Rufel has offered:

Except that the Bible as Bible has all of those "problems with Judeo-Christianity" in it -- let's not even talk about the OT God who would test the "righteous" believers by ordering them to sacrifice their son and then staying their hand just before the knife drops upon the poor innocents' neck.

And as for Christianity, well, what flavour? For the the early church of Augustine's time certainly didn't survive the Great Schism that split the Christian world between East and West (Orthodox and Catholicism, respectively) in the 11th century (1054, as I recall).

And as for Dark Ages... that term is a huge misnomer, for the Medieval World was a diverse place in which some places where certainly "dark" but other places where shining beacons of culture, like Byzantium. (Believe me, after living with two medievalists, one of whom has a doctorate in Medieval Studies, I've become convinced of this.)

And as for the Bible being outlawed, the majority of Biblical teaching was oral -- literacy rates among ordinary folk certainly didn't include being able to read ecclesiastical Latin, which was the universal language of the Western Christian Church at that time. In my own doctoral research in medieval drama, I've found out that for the ordinary folk mystery cycles, that dramatized the Bible from Creation to Judgement Day, was a more effective means of spreading the faith than *reading* it, because, except for a dedicated few, who had time to learn to read and then to read the Bible?

And, no, my research has shown that it wasn't the clergy who wrote the plays -- it was the laity. That's why the plays were so popular -- they were the film festivals of their day.

This sacred/secular dichotomy isn't a medieval thing... in fact, the medieval world saw the sacred and secular as mixed... Manicheanism (this dual-split) was a heretical notion, unfortunately passed down from the residue of Augustine's own dabbling with Manicheanism before he became a Christian, and it was passed down, whole-hog, into fundamentalist strains of Christianity.

So, Eric, I agree with you on Augustine -- although I still think he, like Nietzsche, was a guy whose followers became more extreme than he ever was. The other points I kind of go, "Ummm..."