Pope Benedict XVI resigns
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Eomer
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I'm not agreeing with fanaskin at all, but it's pretty well documented that at least initially during the Industrial Revolution that life expectancies and the like declined until sanitation and medicine caught up with things.
Shit's pretty goddamn swell nowadays though. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fucking idiot.
Shit's pretty goddamn swell nowadays though. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fucking idiot.
The Catholic Church obstructed or tried to obstruct every scientific progess made for the last 1000 years. For fuck's sake, they only recently apologised to Galileo for being right! They refused to let people be enlightened in the middle ages because ignorance in the masses meant they held onto their power. They held the knowledge and used fear to keep the average person in sync. They stand for ignorance, abuse of power and radical crimes against people throughout their history. They deserve to be shelved to the dustbin of history and remembered as a failed experiment that held back humanity for centuries.
Valishar
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I'm an atheist and don't even think that. Who was copying all those books keeping classical philosophy and drama alive during the early middle ages, Catholic monks. Who basically invented the university, the catholic church. From 800 - 1400, the catholic church was the only stable structure the average citizen in Europe could turn to. You think asshole barbarian kings gave a shit?
Suppression of science, all that jazz, is moreso a result of the counter-reformation.
Suppression of science, all that jazz, is moreso a result of the counter-reformation.
There are lots of Western books that would have been lost to history which were saved and in some cases improved upon that came back to Europe via the Abbasid empire up through Muslim Spain.
notice they burned all the books recording the aliens teaching people to build things so we would worship the wrong gods. gods who are apparently in need a couple bucks to tide them over till end times.
hodj
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If it weren't for the Catholic church, we wouldn't have had people like Gregor Mendel.
It really goes both ways. The Catholics definitely did their part to suppress some scientific knowledge, but many people forget exactly how earth shattering the paradigm shifts of the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo and Darwin and Wallace etc really were. I mean Ptolemaic and Aristotelian views of the nature and order of the cosmos had only been around for several thousands of years at that point. Its hard to break through something that entrenched, even today in science.
Also, it takes an enormous amount of evidence to justify such dramatic paradigm shifts and in ALL arenas there will be people fighting for the old order because that is what they have believed their whole lives. Its a very difficult thing to do. Imagine if someone came out today and said "You know, we've found evidence that the first law of thermodynamics doesn't hold in X Y and Z scenarios and we feel it invalidates that law" (not likely to happen but lets just play thought experiment for a second without getting too nitpicky) how difficult it would be to convince the broad body of science that this was so? Very very difficult I would imagine.
High barriers need to be set to justify complete paradigm shifts because they can have a pretty dramatic effect on human society. Change is good but too much change too fast can be a negative as well.
It really goes both ways. The Catholics definitely did their part to suppress some scientific knowledge, but many people forget exactly how earth shattering the paradigm shifts of the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo and Darwin and Wallace etc really were. I mean Ptolemaic and Aristotelian views of the nature and order of the cosmos had only been around for several thousands of years at that point. Its hard to break through something that entrenched, even today in science.
Also, it takes an enormous amount of evidence to justify such dramatic paradigm shifts and in ALL arenas there will be people fighting for the old order because that is what they have believed their whole lives. Its a very difficult thing to do. Imagine if someone came out today and said "You know, we've found evidence that the first law of thermodynamics doesn't hold in X Y and Z scenarios and we feel it invalidates that law" (not likely to happen but lets just play thought experiment for a second without getting too nitpicky) how difficult it would be to convince the broad body of science that this was so? Very very difficult I would imagine.
High barriers need to be set to justify complete paradigm shifts because they can have a pretty dramatic effect on human society. Change is good but too much change too fast can be a negative as well.
This is not true. I mean, do somebasicfucking research. Have a link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholi...ch_and_science
Also try not to sound like such a dumbass when accusing others of obstructing knowledge.
iannis
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If it weren't for the social complexity, stability, and tensions the Catholic church enforced, at whatever repressive cost the men of those generations chose to charge (and maybe that cost was high -- I'd say it was, considering the history of the Church), we would not have the basis for our modern science. Why did all of this flower in central and western Europe? I mean honestly, what is SO special about white people that a person thinks they innovated entirely new societies, entirely new technologies, entirely new modes of study, -despite- all of these authoritarian repressions and conflicts?
