Who Believes the Bible Is Literally True?

[boutons_deux]

For all of those that claim that Christianity impedes the progress of Science (a topic debated often on this forum) check out Rodney Stark's latest book...

Here is a review

The "secret" of Western civilization's success? One factor above all: Christianity

Victory of Reason
by Rodney Stark

By the end of the Middle Ages, Western Europe was set to dominate the globe, while other civilzations like Islam and China were in decline. Why? As Rodney Stark shows in The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, the triumph of the West has one and only one ultimate cause: Christianity, and the breakthroughs -- intellectual, political, technological, and economic -- it made possible.

As Stark demonstrates in detail, while the other world religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone taught that man's capacity for reason was his supreme gift from God. Encouraged by the Scholastics and embodied in the great medieval universities founded by the church, faith in the power of reason infused Western culture, stimulating the pursuit of science and the evolution of democratic theory and practice. The rise of capitalism also was a victory for church-inspired reason, since capitalism is in essence the systematic and sustained application of reason to commerce -- something that first took place within the great monastic estates. And, Stark shows, whereas other faiths asserted the superiority of the past, Christianity was oriented to the future, which allowed the dynamic new societies of late medieval Europe to take off.
In explaining the West's dominance, Stark convincingly debunks long-accepted "truths" about the supposed conflict between Christianity and progress, and proves that far from impeding what we most admire about our world -- scientific discovery, democratic rule, free commerce -- Christianity is what made these developments possible.


The Christian origins of Western success

• The nature and consequences of the Christian commitment to rational theology. Its absolutely essential role for the rise of science

• Why science arose in Europe but failed to do so in China, ancient Greece, or in Islam

• Important moral innovations achieved by the medieval church -- e.g., how Christianity fostered a very strong conception of individualism consistent with its doctrines concerning free will and salvation

• How medieval monasticism cultivated regard for the virtues of work and plain living that fully anticipated the Protestant ethic by almost a millennium

• The role of early and medieval Christianity in fostering new ideas about human rights

• How, among all major faiths, Christianity was unique in evolving moral opposition to slavery -- all but abolishing it by the tenth century

• How, after the resurgence of slavery in Europe's New World colonies, it was Christianity again that produced and sustained the abolition movements

• The material and religious foundations of capitalism laid down during the so-called Dark Ages -- an era, in fact, of spectacular technological and intellectual progress

• How Christian commitment to progress played an important role not only by prompting the search for new technology, but by encouraging its rapid and widespread adoption

• How medieval theologians stoutly defended private property and the pursuit of profits

• The Christian foundations of Western democratic theory -- including the doctrines of individual moral equality, private property rights, and democratic self-rule

• The perfection of capitalism in the Italian city-states. How they developed the management and financial techniques needed to sustain large industrial firms

"Every once in a while a book comes along that not only provides new answers but also transforms the old questions. The Victory of Reason is such a book." -- Richard John Neuhaus, editor in chief of First Things
"Rodney Stark may be the most influential religious researcher of the past hundred years. He has revolutionized contemporary thought about religion and economics, and in this book - his most provocative yet -- he makes a compelling case for the claim that we owe our prosperity, freedom, and progress to centuries of faith in one great, loving, and rational God. The Victory of Reason is itself a victory of reason in a field long dominated by anti-Western, anti-capitalist, and anti-religious myth." -- Lawrence Iannaccone, George Mason University

"Stimulating and provocative . . . Stark demonstrates that elements within Christianity actually gave rise not only to visions of reason and progress but also to the evolution of capitalism." -- Publishers Weekly

what bull !

[Leetonidas]

"Christian" and "rational" do not belong in the same sentence

[RandomGuy]

Another Book...


What evolutionists, environmentalists, and global warming Chicken Littles hope you never learn about science

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science
by Tom Bet

In science, dispassionate, objective inquiry reigns supreme, and researchers will readily give up their most cherished views if the evidence proves them wrong -- right? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Science, like virtually everything else these days, has become a highly politicized field in which the Left has worked energetically to present its pet theories and schemes -- all of which just happen to advance their case for the necessity for ever more government control over our lives. But in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, Tom Bet , who has for several years been making the case for real science as opposed to its politically correct counterfeit in the pages of The American Spectator, sets the record straight about some of the most controversial and politicized issues of our time.

Not only does Bet tell the truth about evolution, global warming, and stem cells -- he also reveals the politically motivated manipulation behind the classification of species as endangered, the denigration of nuclear power as unsafe, Third World health crises, the banning of DDT and other supposedly unsafe pesticides, and more. He even skewers the modern scientific faith of materialism, showing how scientists embrace the evolutionist faith not because it is scientifically unassailable, but because they hate and fear religion -- and direct their supposedly detached scientific efforts to debunking it.

