I understand your logic, but the world is not ready for a Ghandi in the White House and MLK with Buddha in the Senate.
Ghandi said to put your prize positions out in the open in your house, so if a crook broke in it would be easy to find them. These people carried a vision far beyond the physical and would not be practical legislators. I am afraid our country would be given away in short order. Their teachings are meant to be a one on one enlightenment.
Small people talk about other people,
mediocre people talk about things,
and great people talk about concepts.
The people who have had the most influence on this world of ours have been spiritual people. People that were teaching concepts of love and compassion for all people.
Intelligence has nothing to do with working/talking about concepts, any one can talk concepts, I am thinking about Eric Hoffer, philsopher, thinker, and longshoreman. If you have time read one of his books, maybe “The True Believer.”
As far as I can tell there has been no shift in great thinking, no lessening of spiritual greats, there has always been great thinkers that are never heard by the public, both spiritual and non-spiritual.
Yes, The wars we are in are so very productive. From the little I see of them on tv the soldiers are doing a good job at making them want to kill us less? They are holding the Iraqi’s hands and singing Kumbaya, feeding them and building schools so they can learn how to be smarter terrorists. Only a terrorist would think this is a good idea??? So what when they are better terrorists we can bring them stateside and give them all jobs here?
What ever happened to peace? :dubious:
Where is Bin Laden? He might be able to explain my one lousy question. How is it that we can track down anyone who doesn’t pay their taxes and a murderer who flees to the other side of the world but we can’t find this one man?
Someone help me out here? I have the luxury of having to go to work now. I love my job, my home and my life. “God Bless America” and for all the patriots that fight, have fought and died to make this a great country. Thank you for giving me this great life!
I think a lot of the morals we hold dear today were made popular through religion. Would slavery have disappeared as quickly as it did without religion? Would Civil Rights have succeeded as a purely secular movement without the powerful language of religion? Would helping the poor be such a societal imperitive without religion? Perhaps we have no use for it today, perhaps religion is like unions, something that we don’t need until we need it.
I don’t think religion requires that we are unique but I haven’t seen any evidence that we are not in fact unique.
If the argument is that because tehre are billions of galaxies with billions of stars that must mean that we are not unique then why can’t we detect them? These civilizations should be broadcasting enough data that they light up like fireflies in the sky, shouldn’t they? Of course being unique doesn’t really prove the existence of God but the existence of other life doesn’t disprove God either does it?
The problem is that even if one nation advocates and truly promotes peace and the welfare of it’s citizens there are other nations that can and will be aggressive and we {humanity} must be able to deal with it. Now our concerns are not only about military aggression but financial as well as nations and multinational corperations strive to gain leverage over others.
I think MLK and ghandi were more than just stubborn. I think their passion and belief inspired great nations to walk away from evil. Maybe they weren’t great minds in the Steven Hawkings sense of the word but I would propose that they might have done as much good in this world as Carl Sagan or Steven Hawkings.
Exactly. It’s one thing to be brilliant in scientific arenas and grasp complex scientific concepts. It an entirely different arena to strive to understand more subjective issues of human rights, mankinds relationship to each other, justice, peace, equality, and the like. When people are persistant in thier efforts in the way MLK and Gandhi was they gain a deeper understanding and their efforts make an impact on many other lives, sending ripples into history that affect the lives and consciousness of generations to come.
I was just doing some reading on the enlightenment movement and thought this was very relevant to dogmatic religion vs more liberal versions and spirtituality unassoiciated with organized religion.
Here is the challange of spiritual concepts and philosophies and their application. There are things we can’t truly know when it comes to moral relativism and yet we are compelled by the nature of man to explore these areas and struggle on. I’d say those who passionately participate in clarifiying subjective concepts for the sake of bettering mankind’s condition can qualify as great thinkers.
Guys like Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh are no slouches brain-wise, but current religious bright lights are unlikely to be known outside a small realm even within their sects. We know a lot about the towering religious minds of the past because everybody read them, I think.
