The ignorance of religion
So as I've mentioned once or twice, I'm currently reading Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America as an audiobook. For anyone interested in what America is really about and how we got here, this is required reading. Tocqueville is an amazingly insightful (I'm )tempted to use the word prescient) writer who meticulously prepared his account of our young nation.
One thing I found it very interesting to learn in this book is that public education (and thus, the very concept of true public education) in America was founded with religious intent. The very idea that everyone, regardless of social status or wealth, should receive a certain basic level of education sprang from Christianity, and one of the strictest sects of Christianity at that. I'm not as confident of this, but I believe the European university system (thus extending to all Western higher education) began in the middle ages with the Catholic church. I know that the preservation of many classical Greek and Latin texts depended on Christian monasteries through the middle ages. In fact, when most of Europe was buried in ignorance in superstition, the church was one of the few areas where intellectual inquiry continued, however misguided we find many of their ideas today. Gregor Mendel, the founder of the science of genetics, was an Augustinian monk. The entire field of modern biology is in his debt. And he is hardly the only instance: Joseph Priestley, chemist and dissenting minister; John Bartram, father of American botany and Quaker; Blaise Pascal, mathematician and Christian apologist; René Descartes, philosopher and Christian apologist.
So, to those who equate religion with ignorance, I simply have to say, you don't know your history very well, do you?
One thing I found it very interesting to learn in this book is that public education (and thus, the very concept of true public education) in America was founded with religious intent. The very idea that everyone, regardless of social status or wealth, should receive a certain basic level of education sprang from Christianity, and one of the strictest sects of Christianity at that. I'm not as confident of this, but I believe the European university system (thus extending to all Western higher education) began in the middle ages with the Catholic church. I know that the preservation of many classical Greek and Latin texts depended on Christian monasteries through the middle ages. In fact, when most of Europe was buried in ignorance in superstition, the church was one of the few areas where intellectual inquiry continued, however misguided we find many of their ideas today. Gregor Mendel, the founder of the science of genetics, was an Augustinian monk. The entire field of modern biology is in his debt. And he is hardly the only instance: Joseph Priestley, chemist and dissenting minister; John Bartram, father of American botany and Quaker; Blaise Pascal, mathematician and Christian apologist; René Descartes, philosopher and Christian apologist.
So, to those who equate religion with ignorance, I simply have to say, you don't know your history very well, do you?