Page 1 of If We Had A Purely Secular Society Who Would Benefit?

Just for argument`s sake - if all forms of religion were discouraged/ stamped out/ driven underground.  Who would benefit?

J Mark Oates

Stem-cell research - I think if there was no religion, we would have been doing this for years and would have seen incredible benefits. Unfortunately, religious people always get into power and enforce their ridiculous brand of morality on the rest of us.

Who would benefit? Everyone, simples! :)

There`s a well-used meme that`s over on the pope thread about the advancement in scientific acheivements through the ages, starting with the greeks, then the romans, and then this huge f***off void where religious intolerance and persecution abhorred and punished any kind of technological advances as the work of the devil. The bottom line of the image reads something like "Just think, we could have been walking on mars by now".

Some people need something to believe in, fair enough. I believe in science. However, before theories could be proven, they were just that, theories. More to the point, Radical Ideas that went against the teachings of the church, so were quashed with death and torture, mainly by Cromwell and his lot.

A better question to ask would probably be `Who WOULDN`T benefit from a secular society`, because the answer would be much, much easier to answer.

Money-grabbing orgainsed religions

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A secular society isn`t one where religion is discouraged or stamped out, merely one where the state is separate from religion. We partly live in one, but not totally. Our legal system is pretty separate but education isn`t and really should be imho.

You just can`t have children being taught things which are directly in contradiction with modern science. I`m not talking about things like whether there is a god or not, but basic stuff like evolution, and some scary things I saw on that Richard Dawkins documentary, including those poor kids who were being taught that salt water and fresh water don`t mix because a holy book says so.

The whole point about science is anybody can question it, and anybody can test it. The scientific method should be taught to all children as possibly the most important thing they can learn.

It lets them make decisions which will effect their lives forever, in a much more informed manner. And this isn`t just about whether we share common ancestors with primates or not, this covers lots of very important stuff. You`ll make health decisions based on science, hopefully anyway. Of course if you are a Jehovahs Witness then you`d rather see your kids die than get a blood transfusion.

What annoys me is watching people use things that are only there because of science (modern computers) to teach people that the world is only a few thousand years old.

Okay I need to stop ranting now. :(


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There`s a well-used meme that`s over on the pope thread about the advancement in scientific acheivements through the ages, starting with the greeks, then the romans, and then this huge f***off void where religious intolerance and persecution abhorred and punished any kind of technological advances as the work of the devil. The bottom line of the image reads something like "Just think, we could have been walking on mars by now".

I saw that graph.  It says "...we could have been exploring the galaxy by now."

I used to hold the same viewpoint - honestly - until I started doing a bit of research into that assertion.  It`s utter bollocks.  Not because of the intervention of the Church, but simply because the discoveries required to put us on the road to the stars couldn`t have come together any quicker than they did.

That huge f*** off void of which you speak has precious little to do with the Church - it`s all to do with the power vacuum between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Normans turning up in 1066 (the year the lights came back on).  It`s still known as the "Dark Ages", even though a lot is known about it now.  It was called the Dark Ages because historians couldn`t give a flying flick about it until fairly recently and it was standard practice in schools to treat it like an intermission between the Romans buggering off and the Normans invading.

Christianity was busy being persecuted as a whacko neo-Judaic cult for its first three hundred years.  It particularly got up the noses of a couple of Emperors - Diocletian probably being the worst.  He was Emperor from 284-305AD, and was the most notorious for his great Persecution of the Christians which only came to an end with the Edict of Milan in 313AD.  The previous year, the Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine I had converted to Christianity on the advice of his Mum.  In 380AD, Christianity was adopted as the official Roman state religion.

The Romans applied their exit strategy to Britain around 410AD.  That`s the point where British history gets kind of messy because we kept getting invaded by various hordes like the Saxons, the Vikings and the like.  None of them were Christian until much later - up into the 800s and 900s when the country was a bunch of small kingdoms with Kings with names like Earwig.  Christianity had arrived on these shores small-scale while the Romans were still around, but there wasn`t a real effort to introduce Christianity until 597AD when Augustine was sent cold-calling by the Pope to see King Aethelbert of Kent.

At this point it needs to be remembered that Britain was a feudal society.  The King was at the top of the food chain (the only one not covered in sh*t), and he and his noblemen mates had the power of life and death over the peasantry (that`s you and me).

To be continued (it`s past my bedtime).

J Mark Oates

I think religion hasn`t held back science significantly when you graph things on that scale, it definitely has impeded research on stem cells in the last 10 years though. That is just a small area of science, political priorities have held it back far more imho.

So living on the moon? Exploring space? I really doubt we`d be doing that by now, however less people may have died from illnesses we could be a bit closer to curing.

Basically I think Mark has a fair point there,


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Stem-cell research - I think if there was no religion, we would have been doing this for years and would have seen incredible benefits.
The opposition of some Christians/other faiths to embryonic stem cell research is particularly daft since in the Bible God placed no value on the lives of Israelite babies under a month old (and no value at all on the lives of *anyone* from other tribes or cities).