My Objection to Religion

I still see a lot of fanatical Christians who would murder and mutilate you because you aren't Christian. They really don't get the core message of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" as well as Christ's message "Judge not lest ye be judged." They seem to think some of that doesn't apply when they deal with nonbelievers.

A lot of the more fanatical Christians may choose to ignore Christ and live by what the Old Testament says. In comparison with the NT, the OT really is calling for the blood of everyone who isn't a hardcore believer.

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but mostly what the bible says is happening right now which is a strong influence with religions.

Thanks to Religion, Science has had to take a course that not only fits in with the Christian beliefs, but a course that is dictated by the Christian Church.

Now I'm going purely off European and English History here (America was naught but a myth in these times) - first take the Greeks. They were advanced, they even allowed dissection. No qualms there. Then the Romans; pretty much the same... until Christianity popped up.

I don't expect people to know who he is, but Claudius Galen was to medicine as Aristotle and Hippocrates are. He wrote so much on the subject, contributed by the donkey-drawn wagon load. But, ultimately, he ideas were wrong.

The Roman Empire collapses, Europe (and the known world at the time) sink into the Dark Ages, Religion takes hold. Yet in Asia, Islam is prevailing, and with it come some of the most advanced scientific minds the world had seen. Sure, they took Galen's ideas and believed them (same with the ideas of the old Greek philosophers), but they didn't take them on as the standard. Rather they took them and improved them.

Yada yada, Crusades. Christians come along, kill the "devils". Sack cities, burn great libraries to the ground, butcher the genii. And salvage the oild works of Galen. Whoop-di-doo. The Christian Church decides that these ideas are correct, that they fit in with their beliefs. Thanks to this religion, which took these books and writings, and preserved them (nice thing to do, though) the teachings were taught in medical schools, out of the books, until Andreas Vesalius, William Harvery and Ambroise Pare come along and cause an uproar by not only speaking out against Galen, but by proving him wrong (yes, Paracelsus was doing this a hundred years earlier, but he was a crackpot German who got pissed in pubs with the peasants for the crack of it). Well over a thousand years after Galen died, his teachings were finally making way for something else... but not until the Church had had its way.

Sorry for the brief course in the History of Medicine, but throughout the annals of time Religion (namely the Catholic Church) has supressed science to suit it's own needs. Even now it opposes ground-breaking research on stem cells and cloning, simply on age-old principles.

In this day and age there should be no need for Religion to be as deep-rooted in society as it is. Its influence is still far too much - War on Terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, Cloning=no-no, Stem Cell Research is bad.

And I've forgotten what the original point was... nevermind.