Religious Children Meaner then Secular Counterparts??

[Siro]

example

There are COUNTLESS examples. Much of modern science and philosophy trace their roots to the Middle Ages and the support of Christianity's and, to lesser extent, Islam's elites' desire to unravel the mind of God. I noticed that you believe the silly pop-culture myth that Abrahamic religion has set us back. It is not true. If anything, the fall of the scientifically worthless Roman Empire, and the rise of the monotheists pushed scientific progress hundreds of years forward.

I recommend you read what actual historians have to say on the matter. I recommend God's Philosophers by James Hannam. Another good one is Those Terrible Middle Ages by Regine Pernoud. You can also look into Rodney Stark's work, but you have to proceed with caution with this one, as he muddles his thesis with way too much Western apologetics.

 

[str8line]

It's hard to measure the effects in a post-religious world formed by a religious world. One thing athiests tend to forget, IMO, is the benefits of religion that got us to where we are today.

Totally. My daughter loves Christmas. And I love movies about the crusades.

 

[♪alt13]

There are COUNTLESS examples. Much of modern science and philosophy trace their roots to the Middle Ages and the support of Christianity's and, to lesser extent, Islam's elites' desire to unravel the mind of God. I noticed that you believe the silly pop-culture myth that Abrahamic religion has set us back. It is not true. If anything, the fall of the scientifically worthless Roman Empire, and the rise of the monotheists pushed scientific progress hundreds of years forward.

I recommend you read what actual historians have to say on the matter. I recommend God's Philosophers by James Hannam. Another good one is Those Terrible Middle Ages by Regine Pernoud. You can also look into Rodney Stark's work, but you have to proceed with caution with this one, as he muddles his thesis with way too much Western apologetics.

I don't need a reading list nor did I ask for one. If there are countless examples you should be able to provide one we could discuss I would think.

 

[str8line]

There are COUNTLESS examples. Much of modern science and philosophy trace their roots to the Middle Ages and the support of Christianity's and, to lesser extent, Islam's elites' desire to unravel the mind of God. I noticed that you believe the silly pop-culture myth that Abrahamic religion has set us back. It is not true. If anything, the fall of the scientifically worthless Roman Empire, and the rise of the monotheists pushed scientific progress hundreds of years forward.

I recommend you read what actual historians have to say on the matter. I recommend God's Philosophers by James Hannam. Another good one is Those Terrible Middle Ages by Regine Pernoud. You can also look into Rodney Stark's work, but you have to proceed with caution with this one, as he muddles his thesis with way too much Western apologetics.

frizzyperm | College Teacher | (Level 1) Educator
Posted on August 8, 2010 at 2:19 PM (Answer #2)

Historically the church was a great scientific powerhouse. It used to love discovering about the world. A thousand years ago all European study and progress was centered around monastic learning. During the primitive eras of the dark ages and medievalism, the church was a beacon of intellectual progress and a lover of new knowledge.

But then the church started to discover facts which made the church authorities uncomfortable. It started with Copernicus (a monk), who proved the Earth was not the centre of the universe. Then Keppler (a monk) provided the incontrovertible mathematical descriptions for the movement of the planets around the sun.

And gradually, during the last 500 years, science has uncovered more and more facts which force the bible (and the koran and torah, etc) to be wrong.

The final nail in the church's love of science was when Charles Darwin proved we are animals who evolved. We are not God's special creation. Since then the church has adopted a conservative and reactionary stance to science and no longer enjoys new knowledge. The church is very scared of science.

Nowadays religion has nothing to contribute to science. There is no scientific subject that can be improved using a religious explanation. But there are countless religious subjects which can be disproved using scientific explanations. It is a one-way street. Science erodes religious certainties and religion is powerless to defend itself. We are entering an era where religion doesn't have any relevance to society. That fact makes billions of people very paranoid and unhappy, but it doesn't change one simple truth... science casts great doubts on the existence of a literal Christian God.

The God of Moses and Abraham is dead; or, at the very least, dying... like it or not, it is the truth.

 

[Siro]

I don't need a reading list nor did I ask for one. If there are countless examples you should be able to provide one we could discuss I would think.

