I don’t know the book you are criticizing, but I can explain why its thesis and your thesis are equally methodologically flawed. I will also address briefly a couple historical-philosophical points you make in the essay.
First, we must ask: how are statements of the form “Christianity contributed X” or “Christianity didn’t contribute anything” be possible in rational discourse at all? In what sense can they be justified as “true” or “false”, at least to the minimal degree of plausibility?
It’s a very broad topic, so let’s restrict it somehow. You specifically address human dignity. That’s basically an idea, or rather, a moral value. So let’s look at the statement that “Christianity contributed the value of human dignity to Western Civilization”. What exactly can such a statement mean? There are at least two ways to understand it:
1. Without Christianity, the value of human dignity would not have been possible.
Such statement is clearly absurd. Christianity is a very specific religious tradition, and human dignity is a very general moral value that can be understood in multiple different ways that are not dependent on Christianity.
2. Christianity was the first tradition that gave rise to the value of human dignity, and hence it is from Christianity that the West learnt this value.
This is a more plausible claim, but it’s not clear whether it can be proven. The problem is that there are different approaches to human dignity, and even in Christianity it was not always the same, but rather evolving. There is also a question of what “gave rise” means. Some might say that all ideas were already in the scriptures, and just needed to be discovered. That’s a speculation based on questionable epistemology. Again, a much more defensible approach is that certain ideas existed in Christianity from the outset, and were later developed in a certain direction to create a specific vision of human dignity. I think this would be a true claim. Indeed, the precise vision of human dignity that was invented in Christianity is roughly this:
(*) Human has a supreme value amongst all beings in the physical universe, the value stemming from the existence of a unique soul giving him the capacity to connect to God.
Or alternatively, for an even stronger Christian version we could formulate something like this:
(**) Human is uniquely valuable because God himself sacrificed his son for the sake of humanity.
I think it’s completely legitimate to say that the approaches (*) and (**) to human dignity were indeed invented in the Christian tradition. Of course, (**) specifically is uniquely Christian and completely radical. Now we can see that the claim that “Christianity contributed nothing” is false. You might of course object that the vision (**) has no value, and hence contributing (**) still counts as contributing nothing. But that is also false, unless you hold a (100% authoritarian) view that your values must be everyone else’s values, or flatly reject vast bodies of historical data. Indeed, if the most magnificent works of architecture, art and literature were created in the Christian civilization to exalt this specific vision of humanity, then we have a proof that it was found valuable by great minds throughout the history. Historically, this vision also motivated creation of humanistic strains of thought, universities, hospitals and charity organizations which helped advance science and improve humanity’s material conditions, hence it has a value even from the point of view of the most materialistic theories of values. Specifically, I think it is justified to say that the Christian vision of human dignity contributed to Reneissance humanism and subjectivism (most importantly, in revolutionary works of De Cusa), which were very important for the development of Reneissance art and even scientific revolution. Certainly De Cusa’s ideas for learned ignorance and subjective epistemological stance are explicitly theological and Christian-inspired. Either way, it’s true that Renaissance subjectivism was major turn from Hellenistic objectivism, and I think we can argue that it was altogether impossible in the Hellenistic culture (which was much more nature-first “objectivist”). Now Reneissance subjectivism doesn’t need to be perfect and can be still criticized, but it was very important for the mindset of scientific revolution and the emergence of new approach to facts and norms (both eventually formalized by Immanuel Kant in his critical project). Unless you can trace Reneissance subjectivism back to Ancient Greeks and negate the influence of Christianity, it seems that you thereby must accept its importance for the development of the new European mindset.
So, to summarize: Christianity did contribute something of value, and likely, something of enormous value. And this doesn’t mean that these things couldn’t have developed without Christianity; this would be non-sense to say that. But even if these things could have developed without Christianity, the fact is that in the Western Civilization they did develop with the help of it. For someone who doesn’t like facts of history, I’ll quote Feynman “go to another universe, where things are more philosophically easy”.
However, there are a few others objections, which I suspect you might use.
