Is Christian culture compatabel with Western Culture....

Erasmus (1466? – 1536). Desiderius Erasmus, known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, a Dutch was a classical scholar, Renaissance humanist thinker, social critic, writer and teacher. He was born illegitimate, his father, Gerard, being a Catholic priest and curate in Gouda. Illegitimacy was a bar to ordination, so his family had to buy an exemption for him.

Erasmus was an early proponent of religious toleration, and enjoyed the sobriquet "Prince of the Humanists"; He prepared new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament which raised questions that would be influential in the Protestant Reformation.

He was critical of the the Catholic Church. Members of the Catholic Counter-Reformation movement often condemned Erasmus as having "laid the egg that hatched the Reformation." All of his works were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books by Pope Paul IV




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Étienne Dolet (1509 - 1546). Dolet was a French scholar, translator and printer. While studying Law at Toulouse University, he was thrown into prison and banished for his views.

Dolet was criticized by Catholics and Protestants alike, partly because of his anti-Trinitarian views and partially because of his advocacy of rationalism, which the Church saw as anti-Christian.

His enemies succeeded in imprisoning him in 1542 on the charge of atheism. After imprisonment for fifteen months, he was released.

He escaped from a further imprisonment in Piedmont in 1544 by his own ingenuity, but, venturing back to Paris, he was again arrested, and branded as a relapsed atheist by the theological faculty of the Sorbonne. He was first tortured, then in August 1546 , he was strangled and burned in the Place Maubert. It was his 37th birthday.

His goods were confiscated, so his widow and children were reduced to beggary.


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Bernardino Telesio (1509 - 1588). Telesio was an Italian philosopher and natural scientist.

His emphasis on observation made him the "first of the moderns" who eventually developed the scientific method. He studied classics, science and philosophy, which constituted the curriculum of the Renaissance savants. Like other philosophers he attacked the medieval Aristotelianism and scholasticism.

His great work De Rerum Natura Iuxta Propria Principia (On the Nature of Things according to their Own Principles), was followed by a large number of scientific and philosophical works. Telesio writes in De Rerum Natura that "the construction of the world and the magnitude of the bodies contained within it, and the nature of the world, is to be searched for not by reason as was done by the ancients, but is to be understood by means of observation.". This statement summarizes Telesian philosophy.

His views aroused the anger of the Church not least because of his rationalism. He also made no distinction between superlunar and sublunar physics, as the Church did at the time.

He also reasoned that if the soul is influenced by material conditions then the soul must have a material existence. He was a major influence in the development of scientific and philosophical empiricism - and is thus a major figure in the history of philosophy. His books were placed on the Index.


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Pastor PiMPle said:
Bruno wasn't even a scientist....
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Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600).

Bruno was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. He developed and wrote about mnemonic systems which enabled him to perform prodigious feats of memory. Although the techniques were clearly documented, some of his contemporaries attributed them to magical powers.

He was an outstanding scholar, teaching in many of the leading European universities. He spent most of his life under suspicion and was arrested by the Church authorities.

Among the numerous charges of blasphemy and heresy brought against him in Venice, was his belief in the plurality of worlds. Bruno defended himself skillfully. The Roman Inquisition asked for his transferal to Rome. After several months the Venetian authorities consented and Bruno was sent to Rome in February 1593. Bruno proposed that the Sun was essentially a star, and, that other stars were solar systems, with an infinite number of inhabited worlds populated by other intelligent beings. He also held that matter was the essentially the same throughout the universe, made up of discrete atoms and obeying the same physical laws.

In technical terms, Bruno's cosmology is marked by infinitude, homogeneity, and isotropy, with planetary systems distributed evenly throughout - all of which contradicted Church teaching. In addition his ideas were distinctly Pantheistic. Furthermore, a copy of the banned writings of Erasmus, annotated by Bruno, had been discovered.

He was imprisoned for seven years in Rome during his trial. Some important documents about the trial are mysteriously "lost", but a summary of the proceedings was rediscovered in 1940. The numerous charges against Bruno, based on some of his books as well as on witness accounts, included blasphemy, immoral conduct, and heresy in matters of dogmatic theology, philosophy and cosmology. The charges reduced to:

Holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith (five counts);
Claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity;
Believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into animals,
Dealing in "magics" and divination.

Pope Clement VIII declared Bruno a heretic. The Roman Inquisition issued a sentence of death. On February 17, 1600 in the Campo de' Fiori, a central Roman market square, "his tongue imprisoned because of his wicked words" he was burned at the stake.

His ashes were dumped into the Tiber river. All of his works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603.




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Pomponio Algerio (1531–1556). Pomponio Algerio was a civil law student at the University of Padua whose philosophical ideas attracted the attention of the Roman Inquisition.

