The contribution of the church to civilization

Bertrand Russel in his book Why I Am Not Christian states that the church has contributed to the civilization of mankind.
When the Quakers first broke away from the Methodist church, they came up with this radical notion of the equality of mankind and therefore slavery was wrong.
Sylvester Graham was a Presbyterian Minister who for a while was highly influential. He claimed all human ailments were caused my masturbation. Most of his ideas were later abandoned because they did not work. He was mentally ill.

 

Human ailments caused your masturbation?

Nice fetish.

 

lots of contributions, as many bad as good. as many good as bad. net effect negligible, save for a lot of nonsense names and words, describing principally our own ignorance.

 

What about Bishop James Pike who was an early critic of the Vietnam war,called for ordination of women and acceptance of LGBT within the church?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Pike

 

"the church" like "humanity" has this little problem, with its collective ego.
some descenting sect of christianity did not invent the concept of equality.
it was around long before western europe ever invaded the western hemisphere.
and it was not all that uncommon in either place before that time either. it simply wasn't inshrined in some form of doctrine or dogma, but was instead, none the less, a major element of all life, not lived in ignorance of the dependence of all life, on the complex inter-relationship, of all other life.

 

Anyone really interested in this question should read The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Modern civilization is the direct result of the morality introduced by John Calvin.

 

many, if not all, beliefs, and most likely all of them in some way and to some degree, have contributed both positively and negatively, to humanity's persuit of civilization. a goal not unreated to maturity and even sanity. humanity as a species, has a very long way to yet to go before achieving.

 

and the church is some temporary help for those who fail in the enlightenment of living without a form of constituting rules into laws. One has babies, one has nature to breath, and one has currency to supply for the welfare as well as profitable work.

This I see is different than Sartre's freedom live for survival. Ha..ah.

 

They put up some nice buildings. A lot of very fine art was commissioned. Also some great music was written.

 

The medieval church and monasteries helped spreading and developing agriculture in Europe. They also preserved a lot of roman and greek history in their libraries. Our insights in roman and greek history were later on expanded when the knowledge from the arabic libraries was shared.

 

The translation of those Arabic texts was probably the biggest contribution to greater civilization that Christian church ever gave us.

Not just a little ironic

 

Hard to measure, and not sure at all. But they were definately of great use to our civilization(s)

 

Man,,A lot of people hope this guy was wrong,huh??

 

He was wrong about everything. He had no ideas of any merit what so ever.

 

It's evolution of intelligence you can't skip god and what follows.

 

All determinations are Negations. Is the church representative of the negativity of civilization, or is the church telling after-all how God is the light against the Negativity of Civilization? Seriously, I don't have the answer. Maybe the pope does.

 

The church has made us believe that individual lives can go on forever. In a civilized world the dying pass on to some kind of total being of Conscience in a wholly unpredictable way. But what is the physical essence for these kinds of events? The church has no conscience itself to offend us for any judgments we might make. They claim to justify us a Soul for that thing or idea. We at making judgments become to understand how living goes on and dying can happen, but the Soul overwhelms each one of us to catch the Essence at the defined moment Now.

So empirically what is there to say or refer to about the Church, say the Catholic Church? The nature of the world comes appearing before us. For all our intelligence; the church can offer the advice that really we are stupid.