Huh? I'm a pretty foundational Christian, and I see good science as only increasing my understanding and appreciation of God. This author has a chip on his shoulder against Christianity.
The rise of modern science can be dated to Copernicus (1475-1543) and Vesalius (1514-1564). The Greeks, the Arabs, and the Chinese had a deep knowledge of the world. The Chinese had general scientific theories but generally developed a medieval science that accepted Aristotle as the ultimate authority. Arabs were strong in math but they still considered science as one aspect of philosophy.
Modern science can be traced back to Oxford. That is where Grosseteste laid the philosophical foundation for a departure from Aristotle. That lead to fruitfulness at the University of Padua in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Of significance, the Renaissance and Reformation overlapped the Scientific Revolution.
Francis Bacon stressed the need to stop relying on accepted authorities and "to collect information to unlock nature's secrets."
The rise of modern science did not conflict with the Bible. Galileo (regardless of conflicts the the Catholic church) defended the compatibility of Copernicus and the Bible, and this was oneof the factors which brought about his trial.
Both Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) have stressed that modern science was born out of the Christian world view. Whitehead was a widely respected mathematician and philosopher, and Oppenheimer, after he became director of the Institutie of Advanced Study at Princeton, wrote on a wide range of subjects related to science, in addition to writing on his own field on the structure of the atom and atomic energy. Neither man claimed to be Christian, yet both were straightforward in acknowledging that modern science was born out of the Christian world view. It was because of "the medieval insistence on the rationality of God." Christian scientists and philosophers believed that every detailed occurence could be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles.
In other words, early scientists believed that the world was created by a reasonable God, they were not surprised to discover that people could find out something true about nature and the universe on the basis of reason.
Basically God, for some unexplained reason (sin as usual?), killed two-thirds of the European population in a plague for reasons unknown.
Estimates vary, due to the absence of precise census data, but most put the drop in population at somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3. 2/3 may possibly have died in some cities, but since 95%+ of the European were peasants, this was not very significant.
Even the church itself and the Pope were accused of starting the plague. Jan Hus of Bohemia (1372-1415) openly accused the church of conspiracy and gets burned at the stake for his trouble.
I've read quite a bit of history of this period and never ran across this accusation. The Hussites had lots of perfectly good reasons, nationalistic and religious, for rebelling against the Church and Empire.
To the Christians of Medieval Europe the long promised Apocalypse had arrived, and Jesus would surely return soon to claim the faithful and punish the sinners. The Church had taught for ten centuries that all events, natural, political, and social must follow the Bible and all knowledge is revealed there. All events are the work of God for His ultimate purpose. So millions stopped planting crops, stopped planning for the future, and awaited salvation as Christian leaders promised.
I believe this is a myth. Agricultural production was drastically affected, for perfectly obvious reasons, but this sitting down and waiting for God didn't happen on a large scale, as far as I know.
This article is much on a par with the ridiculous and easily disproven claim that more people have died in religious wars than in all others. It's a "let's bash those stupid religious people" funfest.
I don't have time to catalog all his errors.
This has more to do with liberals who dominate our public school system than it does with religious types. The liberals have destroyed and dumbed down education to the point where it is today. Whether through incompetence or by design, I do not know. But a dumbed down population is much easier to control and that is what the liberals are all about...control.
This article is indeed an excellent example of "fringe".
I think the article is based on a false premise. The author has a chip on his shoulder against Christianity. He only has a cursory knowledge of the scriptures. He redefines Christianity in the following paragraph. He denies the word of God by denying that Satan is. And it is hard to imagine that a true Christian would say this.
"Freedom makes all people equal, just as God intended. Only those who wish crush freedom, enslave their fellow man, or use terror to enforce dogma, are the real Satan. Satan is not a actuall being but does represent human evil. For that we must be on guard. Jesus wanted His people to be free from Roman tyranny and died at the hands of Romans for His beliefs. Anyone who wants less than freedom for others is no Christian."
You can be very devoted to any religion and its doctrine and not be a fundamentalist. You do not become a fundamentalist when you forsake reasonable and rational thinking.
The test of fundamentalism is similar to the test for pornography and poetry: I know it when I see it.