Christianity's Valuable Contributions to Humanity: An Examination of Militant Atheism

[no one]

Why does anyone refer to this it as he?

[The Architect Of Fate]

You still haven't show me any Atheists leading the charge to Abolish Slavery. Quite telling.

Why would a group that was barely a fraction of the human population of that time should be expected to be the ones to lead the charge of abolition?This is a ridiculous charge. There were most certainly atheists who were abolitionists (Elizur Wright for example) but i would be more interested in how many atheists defended slavery by contrast to how many Christians did ? How many Christian slave owners have there been by contrast to atheist ones? You could argue demographics of the times when slavery existed at least in it's pre-modern form bias that question and that's the point expecting a tiny minority that has only recently reached any prominence in society to fix a problem the majority started and happily praticed  for centuries is unrealistic and unfair.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Also do i need to point out that Slavery was never truly abolished. It still goes on all over the world. So the idea anyone ended slavery is simply false.

[Belacqua]

It doesn't specify that they were never burned. It also doesn't specify that they were never chewed up and spit out by donkeys. If you have any reliable source saying that one or the other of these things happened, I would be interested to see it. 

Copernicus had supporters and detractors within the church. They finally put the book on the Index of Prohibited Books about 70 years after it was published, but of course by this time it was in wide circulation. And remember that the Index was only enforceable in the Papal States. In other countries bans were almost always enforced by secular authorities, if at all. In Spain, even at the height of the Inquisition, Copernicus was never banned and his book was taught by priests at the university in Salamanca throughout. Even in the Protestant world, book bans were regularly flouted by samizdat editions. If you know of any cases in which people were punished for reading the books I would be interested to hear about them. 

The Index is often exaggerated. Every edition contained instructions on how to read a banned book if you really needed to. My father spent years in a Catholic hospital instead of going to high school. (He was not Catholic, but they were the only ones who would take a patient with no money.) He got a copy of the Index, and used it as a reading list. (It was still in effect then, and included Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and many others.) He enjoyed arguing with the nurses, who were all nuns. The nuns got permission to read many of the banned books so they could better argue with a patient. So it's clear that the bans were hardly absolute, and did not include burning.

I'm not interested in doing your footwork for you.  I presumed that you would have linked to an article that was relevant to your criticism.  My mistake.

Here are three up-to-date and useful books which describe how Copernicus' book was debated and banned by the church:

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Nobody-Read-...311&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Copernicus-Cultur...287&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Setting-Aside-All...337&sr=8-1

All of them can be pirated from Library Genesis. 

None of them says that Copernicus' book was ever burned. None of them says that any such order was made. 

It is difficult for me to prove a negative. But a reasonable amount of legwork turns up no evidence that the book was burned. I have made an effort to look for evidence supporting Fake's assertion, and have found none. This is consistent with everything I have seen in the past. 

The only mention of book-burning in any of the books is when Nicolaus Raimerus Ursus published an attack on Tycho Brahe's system that was very critical. Tycho brought legal action to have the book burned, but apparently no such order was made. This was not a church matter -- it was all secular. 

This is from Gingerich's book:

NORMALLY, BOOKS don't disappear so dramatically. Galileo's Dialogo, the book that got him in trouble with the Inquisition, was published in an edition of a thousand, and despite the ban by the Inquisitors, it remains one of the most common of the great scientific classics. Apparently, its listing in the Index of Prohibited Books simply made it more apt to be preserved in the seventeenth century. By the same token, Kepler was worried about sales in Catholic countries when his Epitome of Copernican Astronomy was placed on the Index, but a correspondent from Venice assured him that his book would be all the more sought after.

Publishers in Venice were notoriously independent of Rome, since at least the time of Aldus Manutius. 

The English translation of De revolutionibus was issued in eight editions between 1576 and 1626. It was well-known in Protestant countries, even where officials criticized it. 

Omedeo's book describes a French Catholic who wrote a list of books recommended for a well-stocked library:

In his famous Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Advice on Establishing a Library, 1627), the Paris Librarian Gabriel Naudé included Nicholas Copernicus among the authors that a good furnished library ought to include, notwith- standing the fact that the Catholic Church had prohibited any support for the physical reality of the heliocentric system since 1616. Naudé insisted that Copernicus, followed by Kepler and Galileo, had thoroughly changed astronomy (Copernic, Kepler et Galilaeus ont tout changé l’astronomie).1 Contrary to the views of Roman censorship and projects aiming at “selective libraries,” such as that of the Jesuit Antonio Possevino, Naudé argued that all those who innovated (innové) our knowledge (és Sciences) or modified any respect of it (changé quelque chose) merit a place in a good library, even though they cast doubt on ideas that were held for irrefutable by the ancients and those who followed them uncritically.2 He even listed Copernicus among scientific innovators who brought precious novelties (Est quoque cunctarum novitas gratissima rerum).3  

Omedeo's book also describes how Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598 –1671) got permission from the church to read De revolutionibus in 1629, a few years after it was placed on the Index. It was not difficult to get permission if you could show you had a good reason.

