I dont think any body wants to write a book here. The Bible also says a day in heavan is as a 1000 years on earth... something to that effect. The world could have been created in 6,000 years. A day to us is not a day to God.

Well that would depend on your belief structure I would assume. Those here who choose to study and rely on evolution and anthropogenesis as it relates to life on the planet would not accept that the Earth could have developed in a time frame of 6000 years. If you take god's word for it, then anything is possible I guess right?

I'm in total agreement with JB and Krimsa on this one Eljay.

Eljay,

This is precisely the type of thing you spoke of in the other thread. You say that you have your own personal interpretations on the Bible and other people have NO RIGHT to tell you how you should personally interpret the bible to make discision in your own life.

I don't think anyone is concerned about how you personally view the Bible. The real point is that apparently your own personal interpretations just aren't holding any water in objective unbiased discussions concerning the overall book.

It is perfectly clear that the Bible is male-chauvanistic. And that these laws are indeed gender specific.

In fact, JB has focused on at least on of these that drives home the point vividly and removes all doubt.

She mentioned the one where the women who's husband dies is not allow to remarry outside of HIS FAMILY.

Where does it say that if a man's wife dies that he is not allow to remarry outside of HER FAMILY?

Where does the Bible ever refer to women purchasing husbands?

Clearly it's male-chauvanism through and through. Where does the Bible ever suggest that a man must remain silent in public and only speak to his wife in private about important social matters?

Your personal interpretations of the Bible simply aren't supportable in light of the overall picture. If you're trying to ignore the male-chauvanism that's in the Bible I think you'd be entirely on your own with that interpretation. It just isn't supported by the book itself.

The book is clearly male-chuavanistic.

Just be thankful that you can indeed make up your own interpretations and ignore what the book is actually saying. This is how protestantism got started in the first place. People didn't agree with the interpretations of the Catholic church so they decided to run off and make up their own interpretations without concern about whether or not the book actually supports their conclusions.

Well, if you believe in God yes anything is possible with Him. Also the Catholic Church was responsible for the organizational birth of modern day science. Maybe you can send a thank you card to the Pope.

The humor forum is that way -------------------->

No Joke my friend!!!


How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
THOMAS E. WOODS, JR.
From the role of the monks to art and architecture, from the university to Western law, from science to charitable work, from international law to economics, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization delves into just how indebted we are as a civilization to the Catholic Church, whether we realize it or not.

By far the book’s longest chapter is "The Church and Science." We have all heard a great deal about the Church’s alleged hostility toward science. What most people fail to realize is that historians of science have spent the past half-century drastically revising this conventional wisdom, arguing that the Church’s role in the development of Western science was far more salutary than previously thought. I am speaking not about Catholic apologists but about serious and important scholars of the history of science such as J.L. Heilbron, A.C. Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, and Thomas Goldstein.
It is all very well to point out that important scientists, like Louis Pasteur, have been Catholic. More revealing is how many priests have distinguished themselves in the sciences. It turns out, for instance, that the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Fr. Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been called the father of Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher (also called "master of a hundred arts" for the breadth of his knowledge). Fr. 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 eighteenth century, 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 effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. 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 — all were typical Jesuit achievements, and scientists as influential as Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz and Newton were not alone in counting Jesuits among their most prized correspondents [Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits, 2004, p. 189].

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





How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

Contents


The Indispensable Church
A Light in the Darkness
How the Monks Saved Civilization
The Church and the University
The Church and Science
The Origins of International Law
The Church and Economics
How Catholic Charity Changed the World
The Church and Western Law
The Church and Western Morality