They weren't just smarter. Or just more curious. Or just looking for new weapons. Something very complex and societal was going on there, and going on in a way it wasn't going on (literally) anywhere else in the world.
China's been China for-fucking-ever. They invented gunpowder before Christ was even born, but they never invented a gun. Hell, maybe that makes THEM smarter.
I don't pretend to know the entirety of that answer. Even the question is a little bit stupid and phrased wrongly. But I'm sure it's the subject of more than a few scholarly doctoral thesis. es. thesi? But to think that the influence of the Church was only detrimental seems a bit simple.
They weren't just smarter. Or just more curious. Or just looking for new weapons. Something very complex and societal was going on there, and going on in a way it wasn't going on (literally) anywhere else in the world.
China's been China for-fucking-ever. They invented gunpowder before Christ was even born, but they never invented a gun. Hell, maybe that makes THEM smarter.
I don't pretend to know the entirety of that answer. Even the question is a little bit stupid and phrased wrongly. But I'm sure it's the subject of more than a few scholarly doctoral thesis. es. thesi? But to think that the influence of the Church was only detrimental seems a bit simple.
hodj
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Eh China never had a need to invent guns because they never really invaded land outside their territories for the greater part of their history after the Warring States period.
They weren't expansionist. Its not that they didn't have guns, I mean they had fireworks, and large scale fireworks fire from mortar cannons and the like, so they had these concepts that could have been readily adapted to warfare, had they a need or desire to engage in it.
They just never had a need to use them in war because they weren't expansionist, unlike European nations.
And the primary reason European nations were expansionist is because they needed the resources to power their societies' growth, for the most part.
Added: A big part of what drove Europeans to develop guns was armor and fortification barriers.
Like the walls around Constantinople that held for 1000 years until guns were invented, and cannons were invented, and then the world's biggest cannon was invented, specifically to knock down the walls at Constantinople so they could be conquered by the Turks.
They weren't expansionist. Its not that they didn't have guns, I mean they had fireworks, and large scale fireworks fire from mortar cannons and the like, so they had these concepts that could have been readily adapted to warfare, had they a need or desire to engage in it.
They just never had a need to use them in war because they weren't expansionist, unlike European nations.
And the primary reason European nations were expansionist is because they needed the resources to power their societies' growth, for the most part.
Added: A big part of what drove Europeans to develop guns was armor and fortification barriers.
Like the walls around Constantinople that held for 1000 years until guns were invented, and cannons were invented, and then the world's biggest cannon was invented, specifically to knock down the walls at Constantinople so they could be conquered by the Turks.
Cybsled
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Everything has a cause and effect, even stuff we shit on like religion. Take for instance Constantinople falling to the Muslims. Since Constantinople was basically the choke point for the movement of goods from the East to the West, this forced Europe to try to find alternate routes to the East, which ultimately culminated in the discovery of the New World probably much sooner then it would have normally. The Christian religion also had a large hand in laying the groundwork for modern corporations, the mass production of goods, and the mechanical clock becoming so integral in our society.
China did use gunpowder as a weapon eventually, with decent success, at which point it basically spread like wildfire. Gunpowder weapons changed war forever. Before then, the most advanced "low skill" ranged weapon was a crossbow. Now you could equip almost anyone who could marginally aim a blunderbuss at enemy troops and turn them into a lethal soldier.
China did use gunpowder as a weapon eventually, with decent success, at which point it basically spread like wildfire. Gunpowder weapons changed war forever. Before then, the most advanced "low skill" ranged weapon was a crossbow. Now you could equip almost anyone who could marginally aim a blunderbuss at enemy troops and turn them into a lethal soldier.
From reading this it seems like you think 'China' was mostly peaceful, which is laughably false. China in the sense that most people think of it never really existed until modern times. It is a land area the size of Europe, and was conquered over and over again by mostly internal and some external forces. Saying that they weren't expansionist is just completely false. Pretty much every chinese dynasty started off by trying to conquor what was tradional china, and most of them never even fully managed that. And when they did manage it the territory they controlled was so huge they couldn't really handle governing more than that.