The Church established universities and paid to send monks and priests there, then supported them to pursue a lifetime of study of natural philosophy. They were pretty much the only consistent sponsor of such pursuits for half a millennium worldwide. And during that time, human knowledge advanced by leaps and bounds. Even basic concepts of logical thinking comes from that period. For example Occam's Razor (Occam was a friar).

But it goes far FAR deeper than that. I recommended those books because they offer a good overview of the subject, and provide you with useful level of knowledge on the issue. Read them if interested, or don't. It's nothing to me.

 

[Siro]

frizzyperm | College Teacher | (Level 1) Educator
Posted on August 8, 2010 at 2:19 PM (Answer #2)

Historically the church was a great scientific powerhouse. It used to love discovering about the world. A thousand years ago all European study and progress was centered around monastic learning. During the primitive eras of the dark ages and medievalism, the church was a beacon of intellectual progress and a lover of new knowledge.

But then the church started to discover facts which made the church authorities uncomfortable. It started with Copernicus (a monk), who proved the Earth was not the centre of the universe. Then Keppler (a monk) provided the incontrovertible mathematical descriptions for the movement of the planets around the sun.

And gradually, during the last 500 years, science has uncovered more and more facts which force the bible (and the koran and torah, etc) to be wrong.

The final nail in the church's love of science was when Charles Darwin proved we are animals who evolved. We are not God's special creation. Since then the church has adopted a conservative and reactionary stance to science and no longer enjoys new knowledge. The church is very scared of science.

Nowadays religion has nothing to contribute to science. There is no scientific subject that can be improved using a religious explanation. But there are countless religious subjects which can be disproved using scientific explanations. It is a one-way street. Science erodes religious certainties and religion is powerless to defend itself. We are entering an era where religion doesn't have any relevance to society. That fact makes billions of people very paranoid and unhappy, but it doesn't change one simple truth... science casts great doubts on the existence of a literal Christian God.

The God of Moses and Abraham is dead; or, at the very least, dying... like it or not, it is the truth.

Right. We're talking historically. Once technology became powerful enough that science established itself as a self-supporting structure of the modern world, religion started lashing out in order to maintain relevance. Science and religion has an overlapping role of providing explanations, and the scientific worldview won out. Like franklin said, we live in a post-religion society in the developed world. But religion helped us get there.

 

[Joe Bagadonuts]

example

While I am firmly in the camp that believes religion has no correlation (or even a negative correlation) to kindness, it would be impossible to overlook religion's role in the development of human society. Church and State were one and the same for centuries. Many books have been written on the subject. The Ascent of Man, by Bronkowski is an excellent one which I last read a few decades ago. It illustrates religions role in creating and organizing societies. Yes, this led to war and other negatives on many occasions. It enabled leaders to subjugate others by creating the threat of afterlife punishment which, in turn, was responsible for the creation of empires. Maybe human society could have developed another way, but it's difficult to imagine what it would have been. If something else had taken religions place we would undoubtedly live in a very different world today than we do now.

 

[Siro]

While I am firmly in the camp that believes religion has no correlation (or even a negative correlation) to kindness, it would be impossible to overlook religion's role in the development of human society. Church and State were one and the same for centuries. Many books have been written on the subject. The Ascent of Man, by Bronkowski is an excellent one which I last read a few decades ago. It illustrates religions role in creating and organizing societies. Yes, this led to war and other negatives on many occasions. It enabled leaders to subjugate others by creating the threat of afterlife punishment which, in turn, was responsible for the creation of empires. Maybe human society could have developed another way, but it's difficult to imagine what it would have been. If something else had taken religions place we would undoubtedly live in a very different world today than we do now.

There is really nothing to "replace" religion in early human societies. It is a natural product of how humans think, and it arose in every human society without exception. When you look at it from that angle, then yes, the question becomes nonsensical because religion was a constant of society that cannot be disentangled from the rest. But if you look at the role of modern monotheism, it becomes a lot clearer. Compared to previous systems, God was a very powerful invention. The level of advancement attained because of it was unprecedented in human history. It even enabled vast progress in morality, compared to earlier societies. Take the Greeks for example. They were able to undergo a mini-Enlightenment within just a few hundred years. But it was eventually all lost because they lived in a perpetual state of war. As bloody as Christian Europe was, it was considerably less bloodthirsty than classical civilizations.