One objection is roughly that these things would have developed differently and possibly faster and better without Christianity. That would be a pure speculation. We don’t have empirical data about alternative histories, and can’t run counterfactual experiments in history. Moreover, it’s still impossible to prove a-priori unless you reduce human beings and civilizations to some high (and of course, freely chosen) abstraction which has essentially nothing to do with the way the world really is.
You might then try to argue that some elements of Christianity are particularly bad, and would slow down human progress under any possible conditions. I think it’s possible to make such arguments, but only to a certain extent. Of course, there are bad ideas within the broad Christian tradition: for example, historically many Christian thinkers promoted anti-semitism. However, anti-Semitism existed in all societies throughout history, and it’s not unique to Christianity. I might as well plausibly argue that civilizational anti-Semitism was born in Hellenistic rationalism, and hence precedes Christianity. Still, it would be of course true that a specific theological form of anti-Semitism was created in Christianity specifically.
But yet again, Christianity is not a monolith tradition, and anti-Semitic interpretations of some elements of the Christian scripture aren’t forced. In fact, Christianity was born out of Judaism, it’s unlikely that Paul and others had anti-Semitic motives while writing some parts of the Gospels. Either way, even if it’s true that Christianity was uniquely pernicious in promoting these bad ideas, the existence of such bad influence can be evaluated independently of other positive influences.
Finally, perhaps the strongest argument would be to attempt to show that there’s something in the non-negotiable core of Christianity that’s uniquely bad for civilization under any circumstances. But I suspect that you will fail in making such an argument. Indeed, good arguments can be made in favor of the idea that any human civilization requires some framework of sacral values. Sacral values are roughly speaking, moral values which are treated as universally binding and transcending any sort of self-interest. They are called sacral because they are entirely non-instrumental, they are “set aside” from any mundane values required for survival, financial flourishing etc. Human dignity in the Christian formulation (**) is in fact an example of such a moral value. Historically, religion has produced such frameworks of sacral values, and institutions that honor them. Christianity is an example of a religion supplying such framework; you can criticize it qua framework of sacral values, or even qua religion. That’s fine, but then remember that frameworks evolve. It’s an entirely separate question of whether you can argue that we can dispense with sacral values, or even specifically with religious frameworks of sacral values without losing civilization altogether. I don’t believe that such an a-priori argument exists; and empirically, all civilizations have had frameworks of sacral values. Christianity is clearly vastly superior to most of them, certainly including Hellenistic religions. So an empirical argument would almost certainly fail.
Let me know if you have any thoughts, and I apologize in advance if it was a bit hard to digest.
I'm not making any of the arguments you suggest. Right now my primary goal is to evaluate Mangalwadi's argument, but in the final entry I'll return to the wider question of how to evaluate Christianity's influence.
No, in this essay you are claiming that Christianity “contributed nothing positive”, and address the specific idea of human dignity. The purpose of my response was to show that these claims are mistaken.
In particular, I identified some ideas that Christianity contributed to the Western Civilization, especially pertaining to human dignity, and showed that those ideas had a positive historical impact and value.
Also, the larger goal of my response was to point out that your methodology is flawed.
You have to give some objective criterions of truth and value priori to making the kinds of evaluations you’re making here or promising to make in the future, in order for your evaluations to be taken seriously.
Don, as always I appreciate what you have to say. And as an observant Jew, I have few qualms with what you’ve written so well here. The one point I would make is that the Torah, which forms the basis of all monotheism, has almost nothing to do with “religion” as you appear to define it. For that reason, there is no root word for “religion” in the Hebrew language. What you are rejecting, it should be noted, is Christianity.
It is also curious that you haven’t quoted anything from the nearly limitless canon of Jewish sages, past and present—which, of course, preceded Christianity by well over a millennium—and which stresses, again and again, the centrality of human dignity.
Aside from Kirill Magidson's point that "Christianity contributed nothing to Western civilisation" is very likely too vague to rationally evaluate, I have another point.
This point relates less to the specific discussion above (Mangalwadi on human dignity) and more to your initial claim (no Christian contributions), which I think is the more fundamental question.
I can think of two major contributions from Christianity that were a. extremely valuable b. specifically Christian (e.g., very likely would not have existed in their current form without Christianity) and c. cannot be credited to either pagan Greco-Roman ideas or Renaissance/Enlightenment thinking.
