Levdrakon:
If you want to show that christianity was a factor in advancing europe faster than other parts of the world, then you should make some sort of argument that christianity itself helped, compared to a hypothetical europe without christianity.
I will give some examples arguments for the opposite viewpoint. (That Europe would’ve been much further ahead without christianity):
Christianity has some science areas marked as certain and without need of proof, including stuff that is incorrect. (Such as creation.) This obviously halts science in those areas.
A lot of educated resources was spent on studying the bible and the like, instead of inventing things.
Statistics say that the ratio of scientists who believes in christianity is lower than the ratio in the general population.
The biggest problems is the one I’ve already raised: that malaria, schistosomias and so forth are all cosmopolitan diseases rather than tropical. Those diseases are rare today outside tropical regions because temperate regions have the technology and wealth to control them.
Added to that it’s hard to argue that blindness caused by onchocerciasis is chronic whereas blindness caused by measles or retardation caused by rubella or parlaysis caused by polio are all examples of “either kills you or you get well again”. I would need to see some evidence that diseases that are more prevalent in temperate regions really are les likely to result in chronic health problems.
My intuitive position would have been exactly the opposite of yours, that most temperate diseases like TB and rickets lead to permanent and chronic health problems whereas most tropicla diseases tend to be acute. But I have no evidence for that either. Suffice it to say that your idea is controversial.
My fault, I should of stuck in an additonal notation. I was merely pointing out that an average IQ of 59 would be quite substantial in terms of developement in a society.
For a nice summary of how colonialization fucked up the natural balance the original tribes of African had read Floods, Famines, and Emperors : El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations By Brain Fagan. He explains that the “primative” way of life for the citizens of one of Africa’s desert is a more effective way of living than “civilized” farming, particularly in times of famine or drought.
Are you kidding me? You’re asking for a citation to show that Jews and Muslims have a reputation for scholarship and learning in the middle ages? Here’s your citation: history itself. It’s, uh, known.
Hilarious it may be, but although a devout Catholic, Galileo is THE showcase example of a scientist forced to recant his research by the Christian Church. You do remember that, don’t you? I understood your point to be “Christianity was main advancer of science in Middle Ages”, and for that, Galileo’s story is a reasonable counterpoint. You are acting, in this comment at least, like your point all along was “Scientists have had religious beliefs”. Well, that’s moving the target, buddy.
Also, from Wikipedia’s entry on the Roman Catholic Church
:
I love that word, “priest-scientists.” But according to you, I’m just making stuff up.
[/QUOTE]
See, now you’re distorting my position. I didn’t say there weren’t priest-scientists. I said you were making up a new definition of priest – your own citation shows that to be, in fact, the case. You bolded one little sub-part and acted as if that was the mainstream definition.
See, that’s just sad. The Middle Ages were long over with by 1741. If you’re claiming 1741 is relevant at all, you’ve moved the target again. And then the Church got around to expressing regret in 1992. How timely!
If you’re going to just knock down straw men, leave me out of it.
Gosh, you’re citing IQ as a methodology and you don’t know where 59 fits on the IQ scale? It’s a pretty straightforward instrument, dude.
The Wikipedia article on IQ has a clear chart of percentile distribution of IQs. Sixty and below comprises only 0.4% of the population. (I couldn’t find another cite for a google of “iq bell curve” that didn’t just go straight to the book.)
People with IQs of 59 generally cannot live on their own; they need family or group support and have a lot of difficulty doing most things. Independent living is generally not possible. An entire country of such people could not conceivably exist. I don’t think you grasp how low an IQ 59 is; that’s not just “kinda slow.”
hmmm. Is what I learned in first year anthropology wrong? Do not “scavenger” societies have more leisure time than horticultural societies?
I was taught that hunter-gatherer societies always had greater leisure time than their agricultural counterparts. The different lay in surpluses. Hunter-gatherer societies require the participation of the entire community to function. However, agricultural societies, requiring more intensive work produced greater returns; thus, creating the potential, through surplus, of a leisure class.
Which I have. If you want me to believe Europe would have advanced more quickly without Christianty, tell me how. The barbarian hordes would have invented steam engines and printing presses and established universities even faster if Christianity hadn’t been holding them back?
I don’t want examples you made up. I want cites.
