
there's a massive flood about to happen.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 16:15,
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they believed in spontaneous generation, see. Deucalion never had to take any animals on board, he just threw some pebbles on the ground afterwards and everything grew straight out of the swamp again, at least according to Ovid.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 16:21,
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I guess we have to thank them for inspiring those plastic animals you grow by putting them in water.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 16:24,
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it's well funny. I reckon the Hebrews were on the sensible side of the fence on this one.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 16:32,
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You'd be in with more of a chance of storing everything on a single ship. Who's the sensible one now, huh?
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 16:39,
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Maybe it's a metaphor - two by two - double helix.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 16:41,
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Though if you worked with a selection of gametes you might just be on to something...
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 16:47,
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in fact the Greeks were making good headway in discrediting religion and mysticism, when Christianity came along and set us back 2000 years
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 16:54,
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they gave us Aristotle, who held science back for 2000 years.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 17:06,
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Epicurus, Euclidean Geometry, Archimedes?
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 17:14,
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as for Epicurus, yeah I'll give him points for his philosophy of science, but it hardly "discredits religion and mysticism".
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 17:20,
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as opposed to the culture the catholic church presided over, under which people were burned at the stake for not believing that bread actually turned into christ in your stomach during the eucharist
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 17:30,
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but I will point out that the "shoulders of giants" that Newton spoke of may well have been the mediaeval Muslim scientists who made enormous advances in the field of optics, amongst others, apparently because of a Qur'anic imperative to "observe nature and learn". I'd also suggest you read up on "the Conflict Thesis".
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 17:35,
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Aristotle/Plato, anyway if we're going to bring newton into it, i shall refer back to Euclidean Geometry
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 17:40,
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not saying anything about Euclidean Geometry either, because it's irrelevant. But let's come back to Epicurus again and see how it relates to what we started with here in the first place. If you are going to go by his philosophy and get your theories by observation of the natural world, well, there was no evidence for the spontaneous generation theory of the Greeks, and really quite a lot for the common Hebrew knowledge that animals only ever come from other animals of the same species. This is why I give the Hebrews the points in this particular game.
There were people in the Enlightenment who liked to ascribe Greek primacy to everything, but it was often just Eurocentric prejudice. A lot of good maths and science originated in Babylon, because they needed it to do their astrology. They were also heavily influenced by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 17:54,
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There were people in the Enlightenment who liked to ascribe Greek primacy to everything, but it was often just Eurocentric prejudice. A lot of good maths and science originated in Babylon, because they needed it to do their astrology. They were also heavily influenced by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians.

obviously the Greeks got things wrong, but they got other things right and they did so by keeping an open mind, one which was shut by the ignorance of religion.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 18:20,
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It's good to have an open mind, maybe if you had one you'd see that this doctrine of yours (or did you uncritically receive it from that Dawkins chap?) that religion is the same thing as ignorance was, well, ignorant.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 18:33,
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i actually went to sunday school untill the age of 10, basically because it was a free babysitter, my parents have no religious standing, but they never told me what to think. since the age of 10 i gradually discredited the bible and decided that instead of believing that god created the earth in seven days (etc) the earth was created over billions of years from leftover dust from a supernova. instead of beliving that humans come from some ribs and some dust we evolved from apes of millions of years. instead of believing that after death your spirit flies off (somewhere) and your reunited with dead relatives, your constituent atoms are re-distributed in the ground or in the air and continue a cycle of life that's been going for billions of years.
you want to talk about ignorance.
yes i do think preaching a book written by men 2000 years ago as scientific fact is ignorant, when all it is at best is a philosophical document on the human nature and society.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 19:22,
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you want to talk about ignorance.
yes i do think preaching a book written by men 2000 years ago as scientific fact is ignorant, when all it is at best is a philosophical document on the human nature and society.

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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 19:42,
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Then let's bring Einstein's General Theory of Relativity into it and throw Euclidean Geometry out the window.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 18:00,
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i think a theory that explains the three dimensional world, without knowledge of gravitation, that still stands today is pretty good.
and the hebrews, christians or muslims contribution to this field in the intervening 2000 years is what?
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 18:18,
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and the hebrews, christians or muslims contribution to this field in the intervening 2000 years is what?

I've already told you the Muslim contribution, they did loads of good science. As did a lot of Christians, Christianity founded a great deal of research. We also have to thank such people as William of Ockham, the 13th century Franciscan Friar who gave us that Ockham's Razor thing you atheists like to bang on about. The Muslims did so well partly because while they had read the works of Aristotle, they didn't take it as gospel truth. Then Galileo came along and proved it wrong on a few more points. I can hardly emphasize this point enough so I'll even capitalise it: ARISTOTLE'S PHYSICS COMPLETELY WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING.
Plato did a little better, to be honest. He came up with the idea, foreign to previous generations of Greeks, of a God created the universe. He also inspired the various Gnostic sects. Unfortunately some people took his story of Atlantis a little seriously, although mostly not until the modern day I must add.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 18:28,
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Plato did a little better, to be honest. He came up with the idea, foreign to previous generations of Greeks, of a God created the universe. He also inspired the various Gnostic sects. Unfortunately some people took his story of Atlantis a little seriously, although mostly not until the modern day I must add.


this house was built in the 1950s. I don't think they used a computer.
Euclidean Geometry - yes, great. Consequences for religion and mysticism: NIL.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 18:37,
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Euclidean Geometry - yes, great. Consequences for religion and mysticism: NIL.

so when a christian, a hebrew or a muslim makes a scientific discovery it's because of their religion and therefore of great importance, but when someone like euclid comes up with something of real significance it's irrelevant.
smacks of apologist sentiment to me.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 18:47,
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smacks of apologist sentiment to me.

that "the Greeks were making good headway in discrediting religion and mysticism". Quite a lot of the Greek philosophers were very mystical, in fact. Of course Galileo et al didn't discredit Aristotelian physics because he was a Christian, but you speak as if religious people never said anything clever at all, as if religion were opposed in principle to science, or even to thinking, and that the bounties of modernity are all ultimately creditable to the Greeks.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 18:58,
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especially with an administration like the catholic church as the dominant authority
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 19:05,
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Religious people have said clever things throughout the ages and not because they were any less religious than their contemporaries. Being clever and being religious are entirely orthogonal properties. And you haven't read up on the Conflict Thesis yet, have you?
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 19:09,
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is in no way a hindrance?
I did the conflict thesis at university yes, shall I list a load of literature and you can tell me if you've read up on it?
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 19:28,
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I did the conflict thesis at university yes, shall I list a load of literature and you can tell me if you've read up on it?

you pulled an ace out of your sleeve just there though, gaz me the bibliography and I'll look into it.
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Wed 26 Oct 2011, 19:37,
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