So I discover no reason to believe that the church called for De revolutionibus to be burned, or that anyone did so. Again, if you have evidence that it was, I'd be interested to see it. I don't expect that asking Fake for evidence backing up his claim would be useful.

[Angrboda]

Maybe you should have asked him for his evidence instead of making the accusation. But then, that's not as fun as slinging around accusations you can't prove.

[Fake Messiah]

For starters, Copernicus's book was on Index Librorum Prohibitorum which meant, as Encyclopedia Britannica explains:

Many books deemed heretical or threatening to the faith were destroyed or hidden as a result of the Index and the accompanying inquisitions, and hundreds of printers took flight to Switzerland and Germany.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Index-L...ohibitorum

[Nishant Xavier]

Just passing through. A quick response on science:

Prof. Woods wrote this brief response on the Church's many scientific accomplishments (one or two now recognized aberrations here and there notwithstanding) like how many Priests were distinguished Scientists, the role of Jesuit Priests in spreading education, the role of the Church in developing Medieval Universities (many of the Great Universities of Europe were built when all Europe was Catholic Christian), and much more.

"TOPEKA, Kan. – About the least fashionable thing one can do these days is utter a kind word about the Catholic Church. The idea that the church has been an obstacle to human progress has been elevated to the level of something everybody thinks he knows. But to the contrary, it is to the Catholic Church more than to any other institution that we owe so many of the treasures of Western civilization. Knowingly or not, scholars operated for two centuries under an Enlightenment prejudice that assumes all progress to come from religious skeptics, and that whatever the church touches is backward, superstitious, even barbaric.

Since the mid-20th century, this unscholarly prejudice has thankfully begun to melt away, and professors of a variety of religious backgrounds, or none at all, increasingly acknowledge the church’s contributions.

Nowhere has the revision of what we thought we knew been more dramatic than in the study of the history of science. We all remember what we learned in fourth grade: While scientists were bravely trying to uncover truths about the universe and improve our quality of life, stupid churchmen who hated reason and simply wanted the faithful to shut up and obey placed a ceaseless stream of obstacles in their path.

That was where the conventional wisdom stood just over a century ago, with the publication of Andrew Dickson White’s book, “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,” in 1896. And that’s where most Americans (and Europeans, for that matter) believe it still stands.

But there is scarcely a historian of science in America who would endorse this comic-book version of events today. To the contrary, modern historians of science freely acknowledge the church’s contributions – both theoretical and material – to the Scientific Revolution. It was the church’s worldview that insisted the universe was orderly and operated according to certain fixed laws. Only buoyed with that confidence would it have made sense to bother investigating the physical world in the first place, or even to develop the scientific method (which can work only in an orderly world). It’s likewise a little tricky to claim the church has been an implacable foe of the sciences when so many priests were accomplished scientists.

The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been called the father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher. Father Roger Boscovich, who has been described as “the greatest genius that Yugoslavia ever produced,” has often been called the father of modern atomic theory. In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished themselves; some 35 craters on the moon, in fact, are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

By the 18th century, writes historian Jonathan Wright, the Jesuits “had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes, and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics, and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter’s surface, the Andromeda nebula, and Saturn’s rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light.”

Their achievements likewise included “star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics.”

These were the great opponents of human progress?

Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated by Jesuits that it has become known as “the Jesuit science.” It was a Jesuit, Father J.B. Macelwane, who wrote the first seismology textbook in America in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.

The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such far-off places as China and India. In 17th-century China in particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible.

Jesuits made important contributions to the scientific knowledge and infrastructure of other less developed nations not only in Asia but also in Africa and Central and South America. Beginning in the 19th century, these continents saw the opening of Jesuit observatories that studied such fields as astronomy, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar physics. Such observatories provided these places with accurate time keeping, weather forecasts (particularly important in the cases of hurricanes and typhoons), earthquake risk assessments, and cartography.

The early church also institutionalized the care of widows, orphans, the sick, and the poor in ways unseen in classical Greece or Rome. Even her harshest critics, from the fourth-century emperor Julian the Apostate all the way to Martin Luther and Voltaire, conceded the Church’s enormous contributions to the relief of human misery.

The spirit of Catholic charity – that we help those in need not out of any expectation of reciprocity, but as a pure gift, and that we even help those who might not like us – finds no analogue in classical Greece and Rome, but it is this idea of charity that we continue to embrace today.

The university was an utterly new phenomenon in European history. Nothing like it had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. The institution that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations, and degrees, as well as the familiar distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, come to us directly from the medieval world.

By the time of the Reformation, no secular government had chartered more universities than the church. Edward Grant, who has written on medieval science for Cambridge University Press, points out that intellectual life was robust and debate was vigorous at these universities – the very opposite of the popular presumption.

It is no surprise that the church should have done so much to foster and protect the nascent university system, since the church, according to historian Lowrie Daly, “was the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge.”

Until the mid-20th century, the history of economic thought started, more or less, with the 18th century and Adam Smith. But beginning with Joseph Schumpeter, the great economist and historian of his field, scholars have begun to point instead to the 16th-century Catholic theologians at Spain’s University of Salamanca as the originators of modern economics.

