Is Christianity responsible for equality and liberty?

[Fisher of Men]

Here's an article entitled:Christianity responsible for equality and liberty
By: DINESH D'SOUZA. What do you think?

Christianity is largely responsible for many of the principles and institutions that even secular people cherish -- chief among them equality and liberty.

In recent years there has arisen a new atheism that represents a direct attack on Western Christianity. Books such as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, and Sam Harris' The End of Faith, all contend that Western society would be better off if we could eradicate from it the last vestiges of Christianity. But Christianity is largely responsible for many of the principles and institutions that even secular people cherish -- chief among them equality and liberty.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal," he called the proposition "self-evident." But he did not mean that it is immediately evident. It requires a certain kind of learning. And indeed most cultures throughout history, and even today, reject the proposition. At first glance, there is admittedly something absurd about the claim of human equality, when all around us we see dramatic evidence of inequality. People are unequal in height, in weight, in strength, in stamina, in intelligence, in perseverance, in truthfulness, and in about every other quality.

But of course Jefferson knew this. He was asserting human equality of a special kind. Human beings, he was saying, are moral equals, each of whom possesses certain equal rights. They differ in many respects, but each of their lives has a moral worth no greater and no less than that of any other. According to this doctrine, the rights of a Philadelphia street sweeper are the same as those of Jefferson himself.

This idea of the preciousness and equal worth of every human being is largely rooted in Christianity. Christians believe that God places infinite value on every human life. Christian salvation does not attach itself to a person's family or tribe or city. It is an individual matter. And not only are Christians judged at the end of their lives as individuals, but throughout their lives they relate to God on that basis. This aspect of Christianity had momentous consequences.

Though the American founders were inspired by the examples of Greece and Rome, they also saw limitations in those examples. Alexander Hamilton wrote that it would be "as ridiculous to seek for [political] models in the simple ages of Greece and Rome as it would be to go in quest of them among the Hottentots and Laplanders." In The Federalist Papers, we read at one point that the classical idea of liberty decreed "to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next ... ."

And elsewhere: "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." While the ancients had direct democracy that was susceptible to the unjust passions of the mob and supported by large-scale slavery, we today have representative democracy, with full citizenship and the franchise extended in principle to all. Let us try to understand how this great change came about.


A New Morality

In ancient Greece and Rome, individual human life had no particular value in and of itself. The Spartans left weak children to die on the hillside. Infanticide was common, as it is common even today in many parts of the world. Fathers who wanted sons had few qualms about drowning their newborn daughters. Human beings were routinely bludgeoned to death or mauled by wild animals in the Roman gladiatorial arena. Many of the great classical thinkers saw nothing wrong with these practices. Christianity, on the other hand, contributed to their demise by fostering moral outrage at the mistreatment of innocent human life.

Likewise, women had a very low status in ancient Greece and Rome, as they do today in many cultures, notably in the Muslim world. Such views are common in patriarchal cultures. And they were prevalent as well in the Jewish society in which Jesus lived. But Jesus broke the traditional taboos of his time when he scandalously permitted women of low social status to travel with him and be part of his circle of friends and confidantes.

Christianity did not immediately and directly contest patriarchy, but it helped to elevate the status of women in society.The Christian prohibition of adultery, a sin it viewed as equally serious for men and women, and rules concerning divorce that (unlike in Judaism and Islam) treated men and women equally, helped to improve the social status of women.

Indeed so dignified was the position of the woman in Christian marriage that women predominated in the early Christian church, and the pagan Romans scorned Christianity as a religion for women.

Then there is slavery, a favorite topic for the new atheist writers. "Consult the Bible," Sam Harris writes in Letter to a Christian Nation, "and you will discover that the creator of the universe clearly expects us to keep slaves." Steven Weinberg notes that "Christianity ... lived comfortably with slavery for many centuries." Nor are they the first to fault Christianity for its alleged approval of slavery.

But we must remember that slavery pre-dated Christianity by centuries and even millennia. It was widely practiced in the ancient world, from China and India to Greece and Rome. Most cultures regarded it as an indispensable institution, like the family. Sociologist Orlando Patterson has noted that for centuries, slavery needed no defenders because it had no critics.

But Christianity, from its very beginning, discouraged the enslavement of fellow Christians. We read in one of Paul's letters that Paul himself interceded with a master named Philemon on behalf of his runaway slave, and encouraged Philemon to think of his slave as a brother instead. Confronted with the question of how a slave can also be a brother, Christians began to regard slavery as indefensible.

As a result, slavery withered throughout medieval Christendom and was eventually replaced by serfdom. While slaves were "human tools," serfs had rights of marriage, contract, and property ownership that were legally enforceable. And of course serfdom itself would eventually collapse under the weight of the argument for human dignity.

