"I realise this is hard for you to believe, Stephany, but civilisations actually borrow from each other." - Irfan

Yes. I significant example was when Spain was under Western, Islamic and then Western again. The World's debt to Greeks comes via Islamic culture. Western theocracy gave the West its Dark Ages.

When cultures mix the superior knowledge doesn't always shine through. The Chinese tried unsuccessfully to show Christian missionaries the Earth was not the centre of the solar system [Christians belived in cycles and epicycles and heaven; the supernatural, was beyond the crystal sphere of the Moon.].

On the other hand, the Arabs and the Hindus shared knowledge and appreciated the signifance of "zero".

LOL Irfan, you are a card. You really are ;-)

Oliver,

There is a reason European astronomers clung to the geocentric system for so long. Klutzy, as it was, it worked. With it you could predict the trajectories of the stars across the heavens and of the sun, moon and planets through the constellations.

The problem with early attempts at a heliocentric system was that they did not work. You still had to ascribe complicated motions to the planets so there was no obvious advantage in switching from the well-understood albeit cumbersome geocentric system to the heliocentric one.

The breakthrough came when Johannes Kepler realized that planets followed elliptical, not circular, orbits. Kepler's three laws of planetary motion put the heliocentric theory on a sound mathematical footing. Thereafter it was adopted relatively quickly.

The Hindu invention of zero was one of the great breakthroughs in computation. It was brought to Europe by Arab merchants who also simplified the elaborate Hindu numerals. Hence, to this day, we use Arab numerals.

Incidentally it seems Hindu mathematicians discovered Pythagoras' theorem before Pythagoras.

For the differences between Chinese and European astronomy see:

http://www.ied.edu.hk/apfslt/v6_issue2/liusc/liusc4.htm

By the time Christian missionaries arrived in China the heliocentric theory already had wide acceptance in Europe. The Chinese were still mainly at the flat-earth stage.

I don't know whence rose the myth that at the time of Christopher Columbus people thought the Earth was flat. By then most educated people knew the Earth was roughly spherical. The third century BC scholar, Eratosthenes, had arrived at an estimate of about 40,000 km for its circumference. That was 17 centuries before Columbus.

See: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Eratosthenes.html

I'm afraid the notion that the Muslims rescued Western scholarship by preserving Greek learning is a bit of early political correctness. By the time Greek learning had been "recovered" from the Muslims Western science had already surpassed it.

Now comes a question:

Where is Allah located?

Answer:

About 29 billion km from Earth.

How do I know:

See koran 32:5 and the link below:

http://www.speed-light.info/

LOL

This is slightly off topic but several posters have referred to the comparison of cultures and how cultures learn from each other, and Nobel prizes were mentioned.

My information that there are only 7 Nobels been granted to who were at one stage or another Muslims.

These are,Sadat,Arafat,Corey,Medawar,Mourad and one other. Of course Medawar, Corey and Mourad were christian and shouldnt be counted, but there are others. Does anyone know who is missing? I certainly can't get 10 as one poster has suggested exists.

On the other hand we do know that 14m people of the jewish faith in all its forms, have produced 129 Nobel Prize winners. A staggering dfference given the disparity in population

From that it is pretty clear who is making the better contribution to human kind. They have the added advantage also that they dont strap bombs onto themselves and their children, or fly planes into buildings.

Once again we see some athiests confused over the meaning od the 'separation' of church and state to mean the 'elimination' of the church. Hence we have cooments like ' it seems the first step is remove all 'religious leaders'. Pell (and anyone else) is clearly entitled in a secular democracy to remind members of the club what the club rules are, and also to ask club members to re consider their membership to the club if they advocate playing a different code.

It is interesting that people don't apply the same logic to the Union movement as they do the Catholic church. The unions now represent a small part of the workforce and have a strong political say largely because they prop up the Labour party

After an open slather on Israel and then Islam, the posters are now attacking the Catholic Church and Islam in one glorious swoop. Who is next?

Perhaps the Anglicans?