Tim Cook wrote:
> Forget 
> those who conveniently blame religion-in-general for holding us back a 
> hundred years or so technologically--we'd be held back a thousand years 
> or so if rigourous science had held sway instead.
> 
> -- 
> Tim Cook
> http://empyrean.freesitespace.net

Actually, I would suspect that, if you where at all correct, we would be 
right where we are now, or maybe a bit farther ahead. There is evidence 
that some "basics" of things like Babbage like devices where being built 
"by" Romans, but most where lost, or destroyed, since they ended up used 
mostly in temples, and later generations made a point to destroy 
anything they couldn't use for their own religion, including some of the 
temples. The problem isn't that religion held us back. The problem is, 
it tended to, and still does, arbitrarily declare certain things, 
"outside the scope of what the god(s) want", and fights to either slow 
down, halt, or outright destroy, those things. Its not just a case of 
someone fudging some numbers, or hiding an idea for a generation or so, 
or relatively "minor" stuff like that, its having to *rediscover* 
something, because the only record that anyone even may have known about 
it is an obscure reference in a book someone failed to burn, or a 
corroded mass of copper gears, at the bottom of the Mediterranean, which 
luckily for us, sank/fell overboard, so no one could destroy it.

There is a difference between "slowing" progress, and regressing it, 
which religions are prone to do.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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