Moreover, politically active Christians were at the forefront of the modern anti-slavery movement. In England, William Wilberforce spearheaded a campaign that began with almost no support and was driven entirely by his Christian convictions -- a story powerfully told in the recent film Amazing Grace. Eventually Wilberforce triumphed, and in 1833 slavery was outlawed in Britain. Pressed by religious groups at home, England then took the lead in repressing the slave trade abroad.

LINK

 

[Fisher of Men]

The rest of the article:

The debate over slavery in America, too, had a distinctively religious flavor. Free blacks who agitated for emancipation invoked the narrative of liberation in the Book of Exodus: "Go down Moses, way down to Egypt land and tell old Pharoah, let my people go." But of course throughout history people have opposed slavery for themselves while being happy to enslave others. Indeed there were many black slave owners in the American South. What is remarkable in this historical period in the Western world is the rise of opposition to slavery in principle.

Among the first to embrace abolitionism were the Quakers, and other Christians soon followed in applying politically the biblical notion that human beings are equal in the eyes of God. Understanding equality in this ingrained way, they adopted the view that no man has the right to rule another man without his consent. This latter idea (contained most famously in the Declaration of Independence) is the moral root both of abolitionism and of democracy.

For those who think of American history only or mostly in secular terms, it may come as news that some of its greatest events were preceded by massive Christian revivals. What historians call the First Great Awakening swept the country in the mid-eighteenth century, and helped lay the moral foundation of the American Revolution. Historian Paul Johnson describes the War for Independence as "inconceivable ... without this religious background."

By this he means that the revival provided essential support for the ideas that fuelled the Revolution. Jefferson, let us recall, proclaimed that human equality is a gift from God: we are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights. Indeed there is no other possible source for them. And Jefferson later wrote that he was not expressing new ideas or principles when he wrote the Declaration, but was rather giving expression to something that had become settled in the American mind.

Likewise John Adams wrote: "What do we mean by the American Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people ... a change in their religious sentiments."

Those religious sentiments were forged in the fiery sermons of the First Great Awakening. The Second Great Awakening, which began in the early nineteenth century, left in its wake the temperance movement, the movement for women's suffrage, and most importantly the abolitionist movement. It was the religious fervor of men like Charles Finney, the Presbyterian lawyer who became president of Oberlin College, that animated the abolitionist cause and contributed so much to the chain of events that brought about America's "new birth of freedom."

And finally, fast forwarding to the twentieth century, the Reverend Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech referred famously to a promissory note and demanded that it be cashed. This was an appeal to the idea of equality in the Declaration of 1776. Remarkably, King was resting his case on a proclamation issued 200 years earlier by a Southern slave owner. Yet in doing so, he was appealing to a principle that he and Jefferson shared. Both men, the twentieth-century pastor and the eighteenth-century planter, reflected the influence of Christianity in American politics.





Freedom Redefined

Christianity has also lent force to the modern concept of individual freedom. There are hints of this concept both in the classical world and in the world of the ancient Hebrews. One finds, in such figures as Socrates and the Hebrew prophets, notable individuals who have the courage to stand up and question even the highest expressions of power. But while these cultures produced great individuals, as other cultures often do today, none of them cultivated an appreciation for individuality.

And it is significant that Socrates and the Hebrew prophets came to bad ends. They were anomalies in their societies, and those societies -- lacking respect for individual freedom -- got rid of them.



As Benjamin Constant pointed out, freedom in the ancient world was the right to participate in the making of laws. Greek democracy was direct democracy in which every citizen could show up in the agora, debate issues of taxes and war, and vote on what action the polis should take. The Greeks exercised their freedom solely through active involvement in the political life of the city. There was no other kind of freedom and certainly no freedom of thought or of religion of the kind that we hold dear.

The modern idea of freedom, by contrast, is rooted in a respect for the individual. It means the right to express our opinion, the right to choose a career, the right to buy and sell property, the right to travel where we want, the right to our own personal space, and the right to live our own life. In return, we are responsible only to respect the rights of others. This is the freedom we are ready to fight for, and we become indignant when it is challenged or taken away.

Christianity has played a vital role in the development of this new concept of freedom through its doctrine that all human beings are moral agents, created in God's image, with the ability to be the architects of their own lives. The Enlightenment certainly contributed to this understanding of human freedom, though it drew from ideas about the worth of the individual that had been promulgated above all by the teachings of Christianity.

