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Originally Posted by Rob Instigator
But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.
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Tell that to the hundreds of millions of bodies which have piled up over the past hundred years of modern warfare. Tell that to the countless refugees and victims of war across the world. Regardless of the motivation for war, the technology used today was created by the callousness of science, cold facts often have no heart.
My point in this is blind following of
anything, be it science or religion is dangerous. You should follow things in depth and substance, hence the purpose of this thread to discuss in substance the arguments back and forth. In this way, we can reason and understand each other with a higher degree of sophistication and preciseness..
And on a question posed before, "What good has religion given to the world?"
Interesting point about this false dichotomy, religion is the ORIGINAL SCIENCE. The origin of collection observation and data about natural phenomena comes from religious quests to understand the nature of the world, to mark a correct calendar, and to preserve knowledge from the past. Whether you are in East Asia, India, the Middle East, or especially Western Europe, the preservation of all the ancient writings which science is built upon including the very art of writing itself comes from religious institutions like monasteries..
Monks preserved the Latin and Greek writings of the ancient world, and these works on mathematics, natural sciences, architecture and history are the foundation of modern science and were the inspiration and practice of the early modern scientists, from Newton to Mendel, Francis Bacon to Darwin.
Without the continuity of the socio-political institutions of religion, Europe, the Middle East and Asia might never had risen to such great heights of civilization and modernity.