How Christianity Helped The West Get Ahead

[Ausm]

Maybe you should stop posting.

I've been posting here 17 years why stop now?

 

[Ausm]

/confused.

Why do you know more about history than anybody else here? I can't understand your babble.

Ok...let's make it simple. Do you really think I give a flying fuck about your question?

 

[Texashiker]

My theory is that Christianity resulted in better institutions due to the belief in an all-knowing god made people less likely to cheat even if they knew they could get away with cheating.

Crime, cheating, lying, stealing, murder,,,, was just as prevalent in the dark and middle ages as it is today. Since ale was brewed by just about everyone and their brother and sister, drinking related violence was rampant.

We can point at several things that contributed to the dark ages, such as the invasion of the Huns into what is now called Europe, which displaced the Germanic tribes.

What brought Europe out of the dark ages is a little more complicated. Christianity played a factor, but so did the little things.

Such as needing marriages documented so the property can be divided when there was a divorce.

A legal system for neighbors to settle disputes. If your dog kills your neighbors chickens, who is responsible? A system like our modern Justice of the Peace was setup for people to settle disputes.

Land leases, contracts, marriages,,,, all the little laws that we use today the people in the dark ages needed as well.

If anything, the evolution of the legal system helped bring Europe out of the Dark Ages as much as Christianity did.

I've been posting here 17 years why stop now?

I meant in this thread.

 

[micrometers]

Crime, cheating, lying, stealing, murder,,,, was just as prevalent in the dark and middle ages as it is today. Since ale was brewed by just about everyone and their brother and sister, drinking related violence was rampant.

We can point at several things that contributed to the dark ages, such as the invasion of the Huns into what is now called Europe, which displaced the Germanic tribes.

What brought Europe out of the dark ages is a little more complicated. Christianity played a factor, but so did the little things.

Such as needing marriages documented so the property can be divided when there was a divorce.

A legal system for neighbors to settle disputes. If your dog kills your neighbors chickens, who is responsible? A system like our modern Justice of the Peace was setup for people to settle disputes.

Land leases, contracts, marriages,,,, all the little laws that we use today the people in the dark ages needed as well.

If anything, the evolution of the legal system helped bring Europe out of the Dark Ages as much as Christianity did.




I meant in this thread.

It's all relative. Christianity doesn't stamp out all vice, but it results in a more moral society due to the belief system. One of the beliefs is that God sees all and knows all. The practical result is that you do not cheat even when you know you can get away with it, or at the very least cheat less.

Other belief systems are more concerned with inner being or social order but they don't have the feature of an all-knowing God and so cheating might be more prevalent.

 

[Kadarin]

It's all relative. Christianity doesn't stamp out all vice, but it results in a more moral society due to the belief system. One of the beliefs is that God sees all and knows all. The practical result is that you do not cheat even when you know you can get away with it, or at the very least cheat less.

Other belief systems are more concerned with inner being or social order but they don't have the feature of an all-knowing God and so cheating might be more prevalent.

Because the only reason why people are moral is because they are afraid God will see and judge them if they are not. Right, gotcha.

 

[micrometers]

Because the only reason why people are moral is because they are afraid God will see and judge them if they are not. Right, gotcha.

Not the way you put it. There are many ways to cast it.

Put another way, in other belief systems there isn't as ironclad a penalty for wrongdoing.

 

[brandonb]

Ok...let's make it simple. Do you really think I give a flying fuck about your question?

Oh! I see! This is a one sided affair where you can claim to be the historian, and nobody can question you.

I will believe all your opinions and nothing but!

In actuality, you are a fucking retard. And the value you bring to this thread equates to nothing but babbling, just as you have proven. Have a nice day.

 

[cybrsage]

Because the only reason why people are moral is because they are afraid God will see and judge them if they are not. Right, gotcha.

If a person honestly believes their religion is true, and this religion contains an all powerful God who knows when you sin, then yes. Yes, people would be moral because they know God will see them.

Those who claim a religion is true but really do not believe it will not care, since they do not really believe it is true.

 

[cybrsage]

By your logic, any culture who tried to create a world Empire should be condoned just because of the positive spread of culture that comes with it.

Some empires would fall into this category, but many would not. Colonialism did not try to spread their culture, they intended to dominate and take resources instead.

The Greek Empire did try to spread their culture, as did the Romans. The Mongols, not at all.

You have to look at each Empire and see what they did, blanket statements fail in this arena.

 

[Albatross]

Link
Link
For people who want to understand more in depth the relation between Christianity and modernity.
Oh,and for people who still believe in the flat earth BS:
Link

 

[woolfe9999]

Not the way you put it. There are many ways to cast it.

Put another way, in other belief systems there isn't as ironclad a penalty for wrongdoing.

