I am about to do a looooong thread, an account on how RELIGION has been fighting SCIENCE and failing at every turn.

If you have no interest in learning something you did not know then Mute or whatever...but if you have an inquisitive mind, strap up

From Galileo to Isaac Newton to Charles Darwin, there is no single progressive thinker that did not incur the wrath of the church from the moment Religion took over...some even paid for it with their own lives.

To better illustrate how insidious the Church was in the past, and continues to covertly be today, I will split the science into its branches based on the material I found from my research

THE BACKGROUND

Even before Christianity became a thing, thousands of years before Jesus was supposedly born, ancient Greeks were already outstanding mathematicians, philosophers and scientists.

Empedocles (444 BC) for instance , showed that air is a material substance and not just a void. He experimented with centrifugal force, knew about sex in plants, proposed a theory of evolution...

He even speculated that light travels at a finite speed, and was aware that solar eclipses are caused by alignments of the Sun, Moon and Earth.

Another scholar, Hipparchus accurately determined the distance between Earth and the Moon, estimated the length of the lunar month to within a second, and discovered the precession of the equinoxes.

Heron of Alexandria invented an internal combustion engine. Thales of Miletus, who lived 600yrs before the birth of Jesus, was familiar with static electricity.

By Roman times elementary batteries had been invented, although no uses for them appear to have been exploited

Foundations of many modern sciences were laid by the Greeks from astronomy to botany, and even specialized fields of physics such as optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, and mechanics.

And the evidence of this in our modern world is out in the open. Modern mathematics is full of references to pioneering Greek mathematicians: Euclidean planes, Diophantine equations, the theory of Pappus, etc etc

All these came to an abrupt stop the moment Christianity became widespread in the civilized world. Scientific research became superfluous once the gospel of Jesus Christ was available

To quote an early Christian rule called “De praescnptione haereticorum”

"We have no need of curiosity after Jesus Christ, nor of research after the gospel. When we believe, we desire to believe nothing more. For we believe that there is nothing else that we need to believe".

Basically, the Church was saying that it knew all there was to be known. Christian knowledge was comprehensive and unquestionable. Rational investigation was therefore wrong. Existing learning was not merely unnecessary, but positively harmful.

Theologians, the religious version of 'educated men', were convinced that God had defined strict limits on the knowledge that human beings might acquire, and anything else was "sorcery".

The burning of scholarly books was started by the highly venerated Saint Paul who visited the great city of Ephesus, leading many Christians in burning books (or scrolls) because they were considered to contain sorcery

As the persecution of free thinkers intensified, the little we know of ancient Greek education was salvaged by scholars who had to run East as refugees where they were accommodated by Muslim rulers in centers like Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad and Gondeshapur in Persia.

1. RELIGION VS COSMOLOGY

The church's stand on cosmology was among the first source of their biggest embarrassment. Theologians had successfully found ways to incorporate Astrology with what was in the Bible...that was until Astronomy came into being

For obvious religious reasons, it was necessary for Christian scholars to place Earth at the center of all creation. God had created the Universe for humans, so it was natural that he should build it around them.

The Church doctrine in early times was that our world was flat and circular, and sat immobile at the center of the cosmos. The vault of the sky was a solid structure, a huge dome rather like a gigantic planetarium.

Stars were physically moved around its inner surface by angels

According to the church, the center of this world was Jerusalem, at the exact spot where Jesus was crucified. located in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as illustrated in the diagram below

Anyone who queried church teachings, or even carried out proto-scientific investigations was liable to severe penalties, they called it heresy - i.e the crime of disagreeing with the Church.

But it was cleverly veiled as blasphemy against God

As more evidence started to pile up, theologians changed their stand that the heavens were fully spherical and rotated about a stationary spherical Earth suspended in space.

These heavens were made of transparent crystal, which explained why they could not be seen.

The funny part? The Greeks, through a man called Parmenides, had already established that earth was spherical 2000 years before...2000 whole years.

Pythagoreans had already found proof that Earth was round: they had noted that our planet cast a curved shadow on the surface of the Moon during lunar eclipses. Other Greeks spoke of the opposite side of the world where the Sun shone while it was their night.

