Forum Post: Commitment to Literacy and Survival of Diverse Ideas made Christian European Culture dominate
Posted 4 years ago on Aug. 14, 2020, 1:32 p.m. EST by grapes
(5232)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
http://occupywallst.org/forum/stealing-commons/#comment-1079318
Protestant Christianity and Evangelicals' commitment to teaching everyone to read ( the Scriptures, of course ! ) gave European culture a huge advantage in its being catapulted to the heights of knowledge because people didn't just use their reading skills on perusing the Scriptures. European culture was very divergent so one could easily move from a place rejecting one's idea to another place welcoming and supporting it. New ideas simply didn't die easily before getting their chances to try out. Highly conforming societies ( which usually have erected brain-cramp cultural walls to provide power stability for their élites; the easiest societies to govern are the static ones but the long-term static ones are for all practical purposes culturally dead societies which can only be revived by a costly collapse or a revolution, neither being desirable ) are generally very innovation-retarded and often have to resort to stealing ideas from others in order to progress.
Yeah, I did read the Scriptures so maybe I qualify as a Christian. Of course, I could read more holy [ and unholy ] books if I knew more languages. We need to provide for low-cost or free browsing of our cultural commons. The dominance of English as lingua franca worldwide may well create a huge generation of monolingual Anglophones whose sheer number kill off the less dominant or at-risk-for-extinction languages ( mine are probably excluded from these.) The keys for understanding different peoples' diverse cultural pasts are their languages. For example, there are linguistic fossils: why do we say, "you've dialed the wrong number" instead of "you've pressed the wrong number?"
Belief in Christianity helped Europe's rise.
Other places can use other appropriate ways.
Forum Post: Freedom of Lunatic Asylum, Human Deluge in southern Asia
I don't have the power to erect a mountain range like the Himalayas ( which got its power to rise from the heat produced from the collision of Theia with Earth billions of years ~4.5Byr. ago to form Earth's molten outer core but also the gigantic single-crystalline-solid inner core so we get tectonics, fast rotations for temperate weather, as well as the geomagnetic field to shield Earth's atmosphere from being fried away by the solar wind over the eons ) to reach for the coldness of outerspace in order to make freshwater from warm moist air but deserts near oceans may get freshwater made from the warm moist air obtained from the ocean surface being pumped deep ( perhaps with solar/wind electric power or simply temperature gradient between surface and deep ocean water via a Stirling heat engine; for places near now-brackish water such as estuaries where most cities are located now, one may use osmotic pressure generated by preventing the freshwater from mixing with the seawater and mixing them under controlled conditions to do work ) into the coldness of innerspace--the oceans--to condense. It may work for ocean-floating settlements, too. The important measurements are the ambient temperature and the dewpoint.