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 ... Enlightenment era anti-Christian rant.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
The Enlightenment was the best thing that ever happened to the human race. The thinkers of that era composed anti-Christian rants because they knew very well what Christianity had done to their world. It was Europe tearing itself apart for more than a hundred years fighting wars over who should be authorized to require everybody else to believe mountains of unfalsifiable mumbo-jumbo that convinced our intellectual fathers to bring forth on that continent a new way of thinking, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that "no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
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.
Yes. That. That was my point. I wasn't saying ancient knowledge was lost because of Christian persecution. It was lost because Christianity told people not to prioritize it. Somebody found a medieval vellum full of religious writings, examined it with modern analytical technology, and made the earlier text visible, the earlier text some semiliterate monk scraped off so his boss could reuse the vellum to record his higher priority prayers. The erased text was Archimedes explaining how to do calculus two thousand years before Newton and Leibniz reinvented it.
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.
A lot of the elite weren't Platonists at all. Stoicism and Epicureanism were common, and of course lots of people still worshipped Jupiter et al. Platonism was just one of the pack until Christianity endorsed it.
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.
Yes, exactly. What it takes for liberalism, atheism and science to prosper is tolerance. The 2nd and 3rd century Roman Empire had it, and then Christianity wiped it away. That's why it sounds so crazy when you give Christianity credit for them now.
So Christianity has a moral code, ethics and theology, that is 100% platonism. ... 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.
Yeah. You know Plato was a proto-fascist, right? Have you read The Republic?
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.
Socialism was, sure; but it's straight-up slave-morality, and slave-morality has never been bound to any particular theology. Socialism derives its appeal from humans' innate zero-sum-game economic intuitions. The USSR was post-Christian as all get-out, and yet belief in socialism went on and on right up until the whole thing collapsed from its inability to be productive. Even Gorbachev was a true believer; he convinced himself the USSR's problem was corruption rather than admitting the concept itself was wrong. And now socialism is more popular than ever in the post-Christian West. And of course socialism was wildly popular in China, which was never Christian. With or without Christianity, I don't think socialism will run out of believers until we've been farming as long as we hunted and gathered.
As for liberalism, that appears to have been dying a slow death pretty much ever since the Liberal Party tore itself apart and was supplanted by Labour. That happened while Christianity was still the dominant belief. With or without Christianity, caring about one's outgroup's freedom is a pretty hard thing to sell.
People, obviously, aren't equaly as valuable. That's just a fact. Some are more capable than others.
Huh? Being more capable doesn't make anyone's value a fact. People can value whatever they like. Value is subjective. Liberalism recognizes this; it's one of the reasons reality has a liberal bias.
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.
That's just bizarre. Powerful individuals always amassed power when Christianity was in charge. Kings and aristocrats were the old normal through about 90% of the Christian Era. When was an individual ever more powerful than when people believed in the Divine Right of Kings? You're talking as though the last 200 years are representative of Christianity. No. The last 200 years are when the Enlightenment
defanged the religion it was born in reaction against.
That could be kinda funny, though, when your kid named Khan is acting up and making you mad and you scream out, "Khaaaan!". You gotta be careful when it comes to names. My cousin had a neighbor in the 70's who named their big, yellowish dog "Taxi", who unfortunately liked to run off and explore, leaving the neighbor frequently standing in an empty suburban street yelling, "Taxi!!!" like an idiot.