Among the scientific myths exploded by Tom Bet :

• Why, quite independently of Intelligent Design, fewer informed people than ever believe in evolution now

• Evolution from the primordial soup: not a scientific truth but a highly questionable philosophical worldview, whose real premises have been carefully concealed

• How boosters of the evolutionary theory systematically stifle debate on the premises of Intelligent Design, and shamelessly silence challenges to evolution

• How evolutionists twist any outcome in nature as a "confirmation" of Darwin's theory

• The famous (and non-believing) philosopher who admitted that "It's easier to believe in God" than in evolution

• PC madness: how the government and private firms have spent billions to clear away trace amounts of chemicals that are actually beneficial in small doses to humans

• Death by environmentalism: how the banning of DDT has created a health crisis of catastrophic proportions in Africa

• How DDT was banned despite clear evidence that it did not pose a significant cancer risk

• Stem cell research: How many of the "breakthroughs" trumpeted by the liberal media have in fact been based on wrongly interpreted or fudged data

• Ugly tissue malfunctions that have resulted from hasty and ill-informed injections of stem cells

• Genetic engineering: how it is turning out to be as hard to achieve in our day as social engineering was in the Communist era

• How, despite the manifest failures and broken promises of the genetic engineering movement, budgets for the Genome Project and similar efforts continue to soar

• The AIDS epidemic in Africa: how it has been trumped-up (requiring the imputation of Hollywood lifestyles to rural Africans) to support the media's myth of heterosexual AIDS and exponential increases in funding for AIDS research

• How Leftist dogmas have interfered with finding genuine solutions to the problem of AIDS and other diseases spreading in Africa

• War between science and religion? Why modern science would never have developed at all without Judeo-Christian religious principles

• Why the Victorian notion of conflict between religion and science refuses to die: it's still being waged by some eminent Darwinians, in defiance of the facts

• The materialist supers ion: how, having (they think) disposed of God, some scientists are eager to fill the void themselves
  Charles Darwin: not merely a detached agnostic (his public pose) but a determined antagonist of Christianity

• Global warming debunked: why the environmentalist dogma that the increase in temperatures has been caused by human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, is unequivocally false

• How, as the inadequacies of global warming theory became apparent, its disciples have resorted to scare tactics and name-calling

• Solar energy and other pet projects of the Left: why they won't work (contributing a mere 0.19 percent of total U.S. energy needs despite massive efforts) and are wasteful to boot

• How economic depression would unavoidably result from the U.S.'s adoption of the Kyoto accords so beloved of leftist environmentalists

• The remarkable study that was intended to demonstrate the danger of nuclear radiation to workers, but instead showed just the opposite

• Why radon spas are so popular -- and other surprising facts about radiation's effects on the human body that environmentalists hope you don't find out

• An open admission by a Sierra Club official that they want to keep the DDT ban in place because it reduces African populations

• PC myth exploded: a worldwide epidemic of extinctions? No: how most species extinctions can be proven to have had nothing to do with human activity

• How the myth of mass extinctions of species caused by humans has been embraced by mass-circulation, once mainstream magazines such as National Geographic, as well by internationally respected scientists -- despite there not being a shred of evidence in its favor

• Why -- despite vehement denials from environmentalists -- property rights are intimately connected with the survival and flourishing of species

• How the environmental movement abandoned science and logic in the mid-1980s -- just as mainstream society was adopting all the more reasonable items on the environmental agenda

• Hormesis: how this little-known but well-attested phenomenon could revolutionize our understanding of how to deal with hazardous materials

• The Flat Earth Myth: how no educated person in the history of Western Civilization since the third century B.C. believed that the earth was flat -- and how the myth that they did has been a powerful weapon of ridicule in the war against religion

• Galileo: one of the first casualties in the war between science and religion? Not quite: how he could have avoided trouble with the Catholic Church if only he had stuck to science and not ventured into theology

• Science: objective? Why it is more politicized today than ever before in history

Punchy, breezy, blisteringly honest, and consistently entertaining -- as well as carefully argued and meticulously do ented -- The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science is a perfect aid for the non-specialist trying to find the truth amid the PC distortions and half-truths that surround us everywhere these days. Here is a strong effort to wean our society and public policy from the scientific myths and cant that have dominated public discourse for far too long.

ish... what a laundry list of dumbassery. If PM still responded to my posts I might bother picking them apart individually.

As it is, when I showed how arguing that "God in the Bible was moral" ends up with having to morally justify murdering children, he kind of gave up on me. Shocking, I know, but then again, I am a demon sent from to tempt him off the path of true enlightenment.

oh the things people believe...

[FuzzyLumpkins]

ish... what a laundry list of dumbassery. If PM still responded to my posts I might bother picking them apart individually.

As it is, when I showed how arguing that "God in the Bible was moral" ends up with having to morally justify murdering children, he kind of gave up on me. Shocking, I know, but then again, I am a demon sent from to tempt him off the path of true enlightenment.

oh the things people believe...

You are possessed by a demon.