Are we on the Galileo thing again? Christian scientists study just about everything atheistic scientists do. Very few exceptions, conducting experiments on embryos being one of them. What about creation? Atheist scientists say “we don’t know.” Christian scientists say “we don’t know - yet. But God had a plan and it’s our job to figure it out.”
Studying the bible led them to the interpretation that they should also be studying nature and the world, which they did.
So? What’s your conclusion? Einstein was Jewish. Did he believe in God? Or not? What did it have to do with his contribution to science?
Nah, you’re right, I just think that InvisibleWombat phrased his point poorly.
I think his point was that no individual in a Hunter Gatherer society could become a devoted weapon smith or warrior. Every individual needed to be able to master all the skills of the entire tribe. Even if food could be gathered in 3 hours a day every individual still needed to learn and retain the skills of archery, tracking, clothes making and so forth. You can’t be expert at all those things and an expert weapon smith or tactician as well.
IOW it isn’t strictly the leisure time available, it’s the time that is available doing something other than basic survival tasks. It’s not like the first full-time warriors or priests were exactly living a life of leisure, but the option at least existed of having full-time warriors and priests.
True. I didn’t phrase it all that well. You understood it correctly, though. I should have said that hunter-gatherer society can’t support a “leisure class.” When a society develops individuals or groups of individuals that aren’t worrying about getting food or taking care of the young’uns, things change dramatically.
Levdrakon:
ok, so my now I have a new guess as to what your point is. It is that Europe would have stayed barbarian and uneducated for thousand years, if christianity was not there. Is this understandment correct?
Perhaps this is already evident from my phrasing, but I doubt this.
-The greeks and the early romans were not christians, and they didnt have any problem educating people.
-China and the arabic world had a huge forward leap during the middle ages, why shouldn’t europe?
-Some historians claim that christianity was a factor in the collapse of the roman empire.
(As for cites on these things, just check wikipedia.)
Of course if the hypothetical alternative is some even more stupid religion, then christianity might have been an advantage.
As for my points against christianity, sorry, but I don’t really feel like defending them. They are not all that related to this thread anyway.
Haven’t read through the posts yet. But my first thought is that sub-saharan Africa was isolated from civilization. Consider Egypt. Ancient Egypt had pyramids but so did ancient India and ancient Mexico. At the very least there was communication between Egypt, India, and the Medditeranean world. That is why Egypt and Ethiopia had civilization. They had contact. Isolation causes civilzation either to be not sustained or not created. Contact, civilization. Isolation, no civilization.
I would say that a bigger factor is that First World citizens’ exposure to those diseases is low. When outsiders push into new areas the local diseases tend to kill them off in droves. Yellow fever killed off literally thousands of workers during the building of the Panama Canal, halting the French effort and almost stopping the project altogether. European susceptibility to local diseases is also considered to be a major reason why tropical areas were mostly not colonized. Natural immunity or resistance is much, much better than technology for preventing disease.
In Virus X, Ryan makes a good case that emergent diseases almost always originate in tropical regions, particularly rain forests. His hypothesis is that relatively nasty diseases provide protection for species by acting as a kind of symbiotic bioweapon. New species moving into an environment have to not only compete with the native species, but also with the viruses that those species are host to. Whatever vector species hosts Ebola, for example, is benefiting from its virus. Humans, for one species, are definitely not going to easily colonize that environment.
Novel viruses tend to be very virulent and have a high mortality rate. Over time, a successful mutual adaptation could lead to the disease being chronic rather than acute. The herpes virus is an example of a disease that has been with us for a long time. Its effects now are very minor in most individuals, but there is reason to believe that when it first came into contact with humans it was much less benign. Most of those chronic diseases have co-evolved with not only humans but the the species humans domesticate. Domesticated species often act not only as a vector for new diseases but also as a filter against extreme virulence.
Parts of The Coming Plague touch on the emergent virus issues, particularly the bits on AIDS, Ebola, and Hanta virus. She also talks about domestic diseases and how they came to be endemic instead of epidemic.
I have trouble understanding your point - are you alleging that Japan had no contact with e.g. mainland China after it was colonised by the proto-japanese? Or do truly have no idea how much early Japanese culture was influenced by (in fact, a slavish copy of) Imperial Chinese culture?
