<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div dir="ltr">On Aug 23, 2021, at 5:27 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org> wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">If everybody has been paying attention, they know that history is my weakest subject. All I wanted to say: the influence of Christianity on governments waned significantly in the last thousand years. Can I get away with that? bill w</div></div></div></blockquote><br><div><div dir="ltr">Not really. Why? Because the influence of religion or Christianity definitely went up during that period and later went down. It’s almost like saying ‘the devastation caused by infectious disease waned significantly over the last thousand years.’ Well, if you leave out the Black Death (probably the worst pandemic of humans), the various other plagues (some of which were revisits of the Black Death), and the spread of malaria (to Europe and then to the Americas), and the many other diseases spread to the Americas and to Polynesia. So, while one might point out that infectious diseases went into decline in the last 150 years or so, over the last thousand years it’s extremely distorting to say they declined. It makes it seem like the decline started in 1000 CE and never appreciably went up during that period.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Regards,</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Dan</div></div></body></html>