You're missing something important about Christianity in particular. You can always repent. The "sinner" knows this.

 

[JEDIYoda]

The more that the West has rejected Christianity, the more it has benefited.

nice statement...care to elaborate?

 

[cybrsage]

The Earth is flat...like a quarter. Spin a quarter and what does it look like while it is spinning fast? Yep, a globe. Slap it to the table and you easily see it is a disc.

The Earth is a disc, spinning fast.


I was told this by someone handing out pamphlets about it at a Navy Base...they were protesting the Navy's involvement in the huge world wide cover up of the flat Earth. Really, they believed it was true...

 

[IronWing]

This is a good read on the subject. While I think the author pushes his assertions a bit past the point that his documentation supports, overall he does an excellent job of making the case that Christian doctrine and the Christian world view are largely to blame for the onset and longevity of the post-Roman dark ages.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Closing-We...dp/1400033802/

 

[micrometers]

This is a good read on the subject. While I think the author pushes his assertions a bit past the point that his documentation supports, overall he does an excellent job of making the case that Christian doctrine and the Christian world view are largely to blame for the onset and longevity of the post-Roman dark ages.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Closing-We...dp/1400033802/

lol. I'm not going to buy the book, but I'll just read a few of the reviews and their thoughts

I am grateful for the care with which Amazon readers have reviewed my book whether they have agreed with my argument or not. The reviews are worth a reply.
My thesis is that Christianity was heavily politicised by the late Roman empire, certainly to the extent that it would have been unrecognisable to Jesus. Note the linking of the church to the empire's success in war, opulent church building and an ever narrowing definition of what beliefs one had to hold to be saved. (Hand in hand with this went an elaboration of the horrors of hell, a radical and unhappy development which can only have discouraged freedom of thought.) My core argument is that one result of the combination of the forces of authority (the empire) and faith (the church) was a stifling of a sophisticated tradition of intellectual thought which had stretched back over nearly a thousand years and which relied strongly on the use of the reasoning mind.
I did not depend on Gibbon. I do not agree with him that intellectual thought in the early Christian centuries was dead and I believe that the well established hierarchy of the church strengthened not undermined the empire. After all it was the church which survived the collapse of the western empire. Of course, Gibbon writes so eloquently that I could not resist quoting from him at times but my argument is developed independently of him and draws on both primary sources and recent scholarship.
On the relationship between Christianity and philosophy I argue that there were two major strands of Greek philosophy , those of Plato and Aristotle. The early church did not reject Greek philosophy but drew heavily on Platonism to the exclusion of Aristotle. In the thirteenth century Christianity was reinvigorated by the adoption of Aristotelianism , notably by Thomas Aquinas. It seems clear that Christianity needed injections of pagan philosophy to maintain its vitality and a new era in Christian intellectual life was now possible. I don't explore it in this book. Even so, when one compares the rich and broad intellectual achievements of the `pagan' Greek centuries with those of the Middle Ages, it is hard to make a comparison in favour of the latter. Where are the great names? (The critic who mentioned the ninth century philosopher Erigena should also have mentioned that he was condemned as a heretic.)
When one reads the great works of second and third century AD thinkers such as Plutarch, Galen, Ptolemy and Plotinus, which are remarkable for their range and depth, one cannot but feel that much has been lost in the west by the fifth century. Something dramatic happened in the fourth century. In 313 Constantine brought the traditional policy of Roman toleration for different religious beliefs to its culmination by offering Christians (who had condemned the pagan gods as demons) a privileged place within the empire alongside other religions. By 381 the Christian emperor Theodosius when enforcing the Nicene creed condemns other Christians as `foolish madmen.. We decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious names of heretics . . .they will suffer in the first place the chastisement of divine condemnation, and in the second the punishment which our authority , in accordance with the will of heaven, shall decided to inflict'.If this is not a `closing of the western mind' it is difficult to know what is. It goes hand in hand with a mass of texts which condemn rational thought and the violent suppression of Jewish and pagan sacred places. There is no precedent for such a powerful imposition of a religious ideology in the Greco-Roman world. The evidence of suppression is so overwhelming that the onus must be on those who argue otherwise to refute it.
Some readers have related my book to the present day- I leave it to them to do so if they wish -it is important to understand ANY age in which perspectives seem to narrow and religion and politics become intertwined as they certainly did in the fourth century. After all American Christianity was founded by those attempting to escape just such political straitjackets. Christianity has never been monolithic or static. In fact,as my book makes clear, one of my heroes is Gregory the Great who, I believe, brought back spirituality, moderation and compassion into the Christian tradition after the extremes of the fourth century. It is the sheer variety of Christianities which make the religion such an absorbing area of study.
I hope Amazon readers will continue to engage with my arguments whether they agree with them or not. Keep the western mind open and good reading! Charles Freeman.
N.B. Amazon insist I award my book some stars! I have chosen ''four' because since I wrote it I have come across a lot of new material which I think could improve its argument further.

