Thoughts on Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris

AlexBP said:

In a previous post, I have already listed several prominent scientists from the Middle Ages who were Catholic clergy. That list would only be a starting point if you wanted to research the many contributions that the Catholic Church has made to science over the centuries. How can you say that "the Catholic Church did its utmost to stamp out enquiry" in the middle ages when the Catholic Church was actually responsible for most of the enquiry at that time? Have you actually read accurate histories of science in medieval times, or only books written by enemies of Catholicism written centuries later?

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I'm well aware that there were many Catholic philosophers and scientists. The Catholic Church would have been responsible for most of the enquiry during the Middle Ages because it was a powerful political entity, ruling over every part of European life. If you lived in Europe during the Middle Ages, you could not avoid the Catholic Church. I dare say, however, that most of the Catholic Church's Middle Age scientific contributions to humanity was in inventing new torture methods to weed out sin from amongst its credulous subjects.

Also, finding enemies of Catholicism isn't all that hard these days, even in unbiased history books. The Catholic Church's support of Fascism and Nazism in the 20th Century is well documented and undisputed even by the Catholic clergy.