quote:
Originally posted by Cueball:
[b]I should think the era was irrelevant. [/b]
It's only irrelevant to a historical idealist.
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[b]Speaking of which, how come all the recent scientific achievements have come from a Judeao-Christian society, some of them rigidlay so? Is that because Christianity is more condusive to scientific endeavour?[/b]
I have told you a very great number of times, that any such achievements are [b]DESPITE[/b] the repressive anti-enlightenment features of organized religion. Not a single scientist worth her salt in any society today will seriously attribute their scientific achievements to religious inspiration. At most, the self-delusional ones among them will claim that "oh, science and religion are quite separate, one explains things materially, the other spiritually", and on and on.
There is no doubt that Christianity and Judaism have suffered massive defeats on the front of exercising intellectual totalitarian dictatorship, but they keep trying.
Witness the non-stop attempts to introduce religious fairy tales into science classes at school in the U.S. and Canada - as I have mentioned, we have had to shut down schools in Quйbec for doing this, where in a previous "era" (you don't seem to recognize historical evolution!), they would shut down schools and burn at the stake anyone who denied that the White Male Christian God had created everything!
They also try to shut down scientific research in areas like stem cells, cloning etc.
And medicine is also a science, no? All three religions militate (to a greater or lesser extent) against women's right to choose and to access these modern scientific medical procedures.
Religion, as a whole, is a force for suppression, for enforced ignorance, for preservation of the status quo. Marx said it was the opiate of the masses. Given an inch, it will put science to sleep as surely as it does the strivings for social change.