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5 Comments

1. 1. way2ec 03:16 PM 3/5/13

   It is hard to keep a good perspective regarding "dark ages" and "enlightenment". How will we be judged? We've put a man on the moon and have creationists trying to force their religious beliefs into science classrooms. We have computers and the internet while we continue to burn fossil fuels putting the future at risk of climate changes we can only guess at. We have the human genome project played out against AIDS as God's punishment of gays. The author has done well to shed some light into the "darkness" of Medieval Science. If history is written by the victors (and my favorite is the conquest of the New World) how will the survivors of the 21st century, let alone the third millennia, write about this period of 7+ billion people and rising, with our irreversible and irreparable damage to the entire world's ecosystems? Will it be as we view the results of a "Holy Autopsy" with three gall stones the symbol of the Trinity? Or the view of the brain's anatomy after the head has been split open by a gladiator's sword? Fracking anyone?

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2. 2. RSchmidt 08:37 PM 3/5/13

   "To some, the Dark Ages didn't end until the 1400s, at the advent of the Renaissance." actually, in many places in the world, including parts of the US, the dark ages never ended.

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3. 3. greenspider in reply to way2ec 08:50 PM 3/5/13

   Talk about trying to rewrite history, eh?
   They didn't call them the "dark ages" because of the Churche's "enlightenment" at the stake.

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4. 4. MrBip 01:42 AM 3/12/13

   The Church has a long history of disdaining wisdom and knowledge in favor of blind, stupid faith. They opposed dissection, Galileo, and scores of other potential advances. (See White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Today they are fighting evolution, stem cell research, and global warming. That's quite a record to go up against. Mostly, Christianity retarded the advance of science, and still is. Why was Greek knowledge preserved only by Islam? Why was the library of Alexandria burned? Why did Christians destroy records of competing religions? Why did they torture heretics? That's not exactly science but it shows their opposition to anything that they don't approve of.

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5. 5. rugeirn in reply to MrBip 07:17 PM 3/12/13

   1. White is a thoroughly unreliable source. He suffers from exactly the sort of anticlerical bias described in the main article.
   2. Greek knowledge was preserved both in the Arab world - which, I would remind you, was not "Islamic" until the advent of Islam in the 7th century - and Byzantium, and in Western Europe. Your idea about this is very skewed.
   3. Your claim that the Catholic church is fighting evolution, stem cell research, and global warming conveniently overlooks the fact that many Protestant churches do the same thing. It also conveniently overlooks the achievements and contributions of Catholic and Protestant scientists through the years, as documented here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_Catholic_cleric%E2%80%93scientists) and here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science.)
   
   Last but not least, the origins of your claims in personal animosity and prejudice are abundantly clear in what you wrote. You need to clear your mind of that sort of thinking, which is deeply unhealthy.

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