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comment by MrScience
MrScience  ·  3518 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Religion's use.

I don't mean to disrespect your opinion or anything, but the idea that religion held back the scientific advancement of the human race isn't accepted by any notable historian. I often see people posting the 'chart' that shows a gap in scientific advancement during so called' dark ages' (which didn't really exist, it was an age dreamt up during the renaissance by writers who had a hard-on for the romans), which also grossly misrepresents human history.

And for what knowledge was lost, you can't blame Christianity for that when the collapse of a continent spanning empire contributed to a great deal of said lost knowledge (much of which was preserved anyway, by Muslims and other places in the east). I think the most common blame I see on Christians is the Library at Alexandria, which had been destroyed, looted, and burned several other times before Christianity even existed, it also ignores the fact that there were plenty of other centres of knowledge.

It's also a very, very eurocentric perspective on human progress, and it completely ignores the intellectual progress in China and the middle east.

I'm not disagreeing with your statement that people use religion as a means to persectute others, that much is true, but the idea that religion is inherently a rival of science in history is a very flawed notion that isn't supported in any historical circles, unless you're counting people like Hitchens (who wasn't a historian).