Among other ideas he believed that "the Roman Catholic Church is a particular Church and no Christian should restrict himself to any particular Church. This Church deviates in many things from truth."

After a year in prison, he still refused to recant. The Venetian authorities would not consent to an execution, so Pope Paul IV sent officials to extradite him to Rome.

In Rome, on August 21, 1555, a monk visited Pomponio in his cell urging him to repent. If he repented, he would be strangled before burning.

The 24-year-old student refused, and an alternative method of torture-execution was found that did not involve the shedding of blood. On August 22, 1556 Algerio was executed in the Piazza Navona. He was boiled in oil. He remained alive for 15 minutes.


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Galileo Galilei (1564– 1642), was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher.

In 1589, he was appointed to the chair of mathematics in Pisa. Galileo made significant discoveries in fundamental science as well as applied science. He played a major role in the Scientific Revolution and has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy", the "father of modern physics", and "the Father of Modern Science".

His contributions to observational astronomy - all of which undermined the Church's cosmology - include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter (named the Galilean moons in his honor), and the observation and analysis of sunspots.

Galileo also worked in applied science and technology, inventing an improved military compass and other instruments.

For advocating a more realistic cosmology, he was tried by the Roman Inquisition, in 1615, The sentence of the Inquisition was delivered on June 22.

It was in three essential parts:

Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of heresy", namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the center of the universe, that the Earth is not at its center and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to "abjure, curse and detest" those opinions.

He was sentenced to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition. (On the following day this sentence was commuted to house arrest, which he remained under for the rest of his life).

His offending Dialogue was banned; and in an action not announced at the trial, publication of any of his works was forbidden, including any he might write in the future

Had he not been a friend of the Pope, or if he had not abjured his views, he would undoubtedly have been burned at the stake.



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François de La Mothe Le Vayer, (1588 - 1672). Le Vayer was a French writer, teacher and thinker.

He was admitted to the French Academy in 1639, and was the tutor of Louis XIV. He wrote a series of books covering geography, rhetoric, morality, economics, politics and logic. Modest and skeptical he became popular at the French court.

He practiced an erudite but savage (and carefully concealed) criticism of religious hypocrisy. He was instrumental in popularizing Skepticism in France.

His works include De la vertu des païens (1642; “On the Goodness of the Pagans”); a treatise entitled Du peu de certitude qu’il y a dans l’histoire (1668; “On the Lack of Certitude in History”), which marked a beginning of historical criticism in France; and five skeptical Dialogues, published posthumously under the pseudonym Orosius Tubero, which are concerned with diversity in opinions, variety in customs of life and sex roles, the value of solitude, the virtue of the fools of his time, and differences in religion.

Had he published during his lifetime, there can be little doubt that he would have found himself burned at the stake.



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René Descartes (1596 - 1650). Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic.

He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied to this day. Although he claimed to be a Roman Catholic, his skeptical approach opened to way to the end of scholasticism and the birth of modern philosophy. He realized the need for discretion.

When Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1633, Descartes abandoned plans to publish Traite du Monde (Treatise on the World), his work of the previous four years, and burned the manuscript. In his own era, Descartes was accused of harboring secret Deist or atheist beliefs. In 1641 his Meditations upon First Philosophy gave such offense to the clergy that he was forced to fly his country “because it was too hot for him.”

His philosophy was condemned at the University of Utrecht in 1643. He was offered an asylum by Christina, Queen of Sweden, and died at Stockholm in 1650.

In 1663, the Pope placed his works on the Index of Prohibited Books. These works, and especially his Meditations on First Philosophy continue to be standard texts at most western universities.


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Kazimierz Lyszczynsk (1634–1689). Lyszczynsk was a Polish nobleman and philosopher, and also an atheist.

A book annotated by Lyszczynsk was passed to a local bishop, who along with a second bishop, sought his condemnation and execution. He was discovered to have written a treatise entitled "De non existentia Dei" (The non-existence of God), which stated that God does not exist and that religions are the inventions of man.

Bishop Zaluski gave the following account of his execution, seeing it as a sacrifice to God:

"After recantation, the culprit was conducted to the scaffold, where the executioner tore with a burning iron the tongue and the mouth, with which he had been cruel against God; after which his hands, the instruments of the abominable production, were burnt at a slow fire, the sacrilegious paper was thrown into the flames; finally himself, that monster of his century, this deicide was thrown into the expiatory flames; expiatory if such a crime may be atoned for."

“O, travelers! Do not pass these stones. You will not stumble upon them if you do not stumble upon the truth. Recognize the truth: for even those who know that it is the truth teach that it is a lie. The teachings of the wise are bound by deceit.”


