[rayiner]

I think cultural legacy is more deeply intertwined with morals than people appreciate. It’s just hard to see it because you’re surrounded by it.

It’s easier to notice when you compare between countries and across religious traditions. My dad was raised very religious (Muslim) in Bangladesh. His grandfather was an imam. He is non-religious and I grew up non-religious, but I joined a Christian church after I got married. From that vantage point I was able to see how much of what I thought was secular American culture could be traced back to Christianity.

Consider, for example, the obsession in Christian countries with equality. They almost fall over themselves to welcome people from different ethnic backgrounds. I suspect this has something to do with Christianity’s origins as a Jewish religion adopted by the Gentiles. I mean, how many societies have a religion centered around some other ethnic group?

There’s so many aspects of society and culture that are the product of history, and of course history is deeply intertwined with religion. My atheist friend, who is white, was telling me how much she hated her uncle for being racist against Muslims. I pointed out to her that was an extremely Christian thing to say! https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2010&ve...

> Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. 37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

By contrast, Islam is a religion that arose in Arab society, where kinship ties mean everything. In my home country, putting people you don’t even know over kin, based on some abstract notion of justice, would be unthinkable. It actually made me a little uncomfortable to think that people like me had caused strife within her family.

[trees101]

Yours is a really valuable perspective on this issue, and probably gives you more clarity than those of us who have grown up immersed in the values of the West like fish in water. I had a Muslim friend who used to comment on how "Christian" my country was, whereas I'd always seen it as highly secular.

The British historian Tom Holland is very good on this topic. His recent book "Dominion" is basically an examination of how Christianity so pervasively shaped the West. He's got some good interviews on YouTube if anyone wants a shorter introduction to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIJ9gK47Ogw,https://www.yout....

[dekervin]

As some said, the greatest trick christianity ever pulled...

[rayiner]

Thanks for the book reference.

[ctrl_s]

> Consider, for example, the obsession in Christian countries with equality. They almost fall over themselves to welcome people from different ethnic backgrounds. I suspect this has something to do with Christianity’s origins as a Jewish religion adopted by the Gentiles

My experiences are almost the complete opposite to yours, I suspect there are major differences between congregations that can't be applied to the nation at large. Churches in the US are weirdly segregated by ethnicity, at least in the south[0] where you find black churches,white churches, Korean churches, etc.

I am African, and had the misfortune of attending a church that's part of the Southern Baptist Convention. I got the distinct sense that they are warm and welcoming to people requiring charity or to rake on as a "project"; not equals. Almost everyone who saw me volunteer assumed I was a poor student at the affiliated Theological college, and would be very warm, but when I'd let them know I was a software engineer and much closer to them socio-economically than they had assumed, they didn't know quite how to act, it was weird,and it happened multiple times.

Trump's presidency was a bad time to be black in an SBC church. I never felt quite comfortable, and my faith intensely tested. It came to a head when I encountered incidents of passive and active racism[1],and I came to the conclusion that we could not possibly be worshipping the same God. Then again, the southern churches could reconcile Christianity and slavery, so perhaps all ethnicities are welcome, with the long-lived exception of blacks. YMMV

0. As a point of comparison: South Africa has more integrated churches, just 1 generation since the end of apartheid.

1. Why aren't you going to a black church? Oh, the other black member, he's intelligent and articulate, he's practically white!

[x86_64Ubuntu]

Keep in mind, that the Southern Baptist church literally exists because the Baptist convention started asking thorny questions concerning slavery and Christianity. In light of that discussion, the southern congregations broke off to form a convention that would welcome African slavery[1] and have white supremacy as a bedrock principle. Sure, there are plenty of blacks in the Southern Baptist denomination, but they attend black churches for the reasons you've noted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention#Di...

[rayiner]

Without trying to detract from your experience, I would suggest that your experience as a Black person in Bangladesh, India, or China would have been a whole lot worse. Heck, even though most Muslims aren’t Arab, it’s pretty darn clear that the Arabs think that is south Asians are second class citizens in the Muslim world. And unlike white southerners they’re not passive aggressive about it.

