What the single biggest setback to science that's ever occured?

lol
Educate yourself, kid.
richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2006/11/science-and-medieval-christianity.html

>educate yourself
>posts a blog link
bloggo

I think you meant the sand nigger (muslim) invasion of Europe (which caused the Dark Ages in Europe... because lots of people were killed off or enslaved by the sand niggers.)

A blog to a PhD historian, on his topic of expertise, and particularly the topic of his thesis. Considering your rank amateurism, I linked to an article intended for public audiences, instead of a direct link to the thesis itself.

>still used the term """""Dark Ages"""""

You are all autists falling for the worst misnomer in history. The usage of the term is shunned by the historical community for this exact fucking reason

>le + fedora = atheism destroyed
Good shit my man.

Remember when King Henry VIII invented an entire religion so he could fuck his sister?
>shit was so cash

richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2006/11/science-and-medieval-christianity.html

> One might object and say, "Historians no longer believe there were any 'Dark Ages'!" That depends on what you mean by Dark Age. What I mean by that term here is any era in which a considerable amount of knowledge is lost, especially scientific and technical knowledge, while the ruling zeitgeist looks backwards to a time before more enlightened ways of doing things were embraced. The loss of over 90% of all literature, and the corresponding historical and scientific knowledge it contained, is a fact. The abandonment of the highest civilized, technological, historical, and scientific ideals of the early Roman elite, in exchange for more barbarian ways of thinking and doing things, is a fact. And that is, by my definition, a Dark Age.

> Far less was recorded during the middle ages, and far less accurately, than had been the case in classical times, and only a small fraction of what was recorded before was preserved, and even what survived remained known to astonishingly few, and put to good use by even fewer. Again, by my definition, that's a Dark Age. At the same time, the greatest aspirations of the pagans, with their struggling ideals of democracy and human rights, just like their empirical ideals and the scientific spirit they inspired, were chucked out the window in favor of more primitive ideas of "god-given" kings constantly at war over a feudal society, pontificating popes and pulpit-thumping preachers, burning witches and the widespread embrace of hocus pocus, even by the educated elite. That's a Dark Age. And however much one might not like it, we had one.

The answer is reified time, nothing else even comes to mind for me

Unironically capitalism.
I hold the key, I blame the key, made me, defame the mold

Soviet dialetical materialism was also a huge setback but not like capitalism is

why are these such huge set backs in your minds, they seem totally trivial and arbitrary to me

hopefully he'll get a pre-nup

Judges and lawyers can rip it up even if there's only one little little little flaw or the judge doesn't think it's fair.

>Blaming the system and not those who ruined it
You're part of the problem

That guy's talking out his ass and clearly has an agenda. He completely discredits his opinion as a historian by getting basic chronology wrong.

>burning witches and the widespread embrace of hocus pocus, even by the educated elite
Strictly considered heresy in the middle ages to believe in either of those. Indeed, witch burning occurred firmly in the Early Modern Period in the 16th and 17th century, the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment eras. The official stance of the Catholic church had always been that witches weren't a thing, and this stance is seen clearly by the fact that the Roman, Venetian, and Spanish inquisitions never burned witches.

The private ownership of capital leads to science to serve the needs of industry and completely undermines its integrity. It's inherently ethically bankrupt, "the vile maxim" and all that.
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist materialism has really fucked up some ecological systems and suppressed scientific advancement.
I guess the real problem is hierarchal social institutions.
>Blaming the inputs to a system for the systems function
>reducing networks to individual nodes
Wew lad

>I called you a blasphemer not a witch, there's a difference I s-swear!
>muh Spanish Inquisition was totally rational
I think the hate for Chriatianity is overblown, but it's stupid to think that the Dark Ages aren't a thing.

Citations please, for all of it. My preliminary googling strongly suggests otherwise.
Ex:
salon.com/2005/02/01/witch_craze/

Okay well when you put it this way I agree with you. But also if we look at it from that perspective, I'm not sure what you imagine science is. Science has only just been hierarchical society's project to introduce regiment and domination to nature

>amber heart

Nigga, didn't she donate to charity what little she could get from the massive fortune of Johny Depp? She didn't even put him in the state hes in right now, the dude did it by over expending every last cent he has gotten.

