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Liz Wagner: The Western Mind and SkepticismReader comment on item: How Fares Western Civ? Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jul 21, 2020 at 07:40 Again this is for kuffar, polytheists, free thinkers, agnostics and atheists and those of us that do not believe that books drop from the sky. >When you wrote that Stark argues that "the Christian conception of God as the rational creator of a comprehensible universe ... continually prodded the West along the road to modernity," I believe that Dr Pipes is very correct, but I would add that the western mind has deeper foundations and not just Christianity. The western mind owes so much of its success to the Greek learning of classical Greece, Rome and the Romans as well as the great minds of Alexandria ad Aegyptum as well as learning from the wisdom, architecture and literature of ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia as well as the Persian civilization. The Semitic people provided us with books written by unknown men (no books drop from the sky) and aimed at providing, as I said before, D-Y-N or law/judgment. Nothing about science or medicine and nothing about rational thinking or even skepticism. Religion? It is a later construct and as I said before the idea of the "one" God is a flawed idea. The Greeks gift to all of humanity has been questioning just about anything. Skepticism is really the foundation of the western mind and comes from being rational and not dogmatic. Dogma is what we get from "Religions" It also explains why the so called Arabic/Islamic civilization is gone and why the Jewish uprising of 115-117 AD was a catastrophe to the Jewish communities in late antiquity. The Christian God is unique and even when books were banned the monks took care of hiding and storing these great treasures the likes of the Nag Hammadi Library and when the Eastern Roman empire followed Judaism and Islam and called for iconoclasm it was the monks that were hiding these artistic treasures and we have them now. Compare it with Othman the Khalifa that "collected the Qur'an" who burned the copies that did not fit with orthodoxy. It was the Greek mind and Christianity that provided us with the great gifts of arts, music and "pictures" and beautiful "idols" that are real treasures to all of humanity. Ms Wagner: The God or Gods of the Semites are no more than a tool to impose laws, at times very silly laws, on the gullible Last, would I go as far as saying that the idea of the rational God is Christian? This I do not know. However, if the question is did Christianity promote skepticism and therefore helped the real foundation of the western mind? If we look at the outcome then we can say that the western civilization benefited from Christianity and I suspect that it did Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments". Reader comments (104) on this item |
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