Are we "wealthier"?.... as a general population, or just that 1%?

and are we better-educated? When is the last time a student failed anything..... even tho' they should have? Our airwaves are more censored than the USSR was! To be better-educated, you have to know more than the mythology of your own country. (we're #1!) To be better-educated, you have to use reasoning skills, not just memorize things for the test and then forget them.

WWI and WWII.

Does anyone know
Where the love of God goes
When the winds of November
Come early?

have had something to do with it.

Not to mention some of the bat-shit-craziest among England's zealots came over here and became the first voting block. They've been with us, trying to take us back to the bronze age ever since. Europe's been there, done that, too smart to go back.

Though I agree the WW's may have had something to do with it. Hard to reconcile an all loving omnipotent being with your home bombed to bits and horrific atrocities committed on an epic scale.

Julie

My feeling is, the Pilgrims were asked to leave England. England was never funner than when the Pilgrims split, right? The people of England got a little tired of these dour, right-winged conservative psycho-Christians wearing all black, bumming people out, confusing everyone by wearing buckles on... their heads. "Is that tight enough for you, Cotton?" "Yea, verily." ...

...I have to hear this all the time in England: "Well, all Americans are fat and stupid, mm-hm-hm-hm-hm." Really? Well, thanks for sending over the best and brightest to start the party. Maybe we can send a few freaky, Texas, militia, hate-group, gun-toting weirdoes back to your country. ...

...How come we got the grumpy boat of bandy-legged Puritans? How come we didn't get the Italian party boat with the cappuccino makers and the gelato machine? That was the sexy boat, man.

Strictly my opinion and not necessarily subject to reality.

As religion became less important in Europe after the 16th century, rulers found a handy new tool for rallying the masses - unquestioning nationalism of the "my country right or wrong" brand. (And as that phrase shows, we Americans made nationalism even bigger. And usually dumber, often tying it directly to our unique brand of religious zeal.)

That kind of nationalism often looks a lot like religious mania anyway, with "state" substituting for "God." See also "Soviet Russia."

I can think of several fairly recent examples where nationalism was used in Europe just like the Old Testament at a Fundie revival meeting.

All these happened AFTER World War II, when you would think some lessons had been learned. Well, they were, I guess. Just the wrong lessons, as usual:

The 1956 Suez Crisis. Sold to the British public as a vital mission to protect the Suez Canal, it was really an attempt at Egyptian "regime change" by Prime Minister Anthony Eden. It cost Eden his job and nearly wrecked the British economy. The target, Egyptian President Nasser, became even more powerful in the Arab world. Epic fail all around.

France's post-WWII colonial adventures in Vietnam and Algeria. Complete with the amazing claim that Algeria was "part of France." That one cost thousands of innocent lives and nearly got DeGaulle himself killed.

But closest to home has to be the collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 90's. Kicked off by the nationalist loon Milosevic trying to create "Greater Serbia." Which spooked Croatia into getting its own nationalist counter-loon, Tudjman.

And the Balkans were off to the races...and up in flames. Religion did rear its ugly head in the New Balkan Wars, but it wasn't as much of a root cause as that mindless nationalism, IMO.

I think you may be onto something with past horrible events causing more people to become atheists.

Look at the United States, the place with the least belief in god in the country is the New England area. It's also the area where the Salem witch hunts occurred a couple hundred years ago. That event convinced a lot of people in the area that theocracy was a bad idea.

The Salem Witch hunts was one of the reasons why our founding fathers didn't want religion and government intertwined, to prevent another Salem Witch hunt from occurring. Who can question your madness if you claim to speak for god and you run both the church and government? If you spoke against what they were doing in Salem they accused you of being a witch.

Ironically, the less developed nation of India elected an Atheist (Nehru who was a Hindu Atheist) as the first head of state nearly 60 years ago. No one even batted an eyelid about it over there.

I cannot talk about Brazil, but I know for a fact that no one has anything against Atheism in "religious" India. Seems like Pew needs to stop defining "religion" in the Abrahamic sense. As a Hindu(a Hindu Atheist to be precise) I should be offended that Hinduism, which has a History of Atheistic philosophies dating from at least 1500 BCE has be misrepresented in this manner. But I'm not, as this is not the first time I've seen people/organizations like Pew) spout total gibberish.

Pakistan and Bangladesh are the failure to create an "atheist" India.

But what you say is true in that if you say "god" around here, or "religion", people go to the default Abrahamic mode....

That's because , until the 60's, Eastern religions were not anyway mainstream over here. Even now, I heard some grandparents of a now divorced couple I know, the wife Korean, say "We can't let those kid grow up in that Buddhist cult!"

