For the Sake of Science

Thought of the day

7 Responses

1. 

   Slater, on October 18, 2010 at 5:13 am said:

   Well, the guy’s an arse regardless. Not the best poster boy for atheism, perhaps. He’s just ammo for the “atheists have no morals” line of religious hokum.

   It does of course prove that charity is not a Christian thing, but that didn’t really need proving in the first place. No matter what “we” do, they’ll only notice the bad things.
2. 

   Nate, on October 18, 2010 at 5:36 am said:

   Charity is, of course, not solely a christian thing. As far as his donation, I just hope it isn’t throwing good money after bad.

   Your last point is an interesting one since I hear an awful lot about the “bad” things about religion and hardly anything about the good.

   There’s good and bad to almost everything. Except bologna. that’s just bad.
3. 

   Slater, on October 18, 2010 at 5:49 am said:

   My last point wasn’t so much a “yay atheist, boo religion”-thing. It’s much more common than that. Everyone tends to notice the bad things more than the good.

   That said, no matter how hard and fairly I try to think of it, I can’t remember very many positive things religion has done. Not that atheism has either, but that’s because it’s a non-belief. It can’t really do anything. I can, however, name a whole boatload of bad things from religion, first and foremost encouraging trust in authority and believing things without reason.
4. 

   Nate, on October 18, 2010 at 7:00 am said:

   I didn’t think you last point was”yay atheist, boo religion”.

   Keeping written language alive in the western world after the fall of the roman empire sounds like a decent thing. I may be biased though.
5. 

   Slater, on October 18, 2010 at 10:57 am said:

   I was fairly certain the Greeks had a big hand in keeping western written language alive. I may be misinformed, though – or were you referring specifically to Latin? Because I honestly wouldn’t care if we had used the Greek alphabet today.
6. 

   Nate, on October 18, 2010 at 12:59 pm said:

   Monasteries played the biggest role. They also played a surprisingly large role in keeping basic literacy fairly high during the early and middle, middle ages. Monasteries ran schools as time went on you see.

   They think that a lot more people were basically literate than was previously thought. that is people may have been able to read but not write.

   Was the catholic church 100% responsible? No of course not, but there was an enormous role played here, and its fair to give them credit for the modern world this enabled.

   Interestingly, to your point about greeks, that part of the world was under the western roman empire and held on for quite some time after the fall of the eastern empire. They didn’t however spread much learning back east. The same pressures that sunk the east continued to press down on the east for a long time to come.
7. 

   Nate, on October 18, 2010 at 8:12 pm said:

   On the west* for a long time to come.