Atheists, liberals, socialists and scientists are still behaving like Christians even though they have largely moved on regarding belief in God.
The evangelising urge is the big one. The rest of the world just cares about gaining power.
And that those at the bottom of the status hierarchy are worthy of dignity. Modern liberal democracy wouldn't be possible without a Christian way of thinking.
Ever have one of those bosses who takes credit for his underlings' accomplishments but their screwups are never his fault? ... So given that context, why the heck would we take it seriously when Christianity tries to take credit for caring about more than power and for those at the bottom of the status hierarchy being worthy of dignity? Shouldn't we suspect those were plagiarized too? Funny story about that...
Your comment is missing its mark. You seem to be engaging in polemics. I'm not.
If I believe the things you seem to think I do, I would be a Christian. I'm not. I'm an atheist. So's Tom Holland
The heck are you on about? I didn't indicate I think you believe anything except what you said: that we're "still behaving like Christians" and that liberal democracy is "a Christian way of thinking". You're giving Christianity credit for advances just because they happened on Christianity's watch. That in no way implies you'd be Christian -- lots of people give bosses credit for what happened on their watch whether the bosses deserve credit or not. Well of course those things all happened on Christianity's watch -- everything that happened in Europe and America happened on Christianity's watch, because Christianity ruthlessly suppressed every competing worldview. But I see no reason to think the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and the rise of human rights and liberal democracy wouldn't have happened anyway if Christianity hadn't been there. Christianity probably slowed them down -- it was a lot of the reason the Dark Ages went dark. Westerners came out of the Dark Ages when the Crusades put us in contact with Arabs and we found they'd preserved copies of vast amounts of knowledge from the ancient Greeks and Romans that our monks had scraped off parchments to overwrite with Christian prayers. If the Roman Empire had never turned Christian then when the Visigoths et al. overran it, the new rulers and the new societies they formed would have ended up adopting Stoicism and Epicureanism and so forth instead of scraping parchments and persecuting heretics. We never would have lost that ancient knowledge and the early modern era could have been born hundreds of years sooner.
That's a bullshit Enlightenment era anti-Christian rant. The Dark Ages went dark because they previously wrote on papyrus. When west Rome lost Egypt they lost papyrous. Velum is way more expensive. Papyrous naturally desintegrates. Its like an inbuilt knowledge timebomb. So copyists had to be selective about which works to copy.
Eventually we figured out how to make paper. Now the price of copying books went down to previous levels.
The gap between papyrous and paper we call the dark ages. The books the Christian monks didn't prioritise disappeared. But that's a function of technology. Not persecution. Europe never stopped being litterate. Constantinople had access to papyrous longer than west Rome, so more books survived. But they to lost access to Egypt, and ran into the same problem.
We could have had science without the Church intimidating Copernicus, imprisoning Galileo, and burning Bruno. We could have talked one another out of slavery without fighting a Bible that was a literal instruction manual for it. The seeds for science, liberalism and democracy were all there in the world Christianity erased; what they needed in order to flower was freedom of thought -- and there was a hell of a lot more freedom of thought in the Roman Empire before it went Christian than after. We have those things now in spite of Christianity, not because of it.
Another way to say the same thing. Christianity is a package of beliefs, values, rituals, iconography.
When Europe secularised we told ourselves that God is dead and now we were godless and humanistic. We were free. The Jacobins of the French revolution banned God and converted churches to "temples of reason". Robbespierre kept going on about virtue and that all people should be forced to be free, on pain of death.
Sounds like a famaliar behaviour?
Yeah, well, there's a reason the world learned democracy from Britain, not from France.
Nietzshe took a peak at how pagan Europe operated and how its values worked and compared them to modern values and realised how deep Christian thinking went. He called it "slave morality". In "Thus spake Zarathustra" he speculated on how a non Christian mindset might function in Europe. The Overman.
Nietzsche also fried his brain trying to save a horse from its owner's whip. Some part of him knew there are more possibilities in this world than slave morality and master morality.
Pagans had slaves. Might makes right. The idea that this would be problematic were fringe philosophical musings.
Christians had slaves; the idea that this would be un-Christian was fringe philosophical musings. And pagans were never about might makes right; that's a story told by paganism's enemies. As Xenophanes wrote, Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and a reproach among men. They knew perfectly well that abuse of power was a shame and a reproach. The idea that the powerful had a duty to be just and virtuous runs all through ancient writers. Good lord, man, the entire origin story of the Roman state runs back to an act of justified rebellion against its king for letting his son get away with rape.
Or put even simpler. If everyone is Christian it has cultural side effects that persist even if people stop being Christian. It completely permeates everything in the west.
Socialism I'll give you. Atheism, liberalism and science, not so much.
Well... its even more complicated. Rome had a variety of paralell moral codes. The elite were various types of Platonists. These shaped Christianity. Christianity is like 1% judaism and 99% Platonism.
What judaism brought to the table was inclusion and intolerance. All Jews are welcome into the faith, even the poor. All Jews is equal in the eyes of God. And Jews who don't accept judaism need to be forced to behave.
So Christianity has a moral code, ethics and theology, that is 100% platonism. Which the Roman elites already followed. What Christianity added was to expand it so that it applies to all Romans, not just the rich.
Before Christianity poor people weren't allowed into the temples (which must have sucked when it rained). Only rich people were allowed in.
But that little 1% of Judaism changed everything. Changed the whole culture. Instead of a kaleidoscope of faiths, beliefs, philosophies, communities, in groups and outgroups there was just one. That changed the culture in fundamental ways.
Christians still thought like pagans until the 500's. The big shift came with the Justinian plague. Power centres moved from cities into the countryside. Where urban luxuries weren't available. Soon after (550 AD) was the last war where the losers were systematically enslaved.
That's arguably when Christians started thinking in a way we would recognise as Christian. Before that they were still, very much, thinking like pagans. Italy today still have loads of pagan cultural remnants. Its a slow process.
De-Christianisation will obviously be equally as slow.
I can't imagine socialism or liberalism surviving in a post Christian world. Both, I think, are products born out of Christianity. People, obviously, aren't equaly as valuable. That's just a fact. Some are more capable than others. As Christian values fade, I think, powerful individuals, will increasingly amass power. Eventually kings and aristocrats will return and be the new normal. I struggle to see any other viable development.
Science and the scientiffic method sprung out of monasticism and was an attempt to decode God's plan. Castel Gandolfo was one of the first and finest scientiffic institutions.
reaction. Your post doesn't make sense to me.
