Originally Posted by
hitch22
WHY I DO NOT RELY ON RELIGION FOR THE CONTINUING OF OUR DISCOVERY OF NATURE AND THE UNIVERSE...
Before there was science, religion and "ancient shamans" had all the "answers". When the welfare of the community was left entirely on their hands, the human race, on the average, barely lived beyond 40. When the question of causation was left entirely to them, we thought that plagues and terrible natural calamities were punishments from God...and numerous human sacrifices had to be made because it was believed to calm down the angry God.
They cooked up all sorts of silly beliefs. Medieval Christians used to believe that the earth was flat or that earth was at the center of the universe, and that the planets moved around the earth through the pressure exerted by the angels (now laughably known as the Theory of Angelic Pressure).
Insanity used to be thought by medieval Christians to be due to possession by devils. It was believed that any pain suffered by the patient would also be felt by the devils, so that the best cure was to make the patient suffer so much that the devils would feel too uncomfortable and abandon his body. The insane, in accordance with this theory, were therefore savagely beaten. This treatment was tried on King George III when he was mad...but unfortunately without success.
When anaesthetics were first discovered, the religious decreed that using such drug was an attempt to evade the will of God. Men were exempted from this decree, because they pointed out that when God pulled out Adam's rib, He put him to sleep first. Women, however, had to suffer because of the curse of Eve.
Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod was likewise condemned by the clergy, both in England and America. They saw it as an attempt to defeat the will of God. They believed that lightning was sent by God to punish the impious or the grave sinners. The virtuous, they say, are never struck by lightning. Therefore if God wants to strike lightning at any one, we should not defeat His will because that's tantamount to helping criminals escape.
When the philosophy of St. Augustine, the man who proudly proclaimed "I am a man of one book (the Bible)", used to hold sway, the religious burned down libraries and books. Augustine also introduced the term "limbo", the destination of un-baptized children. What NON-SENSE! These are things nobody really knows about.
They used to think there were such things as witches ( BECAUSE THE BIBLE SAID SO...see Exodus 22:18 ), and so they burned whole hordes of them. They used to think that boiling or burning people alive was a way of cleansing their souls...so they thought they were doing the heretics a favor. During the Inquisition, they forced Jews to convert to Christianity. They rounded the Jews up in tightly-guarded ghettos and they'd hang pork on their door. If the Jews were caught practicing Judaism (by not eating pork, for example), they were convicted of heresy and consequently executed for it. Or what about the medieval belief in Indulgences? The Popes used to peddle Indulgences to mobilize the infamous Crusades, which saw Jews, Arabs, Muslims and Greek Christians massacred on its trail. They also used to think slavery was okay because the Bible doesn't condemn it but regulated it (see Exodus 21:20-21)...and on and on and on.
St. Thomas Aquinas, the prominent Catholic thinker, was not all that wise in his thinking, either. Aquinas spent a lot of time contemplating on useless stuffs like "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?". He used to struggle with the question of HOW WOULD GOD DEAL WITH THE CANNIBALS? It was believed in those days that, on the Day of Judgment, every particle of the deceased body would be re-assembled. That was the early justification against cremation (though it's curious why Omnipotence could assemble a decayed body but not one that's been subjected to combustion). Aquinas imagines a cannibal who, by practice, eats human flesh. What's to become of the people he ate, on Judgment Day? Aquinas figures that every piece of the cannibal would rightfully be used to re-constitute the people he ate. But then he stumbles into a dead-end. If every part of the cannibal would go to his victims, what's left of the cannibal? How is he going to be properly roasted in hell, if all of his body is used up for his victims?
We continue to see such idiotic nonsense spewed from religious blabber-mouths. A couple of months ago, Pat Robertson blamed the Haiti earthquake on the pact Haitians made with the devil in order to throw off French rule in the 18th century. We read about the Pope condemning condoms as worse than AIDS. Or what about the Vatican banning books and taking childish offense over movies like Harry Potter and The Golden Compass? Come to think of it, it wasn't long ago that the Vatican called rock music as the devil's music, inventing non-sense methods like back-masking to hear the devil's message. We also hear about an Iranian cleric uttering the non-sense that promiscuous women cause earthquakes. Or what about the non-sense from a Muslim cleric in the UK who said that the problem of rape is not the rapist but un-covered meat?
BIBLE JUD? DO YOU WANT ME TO START BIBLE LESSONS YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT?
Just bcos so and so have said this is and that is false doesn't mean that the statement is already true. 
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