[random314]

Without trying to distract from your suggestions, I would like to state that I have never seen race segregated mosques anywhere in India, while these seem to be widespread in the United states.

[random314]

while these seem to be widespread in the churches in United states.

[MockObject]

Seems like a strange post to receive these silent downvotes.

[btilly]

Question. How would you suggest I square your claims about Arab society with the observed fact that every year thousands of girls die in Arab countries from honor killings. And the fact that, as https://www.statista.com/statistics/1019538/mena-arab-respon... shows, in many of these countries, significant minorities think that such killings are justified.

Killing your own child suggests to me that kinship means rather less than it does in Western cultures.

[rayiner]

Honor killings happen because kinship ties are so strong. The individual becomes completely subsumed within the family. Anything that brings shame to the individual is imputed to the whole family. Moreover, controlling reproduction becomes extremely important because that is how kinship links between families are created.

[btilly]

I know that I am showing my cultural biases. But the entire way of thinking that you are describing strikes me as fundamentally evil. Subsuming the individual to the social unit is at the heart of the worst excesses of racism, nationalism, etc. If you look for the worst mass crimes in history, you will find this idea at the core.

Conversely, liberty starts with valuing humans for the individuals that they are. And not as mere appendages which serve a larger whole.

[rayiner]

I would say it’s complicated. Religion reflects culture, and culture reflects technological and environmental realities (e.g. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/people-ate-pork-mi...).

Nomadic desert life is brutally hard—I suspect that if a tribe of Arab nomads had the individualism of people from San Francisco they’d all quickly die of starvation. Independence of the individual from the extended family unit isn’t all that viable absent market economies, social safety nets, etc. Independence of women from men isn’t all that viable in an environment where survival requires physically demanding and dangerous work (herding animals, fending off intruders, etc). Even in modern western society, the old depend on the young for survival; the physical safety of women is underwritten by armed men, etc. We just have layers of abstraction (Social Security, police departments, etc.) that allow those things to be done at arm’s length. In a pre-modern society those social dependencies all collapse into the family unit.

I tend to agree that, as all these economic and technological predicates for individualism arose, Christian societies were better positioned to take advantage. On the flip side, my personal belief is that modern western societies have taken that too far, to the point where they’re no long even viable as societies. The future of Europe, for example, looks to be Islam. Maybe a moderated, more secular version, but probably still quite different than the culture that prevails today.

[btilly]

I agree that a number of Western countries did take advantage. But I wouldn't say that the divide was Christian vs non-Christian. There is a lot in Christianity which can be quoted to support very non-individualistic ideologies. It is that certain societies which happened to be Christian had did develop individualistic ideologies.

But Christian countries have our share of organizations such as the Mafia where family and ethnic group are paramount. Christian history is full of brutal totalitarian states and violent killing.

Separately https://www.pewforum.org/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-p... suggests that rumors of an Islamic future for Europe are premature. And as Muslims integrate, their advantage in birth rate is likely to decline, and net conversions are away from Islam. As a result, long-term, I see no reason why Islam will grow to be more than a significant minority.

[rayiner]

Some Christian societies are more individualistic than others, but almost no non-Christian societies are individualistic. And even the Christian societies that aren’t individualistic are still much more so than virtually anywhere else.

Even the ones that integrate are going to be far less individualistic than native born Europeans. Cultural legacy Carrie’s through for generations—and that’s likely to be especially true for European Muslims given how segregated they are.

[meheleventyone]

> Subsuming the individual to the social unit is at the heart of the worst excesses of racism, nationalism, etc.

Is it though? I don’t think I’ve found more individualistic societies to be less racist or nationalist.

[btilly]

They may be racist and/or nationalist, but you don't tend to get ethnic cleansing or organized genocides.