 

[cybrsage]

The Roman Empire definately took Christianity away from what it was when Jesus started it.

 

[Ninjahedge]

Title Fix:

How Christianity Helped the West Get Head

 

[DrPizza]

Actually, at one point, the Islamic world was the heart of learning and culture. You know where the word "algebra" comes from, right? There are some parallels between it sinking in those regards and what's happening with fundamentalist Christians today.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

I dislike Christanity, but the setback in your graph is more properly attributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. And that probably started as soon as the Third Punic War finished, before the Empire even existed. The chaos of the first century BC and the subsequent reformation helped a bit, Augustus, Claudius, and the other handful of good Roman Emperors helped a bit, but the Roman dominance of the Mediterranean is a huge contributor to its eventual demise.

 

[IronWing]

Actually, at one point, the Islamic world was the heart of learning and culture. You know where the word "algebra" comes from, right? There are some parallels between it sinking in those regards and what's happening with fundamentalist Christians today.

Some but not many. The golden age of Islam got smashed by the Mongols. The sack of Baghdad was to the Muslim world what the burning of the library at Alexandria was to the Greek/Roman world, maybe even worse in terms of the loss of literature.

 

[Darwin333]

Not the way you put it. There are many ways to cast it.

Put another way, in other belief systems there isn't as ironclad a penalty for wrongdoing.

I think you are forgetting about a major part of Christianity and that is reconciliation. Basically you can be a horrible person and sin every opportunity you can and a few hours before your death realize your actions were evil, ask for forgiveness (Sacrament of Reconciliation) and your slate is wiped completely clean. Like shaking up an etch-a-sketch, never happened.

 

[werepossum]

I am offering half off on that.

LOL +1

Funny pic, but its not at all accurate. Written language was preserved in the scattered Christian monasteries after the fall of Rome, math was taught there, higher learning was taught there. Outside of the Christian Monasteries you had hordes of European tribes fighting each other to the death, and most of these tribes were never under Roman influence and had no concept of Math, reading or writing. Those tribes were the ones that destroyed Rome and brought Western Europe's standard of living to the "dark ages".

Christianity is the one thing that unified Europeans during those times and it took several hundred years for it to happen. That pic better represents what happened when Barbarian tribes destroyed a stable nation rather religion...

Some people see a horde of barbarians and Muslims toppling the Christian (for a century) Roman Empire in the fifth century, some people see a horde of Christianity toppling the Christian Roman Empire. Stupid is in the eye of the beholder.

Christianity did indeed form a unifying force within in the tenth century, in the form of the Holy Roman Empire. That undoubtedly helped the West get ahead. Even more import in my opinion was that the Chinese Empire intentionally abandoned the rest of the world, seeing nothing to compare to its own glory, and the Islamic world changed from honoring the pursuit of knowledge to forbidding the pursuit of knowledge other than of the Quran and Islam. It's always easier to win if your competition doesn't compete, and Europe went from being the backwards stepchild clinging to bits of Roman knowledge among two learned companions to the leading scientific and economic power.

It's also worth saying that although the Church was the patron of much scientific advancement, it was also often in opposition.

 

[werepossum]

You're missing something important about Christianity in particular. You can always repent. The "sinner" knows this.

Although that didn't always help you. The phrase "Kill them all, God will know his own" fell more than once from the lips of the Church's mighty.

Title Fix:

How Christianity Helped the West Get Head

LOL

 

[Baasha]

LOL.. you have discredited your post with your title. The exact opposite is true as far as "progress" is concerned.

The western world was stuck in its muck and mire because of that corpse-worshiping cult christianity.

It wasn't until the Enlightenment, a product of deep influence of Eastern philosophy, science, math, and art that the barbarians of Europe started to use reason to get ahead. Of course, the plundering, pillaging, and genocide of millions of people and the theft of their property around the world "helped" these vermin become "rich" materially speaking. The Enlightenment was due to the reconciliation of Hebraism and Hellenism; the former being judeo-christian mythology and the latter being Greek logic and reasoning. By destroying all of the ancient cultures of Europe and committing genocide on the "infidels", christians appropriated Hellenism (apart from various "pagan" customs, holidays, and culturally significant practices).

Christianity and Islam have been responsible for the greatest genocides in the history of the world. In fact, most ancient cultures and peoples live in textbooks and museums today because of these two desert cults. They could never topple India and Hinduism however. That is why both of them are in collusion, along with their communist bedfellows, trying to destroy Hindus under the garb of "human rights", "religious freedom", etc.

