Just How Far Have We Advanced In 600 Years?

Between the 14th to the 16th century, scientific Christian thought proclaimed the following to be the absolute Word of God:

1. The Earth was the center of the Universe.
2. The planets, including the sun and the moon, traversed around the Earth.
3. The Earth was flat.
4. Blood should be emptied from the human body to control disease.
5. Old women with warts or birth marks carry the mark of Satan and should be burned at the stake or hung.
6. Native Americans and Negroes were subhuman and should be killed outright or worked to death as slaves.

These beliefs were not just indifferent trifles – they were the law of the land and had been held by the church for hundreds of years. People who held differning opinions were imprisioned or killed. The first through third had been mainstays of human belief not just in the Christian Church, but had been held as truth since the time of Aristotle.

Galileo was imprisoned by the Inquisition for publishing a book stating the Sun was the center of our solar system and was not the center of the Universe.

Columbus had trouble with the same Inquisition for having the audacity to believe that you might be able to reach the East by sailing West.

Millions of people were bled to death to rid them of the bad blood that was poisoning them and taking their lives.

Millions of men, women and children were put to death in Europe and some even here in America because they were thought to be witches.

The idea that, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” contributed to millions of millions of Native Americans being wiped from the face of the Americas. And how many deaths have been attributed to slavery over the two hundred years of America’s existence? Like Native Americans, Blacks were thought to be subhuman even as late as the 1950’s when it was thought improper for them to marry whites.

And now, today, we have a Christian President of the United States that believes that God told him to attack a sovereign nation which had never threatened this country, costing thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. A man who thinks that it’s not only okay, but that it’s God’s Will that we torture our prisoners. And now he would have us believe that it’s also God’s Will that discarded embryos should NEVER be used by science and doctors to find cures for human diseases.

My God, this is the 21st Century! Have we not learned the lessons of history? We may as well start blood letting and burning witches again.

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