Quote:
|
monks definatly made major contributions to maintaining the knowledge of the past. while europe stagnated and declined, the monks copied books by hand, preserving that knowledge for future generations. but how is that different than the egyptians creating the library at alexandria? and teh preserving of knowledge, while important, is not a christian influence on society (unless teh monks only allowed that knowledge to be learned by people in the church or were selective in what they saved).
|
correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the christians who burnt down the library in alexandria? not to mention the church has always been rather selective and always been pro-censorship on reading materials. If it differed in any way from the churches teachings it was banned/burned/etc. Not to mention authors and free-thinkers where usually proclaimed heretics and executed/imprisioned (example: Galielo [sp?]). Also a lot of things that were done in the name of God was done in greed, like Columbus' return trip to the Americas. He said he wanted to do it in the name of God and spread his word, but in turn it was for the money. As well as trying to convert the native americans and mexicans to christianity... how many died in those peaceful acts? (too clarify I'm not saying this is solely a christian act, almost every single society has been like this. 'cept maybe buddhists and eskimos...)
Quote:
|
having a lot of sex and a lot of babies... incidentally, given the number of people around today and given that we all arose from a comparatively smaller number of people... a lot of inscest has been going on as well.
|
how true this is... read somewhere that just going back to the roman era, you'd need 12 billion different generations of parents. more ppl then that's ever been alive.
as for what we've been doing, societies can only really grow based on their form of goverment. oppressive leaderships don't give a whole lot of room for outspoken thinkers and artists. not to mention almost all technological advancements have been made of wars (we found out how to obliterate whole cities before we even had a science that tried to understand the brain, and almost every invention you use today first got it's start as an application for war. the internet was developed mainly by the pentagon as a way to communicate between bases incase there was ever a nuclear war and was never intended to have any public release). Also society can only really record itself based on it's technological advancements as well (can't write if you don't have any form of writting tools). And let's not forget the old saying "the victors are the ones who write history."