Let me conclude with a warning first issued by one of Western civilization's greatest atheists, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The ideas that define Western civilization, Nietzsche said, are based on Christianity. Because some of these ideas seem to have taken on a life of their own, we might have the illusion that we can abandon Christianity while retaining them. This illusion, Nietzsche warns us, is just that. Remove Christianity and the ideas fall too.

Consider the example of Europe, where secularization has been occurring for well over a century. For a while it seemed that secularization would have no effect on European morality or social institutions.



Yet increasingly today there is evidence of the decline of the nuclear family. Overall birth-rates have plummeted, while rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births are up. Nietzsche also warned that, with the decline of Christianity, new and opposing ideas would arise. We see these today in demands for the radical redefinition of the family, the revival of eugenic theories, and even arguments for infanticide.

In sum, the eradication of Christianity -- and of organized religion in general -- would also mean the gradual extinction of the principles of human dignity. Consider human equality. Why do we hold to it? The Christian idea of equality in God's eyes is undeniably largely responsible. The attempt to ground respect for equality on a purely secular basis ignores the vital contribution by Christianity to its spread. It is folly to believe that it could survive without the continuing aid of religious belief.

If we cherish what is distinctive about Western civilization, then -- whatever our religious convictions -- we should respect rather than denigrate its Christian roots.

 

[The Scotsman]

Please do not post great screed of text they are rarely read and use up band width. Please limit yourself to discussion on specific points.

 

[Gipper]

That is a very good article. And points out very clearly that without Christianity we might find slavery acceptable today and many other forms of barbarism. Christianity resulted in a new enlightenment and freedoms for the individual. And who wants to destroy Christianity and what groups work day and night to accomplish it's destruction? Of course, it is the Left.

And this is why does the elitist Left hates Christianity and has worked to discredit it. They want to replace faith in God with faith in big government and they have been very successful. Many Westerners now fail to believe and even despise those who do. Of course, this includes many DF American liberals.

TIP - You needn't post the entire article. You can post bits of it and include the link.

 

[dahermit]

...Christianity resulted in a new enlightenment...

Magic words spoken over water endows the water with magical powers. Magic words spoken over wine and wafers endows them with mystical magic powers. Magic words spoken in a ancient language (Latin) evokes mystical properties. Magic prayer spoken eight times a day for nine days is guaranteed to be effective (...never known to fail...), in granting a wish.

Evidently you were not referring to the Catholic Church as the Christianity of which you speak; they are still performing their aboriginal ceremonies. The only thing they do differant from "unenlightened" savages is to paint thier faces...wait, there is that black spot they put on thier heads just before Easter.

 

[numinus]

That is a very good article. And points out very clearly that without Christianity we might find slavery acceptable today and many other forms of barbarism. Christianity resulted in a new enlightenment and freedoms for the individual. And who wants to destroy Christianity and what groups work day and night to accomplish it's destruction? Of course, it is the Left.

And this is why does the elitist Left hates Christianity and has worked to discredit it. They want to replace faith in God with faith in big government and they have been very successful. Many Westerners now fail to believe and even despise those who do. Of course, this includes many DF American liberals.

TIP - You needn't post the entire article. You can post bits of it and include the link.

Of course it is.

Why the hell else is the bible and early christian thought part of the topic of any basic political science class?

 

[numinus]

Magic words spoken over water endows the water with magical powers. Magic words spoken over wine and wafers endows them with mystical magic powers. Magic words spoken in a ancient language (Latin) evokes mystical properties. Magic prayer spoken eight times a day for nine days is guaranteed to be effective (...never known to fail...), in granting a wish.

Evidently you were not referring to the Catholic Church as the Christianity of which you speak; they are still performing their aboriginal ceremonies. The only thing they do differant from "unenlightened" savages is to paint thier faces...wait, there is that black spot they put on thier heads just before Easter.

That is the only thing you are capable of comprehending as far as the catholic church is concerned, isn't it -- the outward ritual? You can't even be left to your own intelligence to discern their meaning, can you?

You have civitates dei, the summa theologica, the various church encyclicals produced in the last century, heck you even have john paul 2's book crossing the threshold of hope (which was a best seller by the way)....and still, the only thing available in that puny mind of yours by recall is that tiny ritual on ash wednesday. You probably aren't even aware that the priest is saying 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' as he is smudging the crucifix on the forehead.

Duh?

 

[dahermit]

That is the only thing you are capable of comprehending as far as the catholic church is concerned, isn't it -- the outward ritual? You can't even be left to your own intelligence to discern their meaning, can you?

You have civitates dei, the summa theologica, the various church encyclicals produced in the last century, heck you even have john paul 2's book crossing the threshold of hope (which was a best seller by the way)....and still, the only thing available in that puny mind of yours by recall is that tiny ritual on ash wednesday. You probably aren't even aware that the priest is saying 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' as he is smudging the crucifix on the forehead.