[krageon]

This has to be sarcasm. You don't have to look that far back to know that this is just untrue. There are ethnic cleansings and organised genocides everywhere (regrettably), with very little evidence it has something to do with a specific type of culture.

[dmm10]

Would the early United States be considered an "individulistic society"? If so then consider the continental level genocidal practices which that society consciously adopted. Remember that all of North America was populated before the westward expansion. Feel free to extrapolate backwards in time.

[DyslexicAtheist]

some of these countries have become so good at institutionalizing injustice via their privatized prison systems that this form of ethic cleansing is not even visible any more with the naked eye.

When a large group of your population is unable to financially afford justice that's a form of ethnic cleansing.

Genocide is horrible, but what could possible be more evil? Here is what: masterminding it so that a large group of your population no longer sees it for what it is and would rather point at another country for its concentration camps than solve their issues at home.

> but you don't tend to get ethnic cleansing or organized genocides.

How would you describe the US private prison system, or gitmo if not "organized genocide"?

[MaxfordAndSons]

You can find the idea of the individual being subsumed to the kin group to be disconcerting or strange (I do), without categorizing it as a "fundamentally evil" way of thinking. Honor killings are an extreme end of the spectrum of behaviors exhibited by people with this belief system; but there are equivalently extremes in the behaviors of people with Western, liberal-individualistic belief systems. Both belief systems are just survival strategies evolved by different groups of humans exposed to different historical and environmental contingencies. Both can be perverted to justify extreme evil acts, just as both can fairly point to the extremes, in themselves and the other, and declare them as evil. And note, this isn't cultural relativism: one can respect the sovereignty of the Islamic value system without excusing honor killings, just as one needn't cast Western liberal individualism as "fundamentally evil" because taken to it's extreme people have used it to justify mass shootings of strangers.

[6354dhjgasd]

> but there are equivalently extremes in the behaviors of people with Western, liberal-individualistic belief systems

These are?

[MaxfordAndSons]

Killing strangers for minor violations of your property rights... killing multiple strangers in a rage of entitlement... calling police to kill or punish strangers who are having mental health crises for minor violations of public behavior ordinances... basically killing or punishing strangers for any old reason. I'd venture to guess we do orders of magnitude more of it per capita in the West than people in Muslism countries do honor killings of kin.

[remarkEon]

If you’ve spent some time outside of the west, and what the west conceives as “comparable with the west”, you’ll find that there are many cultures that are what you describe as “evil”.

[btilly]

And, for example, when you encounter things like Afghanistan's "dancing boys" (fathers literally sell their sons to powerful men as sex toys), are you inclined to shrug your shoulders and look the other way at such "cultural differences"?

Yes, there are many things that are accepted in other cultures as normal that I am happy to condemn. If you can't find it in you to condemn at least some of them, then I think that there is something wrong with you.

[remarkEon]

I've personally witnessed these "dancing boys" in Afghanistan, and no I didn't shrug my shoulders. I'm not sure why you think I disagree with you. I'm pointing out that this insistence on the principle of "equality of culture" is a western proclivity that is both naive and wrong.

[rayiner]

Note that I don’t disagree with you in general. I’m no cultural relativist. I just think the post-1960s individualist secular liberalism is a civilizational dead end that’s already correcting itself.

[insanejudge]

> Subsuming the individual to the social unit is at the heart of the worst excesses of racism, nationalism, etc. If you look for the worst mass crimes in history, you will find this idea at the core.

Do you have anything other than the jordan peterson paraphrase to back this as a cause, as opposed to the actual dangerous ideologies? One could just as easily state as absolute fact that subsuming the individual to the societal unit is at the heart of the greatest accomplishments of humankind.

This idea is a straightforward false dichotomy presenting the only alternative to absolute individual liberty as complete subjugation of free will, and used to provide some truly absurd explanations for things, such as 'honor' being the actual problem in this case, not the 'killings'

[6figurelenins]

It's in the definition, and predates "jordan peterson" by about a hundred years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivism#Origins_and_histo...