The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such far-off places as China and India. In seventeenth-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 nineteenth 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. In Central and South America the Jesuits worked primarily in meteorology and seismology, essentially laying the foundations of those disciplines there. The scientific development of these countries, ranging from Ecuador to Lebanon to the Philippines, is indebted to Jesuit efforts.
The Galileo case is often cited as evidence of Catholic hostility toward science, and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization accordingly takes a closer look at the Galileo matter. For now, just one little-known fact: Catholic cathedrals in Bologna, Florence, Paris, and Rome were constructed to function as solar observatories. No more precise instruments for observing the sun’s apparent motion could be found anywhere in the world. When Johannes Kepler posited that planetary orbits were elliptical rather than circular, Catholic astronomer Giovanni Cassini verified Kepler’s position through observations he made in the Basilica of San Petronio in the heart of the Papal States. Cassini, incidentally, was a student of Fr. Riccioli and Fr. Francesco Grimaldi, the great astronomer who also discovered the diffraction of light, and even gave the phenomenon its name.

I’ve tried to fill the book with little-known facts like these.

To say that the Church played a positive role in the development of science has now become absolutely mainstream, even if this new consensus has not yet managed to trickle down to the general public. In fact, Stanley Jaki, over the course of an extraordinary scholarly career, has developed a compelling argument that in fact it was important aspects of the Christian worldview that accounted for why it was in the West that science enjoyed the success it did as a self-sustaining enterprise. Non-Christian cultures did not possess the same philosophical tools, and in fact were burdened by conceptual frameworks that hindered the development of science. Jaki extends this thesis to seven great cultures: Arabic, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, and Maya. In these cultures, Jaki explains, science suffered a "stillbirth." My book gives ample attention to Jaki’s work.




Economic thought is another area in which more and more scholars have begun to acknowledge the previously overlooked role of Catholic thinkers. Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great economists of the twentieth century, paid tribute to the overlooked contributions of the late Scholastics — mainly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish theologians — in his magisterial History of Economic Analysis (1954). "t is they," he wrote, "who come nearer than does any other group to having been the ‘founders’ of scientific economics." In devoting scholarly attention to this unfortunately neglected chapter in the history of economic thought, Schumpeter would be joined by other accomplished scholars over the course of the twentieth century, including Professors Raymond de Roover, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, and Alejandro Chafuen.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

...it is no surprise that the Church should have done so much to foster 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."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Church also played an indispensable role in another essential development in Western civilization: the creation of the university. 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. And it is no surprise that the Church should have done so much to foster 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."
The popes and other churchmen ranked the universities among the great jewels of Christian civilization. It was typical to hear the University of Paris described as the "new Athens" — a designation that calls to mind the ambitions of the great Alcuin from the Carolingian period of several centuries earlier, who sought through his own educational efforts to establish a new Athens in the kingdom of the Franks. Pope Innocent IV (1243–54) described the universities as "rivers of science which water and make fertile the soil of the universal Church," and Pope Alexander IV (1254–61) called them "lanterns shining in the house of God." And the popes deserved no small share of the credit for the growth and success of the university system. "Thanks to the repeated intervention of the papacy," writes historian Henri Daniel-Rops, "higher education was enabled to extend its boundaries; the Church, in fact, was the matrix that produced the university, the nest whence it took flight."

As a matter of fact, among the most important medieval contributions to modern science was the essentially free inquiry of the university system, where scholars could debate and discuss propositions, and in which the utility of human reason was taken for granted. Contrary to the grossly inaccurate picture of the Middle Ages that passes for common knowledge today, medieval intellectual life made indispensable contributions to Western civilization. In The Beginnings of Western Science (1992), David Lindberg writes:

t must be emphatically stated that within this educational system the medieval master had a great deal of freedom. The stereotype of the Middle Ages pictures the professor as spineless and subservient, a slavish follower of Aristotle and the Church fathers (exactly how one could be a slavish follower of both, the stereotype does not explain), fearful of departing one iota from the demands of authority. There were broad theological limits, of course, but within those limits the medieval master had remarkable freedom of thought and expression; there was almost no doctrine, philosophical or theological, that was not submitted to minute scrutiny and criticism by scholars in the medieval university.

