Quote:
Originally Posted by SeeBass
I guess I could just attack Christianity as per Hoz:
Ever hear of the Dark Ages? That's the time when christianity ruled the world.
And from the time of the fall of Rome, until the Renaissance - when people began to again value intellectual thought, not one significant discovery was made. Can you name one signficant scientist or scientific discovery from the 6th century? The 7th? 8th, 9th, 10th?
Now, how many can you name from the 20th?
In the Dark Ages, irrationalism replaced rationalism. In Rome, it was believed by many that the brain was the seat of intellect, and that the heart was just a muscle. In Greece, and later in Rome, it was held that the world was round... in fact, Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the world. People knew 1800 years ago how large the world was... but 1000 years later, they had NO IDEA. The heliocentric system was first uncovered in Greece.
But in the dark ages, irrationalism ruled, knowledge was shunned, and ignorace took over... people thought the world was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth, they believed that the heart was the center of the intellect.... where did this ignorance come from? The bible.
And even worse, diseases that were easily cured by ROMANS were uncurable for people living centuries AFTER the fall of Rome.
The Greeks and Romans invented the clinical method of science and medicine! They held that diseases were natural and curable.
Then came christianity, that shunned knowledge, actively worked against the disease model of medicine, and replaced it with demonology... now, a disease was a demon... Medical science actually went backwards, we actually LOST knowledge!
Think that isn't important?
Well, because of that, the lifespan of mankind actualy shrunk during that time. That's right, 1000 years after the fall of Rome, people were dying at an earlier age than they were prior to the fall of Rome. That's right, as time passed, things actually got worse.
If you don't think that's significant, you tell me what you think the life span will be 1000 years from now. Do you think it will shrink?
How many centuries are we behind? 300-400?
Maybe more.... just look at Greece from 500 BCE to Roman times around 200-300 AD.... look at the growth in thought....
Here's just one sobering thought. Rome, the capital city of the Roman empire, was the world's first city to approach a population of around 1 million - around 100 AD.
They were able to achieve this through technology - fine roads the could be traversed by heavy populations.... well structured buildings built to last.... (go to Rome today and take a look a some) and fresh, clean water... enough not only for drinking, but for public bathing!
The Roman aquaducts were a marvel - Roman civil engineers found a way to bring fresh clean water to a million people....
When was the next time a western city had a population of one million? When's the next time a city met this level of technological achievement?
London.
In the 19th century.
Thanks christianity. Thanks a heap. Thanks for diverting our minds to 'faith' thanks to diverting our works to building cathedrals, rather than cities.
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All that, and no mention that the spread of Christianity in the first place was also a Roman creation?
The advances in medicine, science, etc. during the height of the Roman Empire are results of the social and political climate at the time. The Romans sunk plenty of money into worship (check out the Pantheon); that's not a Christian invention. The difference is that the Romans had heaps and heaps of money and could afford the research into city building, medicine, etc. We're talking about one of the greatest empires in human history, it's unfair to compare it to anything in the west for the next several hundred years, and closed-minded to suggest that Christianity is somehow to blame. If Constantine had made some sort of Greco-Roman polytheistic paganism the imperial faith and crushed Christianity completely, it still would have sucked to live in western europe in the dark ages.
Christianity may have stifled scientific research contrary to it's doctrine, but I'm pretty sure it didn't have anything against clean water. Societies were just too poor to build and advance these technologies.
Also, if Christianity was the all-powerful, thought-stifling influence you believe it to be, how did the Carolingian Renaissance happen? Why was the Roman Empire more advanced in the 4th century than the Umayyad Caliphate 300 years later?