> One could just as easily state as absolute fact that subsuming the individual to the societal unit is at the heart of the greatest accomplishments of humankind.

Do you have a benevolent dictator in mind?

> complete subjugation of free will

The fundamental problem of religion (politics, generally) is that you agree to submit to an all-merciful, all-benevolent, all-knowing entity. The reality of the deal is rather less satisfying.

[btilly]

Sure. If you read Enlightenment Now you'll find several chapters devoted to how many of the horrors of the 20th century can be traced back to ideologies which subsume the individual into groupings involving some subset of ethnic group, nationality, and social class. They are doubly dangerous if they are then paired with utopian ideals. Because if the ends justify the means, and the ends are a perfect good, you can rationalize ay horror.

You can find similar points of view in many previous writers from points as distant in the ideological spectrum as George Orwell and Ayn Rand.

[FooBarBizBazz]

This is sort of a tangential post starting from your phrases "Killing your own child" and "honor killings". I eventually try to link it back to themes of loyalty to "family" vs. "nation" vs. universality.

1.

> Killing your own child

I can't hear this phrase without thinking of Abraham and Isaac. It's the story that the whole of the Old Testament revolves around.

(And then the New Testament goes to heroic lengths of reinterpretation? Or have I just gotten too much Girard in my head? I'm never sure how much to celebrate it as reformist (moving past the animal sacrifice cult of the Levites), vs. to detest it (continuing to worship the obscene god of the burning bush. But then how do you carve out that the Commandments are actually decent?). I'm also not quite sure that I'm really all that big a fan of Jesus himself; I may actually prefer the religion of Paul. But it was Jesus who was responsible for the Beatitudes, and for his famous and beautiful "whole of the law" summary. So I'm not sure. His radical anti-family message, combined with his urgency (and his apparent contempt for his disciples?) have never sat right with me. But maybe the urgency at least is essential.)

And supposedly the version we get in the Torah is the "Hollywood ending", whereas in the original (late neolithic?) story Isaac is simply killed and Abraham is rewarded. So the original is even worse.

(Or perhaps the fact of the "Hollywood ending" to Abraham and Isaac is itself an innovation to be celebrated, and we can view the Old Testament itself as part of that same Girardian process of reform, of yet-worse human sacrifice religions. A good thing about this is that it creates less of an Old Testament vs. New Testament binary/dualism; it expands the field of view.)

(There may also be a Yahwist vs. Elohist conflict I have yet to understand, which may help me tease apart good from bad parts of the Old Testament.)

2.

> honor killings

Not long ago I quoted Genesis 34, which disturbs me for several reasons -- that it celebrates an honor killing being one of them.

(Actually, maybe I'm wrong? Because they do not kill Dinah? More on that in a second.)

That the enemy clan is treated as a unit to be destroyed rather than the individual man is another. How can that possibly be justice?

(Some people will claim that Shechem raped Dinah. NIV translates it that way, but KJV doesn't. I don't believe the NIV translation. First, because those societies still exist and "consent" isn't really something they think about in judging these cases. And I mean, it says right there at the end that the Israelites kill the men and take their wives captive, presumably to be raped. Second, because Shechem is said to speak kindly to her and request her hand in marriage. And third because Hamor et al act as though good relations should be possible with the Israelites. KJV doesn't say "raped", it says "defiled" (more than once), and, given the rest of the chapter's focus on circumcision, I honestly think that the fact that he had sex with her with his intact penis is the thing they found offensive. Symbolic of course of his being an Other. A belief that comports with the rest of the Old Testament's repeated admonishments not to marry outside the Tribe (e.g., Samson and Delilah). I think it's much closer to a Black man being lynched for having the temerity to sleep with a white woman.)

...which brings us to, of course, the central role of genital mutilation to the story, which is another reason to be disturbed by it.