The Catholic Church and "global warming"

Catholic here btw

>"No wonder the history of the original European witch hunts of the late 16th and early 17th centuries has become politicized. By the early 1900s, they were seen as outbreaks of hysteria fostered by a sinister and oppressive Catholic Church. Then, about 30 years ago, revisionist historians began to claim that the trials constituted a more systematic campaign by the patriarchal church to extinguish the remnants of goddess-worshiping pre-Christian religions by wiping out the people who preserved them: women, specifically folk healers and midwives.

>Both views are wrong, but as far as popular conception goes, the second has triumphed."

>"There’s more. The Inquisition was not greatly involved in witch burnings; it had its hands full with Protestants and other heretics, whom the church shrewdly perceived to be a far more serious threat to its power. In fact, while the justification for condemning witches was religious, and some religious figures joined in witch hunting campaigns, the trials were not run by churches of any denomination. They were largely held in civil courts and prosecuted by local authorities (some of whom were also religious leaders) as criminal cases."

>"Current popular history holds that the witch hunts were concerted campaigns by a male-dominated church that felt its sway diminished by stubborn pagan and folk traditions that gave too much respect to wise old women. The persecution, the story goes, was designed to stamp out those beliefs. However, when you look at actual cases, the picture is quite the opposite...Against the bishop’s express orders, the mayor and council arrested and tortured several suspects, causing the death of one."

You should probably actually read the things you post, you fucking fedora

unironically oligarchical capitalism occurring at this very moment.

genetic research for example is being suppressed by the medical/pharmaceutical industry.

Could you please explain how that contradicts anything I said or my earlier source said? I'm not seeing it.

The source does say that it was mainstream Catholic belief to allow the punishment, including killings, including burnings, of convicted witches. It also says that this was a common practice in Catholic areas.

Are you reading the text to say that no sanctioned killing of witches happen before 1500? I hope not. The text surely doesn't say that.

Further, I never made the claim that witch burnings was primarily motivated by the church organization, and neither did my first source. Rather, i was just a flippant offhand remark about the state of technological and scientific progress that THE PEOPLE AT LARGE believed such nonsense, and furthermore many of the elite even believed such nonsense. The remark is not a condemnation of the church, and my earlier source goes out of his way to even explain that the Dark Ages wasn't entirely the Catholic church's fault (a position that requires some nuance to explain).

So, no, I think you're the one who needs to slow down a little bit and read more carefully before posting.

this desu
and a lot of waste cleanup places (take Hanford, for instance) rarely do anything substantial or try new techniques when it comes to actually fixing problems because if it works they're out of a job.

1. "World peace" 1990-today
2. Liberalism
3. Jewish nepotism
Take you pick.

The Christian monks are actually the only force that kept any knowledge alive. They manually copied the books in the cellars and went blind from that, carried the books across the continent by foot and saved the book out of wars.

Everything, so a drooling retard on an anime forum can say "HURR CHRISTIANITY IS TO BLAME FOR THE DARK AGES".

in the USA its the republican party, no contest.

The destruction of the library of Alexandria by Julius Ceasar. Then what remained was trashed by a Christian mob who, chillingly, did not agree with "pagan" science and knowledge.

All the amassed knowledge of humanity was stored in that one place, there were no copies, no man had memorized a fraction of its contents. When the Renaissance finally came around they had to go by fucking statues, paintings and letters instead of well-crafted scientific journals.

>The Christian monks are actually the only force that kept any knowledge alive. They manually copied the books in the cellars and went blind from that, carried the books across the continent by foot and saved the book out of wars.

You have a grossly distorted view of history.

Even until the 14th century, in practice, it was criminal to translate the bible into English. The church didn't want people to be able to read, and definitely not read the bible, because then they might be better able to challenge the church.
ralphmag.org/GI/tuchman.html

It was this culture that lasted nearly a thousand years the general public were illiterate, and no general efforts were made to make them literate, and occasionally efforts were made to ensure that they stayed illiterate.

Therefore, the only people who had the literal capability to preserve books by copying them were members of the church. They were the only ones with the literal ability to read, and they were the only ones who received any sort of governmental funding. In other words, the church helped establish a culture where there was no one else with the capability to preserve books, and occasionally used force to ensure that this remained the state of affairs.

