Newest Answer

Hello,

I hope you are well. I am really busy at work so I am going to give you my answer in little pieces.

To clarify our argument was "Did religious practice contribute the suffering during the plague or was it a help?”" but then I protested that we should only look and Christian religious practice and you did not have problem with that at the time.

“appeasement”
If you disagree with the word appeasement thats fine, I just used appeasement to represent prayer, repentance, and preparation for Armageddon. Maybe you know a better term to use to represent these concepts.

It would be better if you said prayer and repentance. As for preparation for Armageddon (you mean end of the world, I guess), I think even atheists thought the world was ending.

The world certainly was falling apart having 60% of the population dead from plague is enough to make everyone think that the world is ending. Christians had the benefit of particular expectations and when they did not materialize they understood this was just a plague. The Discovery channel did a documentary on the plague (called The Black Death) and while they were critical of the Catholic church for not challenging Galen’s theories they also pointed out that the religious beliefs of the people helped them deal in the wake of the plague.

I argued that philosophically that there was no reason for secular minded people of the time not to just give up (many actually did) and had plague parties. Do you have any reason the people would not give up upon discovery that the best science of the time was worthless (which if you like I can show)?

An Argument of Philosophy
“Bible verses showing that people were to looking for material as well as spiritual answers”, “Ultimate and Proximal causes”, “theology of Aquinas”
“Thus far you have disputed none of these points.”

I believe I did comment on this point, but I did not dispute them.
I do believe many people investigated proximal causes including cleanliness that is promoted in the Bible.
The issue I raised tries to address what was the most common type of investigation, secular or Divine.

I still don’t know what you mean by secular. I feel like we are talking past each other. Do you mean fully modern and scientific? Well, of course that was not common and would not have been either way. The only scientific thinking going was being pushed by religious people. All the non-religious thinking going on was magical in nature. Your idea of secular thought comes from the Christian notion of a clock-work universe and the philosophy of Aquinas. It seems to me that you are asking me to prove that the people were scientific more than they were religious which is not the case and is a unrealistic thing to expect. Just because I can’t show that “secular” was not more common than religious does not mean that religious thought inhibited practical solutions.

I guess you could argue that the old Roman thinking was scientific and 'secular' but the religious people did not have any problems with Roman and Greek science and besides the main problem these people had is that Greek and Roman science was wrong and based on primitive thinking that was used before developments in logical fallacies and scientific method had reach our modern level.

You should be showing me practical actions these people could have taken that religion prevented. And even that only holds true only under your assumption that prayer was not helpful in any really way and if we disregard the material help of the RCC and people's spiritual needs.

There was no philosophic reason to prohibit Christians from seeking scientific causes. In fact, exploring creation was mandated by important Christian philosophers. At this time all the major advances in science had been made by the Church or brought to the people through the RCC’s translations of documents.

Was there any meaningful intellectual thought coming from somewhere else in this time in Europe? Do we have any reason to believe that there would have been intellectual developments similar to those needed in the combat this same disease today?