Personally, I love Hinduism. It's exotic and mysterious to me. I don't believe in any religions, but they all have fascinating aspects to them. I love the Mahabharata, what I know of it. It's just as good as any Greek epic, and far more interesting, idea-wise, than any of the Abrahamic writings I've come across.

One of the strangest delusions of the Western mind is to the effect that a philosophy of profound wisdom is on tap in the East. I have read a great many expositions of it, some by native sages and the rest by Western enthusiasts, but I have found nothing in it save nonsense.

It is, fundamentally, a moony transcendentalism... It bears no sort of relation to the known facts, and is full of assumptions and hypotheses that every intelligent man must laugh at. In its practical effects it seems to be as lacking in sense and as inimical to human dignity as Methodism, or even Mormonism...

The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea formulated by mankind.

If it prevailed in the whole modern world we'd still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we'd be back among the Egyptians of the pyramid age.

H.L. Mencken is entitled to his view, just like everyone else. But as they say, one is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his facts.

Without delving too much into the views expressed here, allow me to reply to a statement by Mr.Mencken

Oh yes...it was this same "Philosophy" that gave the Numerals and the decimal system used to this day..not to mention zero. Oh Btw the "Zero" was explicitly invented by Hindu philosophers to express philosophical ideas..who later also used it as a number.

Most of the trigonometric function..algebra...calculus..and a considerable amount of mathematical and scientific inventions to the west came from India. Stainless steel? Plastic surgery? Vaccination against diseases? yes... these were all known in the "moony" and "transcendentalist" east...and Oh where do you think the Greek's got their Atomism from?



Mr.Mencken needs to get his history correct..because 13th century India was the richest nation in the world. (India and China accounted for about 60-65% of the world GDP till the mid 1700s...till they got colonized. 13th century Europe was in the throes of the dark ages..but definitely not the east..it was the eastern science( transferred to Europe via the Arab traders) and ideas which played a significant part in the renaissance movement of the west.

[IMG][/IMG]


No one claims that India and the East are the pinnacle of civilization..or that their philosophies are preeminent. however at least they do not subscribe to the "If you are not with us, you are against us" Philosophy of the Abrahamic religions. Furthermore they actively nurtured Philosophies in their midst which explicitly denied the existence of god/s.

I doubt anything I say would change the mind if someone who is stuck in 1900s knowledge of the "east" like Mr Menken, however I do hope others would research their facts before making sweeping generalizations. This was the main reason I commented in this thread on the first place, to correct outdated and incorrect assumptions about the East still pandered by the mainstream media as "facts".

Cheers

The zero came from the Fertile Crescent, specifically Babylon and Egypt, and it also made a separate appearance in ancient Mayan culture.

That area is also responsible for giving us the beginnings of algebra, and the roots of astonomy, optics, chemistry, and other sciences, not to mention the roots of the scientific method itself.

These concepts did flourish in India, but they were not ported from India to the "west". They survived the rise and fall of the Holy Roman Empire and then were exported from Italy to the rest of the "west".

As for calculus, that came far later with Newton and Leibniz, two men who were most assuredly not from India.

There is a concerted effort among many today to attribute not just uncommon wisdom, but also amazing ancient discoveries that people have forgotten the history for, to the "east". Wishing does not make it so. Scholars, and professors who teach classes like "Science and Technology through Antiquity" will tell you that much of the scientific, mathematical, and technological progress of the "west" can trace its heritage back through Italy and the empire it once had, to the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Moors*. This is not to discount the likely simultaneous progress of science, mathematics, and technology in the "east", but certainly damages (and damn near destroys AFAIAC) the idea that such progress was a precursor to that in the "west".

[font size="2"]*This is a broad term, and not completely defined, but included Arabs of varying religions as well as Iberian and north African Muslims, all of which made significant contributions to "western" architecture, optics, astronomy, mathematics, and more.[/font]

If i remember correctly the babylonian Zero was a placeholder and was not a true zero..in the sense it was never used alone.
Indians developed Zero as a true number along with the decimal positional notation system, the same numeral system we use today.

PS: Wiki has a good writeup on this(along with references)

/////These concepts did flourish in India, but they were not ported from India to the "west". They survived the rise and fall of the Holy Roman Empire and then were exported from Italy to the rest of the "west".///////

The Numeral system we use today, and the Zero were brought to Europe by the Arabs from India.
The So called Arabic numerals had nothing Arabic about them..even the Arabs themselves called them the Hindu Numerals. The Europeans called them the Arabic numerals because they took the system from the Arabs to replace the Roman numerals in use till then.