Regarding point c, I'm taking the thrust of your article to be that pre-Renaissance Christianity reveals the *soul* of Christianity. Accepting this for the sake of argument, I think the medieval era -- e.g., anywhere after the fall of Rome but before the Renaissance, when Christian ideas dominated Europe -- is a good place to look for uniquely Christian contributions.
And, yes, there was a dearth of innovation in this era, so your general point is "directionally correct". Still, I can see at least two exceptions:
1. The University, which in its modern form is widely regarded as being a direct descendant of the medieval Christian tradition. Yes, there were Madrassas and similar institutes elsewhere, but modern academia in the Western world still bears the distinctive fingerprints of its medieval Christian origin. The idea of universal knowledge, the institutional union of teaching and research, even the guild-like structure of modern academia were all present in the medieval university.
2. Corporate Law, e.g., the body of legislation relating to corporate entities, had its origin in early/high medieval Church law. The central idea of corporate law is that the organisation is treated as a legal person, and (legally) distinct from the individuals involved, who nevertheless have various rights and obligations w/r/t the corporate entity. The Roman Church basically operated as a network of quasi-independent organisations, and medieval canon law had to grapple with issues like "when exactly is an individual agent of the corporation liable?", etc.
All of this proved to be very useful social infrastructure during the rise of capitalism. Apply medieval corporate law to a profit-making entity, add the idea that you can buy and sell pieces *of the corporation*, and you have the early-modern joint stock company. Nick Szabo has a great essay on this ("Origins of the joint-stock corporation").
---
Yes, you could argue that without Christianity maybe we'd have some variant form of universities and corporations, though I think there's a strong case that *the specific forms we have* are distinctly Christian. This touches on a broader point: it's really impossible to tell what is and what is not contributed by any particular set of ideas.
Similarly, going back to the earlier point, the claim as written ("Christianity didn't contribute anything") is too vague to really evaluate. By Christianity do you mean the people, the ideas, the Church(es), or something else? (I mean, tons of *Christians* contributed to Western culture, but I'd guess you'd say they were inspired by non-Christian ideas, so they don't count.)
If the ideas, do you mean only the ideas specific to Christianity, or the hybrid of Jewish, Greek and Pagan ideas that contributed to the Christian worldview? (Again, you could say that Christianity squashed the great classical culture, or you could say that Christianity preserved Greek logic through the dark ages -- i.e. you could argue it either way.)
Similarly, how exactly do you decide what contributed what, when you're dealing with thousands of years of interconnected history? We don't have time machines that let us run history 10,000 times with different religions predominating and see what happens.
At any rate, I enjoy reading your writing, and hope you don't mind the lengthy comments -- I wouldn't write so much if I didn't think it a topic worthy of discussion.
The blind spots among the Christian apologists are gaping; they amount to when Ben Shapiro listed out everything that makes a theory a "Conspiracy Theory" rather than rational speculation.
He took a brief pause. And had to explicitly state that Religion is not a Conspiracy Theory. Because he's a smart guy, and he realized "insiders claiming special knowledge(revelation), unprovable claims, claims not logically connected" etc, all sound *a lot* like religious thinking. And so it is.
The more honest, such as Ben himself, if well pressed admit that religious claims don't make sense. The reason smart people like Ben and Hirsi joined Judeo-Christianity is because they believe it is necessary for social cohesion.
I don't think any of these people believe it is true. To continue with the Ben example, he answered a question from a man questioning his Faith - "Fake it".
You owe it to the community to fake your values to hold everyone together in the face of The Left, the Islamists, the Communists, the criminals, the immigrants.
Everything we have is built *on the rejection* of such thinking. The Enlightenment philosophers cared about *TRUTH* and our modern technology, healthcare, and, most importantly *LIBERTY* is all built on that foundation.
Anyone who has even the faintest grasp of history knows the Christians past were the rule of the Mullahs in Iran, and those backwards, brutal oppressors tortured anyone who dared grope rationally for the truth in reality for themselves. See the Crusades, Inquisition, The Hundred Years War, Witch burning.
Finding the common ground - I think we all agree that human dignity is a valuable moral ideal that is beneficial to human civilization.
My critique of this debate is that both sides are arguing for some version of tribalistic supremacy. The competition seems pointless to me. Neither purely secular humanism nor critically based Christianity can or should try to claim sole credit for this moral ideal.
As a religious humanist, it seems clear to me that the ideal of human dignity can be conveyed and fostered through either scriptural (truth through story) or rational deduction (logic and reason). Yay team. So why the competition?
Does it really matter how we got there as long as we are all striving to get there - to realize human dignity.
I think there is a difference between religious beliefs and the institution of religions. For this identification I must give credit to Rose Wilder Lane and her magnificent book—Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority.
Lane speaks highly of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. She emphasizes that Jesus preached that man is free to act without permission or the rule of authority. She highlights that Mohammed viewed all men as self-controlling and equal—None are superior to other men.
Lane writes:
“ His view was that the priests corrupted Abraham's teaching when they assumed authority to rule the Jews. Christ attacked the priests, and reasserted the truth. But the Catholic and Greek priests now corrupted Christ's teaching, by claiming authority to control Christians. This showed, he said, that organization is evil. There should be no priests. Each individual must recognize his direct relation to God, his self-controlling, personal responsibility.”
Lane observed the use of government controlled schools as propaganda machines for the state.
There is much that isn’t taught in our government schools.
“How does it happen that the Crusaders found so many Christians living among the infidels? Why, Christians lived there all the time. They were part of the Saracens' world. Moslems did not exterminate people whose religious belief was different; here they still are, in lands that the Moslems held for a thousand years—the Armenians, Albanians, Greeks, Copts, Maronites, Druses, Jews, Parsees, Yezedees, Hindus, to mention a few.”
Belief should not be vilified; it is the system of authority that religion has built that must be torn down.
Christians authority forced men to convert or die.
“Europeans slaughtered the Albigenses, the Waldensians, the Socinians, the Huguenots, the Covenanters, and scores of other groups. Five hundred years after the Crusades, Protestants and Catholics were fleeing to the American wilderness to save their lives from European fanaticism.”
This isn’t the fault of believers; it is the inevitable consequence of priests and mullahs.
No Authority Controls Our Actions: We are not Subjects of Any Authority
“Abraham and the prophets after him knew that every human being is self-controlling and responsible. Christ knew it. Mohammed knew it. And eleven hundred years after Mohammed, some hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women living on the coast of North America knew it. This fact is the hope of the world. For only unknown individuals can create and maintain conditions in which men can act freely, conditions in which human energy can operate to improve the human world. Only an individual who recognizes that his self-controlling responsibility is a condition of human life, and fully accepts the responsibility of a creator of the human world, can protect human rights in the infinite complexity of men's relationships with each other. Only this individual protection of all men's rights can keep their natural freedom operating on this earth. Living men and women create the human world. Everyone is responsible for the stupidity, the cruelty, the injustice, the wrongs of which he complains. Let him take the beam from his own eye. Have I never been stupid, have I never committed a cruelty, an injustice, a wrong against another person? I am a creator of this world as it is; I am responsible for what it is.”
Unless you delve into the difference between Christ's radical message as interpreted by the writers of the New Testament and the various social, religious and historical roots of the Old Testament texts, you miss a fundamental aspect of the discussion.
I would point to several arguments in favor of the critical influence of Judeo/ Christianity.
1. In Christianity's view, God created the world. He is not identical with the world. Nor is material world God. He made it separate with its own uniform laws.
2. God made each human distinct and individual.
3.The church was separate from the state and was often in opposition to it. The realm of morality was higher than political sovereignty. The state, ultimately, had to share power.
Contrast number 3 with China, which while technologically advanced, never politically advanced because the state and religion were always one.
I don’t know the book you are criticizing, but I can explain why its thesis and your thesis are equally methodologically flawed. I will also address briefly a couple historical-philosophical points you make in the essay.
First, we must ask: how are statements of the form “Christianity contributed X” or “Christianity didn’t contribute anything” be possible in rational discourse at all? In what sense can they be justified as “true” or “false”, at least to the minimal degree of plausibility?
It’s a very broad topic, so let’s restrict it somehow. You specifically address human dignity. That’s basically an idea, or rather, a moral value. So let’s look at the statement that “Christianity contributed the value of human dignity to Western Civilization”. What exactly can such a statement mean? There are at least two ways to understand it:
1. Without Christianity, the value of human dignity would not have been possible.
Such statement is clearly absurd. Christianity is a very specific religious tradition, and human dignity is a very general moral value that can be understood in multiple different ways that are not dependent on Christianity.
2. Christianity was the first tradition that gave rise to the value of human dignity, and hence it is from Christianity that the West learnt this value.
This is a more plausible claim, but it’s not clear whether it can be proven. The problem is that there are different approaches to human dignity, and even in Christianity it was not always the same, but rather evolving. There is also a question of what “gave rise” means. Some might say that all ideas were already in the scriptures, and just needed to be discovered. That’s a speculation based on questionable epistemology. Again, a much more defensible approach is that certain ideas existed in Christianity from the outset, and were later developed in a certain direction to create a specific vision of human dignity. I think this would be a true claim. Indeed, the precise vision of human dignity that was invented in Christianity is roughly this:
(*) Human has a supreme value amongst all beings in the physical universe, the value stemming from the existence of a unique soul giving him the capacity to connect to God.
Or alternatively, for an even stronger Christian version we could formulate something like this:
(**) Human is uniquely valuable because God himself sacrificed his son for the sake of humanity.
I think it’s completely legitimate to say that the approaches (*) and (**) to human dignity were indeed invented in the Christian tradition. Of course, (**) specifically is uniquely Christian and completely radical. Now we can see that the claim that “Christianity contributed nothing” is false. You might of course object that the vision (**) has no value, and hence contributing (**) still counts as contributing nothing. But that is also false, unless you hold a (100% authoritarian) view that your values must be everyone else’s values, or flatly reject vast bodies of historical data. Indeed, if the most magnificent works of architecture, art and literature were created in the Christian civilization to exalt this specific vision of humanity, then we have a proof that it was found valuable by great minds throughout the history. Historically, this vision also motivated creation of humanistic strains of thought, universities, hospitals and charity organizations which helped advance science and improve humanity’s material conditions, hence it has a value even from the point of view of the most materialistic theories of values. Specifically, I think it is justified to say that the Christian vision of human dignity contributed to Reneissance humanism and subjectivism (most importantly, in revolutionary works of De Cusa), which were very important for the development of Reneissance art and even scientific revolution. Certainly De Cusa’s ideas for learned ignorance and subjective epistemological stance are explicitly theological and Christian-inspired. Either way, it’s true that Renaissance subjectivism was major turn from Hellenistic objectivism, and I think we can argue that it was altogether impossible in the Hellenistic culture (which was much more nature-first “objectivist”). Now Reneissance subjectivism doesn’t need to be perfect and can be still criticized, but it was very important for the mindset of scientific revolution and the emergence of new approach to facts and norms (both eventually formalized by Immanuel Kant in his critical project). Unless you can trace Reneissance subjectivism back to Ancient Greeks and negate the influence of Christianity, it seems that you thereby must accept its importance for the development of the new European mindset.
So, to summarize: Christianity did contribute something of value, and likely, something of enormous value. And this doesn’t mean that these things couldn’t have developed without Christianity; this would be non-sense to say that. But even if these things could have developed without Christianity, the fact is that in the Western Civilization they did develop with the help of it. For someone who doesn’t like facts of history, I’ll quote Feynman “go to another universe, where things are more philosophically easy”.
However, there are a few others objections, which I suspect you might use.
One objection is roughly that these things would have developed differently and possibly faster and better without Christianity. That would be a pure speculation. We don’t have empirical data about alternative histories, and can’t run counterfactual experiments in history. Moreover, it’s still impossible to prove a-priori unless you reduce human beings and civilizations to some high (and of course, freely chosen) abstraction which has essentially nothing to do with the way the world really is.
You might then try to argue that some elements of Christianity are particularly bad, and would slow down human progress under any possible conditions. I think it’s possible to make such arguments, but only to a certain extent. Of course, there are bad ideas within the broad Christian tradition: for example, historically many Christian thinkers promoted anti-semitism. However, anti-Semitism existed in all societies throughout history, and it’s not unique to Christianity. I might as well plausibly argue that civilizational anti-Semitism was born in Hellenistic rationalism, and hence precedes Christianity. Still, it would be of course true that a specific theological form of anti-Semitism was created in Christianity specifically.
But yet again, Christianity is not a monolith tradition, and anti-Semitic interpretations of some elements of the Christian scripture aren’t forced. In fact, Christianity was born out of Judaism, it’s unlikely that Paul and others had anti-Semitic motives while writing some parts of the Gospels. Either way, even if it’s true that Christianity was uniquely pernicious in promoting these bad ideas, the existence of such bad influence can be evaluated independently of other positive influences.
Finally, perhaps the strongest argument would be to attempt to show that there’s something in the non-negotiable core of Christianity that’s uniquely bad for civilization under any circumstances. But I suspect that you will fail in making such an argument. Indeed, good arguments can be made in favor of the idea that any human civilization requires some framework of sacral values. Sacral values are roughly speaking, moral values which are treated as universally binding and transcending any sort of self-interest. They are called sacral because they are entirely non-instrumental, they are “set aside” from any mundane values required for survival, financial flourishing etc. Human dignity in the Christian formulation (**) is in fact an example of such a moral value. Historically, religion has produced such frameworks of sacral values, and institutions that honor them. Christianity is an example of a religion supplying such framework; you can criticize it qua framework of sacral values, or even qua religion. That’s fine, but then remember that frameworks evolve. It’s an entirely separate question of whether you can argue that we can dispense with sacral values, or even specifically with religious frameworks of sacral values without losing civilization altogether. I don’t believe that such an a-priori argument exists; and empirically, all civilizations have had frameworks of sacral values. Christianity is clearly vastly superior to most of them, certainly including Hellenistic religions. So an empirical argument would almost certainly fail.
Let me know if you have any thoughts, and I apologize in advance if it was a bit hard to digest.
I'm not making any of the arguments you suggest. Right now my primary goal is to evaluate Mangalwadi's argument, but in the final entry I'll return to the wider question of how to evaluate Christianity's influence.
No, in this essay you are claiming that Christianity “contributed nothing positive”, and address the specific idea of human dignity. The purpose of my response was to show that these claims are mistaken.
In particular, I identified some ideas that Christianity contributed to the Western Civilization, especially pertaining to human dignity, and showed that those ideas had a positive historical impact and value.
Also, the larger goal of my response was to point out that your methodology is flawed.
You have to give some objective criterions of truth and value priori to making the kinds of evaluations you’re making here or promising to make in the future, in order for your evaluations to be taken seriously.
The. Book is fiction and adults who can’t recognize that border on delusional.
Don, as always I appreciate what you have to say. And as an observant Jew, I have few qualms with what you’ve written so well here. The one point I would make is that the Torah, which forms the basis of all monotheism, has almost nothing to do with “religion” as you appear to define it. For that reason, there is no root word for “religion” in the Hebrew language. What you are rejecting, it should be noted, is Christianity.
It is also curious that you haven’t quoted anything from the nearly limitless canon of Jewish sages, past and present—which, of course, preceded Christianity by well over a millennium—and which stresses, again and again, the centrality of human dignity.
Aside from Kirill Magidson's point that "Christianity contributed nothing to Western civilisation" is very likely too vague to rationally evaluate, I have another point.
This point relates less to the specific discussion above (Mangalwadi on human dignity) and more to your initial claim (no Christian contributions), which I think is the more fundamental question.
I can think of two major contributions from Christianity that were a. extremely valuable b. specifically Christian (e.g., very likely would not have existed in their current form without Christianity) and c. cannot be credited to either pagan Greco-Roman ideas or Renaissance/Enlightenment thinking.
Regarding point c, I'm taking the thrust of your article to be that pre-Renaissance Christianity reveals the *soul* of Christianity. Accepting this for the sake of argument, I think the medieval era -- e.g., anywhere after the fall of Rome but before the Renaissance, when Christian ideas dominated Europe -- is a good place to look for uniquely Christian contributions.
And, yes, there was a dearth of innovation in this era, so your general point is "directionally correct". Still, I can see at least two exceptions:
1. The University, which in its modern form is widely regarded as being a direct descendant of the medieval Christian tradition. Yes, there were Madrassas and similar institutes elsewhere, but modern academia in the Western world still bears the distinctive fingerprints of its medieval Christian origin. The idea of universal knowledge, the institutional union of teaching and research, even the guild-like structure of modern academia were all present in the medieval university.
2. Corporate Law, e.g., the body of legislation relating to corporate entities, had its origin in early/high medieval Church law. The central idea of corporate law is that the organisation is treated as a legal person, and (legally) distinct from the individuals involved, who nevertheless have various rights and obligations w/r/t the corporate entity. The Roman Church basically operated as a network of quasi-independent organisations, and medieval canon law had to grapple with issues like "when exactly is an individual agent of the corporation liable?", etc.
All of this proved to be very useful social infrastructure during the rise of capitalism. Apply medieval corporate law to a profit-making entity, add the idea that you can buy and sell pieces *of the corporation*, and you have the early-modern joint stock company. Nick Szabo has a great essay on this ("Origins of the joint-stock corporation").
---
Yes, you could argue that without Christianity maybe we'd have some variant form of universities and corporations, though I think there's a strong case that *the specific forms we have* are distinctly Christian. This touches on a broader point: it's really impossible to tell what is and what is not contributed by any particular set of ideas.
Similarly, going back to the earlier point, the claim as written ("Christianity didn't contribute anything") is too vague to really evaluate. By Christianity do you mean the people, the ideas, the Church(es), or something else? (I mean, tons of *Christians* contributed to Western culture, but I'd guess you'd say they were inspired by non-Christian ideas, so they don't count.)
If the ideas, do you mean only the ideas specific to Christianity, or the hybrid of Jewish, Greek and Pagan ideas that contributed to the Christian worldview? (Again, you could say that Christianity squashed the great classical culture, or you could say that Christianity preserved Greek logic through the dark ages -- i.e. you could argue it either way.)
Similarly, how exactly do you decide what contributed what, when you're dealing with thousands of years of interconnected history? We don't have time machines that let us run history 10,000 times with different religions predominating and see what happens.
At any rate, I enjoy reading your writing, and hope you don't mind the lengthy comments -- I wouldn't write so much if I didn't think it a topic worthy of discussion.
Excellent post!
The blind spots among the Christian apologists are gaping; they amount to when Ben Shapiro listed out everything that makes a theory a "Conspiracy Theory" rather than rational speculation.
He took a brief pause. And had to explicitly state that Religion is not a Conspiracy Theory. Because he's a smart guy, and he realized "insiders claiming special knowledge(revelation), unprovable claims, claims not logically connected" etc, all sound *a lot* like religious thinking. And so it is.
The more honest, such as Ben himself, if well pressed admit that religious claims don't make sense. The reason smart people like Ben and Hirsi joined Judeo-Christianity is because they believe it is necessary for social cohesion.
I don't think any of these people believe it is true. To continue with the Ben example, he answered a question from a man questioning his Faith - "Fake it".
You owe it to the community to fake your values to hold everyone together in the face of The Left, the Islamists, the Communists, the criminals, the immigrants.
Everything we have is built *on the rejection* of such thinking. The Enlightenment philosophers cared about *TRUTH* and our modern technology, healthcare, and, most importantly *LIBERTY* is all built on that foundation.
Anyone who has even the faintest grasp of history knows the Christians past were the rule of the Mullahs in Iran, and those backwards, brutal oppressors tortured anyone who dared grope rationally for the truth in reality for themselves. See the Crusades, Inquisition, The Hundred Years War, Witch burning.
Finding the common ground - I think we all agree that human dignity is a valuable moral ideal that is beneficial to human civilization.
My critique of this debate is that both sides are arguing for some version of tribalistic supremacy. The competition seems pointless to me. Neither purely secular humanism nor critically based Christianity can or should try to claim sole credit for this moral ideal.
As a religious humanist, it seems clear to me that the ideal of human dignity can be conveyed and fostered through either scriptural (truth through story) or rational deduction (logic and reason). Yay team. So why the competition?
Does it really matter how we got there as long as we are all striving to get there - to realize human dignity.
Awesome, just awesome!
Thank you for the clarity in disentangling religious claims.
Don,
I think there is a difference between religious beliefs and the institution of religions. For this identification I must give credit to Rose Wilder Lane and her magnificent book—Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority.
Lane speaks highly of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. She emphasizes that Jesus preached that man is free to act without permission or the rule of authority. She highlights that Mohammed viewed all men as self-controlling and equal—None are superior to other men.
Lane writes:
“ His view was that the priests corrupted Abraham's teaching when they assumed authority to rule the Jews. Christ attacked the priests, and reasserted the truth. But the Catholic and Greek priests now corrupted Christ's teaching, by claiming authority to control Christians. This showed, he said, that organization is evil. There should be no priests. Each individual must recognize his direct relation to God, his self-controlling, personal responsibility.”
Lane observed the use of government controlled schools as propaganda machines for the state.
There is much that isn’t taught in our government schools.
“How does it happen that the Crusaders found so many Christians living among the infidels? Why, Christians lived there all the time. They were part of the Saracens' world. Moslems did not exterminate people whose religious belief was different; here they still are, in lands that the Moslems held for a thousand years—the Armenians, Albanians, Greeks, Copts, Maronites, Druses, Jews, Parsees, Yezedees, Hindus, to mention a few.”
Belief should not be vilified; it is the system of authority that religion has built that must be torn down.
Christians authority forced men to convert or die.
“Europeans slaughtered the Albigenses, the Waldensians, the Socinians, the Huguenots, the Covenanters, and scores of other groups. Five hundred years after the Crusades, Protestants and Catholics were fleeing to the American wilderness to save their lives from European fanaticism.”
This isn’t the fault of believers; it is the inevitable consequence of priests and mullahs.
No Authority Controls Our Actions: We are not Subjects of Any Authority
“Abraham and the prophets after him knew that every human being is self-controlling and responsible. Christ knew it. Mohammed knew it. And eleven hundred years after Mohammed, some hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women living on the coast of North America knew it. This fact is the hope of the world. For only unknown individuals can create and maintain conditions in which men can act freely, conditions in which human energy can operate to improve the human world. Only an individual who recognizes that his self-controlling responsibility is a condition of human life, and fully accepts the responsibility of a creator of the human world, can protect human rights in the infinite complexity of men's relationships with each other. Only this individual protection of all men's rights can keep their natural freedom operating on this earth. Living men and women create the human world. Everyone is responsible for the stupidity, the cruelty, the injustice, the wrongs of which he complains. Let him take the beam from his own eye. Have I never been stupid, have I never committed a cruelty, an injustice, a wrong against another person? I am a creator of this world as it is; I am responsible for what it is.”
(Discovery of Freedom, Rose Wilder Lane)
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You should review Dominion by Tom Holland. It's a somewhat better book on a similar theme.
I did a podcast on the book, which you can find here: https://youtu.be/YjhHIgZzO3k?si=J89F-MGZ6PftHigm
Unless you delve into the difference between Christ's radical message as interpreted by the writers of the New Testament and the various social, religious and historical roots of the Old Testament texts, you miss a fundamental aspect of the discussion.
In this series, I'm responding to one particular book. I am sure I will miss may fundamental aspects of the discussion.
I would point to several arguments in favor of the critical influence of Judeo/ Christianity.
1. In Christianity's view, God created the world. He is not identical with the world. Nor is material world God. He made it separate with its own uniform laws.
2. God made each human distinct and individual.
3.The church was separate from the state and was often in opposition to it. The realm of morality was higher than political sovereignty. The state, ultimately, had to share power.
Contrast number 3 with China, which while technologically advanced, never politically advanced because the state and religion were always one.