IFeelFree wrote:With our modern scientific knowledge and the discrediting of religion, are we any more enlightened today?
That would depend upon what one meant by enlightened. As recently as one hundred years ago, one could expect that at least half of one's children would die (as a statistical average) before the end of childhood, and most likely in infancy. Tuberculosis was rampant and claimed the high and the low. There is a very simple reason for this--horseshit (something with which you should be very familiar, given the amount you spread around with your "higher consciousness" conceit and your "enlightenment" song and dance).
The single factor which changed all of this, and changed it radically in a generation was the automobile. Horse manure in the streets of every town and city bred flies in numbers you are likely incapable of conceiving (even if you have visited Asia, as i have, you still would have no conception of the number of flies, since they use automobiles in Asia, too). Those flies were the vectors of the diseases which ravaged the children of the world in a way that modern famines have never done. In 1880, the population of the United States was about 60,000,000. This meant that from 3- to 5,000,000 children died each year, including the children of newly arrived immigrant families--Rwanda, with 800,000 killed in two months time just manages to match this death rate. Rwanda was the most horrific slaughter of modern times, since the Nazi holocaust, and yet it only manages to match the casual death rate of children in the United States a century earlier, and can't even approach the casual death rate of children world wide in the 1880s.
Additionally, towns and cities were all the homes of livery stables and urban private stables and paddocks. The horse was ubiquitous, and the horse is, in addition to producer of manure, a vector for tuberculosis. The poet John Keats, who, along with his sister, died of tuberculosis, grew up in relatively luxurious quarters--above an urban livery stable which his father managed. His father died when he was nine, and his mother died six years later--of tuberculosis. What changed all of that, removed the manure of literally tens of millions of horses from the streets of the cities of the "industrialized world" and the urban stables was the automobile. For all that one may allege against automobiles, the positive effect of the proliferation of automobiles on public health is more dramatic than any single other event in history.
I thought about telling the story of Dr. John Snow, but suffice it to say that an understanding of the basic principles of epidemiology, and the application of the then new discipline of demographic statistics allowed Dr. Snow and the "city fathers" of southern London to identify contaminated water as the vector of cholera (and as was soon learned, a host of other septic diseases) without reference to a germ-theory of epidemiology. I could also rehearse for you the advances in modern agriculture, and even how industrial poisons as powerful as DDT can benefit mankind, if properly used--in the case of the latter, to attack the vector of malaria.
While you sit at home contemplating your navel, you do so with access to high quality fresh food, high quality medical care, high quality personal or public transportation--all of which was made possible by the advancements derived from scientific research. You can bleat to your heart's content about spiritual enlightenment and the "benefits" of religion, the likely truth is that you'd have been lucky to have survived your childhood had you been born two hundred years earlier. For this inestimable benefit to us all (yes, that was sarcasm), there is no good reason to thank the priest or the guru. In case you missed the point, even if you had been born only a hundred years earlier, the odds are good that you wouldn't have been any more enlightened--the odds were that you'd have been dead long before you could have attained your "enlightenment."
