I'm personally glad the crusades happened, since the alternative would have cost a lot more suffering. The crusades were a reaction on the enchroaching of Islam on the European continent. If we'd live under muslim leadership like pretty much all Arabic country we'd have much slower progress with science, technology and human rights.

Thanks to Christianity, the Enlightment was possible in Europe. In Islamic countries a similar Enlightment would not be possible, since Muslims are not allowed to doubt Allah or change (reinterpret) the Quran making much scientific progress impossible.

You do not know much about the crusades. The crusades actually helped the muslims in the east. The forth crusade completely destroyed the byzantine empire which was the force holding the muslims in the east. Why did the crusaders attack the christian byzantine empire? Because it was the richest place in the world at the time, full of gold and silver and the crusaders were more interested in loot than in defending the faith.

After the crusaders took constantinople, the byzantine empire broke up into several countries, some controlled by crusaders, some by greeks. Eventually the greeks took constantinople back but by that time it was depopulated from continuous war. And the greeks were never able to get the entire empire back together. The turks then easily took over the various parts of the empire and took over constantinople. Then the turks took over southeastern europe.

Thus the crusaders doomed most of southeastern europe to be ruled over by the turks.

I am not going to get into the debate of whether christianity is better than islam. But it is obvious to me that self determination is better. Thus it was better for the christian peoples of south eastern europe to be ruled by their own christian rulers rather than the foreign muslim turks.

This was quite a tragedy for most eastern european peoples. The turks dealt with them with various degrees of cruelty. They tried to completely wipe the armenians out, for example. And yes the crusaders were mostly responsible for it.

>If we'd live under muslim leadership like pretty much all Arabic country we'd have much slower progress with science, technology and human rights.

Algebra is named after the Muslim who invented it. Zero, and the Arabic numeral system, came to Europe by way of Fibonacci, by way of the Muslim world, and revolutionized trade once the Church stopped fearing the concept of zero because it thought it was witchcraft. Muslim scholars also preserved a great deal of the knowledge of the classical world during the Dark Ages, which might have been lost to Europe entirely after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Were it not for Islam, the Enlightenment may not have occurred, or would possibly have had to occur without the influence of Aristotle, Euclid or Plato.

And you can take your last paragraph and switch out Islam with the Church and the relationship between religion and science would be exactly the same. Both religions of the time allowed for the exploration and understanding of the natural world (science) with the caveat that the religion itself was a given. Look up what happened to Giordano Bruno for an example of how much freedom of intellect the Christian world was willing to permit. (TL;DR he believed the sun was merely one star out of many, and that other stars could harbor other planets, and possibly life, and wound up burned at the stake, because obviously that's heretical nonsense.)

Of course Christianity was hard on scientists in the past, but in Christianity there is room for interpretation. This was made possible since translations were eventually accepted and some texts could not be translated directly (e.g. Hebrew texts). Any Muslim knows the Islamic texts should be read in Arabic and that no man may change the original Arabic texts or be punished with death.

A Muslim knows it's a sin to doubt Allah, so any thoughts that might give doubts in the beliefs of a Muslim should immediately be discarded. Any Muslim that abandons his faith should be killed even! In Christianity it's not a sin to doubt the existence of God and nowhere in the Bible does God ask for the killing of apostates by the believers (this in contrast with Islam).

  Were it not for Islam, the Enlightenment may not have occurred, or would possibly have had to occur without the influence of Aristotle, Euclid or Plato.

I doubt this very much, otherwise we'd have seen an Enlightenment in the Arabic world.

Christian rulers tried their own hardest to prevent the Enlightenment, and then sailed off to go colonize the Middle East. Stop apologizing for them.

Wow, racist much? "Christians be like this, Muslims be like this"

There's a lot of ignorant assumptions going on in your post, but let me just remind you that those "unenlightened muslims" are those to whom we owe modern mathematics.

  Wow, racist much? "Christians be like this, Muslims be like this"

Muslims are not a race. My post was not meant in a racist way.

  There's a lot of ignorant assumptions going on in your post, but let me just remind you that those "unenlightened muslims" are those to whom we owe modern mathematics.

I never claimed no science was part of the Islamic or Arabic world, but I'd argue that compared to the Judeo-Christian (or Western) world practicing and advancing science is much harder and therefore less progress is made.

>Wow, racist much? "Christians be like this, Muslims be like this"

Please don't abuse terminology.

For me, I think it was just cleverly stated. Considering that the quote is an attribution of an attribution, we can't think PG, or even the source PG is quoting, actually believed such things about the Greeks.