I can explore this a lot further, but I really got to go back to work.

 

[Joe Bagadonuts]

There is really nothing to "replace" religion in early human societies. It is a natural product of how humans think, and it arose in every human society without exception. When you look at it from that angle, then yes, the question becomes nonsensical because religion was a constant of society that cannot be disentangled from the rest. But if you look at the role of modern monotheism, it becomes a lot clearer. Compared to previous systems, God was a very powerful invention. The level of advancement attained because of it was unprecedented in human history. It even enabled vast progress in morality, compared to earlier societies. Take the Greeks for example. They were able to undergo a mini-Enlightenment within just a few hundred years. But it was eventually all lost because they lived in a perpetual state of war. As bloody as Christian Europe was, it was considerably less bloodthirsty than classical civilizations.

I can explore this a lot further, but I really got to go back to work.

This is spot on. Religion arose out of man's innate need to explain the phenomena around him. Very quickly religion became the basis of societal organization and the motivation for obeying its rules. Better religious systems literally gave one society a competitive advantage over another, and because religion was so central to identity, both individually and as a community, beliefs were worth going to war over. Weaker societies were eliminated by (or integrated into)stronger ones. The major religions that exist today owe their success (in my view) to the fact that they serve the needs of their particular societies so well.

Religion and science have an interesting relationship because the reason humans are attracted to them is the same: our need to explain our world. Religion releases it's grip very reluctantly even when overwhelming evidence demonstrates that its explanations aren't correct. But bit by bit it is being replaced. There is still a lot that science can't explain, but not nearly as much as there once was. This shrinking domain (except in the case of ignorance under which God's influence will always flourish) is the last stronghold of religion. Among most educated people, though, it's becoming increasingly obvious that we are at a point in human development where organizing society around religion is not the ideal choice.

 

[♪alt13]

The Church established universities and paid to send monks and priests there, then supported them to pursue a lifetime of study of natural philosophy. They were pretty much the only consistent sponsor of such pursuits for half a millennium worldwide. And during that time, human knowledge advanced by leaps and bounds. Even basic concepts of logical thinking comes from that period. For example Occam's Razor (Occam was a friar).

But it goes far FAR deeper than that. I recommended those books because they offer a good overview of the subject, and provide you with useful level of knowledge on the issue. Read them if interested, or don't. It's nothing to me.

There is really nothing to "replace" religion in early human societies. It is a natural product of how humans think, and it arose in every human society without exception. When you look at it from that angle, then yes, the question becomes nonsensical because religion was a constant of society that cannot be disentangled from the rest. But if you look at the role of modern monotheism, it becomes a lot clearer. Compared to previous systems, God was a very powerful invention. The level of advancement attained because of it was unprecedented in human history. It even enabled vast progress in morality, compared to earlier societies. Take the Greeks for example. They were able to undergo a mini-Enlightenment within just a few hundred years. But it was eventually all lost because they lived in a perpetual state of war. As bloody as Christian Europe was, it was considerably less bloodthirsty than classical civilizations.

I can explore this a lot further, but I really got to go back to work.

You've been had my friend.

The first universities were not established by the church. They coalesced around guilds, teachers, students and were based upon the Hellenistic schools of Plato and Aristotle(the platonic acadamy was closed in the 6th century by the eastern orthodox church, derp). They were student supported institutions. It wasn't until long after their establishment that they were "founded" by the church in an effort to control them. Even among the monks it wasn't graduates of monastic schools that pushed science forward, it was the ones that also attended academies and universities established by the people that had use for them. It wasn't religion. It was guilds. It was real world utilitarian education and the demand for it that created universities.

Don't believe me? University of Bologna/Paris/Oxford, it's the same story.

 

[Red]

Can't fail to be impressed by the quality of discourse in this thread. Thanks to all for your food for thought.

 

[fishonjazz]

If life gives you lemons, make beef stew.

Fixed