Societies don't have to be secular to be modern

[Alexandru H.]

I still think Galileo would have been rational enough to agree with me that the church impeded progress when they brought him before the inquisition on charges of heresy

And Galileo is just one example. There are many more, as you know. They burned Giordano Bruno at the stake What excuses do you have for that?


edit: Though OK that was on theological grounds as well as for his heliocentrism. But it should be self-evident that the church was the enemy of free inquiry, and the Inquisition did it's best to turn catholic countries into deserts of the mind. No one can deny that. Hell, the church only recently stopped carrying it's list of banned books.

Giordano Bruno was a real religious nut. If he would have been alive, he would have been the worst kind of religious nut: using science to prove Creationism. I'm amazed by how people still use him as an example of Catholic intolerance towards reason and science. We had a Romanian writer that declared in his autobiography that his school colleagues used to place their fingers in the open flames of a candle and let them burn for as long as possible just like Bruno would do.

[PDH]

As for Galilei,

OMG, the Church got Alexandru too!

[Alexandru H.]

As for Galilei,

OMG, the Church got Alexandru too!

Neah! 

Galilei is a tough subject. While I think the amount of exaggeration from the anti-religious crowd is staggering (house arrest is like the nicest punishment there is), I do like the way he satirised his "friend", the Pope. His trial was just a personal vendetta of Barberini; there were a lot of Catholic astronomers that used the Copernician method just fine, without having to kiss the arse of the Pope.

[Martinus]

As for Galilei,

OMG, the Church got Alexandru too!

Must be the miracles he saw on his walls.

[Razgovory]

It's so odd to find the Poles so keen on attacking religion after so many years of soviet domination.  Hell with out the Catholic church the Poles would probably be part of Russia now.

[Alexandru H.]

As for Galilei,

OMG, the Church got Alexandru too!

Must be the miracles he saw on his walls.

And despite those, I'm still more reasonable than you. I support a secular state in which religion is a matter of personal preference that shouldn't hit anyone else in the head (the same category that includes sexual preference or bodily fluids). You want all religious people to die, believing in the same time that somehow atheism was invented to allow men free use of other men's penises.

It's so odd to find the Poles so keen on attacking religion after so many years of soviet domination.  Hell with out the Catholic church the Poles would probably be part of Russia now.

I'm not a Catholic but I respect it more than any other religion in the world mainly because of Polish Catholicism.

[Martinus]

It's so odd to find the Poles so keen on attacking religion after so many years of soviet domination.  Hell with out the Catholic church the Poles would probably be part of Russia now.

Half of the Polish catholic priests are antisemitic plebeans. The other half are former commie agents.

Unlike in any other communist country, the Catholic church in Poland (as a whole - I am not talking about some individual priests who got involved in anti-communist politics) had a rather comfy relationship with the communist party. After all, it was allowed to practice freely; churches were not turned into warehouses like in Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union; etc.

And after the fall of communism it took the full advantage of the "to the victor go the spoils" rule and claimed a number of privileges (e.g. it is tax-exempt, it holds vast property, only catholic priests can give religious marriages that are automatically recognised by the state - everybody else needs to go before a civil official to have their marriage formally conducted; only catholic religion is taught - alternatively to "ethics" - in public schools - no other religion is being taught as a school subject) that now make even actual devout catholics resent its influence.

It also had at least three situations (since 1989) that could possibly blossom into a Boston-style pedophiliac abuse scandals, but each case was hushed up, since the catholic church in Poland is much MUCH more influential than it is in the US.

[Razgovory]

Who in your family were commie agents?

[Ed Anger]

Who in your family were commie agents?

Predicted marty response: You are a cretin and wishes some form of death upon you.

[Martinus]

Who in your family were commie agents?

Predicted marty response: You are a cretin and wishes some form of death upon you.

Thank you, kindly. That why I won't have to waste time responding to that cur.

[PDH]

I wonder about the perceived automatic disconnect between reason and religion when we have such things as the scholastics (for instance) re-introducing and refining reason in the West (and given Averroes, attempting the same in Muslim Spain) who were both philisophically aimed toward Aristotelian Rationality and their own faith.

I think that religion and uncritical religion may well be two different things that are being lumped together by some.

[The Brain]

FWIW every single person I know that I consider highly intelligent is non-religious. I have no reason to assume I've just been lucky.

[Solmyr]

I wonder about the perceived automatic disconnect between reason and religion when we have such things as the scholastics (for instance) re-introducing and refining reason in the West (and given Averroes, attempting the same in Muslim Spain) who were both philisophically aimed toward Aristotelian Rationality and their own faith.

I agree. I'm as secular as one can be, but as a student of history it irks me that people bash the medieval Catholic Church like it was the root of all evil and ignore all its contributions to scholarly thought.

[Martinus]

I wonder about the perceived automatic disconnect between reason and religion when we have such things as the scholastics (for instance) re-introducing and refining reason in the West (and given Averroes, attempting the same in Muslim Spain) who were both philisophically aimed toward Aristotelian Rationality and their own faith.

I think that religion and uncritical religion may well be two different things that are being lumped together by some.

I thought we were discussing here and now, and not talking about some ideal and abstract universals.

There have indubitably been many great thinkers and scholars in the history of mankind who thought the Earth was flat. And there have been many men who were thought to be of high morals and ethics, and who nonetheless thought it is perfectly moral to put a disobedient slave to death.

Surely, noone would argue that if one was to hold such views today he would be a great scholar or a deeply ethical man, respectively, though.

Noone denies that the religion has served its purpose in the development of human thought. But today it is an obstacle, not a stepping block.

[Valmy]

I disagree. This may have been true in the past, where churches often bickered over doctrinal issues, but these days they work more or less as a single political entity and have similar political goals (e.g. on abortion, gay rights etc.). Of course some may be more extreme than others, and some more moderate, but the same is true even in countries like Poland where 95% of people declare themselves catholic.

Take the US Catholics and Mormons for example. They couldn't be farther from each other in terms of the dogma, but they work as one when it comes to social and political issues.

Um...Marty those are secular political goals.  I do not think a requirement of Secularism is allowing gay rights and abortion.  A religious society would have a church that controls the educational system, thought, and discourse so as to control the political system and society.  Merely having religions that have political opinions is not the same thing as having a religious type of society as opposed to a secular one.