Re: Discussion of James Hannam's book? « Reply #46 on Jul 2, 2011, 6:29pm »
Dear James
You disappoint me. I was yearing for a ringing instruction to sign up on pain of eternal damnation to the One True Church which simultaneously saved people's souls and developed the internal combustion engine, air travel, modern medicine, atomic pysics, and sliced bread.. That would have been a veryhappy answer to all my spiritual and financial woes....
No such luck. Instead, you leave this sad, hapless, ignorant and idolatrous pagan to stew in uncertainty.....
Alack! Did not Christ come to the beknighted Roman world to save me from Sin?
Well, so be it. I don't think you realise, from your felicitous placing, how hard it is to be a mere Hindu pagan, member of a people who literally invented NOTHING except the zero....
Not much there to go on, is there? No-one's needs are zero.
I guess you went as far as any good son of the Church can do to accept my ideas. You possibly even have a sense of humour.
Re: Discussion of James Hannam's book? « Reply #48 on Jul 2, 2011, 11:10pm »
James:
You admit:
"And yes, Hindus deserve heaps of credit for the invention of zero. Whether it was because they were Hindus I don't know. "
And that is the whole point, is it not? The lack of a Christian world outlook certainly did not prevent this epochal Hindu discovery, making possible modern science.
People, in other words, do not make mighty scientific discoveries because of the religion they belong to. Nothing in the alleged "fatalism" of Hindus prevented a good deal of vital science. (And Christians are fatalists too - think of Saint Augustine or Luther or the whole idea of Original Sin!)
People make breakthorughs in useful secular thought (religious thought being singularly useless) because they are intelligent and live in a society that does not make the discussion of ideas independent of religious orthodoxy fatal. In societies where there are independent institutions of learning and research such as the Academy, the Lyceum, the University of Nalanda in India (ever heard of it? It was destroyed by your amiable co-believers in Middle Eastern monotheism, the Muslims) or the famous House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
The ineffable "revealing" of that miraculously necessary thing, monotheism, to the Jews by a doting All-Mighty did not make them serious players in philosophy or science until the Western Enlightenment in the rough-and-ready form of the French Revolution abolished the ghettoes merciful Christianity had confined them to and set them thinking outside the closed worldof the Bible. Seems mere humble idolators had done infinitely better than the Jews until then.
blessedkarl Bachelor of the Arts member is offline
Joined: Aug 2010 Posts: 52 Karma: 3
Re: Discussion of James Hannam's book? « Reply #49 on Jul 3, 2011, 12:05am »
Indian, why are you here? Your posts are riddled with sarcasm and spite.
You are predicating beliefs and attitudes to James which he does not have. Have you ever READ his book? If not I must ask you to stop mocking his ideas. You might say "I am not mocking I am asking" but your posts don't bear this out. You are being extremely rude. James has said before (if you familiarized yourself with his thought you would know this) that he rejects the "holy science" thesis whereby only Christianity enabled modern science to rise. Yet you speak and behave as if he has adopted such a thesis!
Furthermore, you think that the Jews did not develop serious philosophy until the enlightenment? Ever heard of Maimonedes?
Also who says that a religious society suppresses free thought. I already mentioned to you the influx of Greek and Arabic philosophical and scientific texts into Europe during the High Middle Ages. Additionally, there were the rationalistic schools of the period (cathedral schools which would later develop into universities) which sought to understand such thought.
Stop sneering and be open to other opinions.
By the way, you STILL have not answered the point that several of us have made that Gibbon is NO LONGER SEEN AS CREDIBLE BY HISTORIANS. Not religious apologists but professional historians.
What is your purpose coming here? I don't mean to be rude but you sound like some of the southern fundamentalist Christians I have encountered in the past.
Stop being so hostile and talk to us. We are open to listen to your side if you are ready to listen to ours.
Re: Discussion of James Hannam's book? « Reply #50 on Jul 5, 2011, 1:19am »
blessedkarl:
I do try to be personally civil and my sarcasms are about institutions and ideas rather than individuals. I am grateful to you and the others here for taking the trouble to reply to me.
Here is another little nugget of thought:
The role of capitalism really is the unnoticed elephant in the drawing room in this discussion, and makes ridiculous the toilsome attempts by Church admirers (if not believers) to prove that some wondrous Christian state of mind or logical auper-subtlety delivered us the modern world.....
Not so fast, comrades, might say Karl Marx.
What happened, very roughly, was this: the West undoubtedly had an unusual history going back into classical times of restricting the power of rulers more than other major civilizatons. Roman law restricted the power of rulers over property more clearly than other legal systems....This meant that eventually principalities could grow up in places like Northern Italy and the Netherlands where the merchant class was unusually powerful and protected. This incubated capitalism. Capitalism meant a demand for economic and technological innovation, a market for science. It meant that people were increasingly unimpressed by the claustrophobic Middle Eastern, biblical world-view of the Church. The scientists may have been devout Christians often enough, but the implications of their ideas made the Church's doctrines absurd in the eyes of intelligent people. A great example is how the physics of Newton, staunch Christian, inspired Voltaire in his contempt for the Church. The religion of a West growing into modernity could have been Stoicism or Buddhism - any that, unlike later Islam, had some scope for secularism. We might have been spared Christian anti-semitism and the wars of religion.