So, given this context, you want me to thank the church for preserving a few table scraps? I wish to conjure the usual analogy, where the slave is supposed to be thankful to the masters for literal table scraps thrown to the floor. That is ridiculous. The church is to be blamed for the aforementioned policies of general ignorance and illiteracy, in addition to their willful choices to not preserve more knowledge.

TBC

Further, these monks were often more concerned with preserving arcane and obscure theological tracts instead of scientific knowledge. Just as an example, Archimedes was developing the beginnings of Calculus, more than 1000 years before Newton, and he wrote it down. Some Christian monks had his work, and decided to erase it in order to write some prayer hymns or some shit.
sciencenews.org/article/prayer-archimedes
Can you imagine how much farther science might be today if not for this one act? Imagine having Calculus hundreds of years, even thousands of years, before Newton.

PS:
Muslims also had a very large part in preserving ancient Greek and Roman knowledge during the Christian Dark Ages. Much of our knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome comes from the middle east.

>Even until the 14th century, in practice, it was criminal to translate the bible into English.
For a good reason. Half of it's meaning got lost in translation.

>The church didn't want people to be able to read, and definitely not read the bible, Aha, sure, that's why they opened monastic schools and later universities.

>because then they might be better able to challenge the church.
Why would anyone challenge the church, considering that the Muslims were standing in Europe and beheading everyone in their way?

>It was this culture that lasted nearly a thousand years the general public were illiterate, and no general efforts were made to make them literate
The general public was always illiterate. The only literate ones were the merchants and the nobles.
Just look at you, you are historically illiterate.

Missing the point. Before the church, it was socially and legally permissible to read and write. Under the Catholic church, it was often criminal (more or less) to be able to read and write, unless you were a member of the aristocracy or the church. A ban on English translations of the bible: that's the basic effect and purpose.

Yes, the muslims were good for science. Not so much society.

People like to bash religion but to be fair, only Christianity held science back with such tenacity.

Before the fall of Rome, there used to be libraries, universities, where scientific advancement happened, where debate and discourse happened. That was quite literally gone for a thousand years in Europe, due in large part to the apathy and occasional malicious interference of the church and other political powers. The church was not particularly worse than some earlier pagan religions and city governments, but it was different in that it had a near total control on large swathes of Europe for a whole millenia, where practically zero scientific advancement was made, and where large amounts of scientific knowledge were lost.

>The church was not particularly worse than some earlier pagan religions and city governments, but it was different in that it had a near total control on large swathes of Europe for a whole millenia, where practically zero scientific advancement was made, and where large amounts of scientific knowledge were lost.

But it did create the stability necessary to form powerful nations. As the muslim world collapsed from conquest and internal strife, the rich and powerful christians were free to pursue science at a rate never seen before.

Finno-Korean Hyperwar

>the rich and powerful christians were free to pursue science at a rate never seen before.
You're right, but not in the way that you mean. The Dark Ages are the best testified and recorded 1000 year period where practically zero scientific progress was made. I can agree that in a certain sense, this was entirely unique, and never before seen.

You know I mean afterwards.

Or if you don't then you're waaaay out of your league trying to have a discussion on the subject.

After the Dark Ages? Sure, we saw plenty of scientific advancement after the Dark Ages. I agree to this. Possibly more scientific advancement than at any other point in human history.

>Missing the point. Before the church, it was socially and legally permissible to read and write.
No. The majority of the population were slaves, soldiers and "urban poor", they were all illiterate. The "general public" you are referring too were mostly the middle-class city dwellers.

>Before the fall of Rome, there used to be libraries, universities, where scientific advancement happened, where debate and discourse happened
No, shit. It was all funded by centralized taxation system
You can't have a library, when your barony only has a few thousands serfs, who only bring in enough taxes to keep you lance equipped and trained in case your neighbor decides to fuck you up or your liege goes to war.

And you see how it all came back once centralized empires and kingdoms started appearing again. It has nothing to do with the church, that was busy by taking care of the refugees and the orphans of the never-ending wars.

