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Comment by wqaatwt | Hacker News Reader

To be fair in addition to the uncountable horrible things it did or took part in the Catholic church did build the foundations that allowed the concepts of modern scientific thought to develop. No other religion did that.

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And they burned quite people for defending the science that went against their beliefs. They only stopped when they thought it would be good for their economic profits. Exactly the same when they stopped protecting slavery, when they thought it would be good as they would get a lot of new followers and all the money and influence that would come with them.And all the fights that gave birth to the other Christian churches always for the same reasons power and money.

Well yes it’s relative. However the Church in the 1400s to 1600s or so was generally very permissive of scientific debate and not strictly dogmatic. See Galileo’s story, the issue is that when they rejected something (based on a reasonably valid scientific process albeit based on flawed evidence available at the time) that was kind of it and continued to challenging the consensus got you into some deep trouble (with a few exceptions).

One interesting thing is that in the 1400s open debate and heterodoxy was generally tolerated or even accepted IF you did it in Latin and only inside the “international scholar network” that existed at the time and didn’t go around preaching your ideas to peasants and such.

I’m certainly not implying that it was in any way good or let alone perfect in absolute terms, just that it.

> same reasons power and money.

That’s highly reductive

> nd they burned quite people for defending the science that went against their beliefs

much less than the alternatives. muslims killed anyone who did not convert in case you did not know

Oh playing the old game of "you more" , we're not debating which belief is more savage than the other, all of them are, we're pointing out that the followers of the supposedly all loving version of a god killed,should we say assassinated, lots of people just because their discoveries did not fit in their stories books.

That varied wildly. Generally more of an exception that the rule but in the worst cases like under the Almohad’s you did have Jewish or even less extremist Muslim refugees fleeing to the more tolerant (at the time) Christian kingdoms.

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