SloopJohn

I'll reply to you tomorrow Kev, I have to get up in 2 and a half hours for work

It maybe an argument, at times, of loose association (particuarly, I admit, with Newton) but it is also based on these scientists own writings and known outlooks on life. Kepler, for instance, was only interested in studying the physical make up of the universe because he wanted to explore how God had reflected the harmonic perfection of the Trinity in his creation. So whether Christianity was the prevalent belief or not, it clearly had a profound effect on Kepler's rabid desire to study, one cannot dismiss that as 'loose association'. The same could be argued for Jean Buridan, Nicholas Oresme, Nicholas of Cusa, John Philoponus, Thomas Bradwardine, Robert Grosseteste and St. Albert the Great etc, all of whom, in one way or another, are considered geniuses in their respective fields of research and were directly inspired by their faiths. This is not to mention notable Muslim scholars such as Ibn al'Haytham or Ibn Rushid. You don't go and study science today because you believe in racial equality (well you might!) but clearly people did go and study science because of their faiths, and certainly, they still do. I'm not sure how you can argue that world has become less violent in the 20th Century but there have been more wars - was that an ironic statement? Do you honestly believe that the death of a human being in a war doesn't count as a violent death instigated by a society? Nowadays if a few people agree and a few buttons are pushed we can effectively be wiped off the face of the earth as an entire race...now if you ask me...going from a state where we couldn't all die instantly (or very slowly) at human hands to where we can is regression. In fact we teeter on the cusp of instant regression at every moment and only thanks to humanity and science. On your Old Testament argument, Stalin and Lenin combined lead their people to grand total of 60 million deaths over a 30 year period - that's 40 times your New Testament estimate over a period which I estimate at being roughly around 1/75 of the time span covered by the New Testament or in other terms, that's roughly 665 deaths a year in the OT versus 39,000 odd a week under the Soviet regime. That is assuming of course, you believe the Old Testament to be solely and primarily a historically account of the 2255 years (estimated) leading up to the death of Jacob and decide to ignore contextualising the narrative within the barbaric moral context of its time. When tribes of the Old Testament committed atrocious acts of murder, mass killings or the alike (such as the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem in BC586), they were viewed as justified by contemporaries on the basis of the moral code of that time (the same can be said for any immorality partaken in the Greek history). Therefore, how was one meant to judge their moral actions against a code of morality that had yet to come into being? And honestly, do you believe the story of Joseph is to be interpreted literally? - in other words, that it's morals lie in the literal action of the narrative? - indeed, as I noted earlier, it was rare in the Christian scholastic tradition to interpret the Bible literally and a historical / literal interpretation is a relatively new cultural phenomena, lead mainly by the good ol' US of A's hasty reaction to 19th century positivism. Back to the Soviet Regime, it is also worth noting that Stalin and Lenin were very much supported by the West; the British public lovingly referred to Stalin as 'Uncle Joe' whilst George Bernard Shaw, amongst other heavyweight British cultural figures such as Belloc, hailed the Soviet Union as a progressive regime. However, as Heller and Nekrich note, it was common knowledge in the 1930s that Stalin was effectively exterminating the agricultural population of Russia. So why didn't the West ever challenge Stalin? Self interest? To uncomfortable to admit that a progressive society was having to make 'necessary' sacrifices as to advance? Whichever way you look at it, a secular West doesn't come off very well as the supreme moral force, particularly as we spent two or three years avoiding war with a country that was clearly the personification of evil. Indeed at this very moment, we all come home from work every night and watch as atrocities unfold in Homs on the news. We then turn off the TV, say 'oh dear - how awful?', cook up a microwave curry, watch the football and go to bed. Not exactly what I would call a pro-active moral reaction to a current atrocity. How can one argue for a progressive, less violent, more moral 20th Century, when Gil Eliot estimates, in his book 'The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead', that over 150 million people died at the hands of another human between 1900-1972 and that statistic doesn't even cover nearly 1/3 of the 20th Century! There are an estimated 20-27 million slaves in the world at this very moment, more than any other time in recorded history...again...a sign of progressive, pro-active, society? However the real question is...does religion provide a powerful reason for immoral action? It is impossible to deny but religion also provides profound reason for extreme pacifism, for mercy, for seeking peace. Basically what I'm saying is, religion and irreligion are cultural variables, but, as witnessed in the 20th Century, human evil (almost always committed in the name of good) is a worrying constant. Although all education by its very nature coercive, I agree with you that the best thing you can give someone is an education and then, of their own free will (!), let them decide whether they want to follow a religion or not.

would love to get a quality RW or LW (preferably someone who can play both comfortably) in too. but I somehow doubt it.

