Plague: Other Arguments Answered

He said {“I don’t know how this is suggestive that people might have been better off if Europe had not had religious beliefs. “
You keep saying that I am suggesting that people were better off without religion. That is a completely different argument and I am not arguing it here. I am saying prayer itself did nothing to find a cure to the disease and those prayers did nothing. Other prayers asking for strength to survive this plague certainly would have helped people.}

I don’t understand, that sounds circular: prayer did not help because prayer does not help. I have all our conversation on my blog and our topic was the role of the Christian religion, which you felt made things worse.


He said {“Finally, spiritual needs of the people, while you don’t consider it real, was very urgent to the people at the time and it is an articulated need of most of humanity to this day. It was in this area that the people felt most cheated.”
No I think spiritual needs are real.}

I am glad to hear it.


He said {“Even in early Middle Ages before the plague there was a wide market in anti- rodent remedies (Kelly 65).”
Its too bad they didn’t investigate this as a possible solution, unfortunately it was much later when people realized that rodents are notorious for spread disease. Now that’s a secular idea that should have been investigated.}

It would not have helped, more cleanliness would have helped but the people knew that. People were doing their best to control rats, obviously they could not.

You said {“Why didn’t God clearly explain germ theory, or explain the dangers of letting the rodent population get out of hand?”}

Look this is a what is called “begging the question”. You are saying if there was really a God, He would have had to tell people about Germ Theory and since we were not taught germ theory there is no God. However, there could just as easily be a God that did not teach us germ theory.

Here is an example:

Tommy: My dad is a jet fighter pilot
Bill: Have you ever been up in a plane?
Tommy: No.
Bill: Well, if you Dad were really a jet fighter pilot he would have taken you up in a plane.



He said {Why did God only provide help which was already obvious to people, such as cleanliness?
“It was not oblivious. It is only oblivious to you since you were raised in a society where this was common knowledge.”
Obvious may be too strong of a word I would say that the effects of an unclean situation were within the grasp of the average person, since unclean situations provide sensory information.
Your eyes can see how disgusting bodies are when they rot.
Your nose will smell the awful smell when an unclean situation arises.
You hands can feel the dirtiness, sliminess etc.}

This is more of the same argument that I rejected above. Your questions about what God should have done don’t really show anything. However, would like to point out that you are right we do find filth naturally repulsive but there are more and less effective ways of dealing with this. Galin for example suggested smelling flowers and burning fires to cover up bad smells. I would consider this an unhelpful answer.

He said {In the end I would say that secular and divine did happen, I have changed my mind to the frequency of the secular causes. But every prayer to God asking him to stop the plague or provide a solution to it was just as mush of a waste as Astrological investigations.
Do you think these specific events were a waist of time?}

Your question assumes that prayer is never in and of itself helpful which I (like most people) disagree with you about. However, I have endeavored to show that people prayed in addition to and not instead of taking action. Christianity does not teach people not to take actions but to pray and take independent action, as I show Biblical quotes to prove. They would have been better off avoiding Galin based medicine anyway even if they took no action but prayer.

Astrology was a scientific dead end so was the alchemy and magical thinking the Christians were struggling to suppress. Only when these died could European minds start making their strongest advances. But even Astrology has to thank the Christians for their intellectual tools such as writing, numbers, as well as Greek, Roman and Arab sciences.

It would not be until the monk Mendel made his famous experiments with beans that we would get the foundation for the biology necessary to create the antibiotics which to this day remain the only helpful treatment for this disease.

The only other tool against this disease is a religiously derived on…..Quarantine. Which is still the a major strategy used to combat this disease today.

He said {1..“Since religion dominated life in seventeenth-century Italy, prayer was naturally an important weapon against the plague. When the plague worsened in Florence during the summer of 1633, an order came from the Commissioner of Health requiring nuns to pray continuously for the next 40 days for divine.”
13. “Flagellants, religious fanatics of 13th-century Europe who proclaimed the imminence of the wrath of God against corruption and, as a religious rite, practiced public, self-inflicted scourging. The sect arose in Perugia, in central Italy, in 1259-60 and is said to have numbered 10,000.”
15. In 1348, Pope Clement VI led a pilgrimage to Rome for mass prayers to appease God. However, over 90% of the pilgrims fell prey to the very plague that they had tried to prevent.}

Would these uneducated nuns have developed antibiotics? The Flagellants are heretics and many of their teachings were pagan. Would these traumatize people have been inventing the scientific method of prayer were taken away from them?

He said “Considering my other sources that says repentance was used as the main weapon against the plague also shows that a lot of time waited asking or hoping God would provide the answers. This time could have been used to figure out what natural causes spread the plague or least developing a method to figure out the unknown.”

I think that it should be clear that people would not have been looking for a scientific answer if prayer was unavailable. Fatalism and not inquiry marked the unbelievers at this time. Astrology taught nothing but fate and a wild mysterious universe that can not be known. The science of the time had failed these people and instead they were seeking God’s help for this life and the next one.

The Bible offered hope of a knowable universe that could be investigated and had rational natural laws as well as reveled spiritual ones.

These spiritual warnings in Amos could have prevented this plague and repenting (changing behavior) might have limited the recursions of the disease. This was possible not by quick medical answers but by people using their existing medical knowledge to protect the poor from unhealthy conditions.


Take Care,

Poetsong