Read Being Different (www.beingdifferentbook.com) by Rajiv Malhotra on the specific chronology of events that led to the Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment in Europe. The conquest of India by the British kick-started Sanskrit scholarship and Indology. From there, the affinity of Sanskrit and Latin/Greek was found and the primary Indologist William Jones posited that some common ancestor must have existed; now called PIE (Proto-Indo-European). This PIE is a farce and has been discredited by linguists and scholars because it was 'reconstructed' using a fundamental Sanskrit/Hindu text; the Rig Veda. LOL..

As Malhotra states, it was Rene Descartes who first posited 'disembodied reasoning'. This is the underpinning of western philosophy; that the knower and the known are infinitely and always separate. This is in stark contrast to the Dharmic point of view called adhyatma-vidhya (embodied knowing); a state of existence where the knower, object of knowledge, and the act of knowing cease to be separate. This is called "enlightenment" (mokSA/nirvAnA). This theory of disembodied knowing propounded by Descarte was the fundamental reason for the division of the secular and sacred (reason and religion) even found today in modern Europe and America. Both had established domains in which they would not 'bother' each other. Each had its own domain to exercise its 'thoughts' somewhat freely. This separation of church and reasoning, quite literally, was the reason science was allowed to flourish in europe. Until then, scientists were being tortured, burned at the stake, and imprisoned for statements that were apparently against that paperback of toilet paper called the Bible.

This disembodied knowing gave the basis for Europeans to marginalize christianity and the idiocy contained therein. The church was losing its grasp and thus the enlightement was born. Even to this day, there is a stark difference between the scientific and religious sections of society in the west. This divide never needed to happen in India (Dharmic culture). That is a topic for another thread however.

Going back to why that corpse-worshiping desert cult (christianity) was the reason for holding the western world back, the church divided people (still does) into the flock and "others" (infidels much akin to islam). Thus, any lands that were conquered were called "discoveries"; as if nobody else found them before. Not only that, these genocidal vermin claimed that the 'discovered' lands were theirs because they were "christian".

Must be those judeo-christian values I suppose!

That is why one of the most horrid genocides in the history of the world occurred; the native Americans of both North and South America. Read Steve Newcomb's "Christian Law of Nations" to see the veracity of this.

In summary, the european enlightenment came about as a REACTION to the overbearing freaks (christians) who attempted to micro-manage every aspect of one's life, even one's thoughts. This reaction AWAY from that, the renaissance in Hellenistic reasoning, the knowledge transferred from conquered lands (especially India) and Arab traders gave rise to the scientific advancements of modern europe. Without colonial expansion and the genocide of millions, europe, and consequently America, would be the cesspool of bible-thumping untouchables it was not too long ago.

So in my time on here I"ve been pretty critical of fundamentalist Christianity, but I want to talk now about how Christianity might have improved Western society compared to other religions.

Christianity worked in large part by

1) creating the idea of a moral all-seeing God.

2) Separating religion from the natural world

First one: basically, the concept of a all-knowing God means that you will be more honest with your fellow man than you would otherwise. That is because there are always little areas where we know we can get away with a little dishonesty and won't be caught for it. But if there is an all-knowing God, then everything matters.

LOL... sounds like a pre-schooler's theory of responsibility. And that is exactly what christianity is; a comfort religion for idiots. your jew god was sacrificed (human sacrifice! how profound indeed! ) so it could alleviate your wrongdoings? I thought modern people don't like bailouts? What happened to personal responsibility? Tsk tsk.. now it makes sense as to why "conservative" shitheads thump the bible; stress personal responsibility while hoping some dead jew on a stick will protect your sorry ass! hahahhaha..

On a large scale, this results in more efficient organizations with less in-fighting.

have you heard of something called history? christians were slaughtering each other for centuries and even did so in the last century (catholics/protestants). Just like the other desert cults, christianity was the fundamental reason for causing the misery of untold millions around the world; of course, the jews can be excused of this particular transgression since their numbers were always too small to do much harm, unlike the other two.

Second: In Hinduism for instance, you are taught that all life is part of a cycle and we are all one. Practically, what this does is prevent you from really messing with nature if it means disrupting the natural world's spirits. With Christianity, it is taught that God gave man dominion over the Earth. This allows man to really explore chemistry and physics.

"We" are not all one. You don't have the slightest clue as to what Hinduism is so don't comment on it and stick to the topic at hand; christianity.

It was because of Hinduism's ontological nature that Yoga was invented; to discover the true NATURE of reality.

And christian "dominion over the earth" is the fundamental reason for the desecration, destruction, and rape of the planet's natural resources. Queue in the stupid "green" movement as an afterthought. This 'dominion' nonsense was the exact reason genocide on non-christians was committed around the world and the plunder of their resources, land, and wealth! Read Being Different; it truly puts things in perspective.

 

[Ninjahedge]

Tell us how you really feel.