Nah, that gave us battlefield science, which is generally one of the most important.

I'd say after the Moon missions, when we stopped manned spaceflight and didn't go with manned installations on the moon and Mars.

We had it all good to go with natural evolution of designs and then...we just pulled out.

>The "general public" you are referring too were mostly the middle-class city dwellers.

Which is still a shitton better than under the Catholic church. That's the point.

The point is that under the Catholic church, no such universities formed for a thousand years. No one else took up the mantle. And that's in large part because of the policies of the church and government.

Hell, if you watch Richard Carrier's youtube lecture on ancient science, he gives examples of how Romans knew about the square-cube scaling law, and its applicability to crossbows and ballistae. The Christian monks who copied that shit didn't understand it, and made occasional errors while copying numbers in mathematical tables, rendering them useless.

> than under the Catholic church.
You are acting like the Church was the government. Are you retarded?

Do you know nothing of history? The church had substantial political power. Hell, sometimes during this period, they also had the largest army too. And I'm not just talking about the crusades.

I think it is all of the Tesla's ideas that were just too progressive for their age and got lost.. :/

>the witch-burning based on absurd, ancient superstition was *technically* carried out by municipal, not church, authorities, and the church was too busy burning prots and atheists anyway
Wow. You sure showed him, huh.

>Do you know nothing of history?
Seems like you don't.

> The church had substantial political power.
Not really. You knowledge of history is based on hollywood movies.
Vatican was sacked now and then, most prominently by France and Spain, every king and duke who was anyone had his cardinals in the Vatican and tried to push his candidate into papacy, or even overthrow the current pope and legitimize an anti-pope to further his agenda. The last one you saw with your own eyes by the way, the German Pope was replaced by the current one by the Obama administration (see January CIA leaks). That's classic anti-papacy.
De-facto the Church was a non-profit corporation of charity, military and intelligence, which was used by powers to further their agenda.

I don't see how what you wrote contradicts what i wrote. I largely agree with your description. It was an interesting mix and sharing of political power that we don't see today.

I do want to offer some additional nuance. The church did maintain its own separate court system. The court system of the time was a gigantic mess compared to today. There often wasn't a clear and longlasting hierarchy of courts. The church had their own courts, the king had their own courts, other nobles and counties and towns had their own courts, etc.

It is true that the church had their own courts, which had the full effect of law, which could be used to kill people, and was used to kill people.

>this is what movie stars and billionaires are burning their money and lives on in the goold ole usa

She's a 9/10 at best. Embarrassing.

It contradicts in the way, that Church didn't have anything to do with keeping the masses illiterate or stopping progress.

To educate someone you have to pay for it. That's why only the nobles and the merchants were educated. So the one opening schools and libraries should be the monarchies, not Church.

Church only took upon itself the basic social function of welfare, which collapsed along with the Rome. The Church took care of the orphans, distributed bread to the poor, held festivities, and upheld morals. Basically the functions of the Pontifics and Aediles. Everything else was traditionally done by the government, Including education.
The church had nothing to do with the decline in the theoretical sciences, on the contrary, they at preserved the knowledge of arts and sciences.

I grant that it was not just the church. It was the overall culture of the time, which did not value scientific thinking, reading, and learning.

Again, the church preserved some things, but it was far more concerned about preserving obscure and irrelevant theological texts than actual science, see:
>Hell, if you watch Richard Carrier's youtube lecture on ancient science, he gives examples of how Romans knew about the square-cube scaling law, and its applicability to crossbows and ballistae. The Christian monks who copied that shit didn't understand it, and made occasional errors while copying numbers in mathematical tables, rendering them useless.

>Further, these monks were often more concerned with preserving arcane and obscure theological tracts instead of scientific knowledge. Just as an example, Archimedes was developing the beginnings of Calculus, more than 1000 years before Newton, and he wrote it down. Some Christian monks had his work, and decided to erase it in order to write some prayer hymns or some shit.

>It is true that the church had their own courts, which had the full effect of law, which could be used to kill people, and was used to kill people.
No, the courts could only be used to kill or imprison people inside the realm of the Holy See, as it was a sovereign state.
Everywhere else the king had the say and the best the Church could do is excommunicate. But the kings often traded people for other favors of the church.
Inquisition, everywhere it acted, acted with full consent and authority of the local government. For instance some German states refused the inquisition, others turned to Luther and were burning Catholics instead to send a message.

