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Comment by jsemrau | Hacker News Reader

Please educate yourself more on this. Step out of your bubble. Christian nations have created the cultural and technical achievements over the last thousands of years. There is nothing even remotely comparable.

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I wouldn't thank Christianity for the scientific advancements of the West, except maybe for protestant work ethic. Science only started to flourish when Catholic church started to lose power, and religion became a bit more separated from law and politics.

Best religion for progress of humanity is the one that embraces work, tells people to treat each other fairly, and otherwise keeps its hands off from irrelevant details of people's lives - things like what consenting adults do in bed, what they eat or drink, what they can or can't say.

Unfortunately Christians have been historically way too focused on the bad parts while ignoring the good parts, leading to madness like wars between Catholics and Protestants and discrimination of minorities. Think of the current conservative elite in America for example - it's hard to find people who are further away from teachings of Jesus Christ than those greedy, hateful idiots.

More like the last 500 years. Before that the cultural and scientific centers of the world were variously in muslim, hindu, chinese, roman and other civilizations.

And without the Muslims maintaining the Greek and Roman texts, that would've taken far longer. Even algebra and algorithm come from Muslim names.

The Roman/Byzantine empire was pretty much destroyed by Muslims, though. Its a but like thanking the Franks/Goths/etc. for preserving Roman cultural identity in Western Europe by preserving some of their texts..

> The Roman/Byzantine empire was pretty much destroyed by Muslims, though

This is hilariously untrue, if one is talking about the Western Roman empire. An islamic state did conquer Constantinople, which I presume is what you mean.

The Roman empire (western) basically fell apart due to infighting more than anything else.

Mostly enslaved yehudi and persian scholars..

I love hearing the guys from The Rest Of History discuss this from their different perspectives!

The subject wasn't the creation of technology, it was the propensity of theocracies to beat the native out of natives.

eg: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2021/sep/06...

Isn't Canada a secular state? I think the grandparents point was to separate plain old xenophobia from religiously motivated erasure of culture.

The Vatican is a theocratic state, Catholic churches, schools, etc are effective theocracies.

There's a long list of questionable behaviour, eg. enslavement for Jesus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Jesuit_slave_sale

There are more people enslaved now than at any point in time in history. Guess the countries.

There are more people now than at any point in time in history.

Meanwhile, in history, religions enslaved people.

Returning to the point you keep dodging, that includes Christians.

I don't believe in the original sin of slavery in Western countries. Slavery has been existed for centuries before and, despite being abolished by Western countries (hint: there were several wars were people lost lives), still exists in China, India, Indonesia, and a large group of Arab countries.

> I don't believe in the original sin of slavery in Western countries.

I have no idea what that sentence is specifically meant to mean, that aside, western countries have had actual slavery and effective slavery both in the past and the present.

eg: Past & actual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Jesuit_slave_sale

'Present' (Post WWII) & effective: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-27/child-abuse-royal-com...

I don't mean to exclusively beat on Christians or just Catholics here; but I do intend to counter your apparent narrative of good Christians and evil Muslims.

Christians certainly diminished a lot of cultures, just as other religions also did - the initial point that started this above.

Slavery has not been abolished in the West. It has just been put behind walls that the general public do not usually care to see.

Capitalist countries all of them.

The USA has the world's greatest for-profit prison slave system in existence.

There has never been as many slaves in humanity as there are in the US' prisons.

What's that? Oh, they don't count because they're criminals?

Thousands of years… christian nations… educate yourself… hmm

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