What religion saw technological and scientific advances as evil so the nations that adhered to it fell behind economically?

Answer 1

Very few have fought engineering and science as such, but historically the biggest culprit was the Roman Catholic Church for several centuries in Western Europe. They crushed learning as a whole, for learning might lead to questioning of dogma.

The Ancient Greek philosophers who developed various branches or formal mathematics and the notion of a geocentric universe, larded it all with a spurious "secret society" ethos to keep the knowledge within their circles.

Presently, some fundamentalist Islamists think no-one should learn any more than that necessary to read the Koran - and the Taliban of course detest anything female enough to stop girls even learning to read - but it's not so much a pogrom against science as a social control method. They don't know that science and mathematics flourished under early Islam, which after all was invented by a well-to-do merchant with an educated, equally successful wife!

Some minor para-Christian sects hate anything modern; or pick and choose branches of science to abjure, again for social manipulation and control. many such people use the internet, TV etc to spread their message; the irony has not yet penetrated their stultified, brainwashed intellects.

Pol Pot's hyper-Communist Khmer Rouge used a similar approach in Cambodia - ironically Pol Pot himself had graduated from the Sorbonne.

An uncontrollably-learned community is a dangerous community to a dictator.