"[S]cholars of the later Middle Ages," concludes Lindberg, "created a broad intellectual tradition, in the absence of which subsequent progress in natural philosophy would have been inconceivable."

Historian of science Edward Grant concurs with this judgment:

What made it possible for Western civilization to develop science and the social sciences in a way that no other civilization had ever done before? The answer, I am convinced, lies in a pervasive and deep-seated spirit of inquiry that was a natural consequence of the emphasis on reason that began in the Middle Ages. With the exception of revealed truths, reason was enthroned in medieval universities as the ultimate arbiter for most intellectual arguments and controversies. It was quite natural for scholars immersed in a university environment to employ reason to probe into subject areas that had not been explored before, as well as to discuss possibilities that had not previously been seriously entertained.

The creation of the university, the commitment to reason and rational argument, and the overall spirit of inquiry that characterized medieval intellectual life amounted to "a gift from the Latin Middle Ages to the modern world…though it is a gift that may never be acknowledged. Perhaps it will always retain the status it has had for the past four centuries as the best-kept secret of Western civilization."

Here, then, are just a few of the topics to be found in How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. I’ve been asked quite a few times in recent weeks what my next project will be. For now, it’ll be getting some rest.

You can find the Popes address online..so you can send that thank you card.Hope the artical opened your mind a bit.

As many contributions the Church may have made to "civilization" and science, you will find just as many or more 'evil' deeds committed by them.

Alien gods work through cults and religious organizations bringing both culture and technology to mankind. It is no wonder the Churches are privy to such information.

It is the information that the Church withholds and covers up or suppresses that would be of great interest to me.

JB

Man has evil in him and he has good in him. God gave us free will. God said he would not interfere with our will. We reap what we sow and man sows division every waking hour. You can blame organizations all you want but it is the individual that make the whole. When good men do nothing the masses suffer.

Really? Hmmm. I was under the impression that the church actually forced Galileo to stand trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633. The sentence of the Inquisition was that Galileo was required to abjure the opinion that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, and that the Earth is not at its centre and moves; the idea that the Sun is stationary was condemned as "formally heretical."

Gotta love those catholics...

You just don't know the difference between science and technology. That's all.

I've pretty much devoted my entire life to the study of science. I can assure you that anyone who tells you that we have the Catholic church to thank for science is nothing short of ill-informed. Either that or they are attempting to distort the truth outright.

If you'd like to argue religion, better stick to that. Trying to make bogus claims about the chruch's supposed 'positive role' in science will only discredit your sincerety to the topic as a whole.

I am not saying the church was perfect. But if you read the article I posted you will see that a change did take place and that you aur reaping the rewards of that change right now.
What organization is perfect? There has been injustice in the world since the beginning of man but you can not throw away progress because of moments of injustice.It happened, its over and we have to take the good and leave the bad behind us.Thats healthy.

And why are you bashing catholics? Are you going to speak out against blacks and Jews next?

Absolutely. It’s absurd. They are really good at torturing people and putting them in prison for not recanting scientific knowledge or discoveries however. Any "progress" the church has made over the years is only because they CAN NOT get away with killing, torturing and throwing people in dungeons anymore. There has arguably been enough acceptance and inclusion to keep them from having law suits filed left and right, that’s about it. They actually have to be accountable for their actions now as we were wise enough to separate them from the state and any legal proceedings. They were a menace in that capacity.

And they will never live that down will they? Good one!

Oh please! Abra is not bashing Catholics. He is bashing the dogma and the religion, not the poor unsuspecting people to take it as the gospel truth because they have been told it is.

Blacks? is that a new religion now?

Jew? the religion or the race?

JB

Yes...and the good Far outweighs the bad.

You will never convince some of that but thanks for sharing. Valuable info that always seems to not get recognized. If it did more often people would know what a value there is in God's word through His people. You won't find that people who want to dispute God's word EVER admit these facts are true.

abra,

Presumptively, I have disturbed your discourse, once again, only because it offers a choice that I do find ignored and not apprehended of by so many for whatever reason or excuse or lack of opportinity presenting certain overwhelming distinctions categorically rationalized as "not my cup of tea" so to speak.