Duh?

And what difference is their between aboriginal people's outward rituals and the catholic Church's?

All rituals are pretentious nonsense that implies an impossible advantage. Take two groups of Catholics, smudge the crucifix on one groups head and do nothing to the control group. Study them as you will and there will be no evidence that one group has prospered, has obtained better health, wealth or anything. Such is the bull**** of the Catholic church. And the pathetic little troglodytes that follow it.

 

[Gipper]

And what difference is their between aboriginal people's outward rituals and the catholic Church's?

All rituals are pretentious nonsense that implies an impossible advantage. Take two groups of Catholics, smudge the crucifix on one groups head and do nothing to the control group. Study them as you will and there will be no evidence that one group has prospered, has obtained better health, wealth or anything. Such is the bull**** of the Catholic church. And the pathetic little troglodytes that follow it.

And who said leftists are tolerant of those unlike them?

They are most tolerant of those groups working to destroy capitalism, our republic, the family, traditional values, etc.

 

[Fisher of Men]

All rituals are pretentious nonsense that implies an impossible advantage.

Strange opinion. All societies from ancient China to modern America possess rituals and ceremonies.

 

[Fisher of Men]

The "enlightened", the secular, have made eager tyrants.

headline: How Voltaire praised the 'enlightened despot' Catherine the Great

link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jun/02/russia.books

Voltaire piled up praise for Catherine II of Russia, even as she was increasing the burden on the serfs. The loss of their privileges led to revolt, most notably the one led by Emelian Pugachev.

Voltaire also served the Machiavellian Frederick II of Prussia.

 

[numinus]

And what difference is their between aboriginal people's outward rituals and the catholic Church's?

You see?! You do not even know what the difference is and still, you have the temerity to post your unsubstantiated and patently idiotic nonsense in the public domain!

The difference, if you must know, is that the principles these rituals are supposed to be symbolizing lie in judeao-christian theology synthesized in CLASSICAL GREEK THOUGHT -- the same classical greek thought your constitution is supposed to be derived from.

And as far as outward procedures or rituals are concerned, your rules of court descended from english common law -- the legal procedures concocted by saxon barbarians.

You would have done better had you contemplated the difference between aborigines and blood-thirsty european barbarians. I'm sure the aborigine would protest vigorously over such an unwarranted association.

UHmmmm....duh?

All rituals are pretentious nonsense that implies an impossible advantage.

Nonsesne. A ritual is merely an outward action signifying a deeper truth or principle. A rational individual contemplates the deeper truth while performing the ritual while the ***** is lost in the labyrinth of his own ignorance trying to find the connection.

Duh?

Take two groups of Catholics, smudge the crucifix on one groups head and do nothing to the control group. Study them as you will and there will be no evidence that one group has prospered, has obtained better health, wealth or anything. Such is the bull**** of the Catholic church. And the pathetic little troglodytes that follow it.

You see??? You are hopelessly lost in that convuluted reasoning of yours.

What idiot told you that the purpose of imposing the sacramental on you forehead is to bring prosperity in wealth and health, hmmmm? And that sorry excuse for an idiot even gave you the impression that it is done only in the catholic church, eh?

What the sacramental is supposed to remind you is the ephemeral nature of your own life and the inevitability of your own mortality. You are ash and to ash you will return. Does that sound reasonable enough or do you imagine yourself to live forever, eh?

Within this human condition, you are invited to find some higher purpose or meaning. That even an aborigine implicitly knows this is testament to the complete intellectual incompetence of some morons I know. If you still can't get it, then the ritual is wasted on you and you might as well be dead.

Duh?

 

[dahermit]

Strange opinion. All societies from ancient China to modern America possess rituals and ceremonies.

Explain to me exactly what scientific effect a ritual has on any physical thing.

Maybe swearing on a Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, in a court? How about the marriage ritual? How about the "Pledge of Allegiance"? What about the Baptism? Etc.? What about Christening a ship? Superstition is superstition.

 

[The Scotsman]

.......concocted by saxon barbarians.

........ these would presumably be the same Saxon Barbarians that gave us Easter and Christmas?

 

[dahermit]

...What the sacramental is supposed to remind you is the ephemeral nature of your own life and the inevitability of your own mortality. You are ash and to ash you will return. Does that sound reasonable enough or do you imagine yourself to live forever, eh?...

What idiot needs a ritual to know that he is not going to live forever. Why would I need to be reminded via religious ritual that I will eventually die when I have a refrigerator with post-it-notes?