////As for calculus, that came far later with Newton and Leibniz, two men who were most assuredly not from India./////

Calculus did not come from India, however Infinite series and some calculus concepts were discovered before Newton and Leibniz, in India

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_school_of_astronomy_and_mathematics


on edit: Indian mathematicians also researched infinity and defined properties that hold true to this day




///mathematical, and technological progress of the "west" can trace its heritage back through Italy and the empire it once had, to the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Moors.///

^^ If you followed the recent (It's not really recent..has been known for at least half a century now) developments in the history of mathematics, you will notice that much of what was attributed to the moors were in fact originally from India. Even to this day the vast majority of Americans still think that the Arabs invented the numerals/zero and call them Arabic numerals...even though a large amount of the "math" attributed to the moors were in fact not theirs.

Please refer to this page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Hindu-Arabic_numeral_system

As for "not a true zero"...having literally just finished a post attempting to educate someone on what "No True Scotsman" really is about, I find this claim far too similar. Such a statement is simply an attempt to attribute to India an originality that is not its due, and that frankly puts a damper on the rest of the article.

The Main reason I provided wiki links is that they provided a very good overview(and referenced links!). I pretty much assumed that anyone who is interested in this will verify the sources.

But here are some from the Scientific American. It also answers why I meant that Sumerian zero was not a "true zero".
(btw there is no relation to the comment/context I made and to the no true scotsman fallacy..but whatever)

Kaplan states that Sumerians might have used it, but there is no solid evidence to support this claim. Furthermore the Eruopean use of the Zero directly derives from the Indian Numerical system(which the Arabs adopted and passed on to the Europeans)

read the entire article here
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=history-of-zero



Another Article from Yale Global.



more here
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/about/zero.jsp

If you are still not convinced, please ask a math history teacher, and refer to the new Math textbooks (even the ones 10-20 years old in the US still refer to the outdated and debunked "Arabic numerals" concept).


Edited to add:


The Nothing that Is A Natural History of Zero ~Robert Kaplan, Oxford University press


link
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Mathematics/?view=usa&ci=9780195142372

hope this helps

I raised my hand during his class (When he was giving a general overview about world history before jumping into American history) When he mentioned that the Arabs invented the numerals and the zero we use today. I pointed out that this is incorrect. However I guess he was not open to ideas...or maybe not willing to accept that he might be wrong, so he insisted that he was correct and I was incorrect.

I did borrow a few books from the library the next time around and showed him that he was incorrect(using those books are reference). I think he never liked the fact that I called him out on it and proved him wrong

On a related note, the issue is mostly with the US textbooks. The Math textbooks are not updated(i mean updated with the recent history of math developments) as the books in Europe. Even today one might run into math textbooks that still mention that the Arabs invented the numerals and the zero. However in recent years more and more textbooks have the correct information regarding this matter.

...the "philosophy of India" usually comes to us thru knuckleheads like the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Hare Krishnas and Deepak Chopra.

It was much the same when Mencken was writing at his peak, in the 1920's/30s. At that time, quite a few cults like the Theosophists were dumping Indian religious ideas into their already half-baked stew of occultism, the Kabbala, etc.

That type were especially thick in my own city of Los Angeles. Mencken again: The so-called Philosophy of India has found its natural home in Los Angeles, the capital of American idiots.

Nowhere else, so far as I know, is there any body of Theosophists left, and nowhere else has there ever been any substantial following for Yogi. All the quacks who advertise to teach Yogi in twenty lessons for $2, and all the high priests of the other varieties of Indian balderdash have their headquarters in Los Angeles, which is also the Rome of the American Rosicrucians.

And I still say Mencken was right, at least in regards to charming Indian religious customs like the caste system and sati.

I'd love to get an update from Mencken. But he died in 1956, and none of our DU's with Other Ways Of Knowing would loan me a Ouija board.

I recently saw a good documentary on the ancient Indian contributions to math, science and engineering. FTR, I lived in Saudi Arabia for 2 years and Egypt for 4 years - those guys still claim to have invented the zero, algebra, etc. Telling them they didn't is on a par with telling them aliens built the Giza Pyramids. I found that out the hard way.

It's OK to quote WikiPedia about math... it was started by and for mathematicians, and is an excellent, trustworthy source of information on all subjects mathematical. Plus, math lends itself to collaboration and ... most of all ... theorems require rigorous proofs. There's little room for interpretation.

