We will never know where would have been if it wasn’t for the iron grip of the Christian church on western civilization for 1200+ years, but the secularization of society in the last 200 does indicate that we made rapid progress in medicine, human rights and science/technology when no longer were bound by the control structures of the church.
Why might Western Europe have advanced faster than other cultures that weren't "under the iron grip of the Christian church"?
Islamic civilization, in particular, made crucial contributions during that time. Newton couldn't have invented modern physics without hundreds of years of preparation by Islamic mathematicians (including Arabic numerals, algebra, and trigonometry).
And it was really Rome, not Christianity, that was responsible for the stagnation in the west. The Romans were great at practical application but contributed very little new theoretical knowledge even before they converted to Christianity.
What progress was made during the six hundred years between Aristotle and Constantine?
To add to that, a lot of this modern progress was timed with the rise of protestsnism and a certain country specifically found as a refuge for persecuted protestants (not atheists). But that is just one factor, you also have trans-atlantic slave trading and the raping of africa and the colonization of india, all of this allowed many in the west less time in the farms and stables and more time at universities and studying.
Isaac newton was forced to go back home and labor in the farm for a while until people convinced his mom to send him back to uni for example.
How much of the latter is correlation without causation? Would edison and tesla have been prevented by the catholic church from working on electricity? Or Ford on cars? I mean in their time still, you didn't have a theocratic state but society was much more religious. In the 1800s, congress used to have church service at capitol hill and all members would attend for example.
Absolute truth. Lol. Buddy. God doesn’t exist, you have been lied to all your life by controlling beings who wish to fill you mind with ancient fairy tales to keep you in submission. Religion is a refuge for the ignorant.
Hacker news is not the place to be spreading fear, it is a house of science and engineering. We like logic, and freedom. You are advocating for ignorance and superstition.
For what it’s worth Russell’s Teapot is an illogical, fallacious analogy, and almost always the reason atheists think they’re smarter than everyone else.
It’s a is ref to https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi... however I don’t think that’s really in the same class to the Eth chain split. It was a db bug, it got fixed, “infra” bugs. Eth was a forced onchain state fix. “Business logic bugs”.
It is disingenuous to point to the 2013 incident and say this proves a lack-of-decentralization myth.
Please go back to 1400 in your time machine. Those of us who live in the 21st century have no interest in your medieval fantasies.
The only controversy is that your parents, your peers have totally warped your world view to remove compassion, logic and reason. If it wasn’t so such a deadly result for the rest of us, I would say it was sad. But we must not be sad, me must call out a destructive though process that actively regresses humanity and ensure that it cannot harm others.
You broke the site guidelines very badly several times in this thread. Even compared to the other religious flamewar comments in this thread, yours were particularly aggressive, particularly personal, and particularly unacceptable.
Since you've been breaking the site guidelines egregiously in other threads as well (some examples below), I've banned this account until we get some indication that you intend to use HN properly in the future. Among other things, that means not using the site for ideological battle, flamewar, or personal attacks. If you want to commit to that, you can reach us at hn@ycombinator.com. Please make sure to review the rules first: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
And Usury was well known to the ancients as one way to destroy a society.
Rent is not the basis of savings through investment, yield is; of which rent is one kind. Renting a movie at blockbuster made sense in the 90s as plastic shells of magstripe were a scarce good. Today, literally millions of devices could stream their entire lib for free via ad supported streaming apps.
We live in different times. Holding on to artificial constraints for old-times business model nostalgia will look so quaint in a few decades.
Those “ad supported streaming apps” are still reliant on copyright.
Without it, why would anyone choose to view the movie with ads when they can just download it and watch it with no ads?
(Legally, since in this hypothetical, copyright doesn’t exist.)
Or are you just arguing for ad-supported viewing of content? Which is what currently exists for an enormous body of material. See, for example, YouTube.
Uber and AirBnB didn’t get to where they are today without breaking a few laws and regulations. Archiving the digital legacy of our planet is far more important than imaginary property fantasies.
Years ago I saw a NZ comedian called “boy with the tape on his face” with some Spanish speakers. They LOVED it, as did I. This is a wordless comedy show that also transcends language. He is known as “tape face” today with residency in Vegas.
There is something special and innately human about visual and physical comedy transcending language. Strongly recommended.
AEAD or gtfo