Atheists are Polytheists

I know this is pointless, however--Islam only began to spread after the death of the prophet in the mid-7th century. A thousand years later would be the mid-17th century, and only an idiot ignorant of history would attempt to claim that Islam was "ahead" of the west in science at any time after the 13th century. In fact, much of the advantage Islam enjoyed from the late Caliphate to the rise of the Osmanli empire derived from their discovery of the intellectual wealth of the Hellenistic world, and from being a sort of intellectual entrepot between India and China in the East, and the West.

Even before the Crusades began, the Muslim world (which never was a coherent empire) had begun to fragment badly. The Seljuk Turks had overrun the Caliphate in the late 10th and early 11th centuries, and almost immediately began fighting amongst themselves for control of the puppet Caliph, and to attempt to dominate the middle east.

What hurried the decline along was the Mongol invasion in the 13th century. Thereafter, the only remaining power was that of the Mamluks (literally meaning "the owned," they were military slaves of the Turks, largely Caucasian in origin, who had taken over Egypt with the death of the last Ayyubid ruler). Into that power vacuum stepped Ertugrul and then his son Osman, who founded what became known as the Ottoman Empire. (The Arabs called Osman Uttuman, and the French corrupted that into Ottoman.)

The Seljuks had been bad enough, but did have the sense to see the value of the adopted and adapted Hellenistic culture of the Caliphate. The Osmanli Turks were purely interested in military matters, had no interest in culture, and although they left competent administrators in place when they conquered, the were not willing to spend anything on research or exploration unless it had a starkly obvious and immediate military value. Great Sultans like Murad and Suleiman the Magnificent were the exceptions that proved the rule the Osmanli Sultans were only intersted in military prowess, murdering any potential rivals and a sybaritic lifestyle within the harem.

There is, or should be no mystery about the decline of culture in the Islamic world. They never were innovators, although some were quick enough to see the value in the cultures they overran. Science and knowledge flourished in the middle east in the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th centuries despite Islam, just as knowledge was later to flourish in Europe despite Christianity rather than because of it.

Bill knows about as much about history, or less, than my dog.

Okay, whatever the historical details may be, the point remains that current statements like...



...are transparently suggestive of intellectual indolence. Hence the OP claim of "faith" in general and "Islamic faith" in particular, as occupying some sort of cultural high ground is ludicrous. In any case, casual observation of Muslims who have emigrated to the West suggests they have done so for material gain at the risk of spiritual contamination. I therefore interpret the thesis here about atheists as hypocritical.

As late as the 1600's the Western church was suppressing science in the name of religion in a manner and to a degree that the countries under Islam was not guilty of.

As i said, my dog knows more about history than you do.

I more or less agree with this--as i've already indicated. However, people who migrate in the world rarely have religious confession as an object. The thesis here, however, is not hypocritcal, it is delusional, born of intellectual hebetude.

You might ask your bright dog about Galileo and the Western Church in the 1600s or about Baghdad being the scientific center of the human race for a period of roughly three hundreds years.

Galileo Galilei was employed by and lived in the Venetian Republic. When the church condemned his theories (actually the heliocentrism of Copernicus), he was warned by friends in the Venetian Republic not to either promote heliocentrism, nor to leave the Republic. In defiance of that good advice, he went to Rome to argue for the Copernican thesis. He then settled near Florence in Tuscany. For more than 16 years, he lead a quiet life, and was left alone by the church. Then, one of his original defenders became the Pope Urban VII, and Galileo was finally hauled before the Inquistion and condemned. He lived another nine years.

Copernicus was attacked by members of the church, but he lived in Germany at the time of the Protestant Reformation. He was never threatened with the Inquisition, because there no longer was an Office of the Inquisition in Germany. Galileo would have been safe from that prosecution if he had stayed in Venice and never gone to Rome, nor settled near Florence. The writ of the church did not run any further than the Spanish troops who controlled the Romagna.

To suggest that Baghdad was ever "the scientific center of the human race" is an absurdity. The knowledge which was preserved in the middle east was the antiquities of the Greeks, and it survived because it was a part of the Hellenistic culture which lingered there long after the Arab conquest. The texts which revolutionized western thought were all available in western Europe, but they were buried in monastic libraries, and were only "re-discovered" because, to a lesser extent the Crusades, and to a greater extent the reconquista of the Iberian peninsula made them known anew. If there ever were such a "scientific center" in the west, it was in Andalusia before and durring the reconquista.

In the Muslim world, as in the Christian world, universities were places of religious study and dispute. "Scientific" learning was not propagated in Muslim universities any more than in Christian universities. At the time of the Mongol invasion of the middle east, the authority of the church in Europe was eroding. The Avignon papacy followed by the Great Schism destroyed what little authority the church had ever had (it was never as strong as people seem to believe). By the time the papacy was re-united and restored to Rome, church authority had almost disappeared in western and northern Europe. The church could only enforce its point of view in a part of the Italian peninsula, and that was only because of Rodrigo Borgia (a Spaniard), Pope Alexander VI and his sons Juan and Cesare, who conquered or cowed the Romagna. Rodrigo became Pope in the same year as the completion of the Reconquista in Spain, and the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, Carlos, was subsequently elected (through lavish bribery) the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The French and the Spanish fought over northern Italy, with the great general Cordoba finally defeating Francis I. Ultramontane Catholics in France fell out of favor, Martin Luther soon spread his reformation, and Henry VIII eventually defied the church. The freedom to study subjects which might have fallen afoul of the Office of the Inquisition in previous centuries was assured because the church had no authority.

