(January 30, 2013 at 11:58 am)Brian37 Wrote:(January 30, 2013 at 11:50 am)Question Mark Wrote: The primary reason is mostly to educate people on the truth. People are actually of the opinion that a 2000 year old zombie comes to their bed sides and wakes them up int he morning and gives them a reason for living. It's just sad, especially when they impose that belief on someone else.
Imagine how far ahead humanity would have been if at the time of Galileo the church had said "Ok, you're right, the earth does rotate around the sun".
What did they do instead, "We are putting you in prison for your own safety because the masses hate the truth".
I warn that criticism of labels really should be gullibility based and not label based. Humans have always been superstitious.
Indeed. The Family Guy episode where Stewie and Brian go to an alternate universe where christianity never happened was no doubt exaggerated, but I do hold some sympathy for it, you know?
And some theists hold the fact of things like what happened to Galileo as evidence that God is really there, because we weren't ready for the truth yet, and the church was protecting us from the pain of discovery. The church knew Galileo was right.
Firstly, that argument is absurd because it was in fact the church covering their own sovereignty, and second it proves nothing other than the fact that someone had figured out that the solar system follows a heliocentric gravitational model. To attribute anything from that alone as to what the social effects would have been is a complete fallacy.