I really want to know how the west was much more expansionist cirque the 15th century, cause so far as I can remember the west was much more polarized into set borders at that time than china was. I think your view of history is a little too clean, history and the evolution of warfare is much more chaotic than that, especially with regards to major inventions. It was also largely coincidence that gunpowder at the time allowed the turks to finally take constantinople. Those turks benefited from the fact that they happened to be the attacking a walled city at the time when a new technology to attack walled cities was really gaining steam.
By the late 16th century Europe had outpaced everyone else developing that tech, for a whole lot of reasons, none of which really had much to do with Europeans being more or less expansionist than anyone else.
Downhammer
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For all these questions about why Europe and not some other continent I highly suggest readingGuns, Germs, and Steelby Jared Diamond
hodj
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Did I say they were "mostly peaceful"?
No?
Then you might not want to phrase your argument predicated on a statement I did not make. We call that a strawman.
What I said was
Not being expansionist outside of East Asia/traditional territories going back thousands of years =/= by necessity peaceful in all occassions and at all points in time. How you made that leap I'm not really sure, but what it tells me is you're reading what you want to read in what I said, not what I said. I was specifically referring to the fact that Chinese didn't start loading up their boats and marching on Africa and the Americas and Europe, attempting to settle them as Han Chinese or Mongol lands or what have you, not about their internal relations.
Then you ask how the west was more expansionist in the 15th century than China. Well let's see, the Mandarins were busy running one of the most successful bureaucracies in history in China while Europeans were laying the foundation for colonialism, how is this even up for debate? The borders within Europe proper are irrelevant to this discussion, a red herring fundamentally because we're talking about European actions outside of Europe, not within, so that goes back to your original strawmanning of my statement.
Its a good read, but a lot of anthropologists and archaeologists feel he oversimplifies things with his heavy focus on geography. Cultural adaptations can and are often separate from environmental adaptations, and trying to explain every difference in human societies as heavily founded in geography is a bit flawed. Environment definitely play a big role, but how a culture adapts to an environment can vary quite broadly. A good example is just take any two groups in Africa living side by side. Their entire ways of existence can vary dramatically. Maybe one group is pastoralist, another agriculturalist, maybe one group practices ancestor worship, another believes in monotheism. Maybe one group lives entirely off products made by their herd animals, blood and milk and urine and meat, what have you, while another lives harvesting exclusively Mongongo nuts.
Boiling it all down as adaptations to environment ignores the cultural impact. Its somewhat akin to saying that genetics are the only thing that defines people's personalities, even though we know epigenetics, culture, world view, class status/social standing, etc can all impact behavior and personality.
See the problem I have is with the asumption that the Europeans needed to develop guns and the Chinese didn't. Neither statement is really true. The other Problem I have is that the order of events you have is a bit backwards. The Europeans didn't lay the foundation for anything in that initial bout of colonialism. There was no strategy. There was just a whole lot of luck and circumstance. The Europeans didn't really diverge in terms of technology until well after the spanish had conquered the new world.
The Spanish showed up to America after getting essential cut off from the spice markets, they are at this time on what is mostly a trade mission. The level of gunpowder technology they possess is about equal or even a little behind what the Muslims and Han Chinese possesss. The Europeans main advantage is in ships. The chinese have better ships but think merchants are lower than dirt. The Turks think merchants are ok but are focused on overland trade. So they set sail and they start a zombie apocolypse in the Americas totally by accident. They go back home. Then they go back to America to see whats up. Find the Zombie Apocolypse in full swing. They manage to conquor a massive civilization mostly due to luck and the fact that those people are dieing enmass in the plagues they brought with them causing huge amounts of upheavel. A tiny amount of what they accomplish is thanks to guns.
So now Spain is really really rich, and everyone else in Europe wants to be really rich too. This is where everyone starts trying to colonize everything and the Europeans diverge into being highly expansionist colonial powers. But my point is the only reason this shit ever happened is cause of some extremely circumstantial events that the spanish triggered mostly by accident, there was no latent expansionist desire in the Europeans(atleast none that was any different from that of the Chinese or Muslims) prior to seeing the shiploads of gold coming back from America so saying that the Europe developed guns because they wanted to expand is too clean.
Which is a total circlejerk about how everyone is equal and how somehow the white man got the upper hand. Had to read it twice in college.