A video essay on the difference between Disco Elysium's treatment of politics and the woke propaganda of other games. Ultimately, it's a difference of genuin...
Reddit Atheism devolving in to anti-Muslim bigotry was very disappointing.
I saw that happening in real time, starting with the Sam Harris cult. That grifting quack said, I quote, "there is more science and progress in a single zip code in New York than in the entire history of Islam."
How are those things even measured? How many centuries, decades, years are in the running for that zip code? Is the Arabic numeral system (which is a drastic improvement over Roman numerals) discounted? How about the fucking concept of zero? EXPLAIN THIS BULLSHIT :honk-enraged:
Optics, medicine, algebra, AL-GEBRA, and so much other stuff. There was never a dark age, all the cool people just moved to Bagdad, and it's not like the Islamic world was just sitting around between the renaissance and the 21st century.
So many :reddit-logo: wail about the burning of the Library of Alexandria and don't care about the much greater damage done by the sacking of Baghdad. :us-foreign-policy:
There's a interesting book I read called The House of Wisdom: How The Arabs Transformed Western Civilization by Johnathan Lyons. That goes a lot into what you are talking about and more. Though I will say, while the Arabic numeral system and the zero were transferred to Europe through contact and trade with Muslim Arabs, the Arabs got the numerals and the zero from India. Arabic numerals are a modification of Sanskrit numerals (which is why you see them sometimes called Sanskrit-Arabic numerals). But yes, they are vastly more practical for doing math than Roman numerals. I am sometimes astonished that the Romans achieved what they did while doing math with those things.
And when the Christian West abandoned the "pagan" knowledge of the Greeks, for centuries, because of St. Augustine's arguments against secular reasoning, it was the Arab Muslims who were translating and maintaining and even updating the manuscripts of the ancient Greek philosophers. The tendency for using Aristotelian reasoning (First Cause, Unmoved Mover, etc.) to argue in favor of a monotheistic God (something I don't agree with but is nevertheless a step above using faith alone) was something first developed by Muslim clerics, and Thomas Aquinas was shamed by the Catholic church for trying to do the same thing. It was only after his death and posthumous elevation to sainthood that the Greeks suddenly became in vogue again in the Church.
Also the court of Roger II, the "Christian Sultan of Sicily", scandalized the church by being full of Muslims. A geographer in his court, Muhammad al-Idrisi, produced one of the most accurate world maps seen up to that point (in the 1100s).
Medieval Muslims actually improved the Astrolabe by introducing angular scales to the design, and adding circles indicating azimuths on the horizon. It was widely used throughout the Muslim world, chiefly as an aid to navigation and as a way of finding the direction of Mecca, regardless of location, so that prayer could be performed properly.
Reddit Atheism devolving in to anti-Muslim bigotry was very disappointing. I thought we were really gonna kill God that time. : |
Because Imperialism is the cosmic background radiation of imperial core (aka "first world") ideology. And from British imperialism was inherited the idea of the "civilizing mission." And with the "war on terror" came the sudden but unsurprising defection of imperial core atheists from secularism more generally, to anti-muslim bigotry specifically. They joined hands with the Christian Neoconservatives and said "even though we don't believe in Jesus, we are culturally Christian" and "Islam never had a reformation unlike protestantism." and "Christianity is more progressive than Islam even though both are wrong." and other such nonsense copes to justify their bigotry.
As someone who lived through the Epic Bacon Atheist Era this somehow makes me real sad
smh kids these days aren't growing up watching Penn & Teller shooting Bibles with revolvers on TV
Reddit Atheism devolving in to anti-Muslim bigotry was very disappointing. I thought we were really gonna kill God that time. : |
So much of the bullshit in this country is people reacting to the trauma of growing up under Christian Fascism.
I saw that happening in real time, starting with the Sam Harris cult. That grifting quack said, I quote, "there is more science and progress in a single zip code in New York than in the entire history of Islam."
How are those things even measured? How many centuries, decades, years are in the running for that zip code? Is the Arabic numeral system (which is a drastic improvement over Roman numerals) discounted? How about the fucking concept of zero? EXPLAIN THIS BULLSHIT :honk-enraged:
Optics, medicine, algebra, AL-GEBRA, and so much other stuff. There was never a dark age, all the cool people just moved to Bagdad, and it's not like the Islamic world was just sitting around between the renaissance and the 21st century.
So many :reddit-logo: wail about the burning of the Library of Alexandria and don't care about the much greater damage done by the sacking of Baghdad. :us-foreign-policy:
There's a interesting book I read called The House of Wisdom: How The Arabs Transformed Western Civilization by Johnathan Lyons. That goes a lot into what you are talking about and more. Though I will say, while the Arabic numeral system and the zero were transferred to Europe through contact and trade with Muslim Arabs, the Arabs got the numerals and the zero from India. Arabic numerals are a modification of Sanskrit numerals (which is why you see them sometimes called Sanskrit-Arabic numerals). But yes, they are vastly more practical for doing math than Roman numerals. I am sometimes astonished that the Romans achieved what they did while doing math with those things.
And when the Christian West abandoned the "pagan" knowledge of the Greeks, for centuries, because of St. Augustine's arguments against secular reasoning, it was the Arab Muslims who were translating and maintaining and even updating the manuscripts of the ancient Greek philosophers. The tendency for using Aristotelian reasoning (First Cause, Unmoved Mover, etc.) to argue in favor of a monotheistic God (something I don't agree with but is nevertheless a step above using faith alone) was something first developed by Muslim clerics, and Thomas Aquinas was shamed by the Catholic church for trying to do the same thing. It was only after his death and posthumous elevation to sainthood that the Greeks suddenly became in vogue again in the Church.
Also the court of Roger II, the "Christian Sultan of Sicily", scandalized the church by being full of Muslims. A geographer in his court, Muhammad al-Idrisi, produced one of the most accurate world maps seen up to that point (in the 1100s).
Medieval Muslims actually improved the Astrolabe by introducing angular scales to the design, and adding circles indicating azimuths on the horizon. It was widely used throughout the Muslim world, chiefly as an aid to navigation and as a way of finding the direction of Mecca, regardless of location, so that prayer could be performed properly.
Thank you for the new information. I didn't look as deep into the origins of such things as I could have. :fidel-salute-big:
Because Imperialism is the cosmic background radiation of imperial core (aka "first world") ideology. And from British imperialism was inherited the idea of the "civilizing mission." And with the "war on terror" came the sudden but unsurprising defection of imperial core atheists from secularism more generally, to anti-muslim bigotry specifically. They joined hands with the Christian Neoconservatives and said "even though we don't believe in Jesus, we are culturally Christian" and "Islam never had a reformation unlike protestantism." and "Christianity is more progressive than Islam even though both are wrong." and other such nonsense copes to justify their bigotry.
penn repented and is a christian now :troll: