Great essay. In the UK it is hammered into us Christianity is the bedrock of the nation and this is the essence of Conservatism. Small wonder Conservatism has presided over a decades long drift to the Left and anti capitalist environmentalism of net zero growth.
Isn't it a mistake to call Newton, Locke, Bacon, Jefferson, etc Christian as if they had no other cultural/philosophical influences on them. At that point they were steeped in Greek-Roman and more modern thought. At best they were mixed Christians, or Christians in part. I don't know what the right term for them would be at this point, but to say they were Christian is absurd since most of their ideas are not based on the Bible.
It's as absurd as calling some Pagan that just had some water poured on his head during baptism just a Christian, as if being dunked in water erases thousands of years of pagan culture and religion.
Across the series, your argument shifts domains without addressing how the modern framework itself emerges. While it’s not difficult to challenge the kinds of simplistic claims Mangalwadi makes, doing so at the same level leaves the central issue untouched, namely, the transformation from ancient to modern conceptions of reason, freedom, and economic life.
My broader point was that Christianity did contribute to this transformation, and in a rather decisive way; so far, you haven’t engaged with the points I raised in my earlier comments. You mentioned you would return to them, but it doesn’t seem to be heading in that direction. If you want to defend the strong thesis you’re advancing, it would be worth engaging the strongest counterarguments directly.
I think a focused YouTube debate would be the most straightforward way to do that, and I’m happy to present my arguments in more compressed form. Let me know what you think.
I think I've made it clear this is a review of one book, and so I'm covering the essential issues raised by that book. I have a more positive statement of the transformation of the West, a book that Yaron Brook and I are in the process of completing. Alas, I can't address everything all at once. As I said to you before, I'm going to address the issues you've raised, but I'm going to complete this series first.
No, that doesn’t really line up with what you’ve been doing. Your series is titled “How the Bible corrupted the soul of Western Civilization,” and you’ve been advancing general claims about Christian philosophy and its historical impact, not merely evaluating Mangalwadi.
The issue is that your conclusions rely on a framework of reason, freedom, and economic life, whose emergence in the West happened in a specific way. You did say something along the lines that this framework originated in Ancient Greece, but I countered that it’s not at all reducible to Ancient Greece, and in many ways opposite to it.
If my counter-thesis is correct, that Christianity contributed to that framework, then your argumentation, as it stands now, doesn’t go through.
I created the Laissez-faire Capitalist Constitutional Republic of Atlantis. You and all consistent Objectivists at ARI are immediately granted full citizenship. We must create the land, space, on or off planet where are nation will exist.
Great essay. In the UK it is hammered into us Christianity is the bedrock of the nation and this is the essence of Conservatism. Small wonder Conservatism has presided over a decades long drift to the Left and anti capitalist environmentalism of net zero growth.
Isn't it a mistake to call Newton, Locke, Bacon, Jefferson, etc Christian as if they had no other cultural/philosophical influences on them. At that point they were steeped in Greek-Roman and more modern thought. At best they were mixed Christians, or Christians in part. I don't know what the right term for them would be at this point, but to say they were Christian is absurd since most of their ideas are not based on the Bible.
It's as absurd as calling some Pagan that just had some water poured on his head during baptism just a Christian, as if being dunked in water erases thousands of years of pagan culture and religion.
Across the series, your argument shifts domains without addressing how the modern framework itself emerges. While it’s not difficult to challenge the kinds of simplistic claims Mangalwadi makes, doing so at the same level leaves the central issue untouched, namely, the transformation from ancient to modern conceptions of reason, freedom, and economic life.
My broader point was that Christianity did contribute to this transformation, and in a rather decisive way; so far, you haven’t engaged with the points I raised in my earlier comments. You mentioned you would return to them, but it doesn’t seem to be heading in that direction. If you want to defend the strong thesis you’re advancing, it would be worth engaging the strongest counterarguments directly.
I think a focused YouTube debate would be the most straightforward way to do that, and I’m happy to present my arguments in more compressed form. Let me know what you think.
I think I've made it clear this is a review of one book, and so I'm covering the essential issues raised by that book. I have a more positive statement of the transformation of the West, a book that Yaron Brook and I are in the process of completing. Alas, I can't address everything all at once. As I said to you before, I'm going to address the issues you've raised, but I'm going to complete this series first.
No, that doesn’t really line up with what you’ve been doing. Your series is titled “How the Bible corrupted the soul of Western Civilization,” and you’ve been advancing general claims about Christian philosophy and its historical impact, not merely evaluating Mangalwadi.
The issue is that your conclusions rely on a framework of reason, freedom, and economic life, whose emergence in the West happened in a specific way. You did say something along the lines that this framework originated in Ancient Greece, but I countered that it’s not at all reducible to Ancient Greece, and in many ways opposite to it.
If my counter-thesis is correct, that Christianity contributed to that framework, then your argumentation, as it stands now, doesn’t go through.
I created the Laissez-faire Capitalist Constitutional Republic of Atlantis. You and all consistent Objectivists at ARI are immediately granted full citizenship. We must create the land, space, on or off planet where are nation will exist.