Quote (PixileDust @ Sep 30 2014 11:08pm)

Broad generalizations? Actually I gave multiple real examples, and I didn't even mention the pope burning down the library of Alexandria, because of the knowledge it contained. Books are scary after all.

A quote from that reference link that "points to nothing":

Quote (IceMage @ Sep 30 2014 10:15pm)

You gave a few legit examples and the church has been around 2,000 years.  The church has been(besides a few choice examples) a friend and partner of science. 

I read the quote, and I also read multiple ones from Catholic sites(like the Jews and the Holocaust, Christians usually get their history right).  I can't find anything(except on sites with 90's web graphics) that shows the church was against dissecting for medical research.

Quote (Voyaging @ Sep 30 2014 10:27pm)

I'll admit, while I've taken a class on Roman history, I am not deeply knowledgeable, but it is pretty clear that we as a human race were technologically superior to the apex of the Roman Empire long before the Industrial Revolution.

The impact of burning of the Library of Alexandria is overstated. The average human nowadays has significantly more knowledge than the entirety of the library. Of course, nobody can in hindsight assess that its survival could have led to an exponential increase in knowledge, but I'm skeptical.

Off-topic a bit, but weren't you a Christian at one point Pixile? If I'm mistaken, I apologize, but I think I remember that you were a Christian when you first began posting here. If I'm not mistaken I'd enjoy hearing what brought you away from that.

Quote (PixileDust @ Oct 1 2014 12:28am)

I was never Christian; I just am a Christian sympathizer.

e/ In that I understand how fear of the intangible can move one to believe in something unreal.

i.e. hell

Quote

Far from belief in God hindering science, it was the motor that drove it. Isaac Newton, when he discovered the law of gravitation, did not make the common mistake of saying: ‘now I have a law of gravity, I don’t need God’. Instead, he wrote Principia Mathematica, the most famous book in the history of science, expressing the hope that it would persuade the thinking man to believe in a Creator.

Newton could see, what sadly many people nowadays seem unable to see, that God and science are not alternative explanations. God is the agent who designed and upholds the universe; science tells us about how the universe works and about the laws that govern its behaviour. God no more conflicts with science as an explanation for the universe than Sir Frank Whittle conflicts with the laws and mechanisms of jet propulsion as an explanation for the jet engine. The existence of mechanisms and laws is not an argument for the absence of an agent who set those laws and mechanisms in place. On the contrary, their very sophistication, down to the fine-tuning of the universe, is evidence for the Creator’s genius. For Kepler: ‘The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics’.

As I scientist then, I am not ashamed or embarrassed to be a Christian. After all, Christianity played a large part in giving me my subject.

Quote (Voyaging @ Sep 30 2014 11:01pm)

So you think the belief in hell is the primary motivation for theistic belief?

Or rather that fear of the intangible is what leads to belief in hell?

Quote (HighschoolTurd @ Sep 30 2014 09:19pm)

Food for thought.

Quote (HighschoolTurd @ 1 Oct 2014 05:19)

Food for thought.

Quote (brmv @ 30 Sep 2014 23:05)

and why would the words of an apologetic for christianity and the author of the 'philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica' be more food for thought than the words of the authors of THE 'principia mathematica' (especially the more famous one)?