Dude, that's not how it worked. And I'm also talking about 500 years earlier.

I'm sure that the church had the consent of the local kings when they ran their religious courts, just like the king had the consent of the church to run his own courts. However, it's not like in every instance the religious court needed to seek approval from the king. It was its own independent operation, with its own assumed legitimacy, independent of the king, and the kings went along with this publicly.

>The Christian monks who copied that shit didn't understand it, and made occasional errors while copying numbers in mathematical tables, rendering them useless.
The monks came from the lower classes, had a basic education and didn't have any special training in sciences. They did best they could in the time where war never ended and cannibalism was an everyday thing. They sacrificed themselves to copy scientific documents, even if they failed to copy them accurately or didn't realize the importance of some of them.

>And I'm also talking about 500 years earlier.
So when the Rome just fell? Well, there was no government, so yes, they took the job of the courts too but it was a very strange time, because the barons, dukes and the kings were actually all Roman patricians, who's positions were made hereditary during the 4th century reforms. Technically up until the 9th century it was all branches of Roman government trying to figure out how to rule.
The era ended with Charlemagne and that's when the rulers claimed independence in legislature and the courts.

That is most of the era claimed to be the Dark Ages, roughly 300 AD to 1300 AD. I thought this is what we were talking about. What were you talking about?

I'm talking about 700-1300. Since until the mid 5th century Rome was still a thing, and was slowly crumbling under it's own corruption and liberalism, very much like we are now. And the next ~300 years it was falling apart, but still trying to hold together on paper.
The "dark ages" rightfully started with the Muslim conquest of the southern provinces and the crisis in the Eastern Empire.

>slowly crumbling under [...] liberalism

Oh goddamnit, I'm being trolled by a neo-Nazi from /pol/. Go away to your own board, won't you, please.

By the way if you look into the reforms of the 2-4 centuries, especially the financial ones, you will see how Church had nothing to do with it and everything scientific got defunded to keep the legions happy and pretend Rome stronk, so the vassalized Germanic tribes don't start a revolution.

It is true tho. It's a vicious cycle of empires. Liberalism is one of the traits.

If you compare Valens, who let a massive number Visigoth refugees cross Danube and settle into the empire (which later led to massive wars and them sacking Rome) to Caesar, who slaughtered 100,000 Germanic refugees, only because he was getting late to sail to Britain, and didn't have to talk to them, it becomes apparent.

>liberalism
Rome didn't have a bourgeoisie

What? Rome was ran by the bourgeoisie. As you remember, the majority of people in the empire were slaves.

Yes, I'll agree. My first source says as much as well. It wasn't just the church, and it's wrong to blame Christianity as being the sole cause. Christianity was at fault, and it was generally indifferent to hostile to scientific progress, but it was more than just the literal church organization, and it was more than just Christianity too.

Eh no it was slaveowners and landowners
If your "means of production" are free gifts of nature, agricultural land and privately owned people you're not bourgeois

I'm saying the the Church no only didn't have anything to do with it, it helped salvage what was salvageable. If you consider that all the research up until renaissance was done by the church, it's a lot. Then the Church had to do the healthcare during the plagues, oversee basic education and even the propaganda. Basically the Church had to do every administrative function of the state, except the legislature, because the rulers were preoccupied with preparing for wars and repairing the aftermath of wars.
All that for 10% taxes they were getting. I think the indulgence trade was a direct result of them being stretched too thin.

Besides as we know the more functions the government oversees, the less effective and more corrupt it gets.

>If you consider that all the research up until renaissance was done by the church, it's a lot.
What scientific research? There was precisely zero scientific research. That's part of why it's called a Dark Ages, again circa 300 AD to 1200 AD. Absolutely no scientific nor technological nor engineering advances of any kind, and a great loss of existing scientific knowledge.

There was fabulous stuff going on before that, such as Galen, Archimedes, Ptolemy, etc. We were making great advances in mathematics, medicine and biology, physics, engineering, etc.