Eratosthenes of Alexandria (275-194 BC) calculated Earth's size and arrived at a circumference of 252,000 stades, which is thought to correspond to 39,690 km (24,663 miles)...the correct figure was later established to be 40,0008 km

Anaxagoras of Clazomenœ, born around 500 BC, held the Sun to be an incandescent mass of hot stone — as near to the truth as he could have got. He also said that the Moon shone merely because of the Sun's reflected light, as indeed it does.

Pythagoras himself seems to have speculated in the sixth century BC that Earth went around the Sun, not the Sun around Earth...All these findings by people who preceded Christianity

And the Church's proof that the earth was the center of everything? The book of Joshua 10:12-13.

Just because God had made the sun stand still in the sky that meant that the earth was indeed the center of everything

Martin Luther, the supposed founder of protestants, the guy who broke away from the Church because of their backwardness had this to say in regards to the claim that the sun was the center of the universe

"People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves around the sun. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy, but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.”

And here is where the problem with religion comes in. In any normal disagreement, people argue, each giving their point of view with evidence...with Christianity, there is no room for that...you say something they did not like and you are dead, ask Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno was publicly burned at the stake, his crime? He claimed that the stars were just distant suns and that they would also have their own planets orbiting around them...that was his crime.

Bruno’s death was what prompted Galileo Galilei to also recant his assertion that the earth revolved around the sun. To avoid death, he played along to what the Church wanted and he was banned for life from ever talking about his findings.

Another finding that brought trouble to Galileo was his claim that the moon had mountains and plains, something that had already been hinted at 2000 years earlier by Anaxagoras. Galileo confirmed this through his telescope

Church Theologians refused to look through the telescope to confirm, and the few that did look blamed everything they saw on dirty telescope lenses. They even refused to use another telescope. To them, the moon was as smooth as glass and that was that.

The Church also disputed the existence of the moons of Jupiter. With his telescope, Galileo had seen four moons in 1610, but churchmen said they did not exist. They could not exist because all heavenly bodies rotated around Earth, just as Father God had designed them

The existence of sunspots was another inconvenience for the church. These were first studied seriously from around 1610 by Galileo and a German Jesuit priest called Christoph Scheiner.

The familiar argument was that the Sun, being a heavenly creation of God, must be perfect. Therefore its face could not suffer any form of blemish. The church continued disputing sunspots, even though they could (and can) sometimes be clearly seen with the naked eye around sunset

Comets were another issue. On one hand they were seen as destructible, which meant that they must exist within the imperfect region bounded by the Moon. on the other hand, it was realized in the 17th century that they orbit the Sun, meaning they lied beyond the Moon's orbit.

To smoothen out the church’s contradiction, religious theologians came up with the most convenient explanation for comets.

Wait for it

They said that angels created comets as the need arose and dismantled them when they were no longer needed

By the time Isaac Newton proposed the Theory of Gravitation, the church was horrified...here was an invisible force that acted without any physical contact...the church immediately realized that all the 'miracles' they banked on would be exposed by this

If gravity could explain basic planetary motions, then supernatural explanations might soon become superfluous altogether. Isaac Newton was immediately made public enemy number one because of this.

2. RELIGION VS MATHEMATICS

Yeah. The Church was always ready to fight anything that threatened their control. Believe it or not, mathematics was another invisible enemy that the Church concentrated all its resources to fight against..and lost, spectacularly.

Hii kitu ni mrefu

Mathematics was regarded as tantamount to enquiring into God's mind, and such presumption could not be permitted. Churchmen declared geometry to be the work of the Devil and accused mathematicians of being the authors of all heresies.

Ancient thinkers like Pythagoras were regarded as having been dangerous magicians...but the most tragic thing to ever befall a free thinker was what happened to Hypatia.

Hypatia committed the two sins that the Church could never stand. The first one was that she was a free thinker, and the second crime was that she was a WOMAN

Hypatia was a brilliant professor of mathematics and philosophy. She became head of the Platonic School in Alexandria around the year 400 AD. Her lectures were seen as a major threat by Christians. This is how the church described her

“In those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through Satanic wiles.”

