RE: How to select which supernatural to believe?
July 20, 2022 at 3:03 pm
(This post was last modified: July 20, 2022 at 3:31 pm by Fake Messiah.)
(July 20, 2022 at 2:25 pm)Klorophyll Wrote: It was awkward indeed to not believe in God before Darwin
Maybe Darwin was a trigger for broader atheism, but Christianity was falling centuries before him. One of the main triggers was Martin Luther who broke up Catholic Church and thus created places for freethinkers to exist and their ideas to spread. So you had thinkers like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Sir Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes.
What they did was to topple the Aristotelian Great Chain of Being which was an authoritative order of classes of people which is something that the Church imposed in everyday life with God on top and pope below him and then bishops, etc. Which was nonsense and was finally seen as such.
Especially after Newton made his discoveries, a lot of people started looking at God as a passive observer who is behind the "mechanism of the universe" and does not get involved in it anymore. They created deism which then led to atheism.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
