Ro wrote,

"Personally, I think Indonesia is one of the great unsung success stories of the world..."

If you're sufficiently selective you can find good things to say about Nazi Germany. They had great environmental protection laws for example. They were "green" before "green" was fashionable.

Indonesia is not a country. It is the Javanese Empire.

The Aborigines should be thankful that Europeans got here before the Javanese.

It is true of early Islamic history concerning the virtual capture of the whole of the Middle East that it had previously come under the beneficial influence of Golden Greek reasoning from the campaigns of Alexander the Great.

Thus in what is now Iraq and in what is now Iran, as well as in Egypt, the Muslim invaders took great interest in the accumulated scientific knowledge for over three hundred years, even passing it on to the barbarian West through the French monk Peter Abelard, and later St Thomas Aquinas.

Further it is said that scientific reasoning by making Christian faith more worldly magically changed the former barbarian West into what it is today.

Some philosophers say it has been the Germanic arrogance of the West so primed up by the gifting of scientific reasoning through the Muslims that has caused the Muslims to throw out scientific reasoning and sink into their own Dark Age believing that the after life is superior to earthly life.

It is so interesting that an Iranian judge has talked about an Islamic future with democratic features superior to the Western Way, or what she calls the American Way.

bushbred.
Your understanding of the development of Western thought and its influence upon early Christianity is totally wrong. Early Christianity was formulated during the period of a strong Greek culture in Israel from its strong Hebrew experience and heritage.

Western intellectual thinking had nothing to do with Islam. The establishment of Iranian intellectual thinking had developed long before Islam. Their science was established with polytheistic intellectual thinking. The influence of Islam (meaning the religion of the Iranian God Allah under their 600AD prophet Mohamet) had no effect upon the Biblical teachings of Christianity. It did have an effect upon some thinking in the territories controlled by the Roman Church.

Because in the rise of Roman Empire Church it had incorporated pagan practises into its thinking caused, what was is commonly called a Christian Empire, into a period of intellectual decline called the dark ages.

The incorporation of pagan practises into the Roman Church from the Middle Eastern Empires is what took it into the intellectual dark ages. The great intellectuals of the period from 300 BC to 300 AD were predominatly Greek who influenced Western logic and culture

To add to Philo's comments:

More than a thousand years before the birth of Christ Babylonians astronomers had made some astonishing discoveries. For example they had correctly worked out that 235 lunar months equalled 19 solar years. To bring the lunar and solar calendars into synchrony the Babylonian calendar had seven leap months every 19 years.

The Babylonian calendar lives on as the Hebrew calendar. Even the names are derivative. The Hebrew month of Tishri derives from the Babylonian month, Tashritu.

Remember, the Babylonians did all this with naked eye astronomy and water clocks!

So accurate were the Babylonian observations that centuries later Hipparchus was able to use them to deduce the precession of the equinoxes.

This millennia long tradition of astronomy was extinguished in about 1580 when the great observatory of Taqi al-Din was destroyed on orders of the Mufti of Istanbul. To quote Bernard Lewis "What went wrong?"

"This observatory had many predecessors in the lands of Islam; it had no successors until the age of modernisation."

I could provide many more examples. Far from fostering scientific enquiry, Islam destroyed it.

The truth is that by the time the ancient texts were recovered from Muslims European science had already begun to surpass them thanks to the work of people such as the Venerable Bede and Roger Burridan. Scientific progress is not about the reverence for ancient writings; it is about free spirits undertaking new lines of enquiry.

I think it about time we retired the politically correct myth of Muslim "scholars" rescuing Western Civilisation.

It's a load of codswallop

stevenlmeyer,
Thanks steven!

"think it about time we retired the politically correct myth of Muslim "scholars" rescuing Western Civilisation. It's a load of codswallop."

Unfortunately we have this missreprersentation of history taught in our NSW universities as fact. The current faculty of teachers are mostly Muslim

Philo wrote:

"The current faculty of teachers are mostly Muslim"

Well for their own good remind them to wash their noses out thrice if they are awakened from sleep. (See Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 54, Number 516)

On a more serious note, Philo, why not set up a blog. Let the whole world see what you're being taught. Name names. Expose the equine fertiliser.

BUT

Make quite sure YOU are being accurate