response 234 of 293:

Dec 18 03:22 UTC 2003

I read an interesting book recently about how the Chinese, in 1421-1423, built
a huge fleet of ships and sailed over the entire world, planting colonies in
the Americas, discovering Antarctica, etc.  They decided after that not to
explore any more because there was a disastrous fire which led them to believe
that the gods did not want them to do so.  
The Chinese ships were much more advanced than those of the Spanish or
Portuguese, who got hold of some copies of copies of the Chinese maps before
they set sail to the west.  It was even claimed that C. Columbus used a faked
map to show that he could reach China by sailing west, and that he really knew
there was other land in the way.  The faked map was made by pasting together
sheets of one based on a Chinese map and altering a few of them.  

The Chinese sailors did not get scurvy because they sprouted beans along the
way.

response 236 of 293:

Dec 18 06:00 UTC 2003

Europe also gathered science and technology from other corners of the
world with other religions (under which, of course, those inventions were
invented).  These include the abacus, gunpowder, buttons, paper money,
paper itself, the compass, much of metallurgy, the astrolabe.....this list
is enormous. It must also include all the inventions created in
pre-Christian Europe and Asia and Africa. That Europeans took advantage of
these inventions speaks to their own enterprise, but certainly Europe was
not the "cradle" of invention until the industrial revolution. 

response 238 of 293:

Dec 18 12:12 UTC 2003

('Tis is also interesting/relevant that Panini spoke/read/wrote but one
language.)

response 240 of 293:

Dec 18 16:44 UTC 2003

Europe is also probably the nicest place to live in the world, from an
agricultural standpiont; not too hot, not too cold, no monsoon,
tornados, relatively few earthquakes and volcanos, plenty of fertile
land, not too many forests, not much ice or snow. Interestingly,
Britain was one of the last places the Romans colonized and one of the
first they left. It was also one of the first to go over the sea (it
would have been impossible to, say, invade France by that time), and
one of the last to retreat from its imperialist ways. [I hope any
Irish people on GREX will not take offence if I point out that the
Romans never bothered with Ireland.)

response 242 of 293:

Dec 18 17:04 UTC 2003

Re resp:241: I just think "Western European culture is majority
Christian, and Western European culture has dominated, therefore
Christianity is responsible for the dominance of Western European
culture" is pretty dodgy, logically.  You could just as easily use that
line of reasoning to argue that Western European culture advanced more
quickly because it's majority white, for example.

response 244 of 293:

Dec 18 17:15 UTC 2003

Lets be a bit more specific.

Charles Dickens is responsible for the advancement of 
western european culture as we know it today.

response 246 of 293:

Dec 18 18:08 UTC 2003

Christianity promoted warfare (Crusades, conquering the Americas and enslaving
the inhabitants).  That led to increased wealth.  The Romans were also big
on war and technology.  Europe used to be all forested, including the
Mediterranean.

response 248 of 293:

Dec 18 18:29 UTC 2003

re resp:242: You could indeed state that there was/is something special 
about white European Caucasians, but then I'd think you'd have to 
identify that characteristic.  Their general skin color is another 
trait specific to Western Europeans, along with the Roman Catholic 
Church.  I loosely identified the Judao-Christian philosophy of self-
improvement, and their work ethic, as things that contributed to 
Western European dominance.  It seems more likely to me than skin 
color, somehow.

re resp:245: I have no problem with that description, though I'd say 
that almost all of the people who have been so dominant over the last 
500 years were specifically Christian or Muslim.  Almost none of them 
ever even heard of Zoroaster.

response 250 of 293:

Dec 18 18:56 UTC 2003

It seems to me that there is a lot of significance in the fact that
technological progress in western europe was mostly stagnant before, and
increased rapidly after, the protestant revolution.  To pick a couple of
the specific inventions in resp:232 that jep uses as evidence of the
Catholic technological prowess:  The printing press was invented and
popularized by protestant men who wanted to print and distribute copies
of non-latin translations of the bible, in direct defiance of the
Catholic church.  And, most of the technological progress with respect
to clocks was made by people, mostly dutch protestants, who needed it
for navigation on long sea voyages.  

response 252 of 293:

Dec 18 20:57 UTC 2003

Is not. Jews didn't much encounter Zoroastrianism until the Babylonian
captivity, at least 600 years after Judaism was established. You aren't
thinking of Mesopotamian myths (Gilgamesh) which are recounted in the
Old Testament, are you?  Or perhaps the monotheistic Pharaoh (Akhnaten)?

Flem, I'd guess that the same forces that drove the scientific renaissance
also drove the Protestant reformation. As such they'd be cousins rather
than the reformation itself directly leading to scientific breakthroughs.

Nonetheless I think this whole discussion is misguided. Europe was much
more heavily influenced by the polytheistic Greeks than by many other
things -- for better and worse. Recall that the Church was often pushing
Aristotle's teachings, and great as he may have been on some fronts, he
was nonetheless a victim of his time in scientific fields.

John, I'm not sure there is a difference in saying that someone's skin
color (or less superficially, their genetics) has less to do with this
than someone's religion. What is it about the religion that propelled this?
Did it teach to question or explore?  Does it demand submission or did it
tolerate a diversity of thought?

Note: I'm not saying that genetics had anything to do with it, either.
Just that a blanket statement that religion may have somehow contributed
is not very convincing -- especially when the religion in question was
often intolerant of questioning, exploration and diversity of thought.

response 254 of 293:

Dec 18 23:32 UTC 2003

which war did the jains start, which war did *the* "budhists"
start?  

response 256 of 293:

Dec 19 04:42 UTC 2003

re resp:252: Did you see resp:248, Leeron?  Religions come with 
philosophies; ways of looking at the world; standards by which to live 
one's life.  None of these things are genetic.  They're learned.  It's 
certainly different to say that you were born into an environment 
which encouraged innovation and personal self- and exterior 
improvement, than to say you were born with those genetic tendencies 
because of your skin color.

The Roman Catholic Church may have been, as you say, often intolerant 
of questioning, exploring and diversity of thought, but it certainly 
encouraged (among some people) very tight reasoning according to 
strict rules.  People spent their lifetimes developing arguments for 
such questions as, "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"  
They were hot issues for centuries.  The logical rules turned out to 
be practically useful as the basis for mathematical and scientific 
arguments.

re resp:250: I have no problem with anything that you said.  The 
navigational clocks part didn't come along until the 18th century, 
though.  The monks invented mechanical clocks and then later, spring 
clocks in the 13th and 14th centuries to more accurately determine the 
hour of the day.

re resp:255: Joe, you can say I overstated the "nationalism" bit.  I 
still think my main point stands; that the Middle Eastern religions 
were indispensable to the development of Western European culture; 
through it, to the Industrial Revolution; and that they should not be 
dismissively disparaged.  Maybe another type of philosophy would have 
gotten there anyway.  No one knows that.  What we know is, it didn't 
happen that way.