The complete rejection of an apparently good-faith effort towards peace and mutual assimilation is a fourth reason to be disturbed, but consistent with the particularism/separatism of the rest of the Old Testament.

And a fifth is the trickery involved. "Yes, yes, we can all get along! Undergo our painful and irreversible initiatiation!" ...and then be slain without mercy while you're still recovering.

I had the TV on the other day and saw a Rick Steves visit to Auschwitz/Birkenau, in which I was similarly disturbed by the amount of trickery involved. The victims were told to bring their luggage, so they would believe that they were being resettled to live good lives in another place. The sign over the gate famously said "Arbeit macht frei", another lie. All to avoid panic while their killing was planned. All like the promise of the sons of Jacob in Genesis 34:15-16.

All the more tragic because so many of those Jewish victims had assimilated into German society (not necessarily abandoning Judaism, but just treating it as another religion in the Liberal style, instead of as an ethno-nationalist thing), and they and the German gentiles they lived more-or-less peacefully among (until the Nazis riled them up) were essentially living as Hamor had promised,

> 9 And make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us, and take our daughters unto you.

> 10 And ye shall dwell with us: and the land shall be before you; dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein.

which would have been the desirable outcome.

If it isn't clear yet, while Shechem may be a little dumb here (sort of a Romeo character), I think Hamor's the good guy, consistently trying to steer the situation towards a peaceful and mutually beneficial outcome.

We could really use Dinah's point of view here. I choose to interpret her as a sort of Juliet, stuck between these Montagues (Israelites) and Capulets (Hivites).

...

Can we bring it back to the themes of "kinship" and "Arab culture" (or, culture in the Middle East) vs. "Western culture"? To the themes of grandparent post?

Well, my interpretation of Genesis 34 is that it is anti-"miscegenist". Which would be, if not about kinship, then at least about nationality. And certainly not universalist.

And Abraham/Isaac is about sacrificing blood kin for the demands of a god who is arguably the personification of a nation.

So perhaps this is about nation vs. family -- dishonor to the nation outranking loyalty to kin.

Of course, this is all a bit inbred, so "nation" largely is "kin". Maybe then this is a meme that wants to create loyalty among genes at, say, the cousin-level degree of relatedness, at expense both of loyalty to specific children, and also of sympathy to outsiders. I'm thinking about ant colonies and cancer cells now. It's a choice to privilege a certain scale of "incorporation" -- what is the "body" we care about?

[danans]

> I mean, how many societies have a religion centered around some other ethnic group?

Plenty. Southeast Asia has religions centered around Indian or Arab religions. Same for Iran and much of Central Asia with Islam.

All these places have adapted the other ethnicity's belief system to their own culture.

It's no different for Christianity. Bertrand Russell described it as the combination of Greek philosophy with Jewish mythology and Roman societal/power structures.

[bangkoksbest]

I want to add double emphasis on this. Christianity before and without the Greek philosophical influence is primarily a religion of itinerant ascetics and martyrs (without the abstract ideals added, almost all of the story in the Gospels boils down to an itinerant ascetic being martyred).

Some of the earliest extant texts in Christianity come from Justin Martyr, who, just a century after Jesus, was already workshopping the idea that Plato and Socrates were unknowing Christians that laid a philosophical ground for Christianity.

[bckr]

For an intriguing spin on this, look into Manichaeism, a 3rd-century religion from modern Iran which syncretizes Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Buddhism, and survived until the middle of the last millennium in China.

[bckr]

clarification: from what is now called Iran

[ClumsyPilot]

"think cultural legacy is more deeply intertwined with morals than people appreciate."

The cultural legacy of modern Europe is that of Renaissance, which is a partial rejection of many religious morals and practices we would find abhorrent today. Like burning heretics, astronomers and philosophers at the stake, witch hunts, etc.

People were put to death for translating the Bible into english from latin, mind you.

There was a re-discovery and embracement of great works antiquity, think ancient Greece.

