Posted by Bret (63.197.53.200) on May 08, 2002 at 13:35:20:

In Reply to: posted by Vincent on May 07, 2002 at 23:38:27:

Vincent, vincent, vincent. You still can't see, after all of the conclusive evidence and analogies that have been provided that the vision of life that you and many other people cling to is fast deteriorating and will only be remembered in the history books as a reason why humanity could not make the leap into maturity right away.

It's times like these that I wish there was such a thing as a holodeck, like they have on Star Trek. We could put you in it so that you could see the world according to Vincent from the beggining of time to the present and even the future. I doubt you would see much difference from then to now. You would still be wearing a dearskin tunic that you skinned from the dear you killed with your spear and assembled back in your cave in Europe somewhere.

You fail to make the connection between cultural interaction and progress. You claim to be a genetic puritan, but you find no quarrel with fully exploiting everything that every other culture has provided yours with that has helped it to advance.

You fail to see that progress is contingent upon interaction because you cannot comprehend that human beings are something entirely different from animals. I have already proven all of these things in my previous replies to your posts, but I must reiterate one thing: It is our ability to choose that distinguishes us completely from the animal kingdom, so that our progress, unlike animals who are oblivious to the faculty of choice, is contingent upon whether we choose to live as islands unto ourselves and go nowhere, or work with those around us to learn what we don't know and use it to better ourselves.

Did you know that there would be no such thing as Western Civilization had it not been for the Arabs. Yeah, that's right! While Europe was dwindling in the dark ages ravaged by the plague, without any real central authority, sinking deeper into superstitions because of the lack of religion, at the brink of annhilation, Arabs brought ideas about cleanliness, medicine, chemistry, math, politics and spirituality that Europeans had never even fathomed. Do you use soap? Arabs introduced it to Europeans who never even baithed and they wondered where the plague came from. Can you write out the numbers 1 through 10? Do you know what the number zero is? That came from Arabs too. As a matter of fact if you look at how we write our numbers in the west they are almost identical to the original Arabic. And can you imagine any astronomer, or any mathamatically based professional making any quantum leaps using Roman Numerals and not exploiting the concept of zero? There would be no Copernicus. There would be no Gallileo, no Michaelangelo or DiVinci. You like philosphy? You ever heard of St. Thomas Aquinus or St. Augustine? Where do you think there ideas came from? There was no such thing as a Nation State before Islam brought the idea to the west, or universities. While Europeans in general where walking around in darkness the city of Cordoba, Spain was lit up so brightly that night turned into day. This is the city in which Popes were educated and I could go on and on with this example and many others.

Well, you can continue to believe in your contradictory conglomeration of romanticised racism, but don't expect that you will mature as any kind of human being with these convictions.

If you want to talk about other possibilities I would be happy to respond to any questions or comments you might have that are of bennefit, but to be honest with you I don't think what you have posted has been of any real academic value. This is an academic sight and you really have just spouted a bunch of opinions. You have not refuted any academic arguments made against you that have proved the flaws in your opinions and have exposed the falicies in your contentions, so what are you trying to achieve?

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