And the list goes on ... my book “How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization,” [reminds us] how indebted we are, without realizing it, to an institution popular culture teaches us to despise."

[The Architect Of Fate]

Universities or their equivalents existed before Christianity so it contributed nothing and no Christians were not scientists they were copy cats rediscovering what was already known or at least discussed in ages past. There is nothing these so called scientist knew that was not already though up by prior civilisations.


Thomas Ernest Woods is a partisan hack

[Belacqua]

For starters, Copernicus's book was on Index Librorum Prohibitorum which meant, as Encyclopedia Britannica explains:

Many books deemed heretical or threatening to the faith were destroyed or hidden as a result of the Index and the accompanying inquisitions, and hundreds of printers took flight to Switzerland and Germany.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Index-L...ohibitorum

One sentence in the encyclopedia article says that books on the Index might be destroyed:

Many books deemed heretical or threatening to the faith were destroyed or hidden as a result of the Index and the accompanying inquisitions, and hundreds of printers took flight to Switzerland and Germany.

It doesn't say how many or which books were destroyed.

You said that books by Galileo and Copernicus were among those destroyed. I am unable to find evidence of this.

[Nishant Xavier]

To some earlier responses:

That is because deists abolished slavery.

Is that so? Names of those deists, and historical records of their contributions toward Abolitionism, please?

Lincoln and Wilberforce weren't deists, neither were many prominent Christians active in Abolitionism.

Also, it's irrelevant if Marx or Engels or anyone else were Darwinist Atheists, Communist Atheists or anything else. They were Atheists, period.

[When you blame this or that Christian, do you see if they were Catholic or Evangelical Christians, or just Christians?]

For the purposes of this thread, we are interested in the Pro-Racism, Pro-Slavery positions etc of Atheists vs Christians.

On the whole, Christians were far more enlightened first and made more efforts toward Abolition than Atheists. That's the historical record, sorry.

Marx and Engels compared and contrasted with Lincoln and Wilberforce (with whom they were roughly contemporaneous) show that nicely.

Why would a group that was barely a fraction of the human population of that time should be expected to be the ones to lead the charge of abolition?

Agnostics and Atheists had such Significant Influence in Revolutionary France that they Persecuted Christians. After their Reign of Terror (as mentioned in the OP, p. 3), they could easily have played a prominent role in abolishing/outlawing Slavery. So why didn't France take the lead role in that? Instead, the countries that did, America and Britain, were clearly Christian-majority countries at the time. It's also worth point out, again by the contemporaneous comparison, that Atheists had more Religious Freedom in the UK or US than Christians had for quite a while in France.

You could argue demographics of the times when slavery existed at least in it's pre-modern form bias that question

Did you read that New Advent Article I quoted? I can't give links, but you can find it online. Titled, "Christianity and Slavery": "In the Middle Ages slavery, properly so called, no longer existed in Christian countries; it had been replaced by serfdom, an intermediate condition in which a man enjoyed all his personal rights except the right to leave the land he cultivated and the right to freely dispose of his property."

There's a distinction between servitude and slavery. If someone is poor, and wants money, or is in debt, he can be a servant or serf. Not slavery.

Later on, as mentioned, when explorers found people of other races, they wrongly enslaved them. It should be noted the Popes often condemned the practice, going back to the 15th century. For e.g.: "Nevertheless, with the passage of time, it has happened that in some of the said islands, because of a lack of suitable governors and defenders to direct those who live there to a proper observance of the Faith in things spiritual and temporal, and to protect valiantly their property and goods, some Christians (we speak of this with sorrow), with fictitious reasoning and seizing and opportunity, have approached said islands by ship, and with armed forces taken captive and even carried off to lands overseas very many persons of both sexes, taking advantage of their simplicity ...

no less do We order and command all and each of the faithful of each sex, within the space of fifteen days of the publication of these letters in the place where they live, that they restore to their earlier liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of said Canary Islands, and made captives since the time of their capture, and who have been made subject to slavery. These people are to be totally and perpetually free, and are to be let go without the exaction or reception of money." (Sicut Dudum, 1435)

Popular Support for Abolitionism would take quite some time to form. But here, in the 15th century, a Papal Bull clearly condemns enslavement of the innocent. 

and that's the point expecting a tiny minority that has only recently reached any prominence in society to fix a problem the majority started and happily praticed  for centuries is unrealistic and unfair.

Ok, fair enough. But Atheists, as someone else also mentioned, have had quite significant influence starting around the last 200-250 years or so.

Also do i need to point out that Slavery was never truly abolished. It still goes on all over the world. So the idea anyone ended slavery is simply false.

I am speaking of it being outlawed in virtually every developed country, which is a positive development for humanity as a whole, has helped millions experience freedom. Obviously, it should be abolished everywhere, but that may take more time. For the purposes of this thread, Christianity overall played a positive role in its Abolition in much of the developed world. Christian countries also put pressure on Islamic/Muslim countries, to abolish it in their lands, as the article I mentioned shows.

God Bless.