[labster]

This reads like Renaissance era propaganda. It was mostly a reaction to existing social pressures which used the notion of the classics to promote change.

People did not go out and restart republics (for a couple centuries, which is a long time), nor bring back Aristotelian astronomy (rather the opposite), nor rituals of the old gods, nor rediscover ancient works that hadn’t been intentionally preserved by centuries of medieval scribes (papyrus lasts < 500 years in moist Europe). They reinterpreted the past. It was no longer “copy the procedures of the great doctor Galen”, it was “copy the curiosity”.

[ClumsyPilot]

> This reads like Renaissance era propaganda

The fact that we call the time when Church was at the peak of it's power 'Dark Ages' is a testament to success of Renaissance era propaganda

> People did not go out and restart republics

The french revolution?

[Godel_unicode]

Over 200 years after the end of the Renaissance. During the Renaissance, the French were too busy conducting the second deadliest religious war in European history after the 30 years war.

[hipparchus]

I can't help but feel like you've got a deep case of confirmation bias here.

> Consider, for example, the obsession in Christian countries with equality. They almost fall over themselves to welcome people from different ethnic backgrounds. [...]

This is true in anglophone countries, sure, but it's less the case in europe and in particular, say, eastern europe or the balkans: ignoring albania/kosovo/bosnia, you've got plenty of heavily christian countries there who are not so open to people of different ethnic groups (well, which deviate from ethnic groups common to the region). You'll be treated more or less well but still fundamentally considered an outsider, and may not be welcome depending on where you go. Consider otherwise the armenians who, while I'm heavily leaning on stereotypes, are still quite well known for being both 1. pretty deeply culturally christians, and 2. a pretty closed-off community that often intermarry (although I do know there's often intermarriages with greeks and georgians)

I would agree with your point, but I would warn you not to assume that everything true of americans and/or anglophone countries often follows closely in other christian countries.

[dragonwriter]

> Consider, for example, the obsession in Christian countries with equality.

I think you are confusing “Western liberal democratic societies” with “Christian countries”. The latter are a subset of historically Christian countries (many are more accurately post-Christian, now), but plenty of Christian countries are not Western liberal democracies and those do not fit the mold you are trying to fit “Christian countries” into.

[unmole]

> Consider, for example, the obsession in Christian countries with equality.

Citation needed.

> They almost fall over themselves to welcome people from different ethnic backgrounds. I suspect this has something to do with Christianity’s origins as a Jewish religion adopted by the Gentiles.

Yet Christian kingdoms had zero qualms about persicuting Jews for centuries.

> I mean, how many societies have a religion centered around some other ethnic group?

You mean like Islam which has over 1.9 billion adherents and privileges a language spoken by 300 million Arabs?

[DyslexicAtheist]

>> Consider, for example, the obsession in Christian countries with equality.

> Citation needed.

Jacques Ellul got you covered[1], if you dig through the footnotes and references in his books you'll be able to find hundreds more.

Jacques Ellul's La subversion du Christianisme (The Subversion of Christianity)

also "Trahison de l'Occident" (The Betrayal of the West)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul#Bibliography

[tsimionescu]

Christianity in Europe has been historically the biggest source of social hierarchy, supporting the divine right of Kings, the notion of deference to the priesthood, and the priesthood's subservience to the Pope (or, in Eastern Europe, the Patriarch).

Even after the Reform, Christianity encouraged tight family groups, the wife's subservience to her husband, and similarly children's subservience to their father.

Equality only exists in Christian texts, it is not part of any common practice.

If you want to look for a historical source about modern ideas of equality between people that inspired the Enlightenment movement, then that source are the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee), whose society didn't have the same type of rigid hierarchies that all European societies at the time had.

[nautilius]

Obsession about equality as a central tenet in Christianity? You may want to read up on the crusades, slavery, the 30 year war, how even other Christian immigrants (Irish, Italian, etc) were welcomed into the US etc.