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Pierre Bayle (1647 - 1706). Bayle was a French philosopher and writer whose work influenced the Enlightenment. He was converted to Romanism while studying at the Jesuit College in Toulouse in 1669, but his new faith lasted only seventeen months.

He abjured Catholicism and became skeptic, as evidenced by Thoughts on the Comet, in which he compares the supposed mischief of atheism with the real mischief of fanaticism. Vulnerable and aware of the fate of other secular thinkers in Toulouse he fled to Switzerland, and later to the Dutch Republic, where he advocated a separation between faith and reason, and occupied a number of academic posts, often losing them when religious authorities objected to his teachings.

Though in the Dutch Republic he was relatively safe from his greatest critics, including the Inquisition, Bayle was deprived of his chair in 1693. One of his works was ordered ordered to be burnt by the public hangman.

Bayle worked on his massive Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary), one of the first encyclopedias of ideas and their originators. It expressed the view that much that was considered to be truth was actually just opinion, and that gullibility and stubbornness were prevalent. The Dictionary would remain an important scholarly work for several generations after its publication and remains a work of value for its learning and observation.

Bayle's works ushered in and influenced the Enlightenment. In modern times, Bayle has been called the Father of Free Discussion.



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John Toland ( 1670 - 1722)

Toland, born in Ireland, renounced his Catholic faith in early youth, and went to Edinburgh University, where he became M.A. in 1690. He went on to Leyden, where he developed his skeptical ideas.

In his first book Christianity not Mysterious (1696), he argued that the divine revelation of the Bible contains no true mysteries. All genuine dogmas of the faith can be understood and demonstrated by properly trained reason from natural principles.

For this he was prosecuted by a grand jury in London. As he was a subject of the Kingdom of Ireland, members of the Irish parliament proposed that he should be burnt at the stake, and in his absence copies of the book were burnt by the public hangman in Dublin. Toland compared the Protestant legislators to "Popish Inquisitors who performed that Execution on the Book, when they could not seize the Author, whom they had destined to the Flames"

Toland was denounced by Dr. Blackhall before Parliament for another of his works, to which he wrote a reply before fleeing abroad to be received by the Queen of Prussia. Toland was probably an atheist, but he identified himself as a Pantheist in his publication Socinianism Truly Stated - possibly because he was anticipating capture and trial.


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Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679). Hobbes was one of the principal founders of modern political philosophy.

He also contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, geometry, the physics of gases, theology, ethics,

An Englishmen, he developed some of the fundamentals of European thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order; the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.

Hobbes was accused of atheism, and of teaching views that could lead to atheism. In parliament the Bishops wanted him tried and executed as a heretic, but could find no law to justify it.

The king played an important role in protecting Hobbes when, in 1666, the House of Commons introduced a bill against atheism and profaneness. That same year, on October 17, it was ordered that the committee to which the bill was referred "should be empowered to receive information touching such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness, in particular the book of Mr. Hobbes called The Leviathan". Hobbes was frightened at the prospect of being treated as a heretic, and burned some of his papers.

The only consequence that came of the committee was that Hobbes could never thereafter publish anything in England on subjects relating to human conduct. The 1668 edition of his works was printed in Amsterdam because he could not obtain the censor's license for its publication in England.

Other writings were not made public until after his death. Hobbes was not even allowed to respond to his religious enemies, whatever they said and wrote about him. Even so, his reputation abroad was formidable. Noble or learned foreigners who came to England rarely neglected to pay their respects to him up until his death in 1679.



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Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715 - 1771). Helvétius was a French philosopher. Descended from a line of celebrated physicians, he had a large fortune which he dispensed in works of benevolence.

Attracted by reading Locke he devoted himself to philosophy and retired to a country estate, where he employed his fortune in the relief of the poor, the encouragement of agriculture and the development of new industries.

In August 1758 he published a work On the Mind (De L’Esprit) which contained ideas considered utilitarian, materialistic and atheistic. According to Helvétius "all human faculties may be reduced to physical sensation, even memory, comparison, and judgment. Our only difference from the lower animals lies in our external organization. There is no such thing as absolute right. Ideas of justice and injustice change according to customs. The ends of government are to ensure the maximization of pleasure. Public ethics have a utilitarian basis, and he insisted on the importance of culture and education in national development. Education is the method by which to reform society, and there are few limits to the social improvements that could be brought about by the appropriate distribution of education".

His atheistic, utilitarian and egalitarian doctrines caused an outcry from the Church.

