//the thing with my religion is that while it claims an exclusive understanding of what is true, it allows individuals free will. It doesn't insist that you believe.//

To celebrate the release of 'American Gods' on TV (Yay!!), I've decided to start worshipping the Norse pantheon. It claims an exclusive understanding of what is true, including the bit about the gods slaying the giant Ymir and creating the earthly realm from his remains. A far more satisfying and plausible tale than Yahweh just pulling it out of his fundament.

It doesn't insist that you believe, either: Ragnarok will come whether you believe or not.

Unfortunately, my religion did not create the modern world which gives us all so many benefits, because it's all just fairytales and superstition. No, it was science that created the modern world.

Still, it's nice to have some pleasant stories to go along with your science and it doesn't really hurt anyone as long as you remember that they are just stories.

Hi Toni, for Christians what you just posted is all superstitious buck, they on the other hand have the fair dinkum lowdown on all this twaddle including Adam and Eve, Noah and the six dwarfs, sorry got it wrong, seven dwarfs forgot Daffy.

I considered Graham an intelligent person, wouldn't run this web site if he wasn't but to say "And my religion has created the modern world which gives us all so many benefits". A bit like Einstein ditching his 'Theory of Relativity' in favor of his 'Theory of Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden', we would lock him up.

Paul1405,

You just don't understand what Graham meant by that. And you would not want to find out.

The problem you and some ors have is that you exist in your own bubble and get your information from the far leftist echo chamber which is you censoring your own sources of information to an already closed mind.

Worse, Mr Google and ors have implemented preferential searches, which compound the effect.

The cave already exists for the far leftist Greens and sadly they know and welcome their gaoler. Mental rigidity and hello there to increased risk of dementia. Your choice and all to get your jollies confirming your deep prejudices against 'Whites' from the UK and Europe. You'd irrationally hate the US with a passion too though.

While I might not always agree with Christianity or other religions, although Christianity with a blend of Buddhism seems reasonable (there is considerable flexibility, but not in your mind of course, not if your schoolboy bias is to be fed), I am not inclined to be judgemental about their choices for attempting transcendency in their lives.

If a concept of God helps, great and I am sure that the Christian and most other congregations do a lot of good for the good citizens and through compassionate outreach for others, such as amateur funnyman yourself. BTW, how is Mr T? Just as vocal in enthusiastically confirming your view and going several hundred metres further as usual? How comforting for you, no angst there at all.

and the god deniers believe we are evolving to be more clever. Pleeeeease!

Hi Paul,

That was Cook Islands 'Maori'. When we lived in Auckland around 1970, I went a bit crazy and reversed Savage's 'Cook Islands Maori-English Dictionary' to English-Cook Islands Maori - pen and paper in these days - and sent it off to the Crocombes at the USP.

You might be over-reacting to the false notion that Graham is suggesting that modern knowledge springs directly from the pages of the Bible: I don't think for a moment that Graham is suggesting that. Instead, if you think (from, say, Marx's point of view) that ideas spring originally, way back, hundreds of years ago, from that conflict between bitter experience and existing ideologies, to produce 'better' interpretations of reality, over and over again as experience tests those new ideas - in Marx's (well, Aristotle's really) process of thesis - antithesis - synthesis.

That long and bitter struggle may well have been against conventional Christian beliefs, but its origins were embedded in them. One factor that helped all those bitterly-fought processes along was the divided political nature of Europe, whereby thinkers could test their hypotheses in their own circumstances, and compare those of others in different circumstances - there was no single over-arching imperialist power (such as afflicted the Muslim world for so long), especially once the power of the Catholic Church was broken in the early sixteenth century.

Not that the established powers, Church and State, didn't try to violently suppress new ideas with which they disagreed - it would be no fun being drawn and quartered. But ideas are difficult to suppress and destroy, so out of all those difficulties, over hundreds of years, modern science was born and eventually thrived. But it must have been touch and go, as the absence of any advanced science in Muslim societies attests: imperialism and reaction often do work quite effectively, and efficiently.

Of course, the printing press helped all that along as well: knowledge could be translated and shared across Europe. The first printing press in the Muslim world was set up in Constantinople in 1824, 400 years after Gutenberg.

Cheers,

Joe

This may be of interest:

http://www.muslimheritage.com/article/muslim-printing-gutenberg