Did a mouse invent rodent traps?

This is my reply to a commentator who made the very public claim that all secular education has the Catholic church to thank for it's existence:-



I’ve been trying to resist the urge to correct this utterly ridiculous idea, currently being proffered, that Catholicism is the founding influence of the scientific method of enquiry or modern education.
Given the history of the (Christian orthodox) suppression of any understandings, that didn’t uphold it’s very superstitious dogma, for more than 1,000 years, I don’t know whether to laugh at its stupidity, or to be offended by its hypocrisy.

The scientific empiricism, experimentation, Socratic methods of setting and questioning a premise, was known to the ancient world prior to 300 BCE, and yet suppressed by the Christian authorities as late as the 17th century.
This is easy enough to demonstrate in the fact that Galileo was being persecuted and threatened, by the Catholic hierarchy in the 17th century, for heliocentricity, which was known to the likes of Eratosthenes and Aristarchus in the 4th century BCE.
The ideas of this ancient “age of science and reason”, even works of Plato and Aristotle on which Christianity was founded, were not openly available to any education system in early Christendom. - Indeed, the Catholic inquisitions were very big on destroying books.

There can be no doubt that early Catholicism is responsible for the dark ages!

The fact that it was the only influence on education, during a period of incredible ignorance and counter progress, in the wake of an enlightened age, is strong testimony of that.

Had it not been for the contemporaneously more progressive and broad minded Islamic world, from 600 to 1000 CE, we might have lost all of the wisdom from the Hellenistic/ancient world.
Had it not been for the Reconquista victories over the Moors in Spain, or the captured cultural literature of the crusades, it might well have been lost in the Dark Age brought about by the rise of Muslim fundamentalism.
Between the imposed ignorance of both Christian and Muslim dogmas, humanity has lost millennia of intellectual and scientific progress.

I’m sure you’re going to point out all the philosophers (too few, to my mind) and scientists that came out of this early christian education system.
These people were individuals, that had to make do with the system that was there, as the prevailing, default, and ONLY available information.
They were exceptions to the rule – if they weren’t, history couldn’t mark them as unique.

They succeeded despite Christianity- certainly not because of it

Heliocentricity, the big bang, many minor sub theories of evolution and many other understanding, came to us from Catholics.
Other scientists were Jewish, Muslim or other supernatural beliefs.
- So what?
That’s like saying Christianity is criminal, or Prison produces Christians, because there is a disproportionate number of Christians in US prisons.

All continental congress and the founding fathers of your country were subjects of the British king - and products of the very imperialistic culture they overthrew.
Are you saying that the British Empire is the purposeful creator of the constitution that overthrew its influence on the colonies at that time?

Jesus Christ, according to your legend, was said to be a circumcised practicing Jew – yet worship of him isn’t Judaism.

Most scientists ( if not all) before Darwin were creationist because the default belief was such.
Indeed the facts, that uncovered evolution, were from enquiries with a creationist or Christian presupposition, that were swayed to evolution by the consequential overwhelming evidence.

The same can be said of biblical archeology, sanctioned by the Christian Church to support , with evidence, the validity of the biblical stories. It has been forced to change its name because the evidence discovered doesn’t support the bible as historically true, and of course umsurmountable geological evidence which has disproved the biblical estimate for the age of the earth.

Can anyone realistically claim that all this dogma damning evidence was authored by foundational Christian dogma????

Did the mouse, in fact, invent the rodent trap?