Also, just because some Christians share some of the morals of your humanist friend does not imply any relation whatsoever. There appears to be that desire from religious groups to often exaggerate and emphasize any such correlation as something more. When your friend meets with his family at the end of December and again at the equinox in spring - do you point out how Paganist he is? And, when you as a Christian presumably celebrate Christmas and Easter with your family - do you tell them they are just like Pagans as well? If not - why not?

[rayiner]

> Obsession about equality as a central tenet in Christianity? You may want to read up on the crusades, slavery, the 30 year war, how even other Christian immigrants (Irish, Italian, etc) were welcomed into the US etc.

You may want to read up on slavery. Abolition in Christian societies was mainly a religious movement. Arab societies practiced it extensively as well, but kept going until the 20th century, and only really stopped because of international pressure from Christian countries.

The crusades? Both Muslims and Christians engaged in offensive military campaigns during the crusades. Only in Christian countries do any appreciable number of people feel bad about it.

Likewise, the speed at which Irish and Italians were integrated into American society is pretty much unparalleled by anything in any non-Christian society. I’m Bangladeshi on both sides back into the the dim reaches of history. But if I went back I would be “bideshi” (foreigner) because I was raised in American. My white wife and mixed kids would never be considered Bangladeshi, no matter how long they lived there. (It’s an ethnostate: a country for people of ancertsin

[nautilius]

> You may want to read up on slavery. Abolition in Christian societies was mainly a religious movement.

Ah, so there were Christians who opposed it, which makes that the central tenet in Christianity. But there were also those Christians who practiced it - does that now make slavery a central tenet in Christianity instead?

You can't just cherrypick what you find most flattering for your group and then round it off with 'but the Arabs'.

Italians are still a protected minority in New Jersey, and Hispanics are still a protected minority throughout the US. Natives were forcibly Christianized and then killed or deported to barren lands no one wanted.

[jezclaremurugan]

I think we need to factor in "Correlation is not causality" and the presence of confounding variables.

Slave abolitionists explicitly mentioned where they derived their morals from - clearly establishing causality.

Could there be something else common among slave practitioners apart from religion - like common materialistic greed and superior firepower to overpower and dominate others?

[nautilius]

> Could there be something else common among slave practitioners apart from religion

Cherry picking again, are we? So now we are looking for an alternative explanation - but only on the evil side. The existence of Christians who opposed slavery does not prove that it is in any way central to Christianity, or exclusive to Christianity. That's not how logic works.

How about spinning it the other way around? Giving man 'dominion' over everything that creeps on earth, throw in a bit of manifest destiny and some appropriate bible quotes - voilà! A perfectly fine Christian justification for why slavery is the Christian way to do things. https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-33/wh... https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/ etc.

On the other hand, the humanist Enlightenment in France led to the French revolution, led in turn to laicist France granting citizenship to former slaves in 1792 on non-religious grounds.

So yeah, there was something else among both abolitionists and slave holders, which is my whole point.

[rayiner]

Abolition among white Americans arose expressly as a religious movement. They weren’t just Christians who happened to oppose it, but an opposition expressly rooted in Christian theology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers_in_the_abolition_movem...

Supporters of slavery, by contrast, often invoked the language of science and progress and condemned abolitionists as religious zealots. The famous Cornerstone Speech, for example, given by the VP of the Confederacy:

> This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics.

Think about this logically. Imagine you’re a white European looking around at the world in 1776. There is no systematic archeology, there is no science of genetics. What would cause you to look around at the civilization and technology Europeans had developed, compared to what Africans or Asians has developed, and conclude that all people were equal? Back then it was a moral premise you had to accept on faith without the support of science.

Consider Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about the Creator endowing all men with alienable rights. Even though he was probably a deist, he expressly incorporated Christian morality into his worldview (e.g. the Jefferson Bible).