As a parent, to say the least, and as a man long since not married any longer to mom, I am also a single parent that has been given realtime education by the school of endurance and perseverance. The fruit of which is a 'degree' made possible only by the exercise thereof.

Were mankind dominated by a chauvinistic and mysogenic delusion such as is pathetically called upon as an excuse for society's ills in part, and perpetrated by Christian thought and discourse, then certainly history would be the revisionist fantasy, in fact, that ignorant men would delude themselves with.

That not being the case in reality, I must say, that nothing is further from the truth that remains so exemplified in the elusive protestations of self centered, egotistical and arrogant demogogues that speak from nothing more than their abundance of lack in experience, knowledge, understanding and wisdom found only in the selflessness of denying oneself for the good of those dear and tenderly entered into their hearts and held in higher esteem than their very own lives, which is foreign to any that through fear or enlightened self interest have determined for themselves to be the purview of the foolish and ignorant and basest of men.


Departing from the embrace of family life and the merits of the fruit of endeavor so attached sequesters the critical thinking skills of the abhorrant that arrogantly esteem voids as honorably magnanomous perspectives fruitfully lavished on such as have not so entangled themselves.

Such liberties are licentious and lascivious delusions that plead the ignorance and folly of the haughty aspects of false pride.

There is nothing to wonder at in awe by such inept conclusions made by the pontificance of those that harbor such abundance of lack as those bereft observations made from a hardened heart.

Sadness and pity accompanies the violence and assault of such arrogance upon the learned and wise that have tasted and feasted upon the joys of love and the import of the whole duty of man to the very least of those in this world, namely, the very souls all around that are the very objects of such well learned lessons and must share the world each day with the likes of those that would hold the person next to them, unwittingly so, in utter contempt.

Which, by the way, may be one of my children that smiled at you in the course of your day at some point in the past, present and future.


oops.

Those good old Catholics...You Are targeting a whole group of people because of their religious beliefs. That is no better than targeting someone because of the color of their skin or the culture they grew up in.Thats my point.

Also separation of church and state by our founding fathers was put into place to keep the government from persecuting people of different religious beliefs just as much as it was put into place to protect the government from becoming a giant church on to its self. But then again some people make politics their religion and others make Science their religion...just Replacing one belief system for another is all that you are doing.

Most Muslims do not want to fly planes into American buildings so would you accuse them all of being mindless sheep that follow their dogma and infer that they don't mind a good old beheading from time to time????.

One last thing we are a hair on a bugs ass when you look at the size of the universe..You have no more of the truth than I have when it comes down to it all.

Just found an interesting site. I know it’s a little off topic since this new mythology of "how the Catholics have actually been the pioneers of science" broke out. I’m sure that discussion/discourse can wait.

As soon as Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire by imperial edict (315), more and more pagan temples were destroyed by Christian mob. Pagan priests were killed.

Between 315 and 6th century thousands of pagan believers were slain.

Examples of destroyed Temples: the Sanctuary of Aesculap in Aegaea, the Temple of Aphrodite in Golgatha, Aphaka in Lebanon, the Heliopolis.

Christian priests such as Mark of Arethusa or Cyrill of Heliopolis were famous as "temple destroyer." [DA468]

Pagan services became punishable by death in 356. [DA468]

Christian Emperor Theodosius (408-450) even had children executed, because they had been playing with remains of pagan statues. [DA469]
According to Christian chroniclers he "followed meticulously all Christian teachings..."

In 6th century pagans were declared void of all rights.

In the early fourth century the philosopher Sopatros was executed on demand of Christian authorities. [DA466]

The world famous female philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria was torn to pieces with glass fragments by a hysterical Christian mob led by a Christian minister named Peter, in a church, in 415.
[DO19-25]