That's part of the joy of it -- working on ancient problems. Just yesterday a.m. I was prepping for an Adv. Calc II midterm and looked up absolute convergence and conditional convergence proofs, finding a nice academic site that began the page with a quote of the pre-Socratic Zeno's Paradox of the Tortoise and Apollo. So the idea was there... it just took Newton & Leibniz to formalize what the mind could envision, but words and static geometry could not express. Zero was one of those sorts of things. The concept of nothing has been with us a lot longer than the numeral we use to express it in mathematical language.

One of the big attractions to math is its antiquity -- "standing on the shoulders of giants". As my number theory prof. said, before the age of digital encryption, number theory was called the "queen of mathematics", and nobody studied it for the money. "For the glory! To write your name in stone!" To have your name attached to the ancient, multicultural pursuit of knowledge in its purest form. All of the open questions in math are old. It's possible that nobody will ever get some of the Clay Prizes in Math. The last winner refused it on the principle that he didn't work alone, and others were more deserving. There is no Nobel prize for mathematics.

*Full circle: you're both right about zero. By the time the Indian counting boards (probable source of the "0" numeral) enter the record, counting boards were widely used in the west, as well. We were just on a curve whose limit approach zero as t->c.

In Ibn Warraq's Why I Am Not a Muslim, the author marvels at the reputation Islam has in the West as tolerant and peaceful. He traces it back to the Enlightenment, when anti-clerical writers needed a foil to the wicked Christian priesthood. All the sins of the Papacy were mirrored in the virtues of the mullahs and imams. This was after abandoning the Chinese as urbane and enlightened gentlemen. There was even a practice in the 1600s of writing satirical critiques of British society in the form of letters to the Forbidden Palace from the Chinese ambassador in London. This unfortunately fell apart when merchants returned from the East reporting that the Chinese exhibited the full range of foibles as the rest of the human race. At that point, the average Western thinker was still ignorant enough about the "Turks" to project any virtues they pleased onto them. Of course, the author excerpts letters sent by the British ambassador from Istanbul detailing the brutal persecution of Jews, Christians, and impious Muslims.

At root, he traces it back to the tendency to romanticize foreigners. The earliest example is Tacitus's Germania, which exalts the virtues of the primitive band-level society of the Teutonic tribes against the pretense and excess of early Imperial Rome. Most important, though, is the invention of the notion of the "noble savage" by Peter Martyr Anglerius during the Spanish Conquest of the New World. It's just the same as hating on the French as smelly and arrogant - foreigners aren't people like us, they're cartoon characters.

The East is heavily romanticized, whether by Christian theologians adopting Muslim religious ideas as somehow more deeply spiritual than the decadent and godless West, or New Agers adopting "ancient" Indian and Chinese practices.

I believe the Indian constitution defines India as a secular country and not an "Atheist" one. We have had Atheist heads of state, women heads of state, and minority heads of state. Right now the PM is a Sikh(minority), the President is a Woman, and the VP is a Muslim.

I personally Believe its a great thing that Pakistan and Bangladesh Split away from India. In the long run it had only benefited India...notwithstanding the minor issues.

And yep, as you pointed out..there is a lot of misconception about the Dharmic Philosophies ( Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism). It's often because that the Eastern Philosophies are(in some respects) very different from that of the Abrahamic ones.

PS: Oh yeah...Mahabarata is my all time fav

Because you can't control him with threats.

Ok, this is really cynical, but at this stage in my life, people just seem really insecure. They want the illusion of control: Self control, control of others, control of the future, whatever.

People want simple black and white unambiguous directions: It's word-search vs 10 page research paper.

Even brilliant people want it told to them, and they want their investment in "the system"validated by others.

Atheists are not predictable because they don't require the approval of others and so are not easily lead, and don't offers simple leadership to the insecure.

I think the bell curve of belief is really telling you about the personal security bell curve: The capacity to find contentment without a child-like state of punishments and rewards.

it doesn't usually come up. Back when I was a working stiff (microwave engineer) it never ever came up. Not a factor.

Atheism is an obstacle to a political career or to being a conman. It's worthwhile to watch the pattern of where scams are successful--they tend to target the religious. Utah, as I well know, is more or less the nation's capital of scams. OTOH, if you start your spiel "There is no God" you're going the tar and feather route.

That opens up the question whether I mention two categories or one.

This is a place where people put little fish on their business signs and cars in order to tell people that they're really Christian businessmen, and the majority of people patronize stores and services owned and operated by fellow members of their church, to the extent that they will avoid others where possible/practical.

Those not part of the inner circle, or willing to fake it convincingly enough to be part of the inner circle, are SOL.

And it doesn't just apply to patrons of small businesses, it also applies to employees. The last place I worked employed no less than 23% of its workforce from the same church as the business owner.

it helps me avoid giving them my business.