Things are never so simplistic as Bill would like us to believe.

Hebetude...certainly.....but perhaps also psychological denial of their willingness to indulge in material acquisition and behavioural freedom. Indeed such cognitive dissonance might be cited as one of the causes of violence in would be martyrs. (though I have no intention of substantiating such a thesis).

I note that we have yet to hear from a Muslim on this forum who has the intellectual integrity to admit that is is possible to be "moral and ethical" without believing in God or an afterlife. It does not seem to occur to them that "good actions" with no promise of "a reward" are quite normal and on reflection kick religious altruism into spiritual oblivion.

You won't find too many christians who are willing to acknowledge that, either. In fact, there are some notorious cases of people at this forum who allege that atheists (and they are just as self-seving in their definitions of atheist as is the author of this thread) can have no basis for moral behavior--and these are people whose dedication to religious doctrine is suspect or stated by them to be non-existent.

By the way, for whatever one may allege about learning in the Muslim world a thousand years ago, the great schools of the middle ages were located in those areas in which the "great religions" intersected. In Andalusia (what we would call southern Spain) Muslims, Christians and Jews all studied and taught together. Salamanca was accounted by the bigot Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) as one of the four great universities of the world (by which he meant Europe). At Salerno, south of Naples, there was a great university and the only advanced medical school in Europe. Salerno was a part of the Kingdom of Naples, which had formerly been a part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and was the other great convergence of the three "great religions." The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was also the King of the Two Sicilies and founded a university at Naples. He tolerated Muslims in his kingdom (which aided trade) as well as Jews, and he employed middle eastern Jews to translate the great works of the Hellenistic and Classical Greek periods and the works of Arab scholars. He made that university an athenaeum, dedicated not just to learning on the part of its students and staff, but of the dissemination of knowledge. He was in particular interested in finding and translating scientific works.

The greatest centers of learning in the world of Europe and the middle east in the middle ages were those places were the greatest tolerance was shown.

"Tolerance" and "intellectual flexibility" are close partners.

In one statement you say that it is "possible" to be moral and ethical sans belief in God. In the very next sentence, that it is "normal". There is a little space between the two estimations, no? I can't help but wonder by what standards you measure, especially since you submit that one kind of moral behavior "kicks" the other into "spiritual oblivion".

A simple stylistic device. The first sentence places the reader in the mind of the theist who resists "the possibility". The second sentence zooms the reader out of that parochial cave into the "real world". The third moves even further out to the "transcendent position" of suggesting that "spirituality" must necessarily be divorced from reward or coercion.

Strange is it not that I had not seen any study that the prison population is full of evil non god fearing atheists.

Try googling "incarceration and religion". It looks quite interesting.

http://holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm

The results of the Christians vs atheists
in prison investigation.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Rod Swift
I have expanded the figures to provide a % of the total respondents, and I have ranked them (they were presented to me alphabetically). These stats were obtained from their computer on 5 March 1997.


Dear Mr. Swift:

The Federal Bureau of Prisons does have statistics on religious
affiliations of inmates. The following are total number of
inmates per religion category:

Response Number %
---------------------------- --------
Catholic 29267 39.164%
Protestant 26162 35.008%
Muslim 5435 7.273%
American Indian 2408 3.222%
Nation 1734 2.320%
Rasta 1485 1.987%
Jewish 1325 1.773%
Church of Christ 1303 1.744%
Pentecostal 1093 1.463%
Moorish 1066 1.426%
Buddhist 882 1.180%
Jehovah Witness 665 0.890%
Adventist 621 0.831%
Orthodox 375 0.502%
Mormon 298 0.399%
Scientology 190 0.254%
Atheist 156 0.209%
Hindu 119 0.159%
Santeria 117 0.157%
Sikh 14 0.019%
Bahai 9 0.012%
Krishna 7 0.009%
---------------------------- --------
Total Known Responses 74731 100.001% (rounding to 3 digits does this)

Unknown/No Answer 18381
----------------------------
Total Convicted 93112 80.259% (74731) prisoners' religion is known.

Held in Custody 3856 (not surveyed due to temporary custody)
----------------------------
Total In Prisons 96968


I hope that this information is helpful to you.

Sincerely,

Denise Golumbaski
Research Analyst
Federal Bureau of Prisons



Now, let's just deal with the nasty Christian types, no?

Catholic 29267 39.164%
Protestant 26162 35.008%
Rasta 1485 1.987%
Jewish 1325 1.773%
Church of Christ 1303 1.744%
Pentecostal 1093 1.463%
Jehovah Witness 665 0.890%
Adventist 621 0.831%
Orthodox 375 0.502%
Mormon 298 0.399%

Judeo-Christian Total 62594 83.761% (of the 74731 total responses)
Total Known Responses 74731

Not unexpected as a result. Note that atheists, being a moderate proportion of the USA population (about 8-16%) are disproportionately less in the prison populations (0.21%).
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Nice point ! We must remember however that "finding religion" tends to be a popular move by long term inmates whether for reasons of "privilege earning" or peace of mind. This is likely to have some effect on the figures.

But with respect to this thread, we might note with interest that Muslims make up only 0.8% of the US population, but over 7% of the prison population. This is the inverse of the atheist situation !

Ok. I don't agree with you, but I understand what you wrote.

See, that's where you go wrong. Even though our lives serve no objective purpose, we can still make our own, personal purposes for them. At least in my experience, they do a perfectly fine job at imbuing my life with a sense of motivation, belonging, and wonder. That's true even though I don't worship those purposes, or some deities personifying them.

So God was invented just to justify your existence? Sounds about right.