T is for Tempora Mutantur

I’m doing this blogging A to Z thing. Today is T.

Tempora mutantur is a Latin adage that dates to the Protestant Reformation. It translates to times change.

A longer version is Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. 

Times change and we change with them.

500-ish years ago, the Catholic Church held enormous power in Europe. Martin Luther, protesting corruption in the church, nailed his objections to the door, and Protestantism was born.

That’s the incredibly short and not really accurate version. There were many factors that contributed to the Protestant Reformation. Luther wasn’t alone in his call for change and it wasn’t just corruption in the Church they objected to.

There was a lot going on at the time, including advances in scientific knowledge, and thanks to a little thing called the printing press, dissemination of that knowledge.

Times were changing, and reformers wanted to change with them. Demanded to change with them. Demanded that the Church recognize the world as it was and evolve. And when the Church didn’t, they started their own.

Flash forward to 2016 and we have people in positions of power denying science and refusing knowledge in the name of religion, desperately clinging to the past, and calling it conservatism.

Ironically, some of these people belong to the same religions that emerged when the Catholic Church refused to budge.

Tempora mutantur. Times change. We all need to change with them.