That being said, if you grew up in the Middle Ages and you were a smart dude, you went into a monastery or possibly to a university where you’d study religion. There are just a lot more options these days.
Whereas nowadays, probably most adherents of any denomination do not read the works of its intellectual heavy-hitters.
Once large numbers of intelligent people decamp from religion, those who are left are by definition more interested in simple dogma. In other words, religion has gotten dumber.
I agree with you that that webstie seems a bit over the top. First of all, that website’s main source is White’s The Warfare of Science with Theology. That book is regarded as a joke, on par with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Why? Because White claims about the evils that Christians did to scientists never actually occurred. He simply made them up. Here are some cites: http://www.bede.org.uk/flatearth.htm
Now let’s look at the claims on that webpage in detail. The webpage claims that Copernicus was a victim of the Catholic Church. In reality Copernicus was a clergyman in that Church, was never persecuted, and never expressed any unhappiness with it. So much for that claim.
Giordano Bruno comes next on the list of scientists persecuted by the Catholic Church. In reality he was not a scientist. He was a mystic, the sort of person that most on this board usually despise. While his execution was not just, it had nothing to do with science. Your webpage is batting zero for two at this point.
Galileo has already been covered upthread.
Rene Descartes was another faithful and happy Catholic, just like Galileo and Copernicus. He had disagreements with some Catholic thinking not because he opposed it, but rather because he felt that his philosophy would put core dogmas on a firmer footing. Nothing there.
Isaac Newton was a deeply religious man who spent much of his life on careful Bible study. He never suffered persecution of any sort, as he lived in England and had religious freedom just like all Englishmen.
I won’t bother working through the rest of the list, but I do note that virtually none of the quotes attributed to the Catholic Church have any source, which leads me to suspect that they were made up.
When did it do so, exactly? Your webpage says that the Church promoted the idea that the earth was flat. That’s a lie and even most atheists know better. Then there’s the claim that the Catholic Church promoted the geocentric theory while secular scientists promoted the heliocentric theory. That’s nonsense: we’ve already seen that two scientists who played critical roles in developing the heliocentric theory were devout Catholics (Copernicus and Galileo). A bit of research will show that two devout Christians were vital in the scientific proof of the heliocentric theory: Johannes Kepler (a devout Lutheran), and Giovanni Cassinni, who provided the clinching proof of Kepler’s theories with observations made from the roof of a Catholic church. It’s also worth noting that three Catholic clergymen were involved in inventing the reflecting telescope, which permitted great advances in astronomy.
Your webpage then tries to change the subject away from science by spewing the usual untrue statements about the “Christian Empire” supporting slavery in America, having women treated as chattel, etc… Of course we all know that the Church opposed slavery in America, but that’s wandering off topic. The point is that no informed person could have turned away from religion because of Christianity’s attacks on science since those attacks are works of fiction created by atheists. Of course some people may have been misled by the atheist propaganda, but for informed people we can reject that hypothesis.
As for the OP, I question the premise. In the year 1700, only about 5%-10% of the American people participated in organized religion. Today the percentage is much higher. So we should be looking for reasons to explain the increasing interest in religion over the past three centuries, not the decreasing interest.
Do we even have “general thinkers” any more? It seems as though, in the modern era, “great thinkers” have become ever more specialized, and I wonder if this isn’t relevant to the question.
Slavery was not ended by religion. It was ended by the Civil War. In short, at the point of a bayonet, by force. Civil rights in the 60s was brought by force too - the FBI and the government.
As for general civil rights and freedom, sure they support their freedoms but not necessarily everyone else’s.
So which religion shall we examine? The overall “trend” always SEEMS, from the very beginning, one of “freedom for me, but you damn well better obey” - no matter which “faith” it is.
Yep, Pius 9 was a real supporter of freedom and rights etc. He did a few other shitty things too. His “official policy” was that no one had any rights, they only had whatever the nobles and the church saw fit to let them have.
Thank you for giving me this great life!