This reminds me of some of the Islamic thought processes surrounding Aristotle and "foreign science". Namely, I remember the idea of natural motion contradicts God's ability to determine and manipulate anything in the universe, causing problems in the Islamic faith. Also, calling philosophy "not sophisticated" just reminds me of how many Islamic scholars thought the foreign sciences and their followers were unsophisticated.

I find this very interesting. From how I understand this, this passage is saying that certain members of the church had to come up with certain articles of Aristotle to ban. This resulted in a lot of overlap, disagreement, and inconsistency. This feels odd. If these articles really do contradict the faith, you would think there would be more consistency.

This is another difference between the two religions that I find very interesting. Again, is there a certain value embedded within either Christianity or Islam that paves the way for these types of developments? Or does this speak more towards each religion's demographic? In other words, does this say more about the religious beliefs or the people practicing?

This is very interesting. We hear a lot about how western Europe is typically more powerful, more advanced, etc in the modern day and age. Because of this, I tend to assume that western Europe was more of a cohesive and unified place than any other region, historically. Obviously this isn't true, but I find the differences between how religions spread to be an interesting case study of this. Was this simply because Islam came first? Or is there something about the religious values, the people practicing, etc, that made Islam spread so much faster?