Yep, and a lot of them lived back when being accused of heresy by the church was literally a death sentence. So again, not exactly an environment that fostered critical thinking, certainly one that punished speaking out against the church in any sort of way.

Galileo, for example, was condemned on his death bed by the pope and buried in an unceremoniously small room next to the novice's chapel for almost 100 years before he was reburied in the main basilica[0] .

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Death

Galileo was sentenced to house arrest, for disobeying a direct order from the pope to tell geocentrism and heliocentrism were both possible.

This was actually the best scientific conclusion at that time until Foucault proved that the Earth was rotating two centuries later.

Actually, the worst enemies of Galileo were the Aristotelians which teachings were not based on religion. They used the inquisition to stop Galileo.

source: same wikipedia article.

Thomas Aquinas (just to name one) was a scholar of the highest order and was absolutely not just pretending to be a Christian. It’s a strange worldview to imagine that Christianity provided no academic contributions to the world. To some extent, it invented academics. This is more or less z

I am not a Christian and was for a long time a fairly militant atheist - but this point is historical fact.

I don't think that this fact some how dismisses the likelihood that many people throughout history merely pretended to be Christian simply to avoid being burned at the stake.

That's what organized religions did/do to non-believers. They burned them at the stake. Or stoned them to death, Or drowned them, or exiled them.

If your goal is to make contributions to society, in that context you're damn well going to say whatever you need to say about your personal beliefs to ensure that kind of shit doesn't happen to you. Hell, even if you don't care about making contributions to society you're still gonna say what ever needs to be said to ensure you don't end up burned at the stake.

The end result of all these theistic threats is that a lot of people who made great contributions to society did so under the auspices of religious organizations not because they genuinely believed in the tenants of those organizations, but because they had to.

And those organizations made those threats, and continue to make those threats because they know that this is the outcome -- that people will do things in their name to avoid the shit that the religion can do to them.

It's a racket, much akin to the mob coming up to a shop keep and telling them that it would be a shame if something were to happen to their business if it didn't have some kind of 'protection' that the mob can offer them.

It's no coincidence that the Catholic church and the mob originate from the same part of the world.

Isaac Newton clearly defies this theory. He dedicated a significant portion of his time to exploring religious ideas that practically made him a heretic. He would have had a lot less conflict with the church if we was just an atheist going through the motions, rather than a true believer with his own unique interpretation of the scriptures.

while these are interesting points, both posts are strongly euro-centric.

Religion was one of the stronger organizing forces of the old world and so good and bad both have roots in it. It was more stable than the leadership of kings/queens/chieftans which was blood-run and disrupted by the murder of either the existing leadership or the entire bloodline. Chaotic at best.

Learning/education has been shown to be part of religious teachings long before JC was even a discussed historical figure. For example, Buddha taught under Bodhi trees, Hindu philosophers under Banyans and so on. All kinds of 'modern' conceptions came from religious individuals, because most everyone was religious. It was deeply intertwined with early culture and simply belonging to a given geo-community

Our rejection - and I do mean our - of religion and easier coexistence culturally as atheists and agnostics is relatively recent.

Many people, yes depending on how you define many. But majority or them? No.

But, no, in general people in the past believed their own religions. We are atheists culture and large atheist traditions at this point, we have hard time imagine it.

Thomas Aquinas was a theologian, working purely within the circular Christian scholastic system to talk, essentially, about nothing. Where he did talk about concrete things (ethics, politics, even economics) he simply argued based on his religious dogmas. Meh, not very interesting.

> To some extent, it invented academics.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Keep in mind Christians were responsible for the destroying huge amounts of books, temples, and cultural artifacts after they took power in the Roman Empire. The amount of knowledge lost to the murderous hands of Christian monks is incalculable. It was only really after the 10th century that Christian monks began to preserve and translate the classics to Latin (the common picture we have of the monk painstakingly hand-copying the classics to preserve them).

Religion is a human need - maybe not an obvious animalistic one but because it crops up with every civilization, I think it isn't something on the outside, it's something within us.

Wheather you think it's a means of social control, a way to create distinct in-vs out group, a means to cope with death or whatever you attributes you give to it..

Just because you can rationalise it doesn't mean it goes away.. just like you can't suppress base biological urges by "thinking them away", atleast not in the long term.

Religion just comes back up in other places in forms that don't even look like the original thing but shows all the signs of it.

Religion is far from a universal biological need. The proof of that is in the huge rise of secularity after (i) we began to rationally understand the universe, including deep questions such as how our bodies minds work, the origin the universe, etc, and (ii) religious freedom meant people could freely reject the dominant religion and not be killed for it, which is usually a pretty strong motivator to "love" the dominant religion.

The current belief in "The Simulation" has all the trappings of a newly forming religion.

And for example scientific foundations for Big Bang were put by Belgian priest and treated with suspicion as too consistent with world as created at some point.

> Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre proposed an expanding model for the universe to explain the observed redshifts of spiral nebulae, and calculated the Hubble law. He based his theory on the work of Einstein and De Sitter, and independently derived Friedmann's equations for an expanding universe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Big_Bang_theory

World is not some simple.

Also, do you really need throwaway account for THAT?

Galileo didn't get in trouble for his theories about the Earth and the Sun, he got in trouble for making theological conclusions from them, and for being an utterly insufferable douche who also managed to personally piss off the pope.

His theories also did not have a scientific backing, given the knowledge available at the time, and were closer to wild-ass guesses that just happened to be right.