19 APR 2013 by ideonexus

 Christianity's Contempt for the Sciences

Contempt for human sciences was one of the first features of Christianity. It had to avenge itself of the outrages of philosophy; it feared that spirit of investigation and doubt, that confidence of man in his own reason, the pest alike of all religious creeds. The light of the natural sciences was even odious to it, and was regarded with a suspicious eye, as being a dangerous enemy to the success of miracles: and there is no religion that does not oblige its sectaries to swallow some physica...
Folksonomies: science religion
Folksonomies: science religion
  1  notes

It was a threat to it's authority, and if printing existed at the time, science may have survived, but instead it was abolished.

19 APR 2013 by ideonexus

 The Rise and Fall of Greek Science

This fortunate circumstance, still more than political freedom, wrought in the human mind, among the Greeks, an independance, the surest pledge of the rapidity and greatness of its future progress. In the mean time their learned men, their sages, as they were called, but who soon took the more modest appellation of philosophers, or friends of science and wisdom, wandered in the immensity of the two vast and comprehensive plan which they had embraced. They were desirous of penetrating both th...
  1  notes

Condorcet chronicles the Greek sciences, with their propensity for for philosophizing and fantasy, ending with Socrates, who demanded empiricism.

30 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 The Social Darwinism of Wealth Consolidation

While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.
Folksonomies: social darwinism
Folksonomies: social darwinism
  1  notes

Andrew Carnegie argues that economic inequality is good for the species because it promotes natural selection.