[SeeBass]

Originally Posted by HPLovecraft

That reads like a list of reasons (faulty as they are) as to why Christianity is a destructive influence, not religion. I won't go into depth and refute everything you said, largely because it's all been said before on here, both of us will argue until our fingers fall off, and nothing much will be settled.

What I will say, however, concerns the point you mention about the Bible (and what I assume you to truly mean -- religion) encouraging mediocrity and hampering ambition. This is straight-up bologna. You wouldn't be where you are today if it weren't for the exceptional abilities of religious men and women before you. Some of the greatest artistic expressions of our western heritage are existent because of religion. Do you believe Michaelangelo aspired to mediocrity? Leonardo (who also happened to be a groundbreaking scientist)? Are you familiar with the work of John Milton? Dante? Machiavelli? How about Gothic architecture?

How about science? The science of today stands on the shoulders of those giants in science of the past who tried to explain the world in natural terms; not to prove that God didn't exist, but to further add to His glory. And I quote:



Thomas Aquinas, the great philosopher, certainly wasn't anything mediocre or lacking in ambition. Copernicus first presented his system of the planets circling the sun inside the Vatican, at the behest of the Pope! Bacon, Descartes, Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton:



Even Albert damn-freaking Einstein was a religious man:



I won't even mention the contributions of those who followed the creeds of other religions and explored and created in the name of God or the gods. Homer, the literature-loving kings of the Mughal Empire, Ghandi, the fusion of art styles in Andalusia. . . . The entire groundwork of our Western Heritage, and the rest of the world, was laid out in the name of religion. Dismissing it as merely something that makes fellows aspire to mediocrity is not just plain wrong, it's ridiculous. Where we stand today is testament to the error of that statement.

I think a fair debate would be that if there was no religion we would be colonizing space right now. I know you wouldn't agree but IMHO religion has held back the advances of humanity.