People, in other words, do not make mighty scientific discoveries because of the religion they belong to.
What is your evidence for this claim? There is abundant evidence that certain religious beliefs inhibit scientific discovery, and others do not; some in fact encourage it.
If we believe that the sun is rowed across the sky in a boat by the sun god, or pushed along the heavens by a dung beetle, how close do you think we're likely to get to an accurate science of astronomy? Similarly, if we believe as Aristotle did that the planets are moved around by spirits, how close are we likely to get to an accurate science of astronomy?
Re: Discussion of James Hannam's book? « Reply #52 on Jul 5, 2011, 6:48am »
fortigurn:
As I explained above:
"....in places like Northern Italy and the Netherlands where the merchant class was unusually powerful and protected. This incubated capitalism. Capitalism meant a demand for economic and technological innovation, a market for science. It meant that people were increasingly unimpressed by the claustrophobic Middle Eastern, biblical world-view of the Church. The scientists may have been devout Christians often enough, but the implications of their ideas made the Church's doctrines absurd in the eyes of intelligent people. A great example is how the physics of Newton, staunch Christian, inspired Voltaire in his contempt for the Church. The religion of a West growing into modernity could have been Stoicism or Buddhism - any that, unlike later Islam, had some scope for secularism. We might have been spared Christian anti-semitism and the wars of religion."
Now, what is so hard to grasp about this? It smacks you in the face. One can't miss seeing it if you tried - unless infatuation with the irreplaceable glory of the blinds one.
Sure, people have misconceived ideas about physical causation. But even in Ancient Greece they had good ones like heliocentrism which did not survive until revived about a thousand years later.
Why?
Because in the pre-capitalist economy there was no strong market for science. So science's prosperity in places like Classical Greece, India and China was episodic. Only with capitalism did science become a permanently progressing thing.
No-one needs the Church to get science. Science comes from the freedom to make money.
So, as Aristotle might say: "Goodbye to the Judeo-Christian linear sense of time and the rational Creator as begetters of science. Give me old Moneybags instead. "
Re: Discussion of James Hannam's book? « Reply #53 on Jul 5, 2011, 6:58am »
fortigurn:
One sentence above was garbled. It should read: "One can't miss seeing it if you tried - unless infatuation with the irreplaceable glory of the Son of Man blinds one."
I do try to be personally civil and my sarcasms are about institutions and ideas rather than individuals. I am grateful to you and the others here for taking the trouble to reply to me.
Hi IC, I have watched this discussion but not joined in because I too felt that you were only interested in mocking and provoking. If I was wrong in that assessment, I apologise, but that was my honest assessment.
But it still is unclear to me what you are wanting to discuss with us, and why. I haven't seen a consistent theme in your comments, nor a logical presentation of propositions and evidence. And it hardly seems worthwhile replying to a mass of unsupported and sometimes unfathomable assertions.
I don't intend to be rude, just trying to open up a line of communication.
So can you sum up in a few sentences what you are wanting to say to us all please?
That's not evidence, that's assertion. I see no actual data there; no statistics, no historical events referred to, no quantifiable data whatsoever, and no analysis.
Quote:
Sure, people have misconceived ideas about physical causation.
Great, let's start there. Now how close are those religious ideas I listed going to get you to a good astronomy?
Quote:
But even in Ancient Greece they had good ones like heliocentrism which did not survive until revived about a thousand years later.
Why?
Because in the pre-capitalist economy there was no strong market for science.
You have not provided any evidence for this. Greek society was about as good a free marketplace of ideas as any society could get in those days, and Greek science thrived for centuries, yet they never managed to get further than Aristotle. Why? Because their mythological cosmology prevented them. Let's take a look at some of their ideas.
* The planets are pushed around by spirits: completely prevents the development of an accurate understanding of physics and astronomy
* The stars are made of ethereal material: completely prevents the development of an accurate stellar cosmology
These ideas have nothing to do with capitalism, and they endured long after capitalist societies were well established in Europe.
Re: Discussion of James Hannam's book? « Reply #56 on Jan 20, 2012, 10:00am »
I've noticed two things with the critics of James' book (as the two latest reviews on Amazon illustrate):
They will either:
A. Claim that all the Medieval scholars did was "steal" from the Greeks and thus the Middle Ages offered nothing to science.
B. Claim that the Church had either nothing to with the scientific growth and that everything that it did right was accidental and that we would be in space without mean old religion blocking the door.
A. Claim that all the Medieval scholars did was "steal" from the Greeks and thus the Middle Ages offered nothing to science.
I would be embarrassed to steal from the Greeks. They had about one good idea for every ten loony ideas, and it was their own epistemology and mythological cosmology which strangled the Western scientific continuum for over 1,000 years.
Aristotle was arguably singlehandedly responsible for retarding at least three major scientific breakthroughs; germ theory, the Big Bang, and momentum.
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