Bede

Sorry, you've lost me again. What facade are you talking about? If you disagree with the scholarly consensus on the conflict myth write a paper and send it to a journal. You have pretentions towards being a histoy student. Also, please tell your professor that you think Gibbon's explanation of causation is correct and that you don't even think it worth questioning when someone brought it up. Furthermore, mention to him that you will henceforth use nineteenth century popular history that all his colleagues have derided as an authority in your essays. Failing that, why don't you drop the facade?

Best wishes

Bede

spin

No, you drop the facade...

No, you drop the facade...

I saif it first, you drop the facade...

Deep dialogue there.

Bede, I like the way you defend the religion's persistent attempts to control the change of the status quo. When some scientist gets done in by the church, naturally it's not for the scientific work that the person has done. That's not really the realm of the church. The church's realm is the spiritual and theological, ie if anyone is deemed as ummm, heretical the church in the past could screw them without compunction. All you need do is torture people enough or stick them in prison for long enough (that's what the church did with Bruno), they can eventually drag something they can deem as heresy out of them. Naaaaa, the church doesn't stifle science:it stifles scientists and thinkers who are well, give us a little time, Cardinal Biggles bring on the comgy chair, yes, nobody escapes the spanish inquisition!!@$?! Our chief weapons are torture and imprisonment until we get the truth and we have free reign to do that, well, we did, and we can make those heretics eventually admit to their crimes. We're not interested in their scientific experiments at all. We know that they are heretics, so we have to do something. We can't let them spread their heresies. It's like that vile rock music. Satan travels through the speakers and infect people. Satan travels through these so-called scientific advancements. We don't really mind advancemens. Really. Science is ok. I mean it. So I refused to look through Galileo's contraption. I didn't want eyestrain. But science is not the problem. Heretics are. Heretics are bad. And funny, a lot of these scientists and thinkers were heretics. And we know about heretics and what to do with them.


guru

Lafcadio

Few issues:

a) what the OP means by science? For me science is some post-Kepler/Galilei stuff. I can identify some proto-scientific efforts, like of some Greek thinkers or some scholastic scholars and expand the term. The more we enlarge the term, the less religion is hostile with it, because cathedrals, ziggurats or numerology require some knowledge. How do you label this knowledge in a science vs religion debate, especially when "hostile religion" is brought up?
b) http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/dwarfs.html - why would I go with that and not with Duby or a serious historian? Mocking the recent history and denying the Holocaust can bring prison. Mocking the old times history is a funny activity for propagandists. This is saddening. I notice the lack of serious references that it's a sign of pseudoscientific articles, be it of religious or anti-religious fundies.
c) Why would I accept their thesis about the "Degeneration: The Christianisation of Art" when the historians (at least some europeans do, I apologize to the entire planet Earth for my europocentristic views) of art talk about an assault of the instransigently abstract asiatic mysticism or of the replacement of the volume with the decorative and the ornamental. What these guys do believe about modern art? How about Kandinsky or Klee compared with Rafael or a pompeian mozaic?
d) Why is the entire site content isolated from all various of historical events that can form a context for the facts presented there and the only factor is whether the culture was Christian or not? Did they prove the insoluble link between Christianity or non-Christianity and any certain achievement? The entire content is begging the question. Their conclusion is their premise. The only purpose of the association is the denigration.

It saddens me that such ignorance can go widespread. From mocking a religion they came to mocking an entire European culture. Luckily or unluckily the average modern guy doesn't know much about it so he just doesn't give a damn. Orwellian history is closer to us than we ever imagined.

sorompio

Every advance, scientific or technologic, was made against the Church and religion, no thanks to them. If most scientists of the Modern Era were Christians is because there wasn't any other way. How could it be? The Church monopolized education, and no other possibility were available until XVIII century.

Anyway, many of these great men (Newton, Huygens, et al) studied and gave name to the stars. Why did they decide not to name them after saints or angels, in spite of their Christian education, and chose instead Pagan Gods? The answer is quite obvious to me.

Lafcadio

Can you prove it? No? Thanks.
Did Newton compile his Principia against the Church? No? Thanks.

I doubt they named their pets or anything else after saints or angels. Do you see the pattern? Also, do you see why an educated man would keep naming the stars with Arabic/Greek names?