I'm not defending the 'lie' of religion in itself, I'm defending historical truth; researched by historians very few of whom are religious. If defending the truth seems to redundant to you then I wonder why you are even replying to my answers. And in terms of the motivation to distort of the truth being only the side of the religious - have you read God Is Not Great? - it's embarrassingly inaccurate in terms of it's historical facts and, strangely enough, every error that Hitchens commits seems to favour his arguments... I fail to see how ones motivation to do something effects the quality of it's outcome. Are Kepler's and Pascal's pioneering scientific achievements really rendered inconsequential because of their overt Christianity? Is the American civil rights movement tarnished because of Luther Kings faith? Is Dreyer's cinema ruined by his Protestantism? Is Tolstoy's literature irrelevant because of his religious extremism? Is the Human Genome Project less worthy of admiration because it was once headed up by Francis Collins? Of course it's my prerogative. However I am yet to see you come up with any depth of argument to further your claim that humanity has progressed, over the past 800 years, in spite of Christianity. I can think of many recently, particularly the current issue of the church's stance on gay marriage, so that might be a good place to start. Indeed as I mentioned in that other topic, the idea of progress itself is largely one inherited from theology and really should be discarded if society wishes to free itself from the burdens of its religious past. But it's too convenient for humanism's philosophical rhetoric so, of course, it's retained within secular thought despite having absolutely no logical foundation outside of a theistic framework (I'm just paraphrasing Schopenhauer and Gray here). Throughout this debate I have always defended my historical position with evidence - I don't see how this is defending a 'lie' because at no moment have I been defending Christianity as philosophical system nor have I been defending it's historical origins in the life and death of Jesus Christ. I've simply defended what is believed by myself, and many other secular academics, to be true. If you want to get into the business of what is literally 'true' or 'false' in our perception world then I'm happy to go there, despite not being the best qualified person, but it is a rather substantial can of worms that is nowhere near as simple as it seems.

I would die a happy man if we finished above Liverpool that's all I really care about

Well I studied Eastern philosophy a bit in my MA so that got my interested, plus one of my best friends did a PhD in Ethics at Oxford and is a pretty strong Christian so he was always challenging me, particularly during my more nihilistic years

some heavyweight shit there Happy Might take it up a notch to the magic faraway tree next.

wait till sloopjohn reads that....reckon he's a bit of a "trendy vicar"....like the bloke from Rev, or Simon Mayo etc etc...

interesting...might try this next game with Swansea

No Banega either? just bizarre

Won 5 on the trot in Division 3 Came up to Div 2. and lost my first four back the drawing board...do you guys always play in normal attacking mode? I've found switching to defensive mentality from the off quite effective

I think the problem with Messi and Argentina is team selection Every time I've seen Argentina play, bar Messi's inclusion, the team selection is totally bizarre At the last WC, Argentina started the match against Germany with one central midfielder! against a team that had ripped England apart on the counter the previous match..

The point I was making was that Christianity was heir to a Aristotelian, geocentric cosmological tradition that they had no choice over inheriting - it was as much of fault of paganism and as it was of Christianity that these other traditions were ignored. Might I add that is perhaps fair to say that the lack of real scientific advances in the post-Byzantine period, between the 8th and 13th Centuries, is down to Islam inheriting a deeply flawed late Hellenistic tradition which whilst improved upon in some measure, particularly in the field of optics and astronomical calculation of the calendar, didn't advance beyond Aristotelian science or Ptolemaic astronomy. To say that Christianity ignored these traditions on purpose is simply not true and their astrological tradition was simply a continuation of what had come before... There is this myth in modern culture, propagated by historians such as Draper and Freeman, that once upon a time there was a flowering of Hellenistic culture; a culture that cherished reason, lauded clear thinking, pursued science and high philosophy. Then, as if out of nowhere, the dark shadow of an ignorant Christendom descended upon these poor souls, trapping them in a cage of irrational metaphysical dogma that stalled the progress of Hellenistic culture and extinguished the raging conflagration of pagan thought. 500 years passed, and thanks to Islam, Christianity, and more specifically, Copernicus, discovered heliocentrism, as if by magic, and reason began its indisputable, triumphant march through the murky mists of faith, leading us towards the bright lights of modernity which we have arrived at today. This is of course, a total myth and goes against all historical evidence of the last two thousand years... that's my point