The Sorbonne condemned the book, while the priests persuaded the court that it was full of dangerous atheistic doctrines. The book was declared to be heretical and was condemned by both Church and State. It was condemned by Pope Clement XIII on January 31, 1759, and burnt by the order of the French Parliament on February 6, 1759.

Terrified at the storm he had raised, Helvétius wrote three separate and humiliating retractions. But times had changed.

Most educated people regarded him as saying nothing new, merely repeating obvious truths. It was only saying things out loud that caused a fuss. In Paris salons his ideas were already widely accepted. Mme. du Deffand said “he told everybody’s secret.” Madame de Graffigny claimed that all the good things in the book had been picked up in her own salon.

As a result of the publicity Helvétius became a celebrity across the continent. His book was republished in Amsterdam and London, and translations were made into all the main languages of Europe.


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The ancient Greeks were outstanding mathematicians, philosophers and scientists.

One of them, Empedocles, showed that air is a material substance and not just a void, experimented with centrifugal force, knew about sex in plants, proposed a theory of evolution, speculated that light travels at a finite speed, and was aware that solar eclipses are caused by alignments of the Sun, Moon and Earth. Knowledge of astronomy was advanced.

Hipparchus accurately determined the distance between Earth and the Moon1 , estimated the length of the lunar month to within a second, and discovered the precession of the equinoxes.

Some of the achievements of the ancient Greeks are astonishing.

Heron of Alexandria invented an internal combustion engine. Thales of Miletus, who lived around six centuries before the birth of Jesus, was familiar with static electricity.

By Roman times elementary batteries had been invented, although no uses for them appear to have been exploited. Foundations of many modern sciences were laid by the Greeks from astronomy to botany, and even specialized fields of physics such as optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, and mechanics.

Modern mathematics is full of references to pioneering Greek mathematicians: Euclidean planes, Diophantine equations, the theory of Pappus, and so on.

The outlook of Christians was fundamentally different from that of the ancient Greeks.

According to Christians, God revealed himself through the Bible. As Tertullian explained, scientific research [inquisitio] became superfluous once the gospel of Jesus Christ was available:

"We have no need of curiosity after Jesus Christ, nor of research after the gospel. When we believe, we desire to believe nothing more. For we believe that there is nothing else that we need to believe."
De praescnptione haereticorum (On the Rule of the Heretic)


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The Church taught that it knew all there was to be known. Christian knowledge was comprehensive and unquestionable. Rational investigation was therefore unnecessary.

Existing learning was not merely superfluous, but positively harmful. Theologians were convinced that God had defined strict limits on the knowledge that human beings might acquire, and anything else was "sorcery".

When Saint Paul visited the great city of Ephesus many Christians burned their books (or scrolls) because they were considered to contain sorcery. This set the tone for Christian thought.

In the fourth century Eusebius attacked scientific inquiry, dismissing it as "useless labor".

St. Augustine of Hippo, who regarded scientific inquiry as a worse sin than lust, also said that "Hell was made for the inquisitive". To seek to discover more was a sin and therefore also a crime, the crime of curiositas. For him, scientific curiosity ("knowledge and learning") was a more serious sin than lust:

"To this the sin is added another form of temptation more manifoldly dangerous. For besides that concupiscence of the flesh which consisteth in the delight of all senses and pleasures, wherein its slaves, who go far from Thee, waste and perish, the soul hath, through the same senses of the body, a certain vain and curious desire, veiled under the title of knowledge and learning, not of delighting in the flesh, but of making experiments through the flesh".

The Christian commitment to obedience rather than knowledge meant that what you saw as white was black if the Church said it was. Church dogma thus over-rode all empirical evidence into modern times.

To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it
(St. Ignatius Loyola, 1491 - 1556, Spiritual Exercises, Thirteenth Rule.)


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PostmodernProphet said:
that was never the question......you asked what part of Europe the Moors held at the time of the crusades.......the answer was southern Spain parts of which the Moors held until 1075.....
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I didn't - I asked what part were they attacking, as you know. They had discovered in Spain and France that the place was to poor to be worth the trouble, and concentrated on rich, civilized places. I suggest you read 'The Silk Roads'. It gives a good understanding of the times..
 
iolo said:
I didn't - I asked what part were they attacking, as you know. They had discovered in Spain and France that the place was to poor to be worth the trouble, and concentrated on rich, civilized places. I suggest you read 'The Silk Roads'. It gives a good understanding of the times..
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lol.....nice dodge...doesn't change the fact you were wrong, but it does show you're quick on your feet......
 
Legion Troll said:
various and sundry
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I note that only four of the people you mentioned were described as not being Christians and those four were philosophers rather than scientists.......thus you have done an excellent job of documenting the fact that the scientists of that era were in fact Christians.......thank you for your tireless effort on our behalf......
 
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