capacity in the social system to allow people to create a market for the products they produced and/or have wealthy beneficiaries willing to support these local ventures. Second, there must have been a large enough population of literate people to absorb and spread the ideas to those not as literate. This means that a certain level of wealth, leisure and infrastructure existed at this time that I would argue did not exist in the centuries when John Wycliffe and Jon Hus made the same arguments. They had tried to spread the same seeds of discontent years earlier but they could not take root in the social systems as they existed at the time.