>Eh no it was slaveowners and landowners
Every free citizen with some money was also a slave owner. Due to the permanent conquest the slave market was so oversaturated you could get a slave for a denarius.

By the way the corporations were a thing after the Punic wars, due to the price drop on slaves the merchant collectives and rich families bought out all the land and worked it with slave labor. The unlanded people moved to the cities and formed a large caste of "urban poor", for whom later a welfare system was installed and they were used for political campaigns for the promises of more gibs, similar to the modern American negroes.

>Uses the word "negro"
>Expects to be taken seriously
I curse thee vampire, away!

What's wrong with that word?

I curse thee vampire, away!

>Every free citizen with some money was also a slave owner.
I mean, yeah. They had a ruling class in the usual sense, and the contrast was immense. Just no bourgeoisie.

Niggers. Is that better?

Well, are mills, smithies and sawmills means of production? Because literally everything was ran by slaves.
Of course they had bourgeoisie.

And by the way land is a mean of production too, according to the Marxist theory you're referring to it should belong to the farmers working the land, not to the land owners.

Hippies and socialism. Imperialism and war would have landed us in Space already.

Science only happens in a free society, where society values independent thinking, critical thinking, free expression, and truth over dogma. Those values are not compatible with imperial dictatorships. That's the point. Any sort of religion is an impediment, and any sort of dictator is an impediment (because they'll want to squash those sorts of values).

>Science only happens in a free society, where society values independent thinking, critical thinking, free expression, and truth over dogma.
USSR and Hitler's Germany would like to have a word with you.
It's actually quite the opposite, the more totalitarian the government, the more progress occurs.

Explain how North Korea is developing systems to launch nuclear weapons, then?

Science grows on necessity for survival. Look at the leaps of progress we made in technology in WW2. Global warming will be the best thing to speed up the singularity, only in the face of danger does motivation kick in, just like grinding up non stop a day before the final exam.

You might see that for a short period of time, but it's not stable. In most dictatorships, you see the opposite.
svt.ntnu.no/iss/Indra.de.Soysa/POL3503H05/olson.pdf

Because someone else worked out the basic idea before them, and they are squandering the resources of an entire fucking country. Highly inefficient use of resources.

>Because someone else worked out the basic idea before them, and they are squandering the resources of an entire fucking country. Highly inefficient use of resources.

They are still making progress, so Science is definitely happening. Whether it's efficient or not, it's another point entirely. Do not move goalposts, buddy. You do not need a free society for Science to progress.

>In most dictatorships, you see the opposite.
Actually no, you see the same. Because nothing stimulates more that "get that thing into space or we will kill your family".

You can see this in North Korea, a country in a complete economic isolation under total trade embargo managed to have a successful nuclear program, a space program and is now testing a long range ICBM.

>Whether it's efficient or not, it's another point entirely.
No, that's the entire fucking point. The earlier claim was that progress is made faster under extreme dictatorship or something, and North Korea is definitely not a fucking example of that.

North Korea is a perfect example of it see They even have their own computers with their own processor architecture. No free country of their size and population has achieved the same technologically, ever.

>The earlier claim was that progress is made faster under extreme dictatorship or something
>or something

>>>>Hippies and socialism. Imperialism and war would have landed us in Space already.

This claim clearly indicates Scientific progress is made in times of necessity and war. Get some reading comprehension skillz.

Dude. It's not like they invented that shit. They got it off the internet. That's not scientific advancement. It barely even qualifies as repeating the engineering advancements of others.

No, it was "imperialism and war". You just ignored half of it.

I'll grant that war is often a big cause for innovation - for the winner's side anyway. Still, I suspect you see only practical engineering advancements, and very little pure math and pure science advancements, for obvious reasons, and pure math and pure science advancements are very important for tomorrow's technological advancements.

>They got it off the internet.
Yes, there is a lot information on the internet about enriching uranium, building intercontinental ballistic missiles or starting a silicon foundry.

As I said, practically no scientific advancements, and pisspoor repeating of engineering advancements of others with lots of guidance and help.

Most countries can't even do that, with free trade, international banking and massive help.

I think it's very clear to everyone here, that you're just talking out of your butthole, Mr ''Scientist''.