Re: Hard Sci-fi?

On May 12, 10:02=A0pm, Remus Shepherd <re...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> =A0 =A0Wow, cognitive dissonance there. =A0I was raised Catholic. =A0The
i=
dea that
> religion *encourages* scholar****p is alien to me.

The (very expensive) R&D on the printing press was mostly paid for by
the Catholic Church. Early European universities were largely founded
from Cathedral schools. For that matter the Cathedral schools were
also the source of the students.

The other large literate group in Europe at the time were Jews,
required to be literate to study Torah. Broadly if you knew how to
read you owed it to either the Church or the Synogog.

The massive increase in farm productivity from the three field system
used methods INVENTED by monastaries and transmitted and taught by the
church. Without that improvement there's no modern world.

For that matter as far as anyone can tell WRITING able to do more than
simple accounting was invented by and for religions.

Just WHO do you think DID scholar****p throughout most of history if
not priests of one sort or another? Chinesse Mandrins maybe, but that
whole class and their methods were a fairly direct result of
Con****ism.

DougL