In 415 she was seized by monks and other followers of a local bishop called Cyril. They stripped her and dragged her naked through the streets to a church. They cut off chunks of her flesh with sharp sea-shells until she was dead, and then burned what was left of her body.

Would you like to know what happened to that Cyrill fella? He was given the name "Lover of God" by jubilant Christians. He is now a Saint with feast days on 18th January and 9th June.

When I say religion is a woman's biggest enemy I am not playing around.

The only time the Church was open to using Mathematics was when all mathematical effort was directed towards calculating the date of Easter, a matter that the Church believed to be of the utmost importance

Now, this is where it gets Crazy..The Church banned the use of Arabic numerals, especially when the concept of ZERO (0) was introduced along with Arabic numerals from the East, it was termed as "dangerous Mohammedan magic".

The number Zero was declared satanic

As a result of this fear of a single number, great mathematical books that could have propelled humanity into the future much faster were destroyed because the church could not understand number Zero.

The church reasoned that ZERO was nothing and because God is so perfect, there is no way he would create nothing, therefore, ZERO was nothing more than the creation of the DEVIL to lead man astray.

3. RELIGION VS BIOLOGY & MEDICINE

The last segment based on what I could find...I am still looking into Chemistry too but that is not yet complete.

The first instance where the church started its war with biology was with the Noah’s Ark’s story. It had gradually become difficult to believe that all animals had all fitted into Noah's ark as more and more species were getting discovered.

Questions started coming up.

- Where was all the fodder stored, and what had the carnivores eaten during the voyage?
- How were the tropical animals kept warm, and the Arctic ones cold?
- How did Noah collect them all, and how did they all get back home afterwards?

By the 1830s a respected geologist Charles Lyell had realized that for geology to become a respectable science it was necessary to accept that the forces that had sculpted Earth's surface in the past were just the same as those that operate now.

The problem was that this implied hugely extended timescales. This greatly undermined the long-held belief that the earth and everything in it were 4000 years old. Because of this, Lyell had to resign from his post King's College in London

Enter Charles Darwin and everything that the church stood for was turned upside down. Darwin was struck by a number of facts observed during his voyage which seemed at odds with the view that each species had been individually created.

- The organic life and fossils he studied so intensively and collected with such assiduity seemed littered with clues, odd similarities, and juxtapositions.

Why did closely allied animals replace one another as one traveled southwards? Why did extinct fossil species show such close structural relation to living animals?

Above all, why, in the Galapagos Islands did the finches and the giant tortoises show slight variations from island to island, so that the local inhabitants could always tell from which island a tortoise had come?

The Church's horror was that Darwin and Wallace proposed a mechanism (natural selection) by which new animal species could have come into existence. Worse still, it explained how complex organs — like eyes — could have come about without the need for divine assistance.

This was a severe blow to the Church because, for the first time, there was a credible alternative explanation for the existence of mankind, although Darwin himself was careful to play this down lest he found his head on a pike.

But of course, the Church fought Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

As more fossils kept getting discovered, the church explained them away as

(WAIT FOR IT)

tests of faith planted deliberately by God

Almost immediately, the church realized how dumb that argument was, so it made one last stand against Darwinism. It started an alternate theory called Creationism which placed humans at the pinnacle of life

Then came the biggest shock when it was discovered that more than 98.5 percent of human DNA is shared with chimpanzees, and over 50% with bananas. What followed was denial from the church, it simply refused to listen and covered its ears.

To this day, there are people who still deny a wide range of scientific discoveries, including the evidence that Earth is more than 6,000 years old. To do this it is necessary to reject the validity of carbon dating and similar techniques with other isotopes.

They deny the reality of genetic mutation despite the fact that certain viruses (like the influenza virus) are known to mutate every year.

To finish up, the one thing you can deduce about religion is that it flourishes in an environment where questions are not asked. That is why it is always fighting science. The church used to get away with anything, whatever they said was law

and because there was no technology or knowledge back then to dispute them, coupled by their brutal crushing of anyone who dared speak up, they basically had free reigns to education, shaping opinion for thousands of years

But this is 2020, it takes more effort and energy to remain ignorant...this thread is not meant to turn you into an atheist, we both know you are too afraid of hell...this thread is to simply inform you that shit went down in the past, shit that has shaped your faith

The End