some heavyweight shit there Happy

Did you read my other post about Galileo? Firstly I'd like to point out that I'm not here to defend Christianity the religion, I'm here to defend it's role in history - new atheism has totally re-written modern history to it's own ends - Hitchen's book is a case in point - it is so full of historical errors it is impossible to keep track of them all. I'm not looking to convert anyone, hell no, I'm just fascinated that no one cares about getting the historical facts straight and don't care when individuals, like Dawkins, like Hitchens, like Dennett, like Harris, twist facts to their own means against all academic opinion... I don't want to get drawn into an argument about how many people died or whether the Old Testament was ever meant to be a historical account (which clearly, if you read my posts, I don't believe it is). Of course millions died in you read the Old Testament literally, but also millions have died in the name of social progress. So who's right? Nietzsche was a brilliant thinker but from your posts I doubt you'd agree with him about much - if he said that about Christianity then you must be worried about what his assessment of humanism must've been. I think you'll find, as equally, atheism requires the suspension of logic, deductive reasoning, leaps of faith and dirty stupiditiy (sic) - there are philosophical and historical mistakes in Dawkin's book that an undergraduate would be embarrassed to make. This is not to say, however, that there aren't fantastic arguments against Christianity and that a lot of them hold weight (Nietzsche and Feuerbach are the two obvious geniuses on the side of atheism) but for instance, Russell's teapot and Dawkins spaghetti monster are two examples of popular atheistic ideas that rest on uneasy ground philosophically. I'd also think you'd find that if you did a little bit of research, you'd find apologist arguments, in a lot of ways, quite valid, but I doubt you want to do that - why should a liberal be open minded?

Astronomy in the medieval church was largely founded on, and in opposition to, the Aristotelian model, which was the most influential astronomical theory to emerge into Roman culture...whether it was the most correct, in relation to our knowledge nowadays, I'm not qualified to comment on. However in contrary to what you claim regarding science, thousands of years before Galileo, the sciences, as we understand the term, were actually in a terrible shape. I'm going to whip out a quote here from David C. Lindberg, who is one of the most celebrated historians of the past decade: "It is agreed by most historians of ancient science that creative Greek science was on the wane, perhaps as early as 200 B.C., certainly by 200 A.D. Science had never been pursued by very many people; it now attracted even fewer. And its character shifted away from original thought toward commentary and abridgement. Creative natural science was particularly scarce in the Roman world, where scholarly interests leaned in the direction of ethics and metaphysics; such natural science as Rome possessed was largely confined to fragments preserved in handbooks and encyclopedias" He also notes that there is little evidence to support the claim that: "the advent of Christianity did anything to diminish the support given to scientific activity or the number of people involved in it" In fact, there is a lot of evidence to suggest the opposite. The 6th Century Christian theorist, and critic of Aristotelian astronomy, John Philoponus had a profound effect on Galileo (amongst other things he theorised that space was a vacuum, that light moves and the eye receives it due to the rules of optical geography) and his research was directly governed by his faith. He believed the entire universe was a creature of God, and thus everything in existence was part of natural order governed by discernible rational laws. Unlike a pagan thinker, who would've been unable to deny the divinity of the night sky, Philoponus was able to cast off metaphysical dogma and thus question the scientific assumptions of his time.. Indeed his thought was taken up by Islamic scholars such as Bajja and later, scholastic thinkers such as Oresme and Buridan and if it wasn't for the Islamic invasion of Alexandria in the 7th Century, a lot of Kepler and Galileo's theories about the universe may have been arrived at a lot earlier...

Well Urban VIII was a Pope, so I'm not sure how he doesn't count as being at the behest of the church. Of course everyone nearly everyone was a Christian back then - but let me ask you this - if these minds are as erudite as you make out - surely they were thinking, rational types who were also comfortable with dismissing a theory if they didn't agree with it. So to say 'oh they just accepted Christianity because it was the status quo' about a mind such as Newtons, a mind that is the origin of the theory of gravity, is a little odd. Voltaire was comfortable dismissing religion, and he predates Newton and was (well, relatively) a contemporary of Pascals... If you've ever met a religious person, which I'm assuming you have, you'll know the emphasis they put on how their faith affects all aspects of their lives...this is an axiom of any recorded religious thought of the past two thousand years...so I think it's only fair to say that this aspect of said scientists lives had an impact on their work, whether it is for good or for bad is another matter. It certainly didn't stop Newton dabbling in a touch of alchemy though Well the origins of the idea of discrepancy between religion and science is literalism which is still a relatively new phenomenon in the church, and literally interpreting the Bible has always been a method of conservatism for the church (witness the rise of Creationism in the 20th Century in the face of Materialism). If Darwin's theory of evolution had been stumbled upon in the 14th Century, it would've of most likely been accepted by the church as it was commonplace within scholastic traditions to not interpret Genesis on a literal level (Augustine interpret Genesis literally but it's so far removed from the bizarre tract of Creationism that its barely worth mentioning) and thus there would've been no friction. Christianity, at least in what we know of it's initial un-institutionalised apolitical pre-Nicaean form, was never concerned with answering questions of how the world came to be but rather of why the world came to be and how one should act in this life. It was a pragmatic religion above all and a revolutionary one at that..

that last shot on the MotD coverage...Dogleash asking for offside then going ballistic

Barton had a shocker too

just saw Dogleashs doing an interview on Sky...total gold completely lost it with the interviewer

can't wait to see Dogleashs interview

my flatmate is a Lolerpool fan, safe to say he's piped down in the last few minutes

:lol:

QFT