John D wrote:
and... this is where the regular Christian gets is right. We are all flawed.... and we all need to be forgiven from time to time. And... the non-Christian left has NO forgiveness. Muslims have no forgiveness. Commies have no forgiveness.
I will pick the simple Christian any day of the week.
This has been my trajectory. I used to HATE Christianity as a young socialist, but over the years I've come to think that there's a lot of rationalist mythology around it - necessary for psychological self-bolstering as rationalists were pulling away from religion and carving out a secular space in culture, but not actually true.
The key to understanding Christianity is that it has tremendous continuity with the pagan culture of antiquity that came before it. Christianity has some Jewish elements, obviously, but by far the larger part of the effective part of Christianity (the part that worked on a day to day level in governance and personal psychology) was the Graeco-Roman culture and philosophy that Christianity inherited.
So when one disses Christianity, one is being rather silly, in this way: one is actually dissing an ancient culture that's been fairly continuous for a long time, at least as old as Buddhism, that's quite continuous with our modern scientific culture.
For example, the inheritance of the Stoic concept of
Logos in Christianity, and of the philosophical armories of Plato via St. Augustine, and Aristotle via St. Thomas Aquinas, is what led Christians to view the world as
intelligible and amenable to scientific investigation. Contrary to the mythology, the Roman Catholic
establishment in the Middle Ages (during the Scholastic period) was generally pro-science.
The advance in science wasn't any sort of "clean break" with what came before, it was rather a particular focussing of attention on the kind of cause that's amenable to quantitative analysis, Aristotelian "efficient cause," and the
bracketing of questions about "final cause."
Over time, final causes dropped out of the picture entirely, which is what led to secularism: without final causes and Aristotelian/Scholastic distinctions like actuality/potentiality, the Cosmological Argument has no logical force, and devolves to the easily-dismissable Paley type of "Argument from Design".