More Shit For Creatards To Swallow

[Hatshepsut]

We have already compared the benefits of theology and science. When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few... (Ingersoll)

I think Ingersoll's take on it simplistic. Theologians have never governed the world. They've had a function in legitimizing the political rulers who do govern the world, in western history most notably in connection with the divine right of kings. But the religious and political establishments in the West have always been separate. They were separate in most other societies as well, including Egypt: Islam's unification of spiritual leadership and state was actually an innovation, one which didn't last too long at that. The Galileo sideshow aside, religion didn't much interfere with the progress of science and technology either. Such renowned mathematicians and physicists as Renee Descartes, Simon Stevenius, and Isaac Newton were devout folks who spent more time on religious or philosophical rumination than on science. Religions have never opposed the introduction of new technologies from the wheel to the digital computer.

The emergence of people from their medieval huts was more a political than an anti-religious development. It did involve the reduction or abolition of traditional state subsidy of religion, yet it was the decline of birthright entitlement, the breaking of guilds and monopolies, and subsequent rise of a larger middle class, soon followed by mass production techniques which made goods cheaper, that has led to our current prosperity.

At least that's what my Inner Neanderthal is telling me.