Is Christian culture compatabel with Western Culture....

Leonthecat said:
If Christians spent more time figuring out what caused the spread of the disease instead of praying to imagined beings and subjecting themselves to the whims of "holey men", much of the death and backwardness could have been avoided.
So no. Christianity was solely responsible for the Dark Ages.
Without religion mankind could have gone to the moon and cured diseases,easily 200 to 400 years earlier.
Nothing has held us back more than magical thinking.
Nothing.
Click to expand...

Wow lol.

Ever hear of Louis Pastuer?
 
And the prayer of faith shall save the sick.... James 5:14-15

Herbalists had existed since ancient times, and herbalism was known everywhere.

The Mesopotamians, for example, knew about hellebore, hyoscyamus, mandrake and opium.

The founder of pharmacology is generally regarded as an ancient Greek, Dioscorides, whose work was known in Latin as De Materia Medica. It detailed some six hundred plants and almost a thousand drugs.

Such knowledge was scorned by the Church, as were contemporary herbalists. Like alchemists, they were often accused of practicing witchcraft.

Had churchmen taken a more positive interest they might have learned that witches' sabbats owed their existence more to hallucinogens such as hyoscine than to Satan. They might also have learned that naturally occurring compounds can be used as antibiotics and anesthetics.

Mandrake, hemp and poppy were all alkaloids traditionally used as anesthetics. As well as hyoscine (scopolamine), modern drugs such as picrotoxin, serpasil and cocaine were all documented in ancient pharmacopeias

For many centuries the Church clung to the theory of signatures. Theologians taught that God had created certain plants with magical medicinal properties and that he had left clues to these properties. Thus a yellow blossom would cure jaundice, and a red one could improve the blood. A root shaped like a foot would relieve gout.

Like so many other beliefs of the Church, this one was utterly mistaken and served only to hold up progress. Objective research was pointless because the Church already knew the answers. Pharmacy therefore remained static, confined in a straitjacket of error.

The Church retarded and even regressed other areas of medicine, rejecting sophisticated rational ideas of ancient times. Ancient peoples had practiced surgery, including cataract operations, brain surgery and plastic surgery. They used ligatures. They were aware of the importance of public health and personal hygiene.

Followers of Hippocrates held that every illness has a natural cause. Christianity rejected all of this. In their view illness was indisputably caused by sin, diabolical possession, witchcraft and other satanic forces. To deny it was to invite the attentions of the Inquisition.




http://www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com/ea0_trad.htm
 
Legion Troll said:
And the prayer of faith shall save the sick.... James 5:14-15

Herbalists had existed since ancient times, and herbalism was known everywhere.

The Mesopotamians, for example, knew about hellebore, hyoscyamus, mandrake and opium.

The founder of pharmacology is generally regarded as an ancient Greek, Dioscorides, whose work was known in Latin as De Materia Medica. It detailed some six hundred plants and almost a thousand drugs.

Such knowledge was scorned by the Church, as were contemporary herbalists. Like alchemists, they were often accused of practicing witchcraft.

Had churchmen taken a more positive interest they might have learned that witches' sabbats owed their existence more to hallucinogens such as hyoscine than to Satan. They might also have learned that naturally occurring compounds can be used as antibiotics and anesthetics.

Mandrake, hemp and poppy were all alkaloids traditionally used as anesthetics. As well as hyoscine (scopolamine), modern drugs such as picrotoxin, serpasil and cocaine were all documented in ancient pharmacopeias

For many centuries the Church clung to the theory of signatures. Theologians taught that God had created certain plants with magical medicinal properties and that he had left clues to these properties. Thus a yellow blossom would cure jaundice, and a red one could improve the blood. A root shaped like a foot would relieve gout.

Like so many other beliefs of the Church, this one was utterly mistaken and served only to hold up progress. Objective research was pointless because the Church already knew the answers. Pharmacy therefore remained static, confined in a straitjacket of error.

The Church retarded and even regressed other areas of medicine, rejecting sophisticated rational ideas of ancient times. Ancient peoples had practiced surgery, including cataract operations, brain surgery and plastic surgery. They used ligatures. They were aware of the importance of public health and personal hygiene.

Followers of Hippocrates held that every illness has a natural cause. Christianity rejected all of this. In their view illness was indisputably caused by sin, diabolical possession, witchcraft and other satanic forces. To deny it was to invite the attentions of the Inquisition.




http://www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com/ea0_trad.htm
Click to expand...

