Posted on 10/11/2004 10:57:23 AM PDT by Chickamauga
Here's a nice object lesson in what happens when religous lunatics take charge of public policy:
The real cause of the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages was the ignorance of conservative Christianity. Church leaders in their overzealous campaign to hunt down and burn witches at the stake decided that cats, like free thinking women, were agents of Satan. The Pope ordered both witches and cats to be annihilated.
Destroying all the feline population in feudal towns and villages upset nature's balance because it was the role of cats to contain rodents and other vermin by killing them. Without cats, the rodent population ballooned.
Rats were the primary carriers of the dreaded flea that was the source of the plague and by ordering the destruction of those sinister cats, the Pope, in all of his infallable wisdom, unwitttingly ordered the death of 50% of Europe's population. Almost all the dead were Christian. Talk about unintended consequences.
It was nature's revenge on those who place their faith in the wholesale ignorance of religion and a cautionary tale for those who believe God's law is of a higher order than nature. Everybody knows it's not nice to fool Mother Nature because she'll get even.
For fun, Sarge. You remember fun.
Even Older First Lieutenant
Actually DeFoe wrote that 200,000 cats were killed in London during the Great Plague (1640) as a preventative. Cats were believed to be witches' familiars.
Yours is the most eloquent of all the responses.
Why omit sentences? Change science to nature? Change political backlash to unintended consequences? etc., what's the point?
Thank you. I'll be in town all week :o)
People's ideas of fun don't include stuff like you've "shared" previously. However, if you're trying to reform, then we'll continue to march.
Ancient Former Captain...
What's said is simply not true. However, if one were to go back in history, every region and belief system have had good periods and bad periods. Just where do the descendants of that era live now and what belief system has proven most effective over time?
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