Lafcadio

Oh and Bede, your apology didn't convince me of how Christianity didn't hinder science while banning books. I can understand Bruno was no scientist. I can understand the Church and State went together and attacking one was attacking the other. But some of those books were about something else.
In a way I support Lawyer's position from post #65. Religion didn't interfer with science until the dawn of Enlightenment or so. Of course, about the same time, science started to interfer with religion. We get close to Laplace's anecdotic moment.
The fall of Monarchy was also the fall of Church. And their desperation showed up as intolerance as it almost always shows. A Byzantine intolerance, I might add, as their Church and politics showed similiar faces when lost the grasp of control. These undeniable acts of intolerance were even against the science that once bred inside the Church. The debates were no longer quarrels between clerics, but ideology wars and desperate attempts of the Church to be both traditional and modern. That's a dangerous anachronism.

Wads4

Thanks for your informative post. I made no comment about Historians in general nor Hitler's alleged Christianity, so you may save your snide remarks for use elsewhere. I merely made a brief reference to Gibbon's views.So if he is at fault, and he was completely mistaken and bigoted, then the Catholic Church was of course right to put it on the Index?

spin

Yet he was right that there was a multiplicity of star systems like ours. That was a new and important contribution. He was a staunch advocate of science and a passionate freethinker.


spin

Wads4

"If you are tempted to dispute any of the foregoing, please be advised that I am a graduate student at a bigshot university and I will demonstrate my scholastic and general superiority by subjecting you to an unending stream of snide remarks."

Before claiming general superiority please be advised that I am also a graduate student at a bigshot university (London),--in Medicine,- arguably more useful than scholastic studies, though I bow to your greater knowledge in this field, having studied ancient history , philosophy, science and comparative religion as a mere hobby for the last 40 years, since qualifying in Medicine, (and general courtesy).

Lafcadio

Also the Greeks and many other ancients believed there are four main forces that guide our world: fire, water, air and earth (a view held by Bruno too, as we speak about him). Is it a coincidence that physics today recognized four types of interactions in the entire universe? Let's not indulge us in pretty coincidences. That's religious enough to discredit the entire claim of freethinking anyone could have on this issue. That it fits our today view it shouldn't blind us about what were his thoughts or his methods like.
Bruno actually thought of a solar system to be an unit of the universe. It can be through multiplicity extrapolated from the Copernican cosmos. Bruno's infinity follows Plotin but also Cusanus and Ficino and they were not burnt for it, nor worshiped as martyrs or pioneers of science or freethought. Also Cusanus promoted pantheism, so Bruno really had where to take his ideas from and solve the God vs infinite universe problem. He even confessed the concidence of opposites, another idea taken from Cusanus.
The multiplicity of the Copernican cosmos is somehow conditioned by the fact Bruno has a kind of horror vacui and he has to fill somehow Cusanus' infinity. Between solar systems there's spiritus and the solar systems are infinitely many. Even more, before Bruno was held that both Sun and stars are made from fire, Bruno was the first (in my knowledge) who launched the unsupported assertion (at his times) that those heavenly fires can have planets. He still kept the religious idea that comets are divine messengers. If we regard his cosmology overall certainly we can say, knowing where we are today, that this is a step in the undeification of heavens, but certainly this man didn't do that knowingly. His philosophy just follows his teachers and gives a personal interpretation here and there. Nothing impressive in that. His vision is a product of the many which now fall in his shadow and also contains significantly many untrue elements for our today's truth to consider him a pioneer of science. Is like finding a certain sequence or a certain element in an ancient mythical cosmology which matches our today's vision. We know he didn't have the premises to reach our conclusion the way we did. I think I'm not out of line to consider his now true conclusion just accidental. They were part of his vision, a vision with relatively same argumentative strength like the mainstream Catholic one. They didn't have a single proof if the world was infinite or finite, or if the stars were in fact Suns with planets. They didn't have a single proof the Sun and the stars were made of fire, that was just asserted through analogy. Let's not overstate the real value of their thoughts. Bruno's thinking became famous mostly because he was burnt. Today almost everyone knows of Bruno, few know of Ficino. So if anything caused what Bruno is now, is his death. Otherwise his influence and importance would be much more diminished. One more philosopher among others, who held this original idea - that stars have orbiting planets around them. Even more, for science, no one could really advance further from his idea, until much later. I much more value someone like Copernic which made others just after him to embrace and develop his idea (though today incorrect as a whole) than someone like Bruno which just throws some claims and after many, many years we discover some were accidentally true.

He couldn't be a staunch advocate of science as in his time there was not such thing. His cosmology can be overall and not erroneously characterized as a purely mystical one.
While about him being a freethinkiner, most of his work can be deconstructed and attributed to his predecessors. He's a freethinker in the sense that his vision was conflicting with the Church's vision of his time. His philosophy among neoplatonic mysticism encapsulates also Christian elements, mainstream or heretical (for instance, he had one earlier trial accussation on Arianism).

Overall I think his importance is over-emphasized. Putting my cynical mask on I can say he's a success story.