Obvious then and obvious now. Magical thinking = protracted ignorance.
Religion = institutionalized stupidity.
 
Those who carried out medical research were constantly at risk. Men such as Leonardo Da Vinci were obliged to carry out research in secret. Any publicity was dangerous.

The man who recognized mental illness as the explanation for diabolical possession was persecuted and obliged to flee for his life. Anyone who adopted Hippocratic techniques was regarded as a heretic.

Medical assistance was an attempt to confound the will of God. A professor of medicine at Bologna who used skin grafts for plastic surgery was charged with impiety.

Powerful churchmen forbade vaccination during smallpox epidemics because it was "against the natural law".

Anesthesia was prohibited on the grounds that if God meant us to suffer, then we ought to accept the suffering and not seek to ameliorate it.

It was better that a woman with an ectopic pregnancy should die, in accordance with God's will, than that an operation should be performed. Christian morality informed official medicine.

So it was that Christian physicians adopted the view that sexual activity was responsible for all manner of physical ills, a view that even minimal scientific research could have discredited centuries ago.



http://www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com/ea0_trad.htm
 
Jarod said:
So I keep hearing this crap about how Liberals should be opposed to Muslims because they are hostile to women's rights and homosexual rights.


Here is my response.... There are groups of Christians who are hostile to women's rights and homosexual rights. I disagree with their positions and their stance.



HOWEVER, I agree that they have every right in America to think like that and to speak about it and to promote their ideology! In fact I would fight for their right to do so! The existence of people with these beliefs is ABSOLUTLY compatible with Western Culture. Its healthy and should be encouraged. -----Jarod


So, in closing I point out that I hold the same standard for Muslims. I may disagree with some of them politically, but stand up for their right to have an opinion different than mine! I wont be voting for people with ideas I disagree with, I will debate them, I will point out the error in their arguments, but I will also protect their rights to make those arguments.
Click to expand...


HOWEVER, I agree that they have every right in America to think like that and to speak about it and to promote their ideology! In fact I would fight for their right to do so! The existence of people with these beliefs is ABSOLUTLY compatible with Western Culture. Its healthy and should be encouraged.


So is it absolutely compatible with Western culture that Islam doctrine forbids any promotion of homosexual and womens rights.....???

Of course it isn't..its absolutely incompatible ......understand the difference now....?
 
Leonthecat said:
No. The cause of the protracted ignorance of the Dark Ages falls squarely on religion, specifically Christianity.
You can not effectively argue otherwise, and you know it.
Click to expand...

ignorance continues today in your every act and deed......you are the inheritor of the Dark Ages mentality.......
 
Christians were still trying to prove the existence of the human soul into the twentieth century. Dr. Duncan MacDougall (1866 - 1920), a Christian physician in Haverhill, Massachusetts, sought to measure the mass lost when the soul departed the body at death. He attempted to measure the mass change of six patients at the moment of death.

In 1901, MacDougall weighed six patients while they were dying from tuberculosis in an old age home. The death bed was placed on an industrial sized scale which was reported to be sensitive to "two-tenths of an ounce". His first subject reportedly lost "three-fourths of an ounce". He took his results to support his hypothesis that the 'soul' had mass, and when the 'soul' departed the body, so did this mass.

MacDougall also measured fifteen dogs in similar circumstances as a control, because according to Christian theologians, animals do not possess souls, so no change in weight would be expected. As anticipated, the canine results were "uniformly negative" with no perceived change in mass. MacDougall took his results as confirmation that the 'soul' had weight, and that dogs did not have 'souls'.

Researchers soon noted that MacDougall's experimental results were flawed in several ways: limitations of his equipment, lack of sufficient control over the experimental conditions, the small sample size, and inadequate allowance for the differences in sweating between dogs and humans.

Out of MacDougall's six human patients only one had apparently lost weight at the moment of death. Two of the patients were excluded from the results due to "technical difficulties", one patient lost weight but then put it on again, and two of the other patients registered a loss of weight at death but a few minutes later lost even more weight.

MacDougall did not use the six results, just the one that supported his hypothesis - attracting widespread derision within the scientific community.

No properly conducted scientific experiment has ever confirmed the weight of the soul, and theologians have now decided that souls are weightless.


http://www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com/gg0_medicine.htm#twentieth
 
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