Or consider German Americans, one of Lincoln’s core constituencies that pushed him toward emancipation. These were recent immigrants to the Midwest who had no historical beef with the south. Yet, per capita, states like Iowa contributed the most soldiers to fight and die for the union. Do you think they were driven by abstract enlightenment principles of equality and justice?

It’s widely accepted today that the Civil War was about slavery. That has a remarkable implication. 360,000 union soldiers died to end slavery in the south. Can you name another example of one ethnic group incurring that kind of casualties to fight for the freedom of a different ethnic group? Maybe there are other examples but I’m unaware of any.

[t-3]

> It’s widely accepted today that the Civil War was about slavery.

That's a bit too simplified. The South fought primarily because they wanted to keep slavery and thought Lincoln would abolish it, but the North fought primarily to prevent secession, and ending slavery was just a convenient tool they could use to help win the war. The "good north vs evil south" narrative is too often used as a political cudgel, and doesn't really accurately reflect the on-the-ground reality.

[nautilius]

I am really tired of the cherry picking in this thread.

That there were Christians who opposed slavery does not mean it's central or exclusive to Christianity. Christians also justified slavery with the bible. https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/

That there were slave holders who justified their view in science does not mean that it's central or exclusive to atheists (see citizenship rights for slaves in the laicist French revolution)

>Consider Thomas Jefferson,

I'll consider Thomas Jefferson who readily incorporated slavery in his business while formulating his Jefferson Bible.

>Or consider German Americans

Maybe recent immigrants were driven by a desire to contribute to their new home?

>Maybe there are other examples but I’m unaware of any.

Unclear how superficial or cynical this is meant. WWII could come to mind.

Really, yours is the first account I read of the Civil War as a religious crusade of the Christian North to finally bring god to the heretics of the South.

[bangkoksbest]

Liberalism is marked by comparison to abstract ideals. Whether and to what degree other areas of the world do worse in comparison to those ideals is not usually going to be something of paramount concern.

This idealisation and universalisation is not only Western of course. I'm a mixed kid like your kids, but South India rather than Bangladesh, and I would be and am rather unquestionably accepted as Indian when I am there. But a major driver in the split between India and (then-)Pakistan comes down to the (novel & idiosyncratic) liberal ideals we compare to.

As a final note re: the Crusades. I was not under the impression the Crusades were looked down upon because of war, but because they too often were incoherent raiding expéditions that sacked and subdued parts of Christendom even more than they won control of the Jerusalem.

[rayiner]

> This idealisation and universalisation is not only Western of course. I'm a mixed kid like your kids, but South India rather than Bangladesh, and I would be and am rather unquestionably accepted as Indian when I am there. But a major driver in the split between India and (then-)Pakistan comes down to the (novel & idiosyncratic) liberal ideals we compare to.

"Liberal India" is a narrow slice of the country--more representative of the British culture that heavily influenced the Indian elite than ordinary Indians: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...

Heck, my mom went to college and graduate school and had a white collar career in Bangladesh in the 1960s and 1970s. But she came from a wealthy, socially prominent family, and had British tutors growing up. It would be tremendously misleading to use her experience to talk about how "liberal" Bangladeshis are.

[mangodrunk]

Equality isn't a central tenet of Christianity (for some sects, probably it is), and even if it were, many Christian socities have certainly not practiced that. Christian societies have tendencies to be militaristic and exploitative. I do think that is in part driven by their religion, to convert others.

You are are oversimplifying, cherrypicking, or getting the facts wrong.

Isn't equality a tenet of Islam?

[trees101]

Christianity subsumed some pagan traditions. It's hardly a secret "gotcha", it's open for all to see. In the same way that when I eat an apple, the apple becomes part of me, I don't become an apple.

There are critical differences between Paganism and Christianity. For example, the philosopher Rene Girard showed that many traditions had stories of mimetic desire and scapegoating, but Christianity showed the crucial end of that story, the fact that the killing of the scapegoat to save the community is a lie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSzF2OG2ejI.

GK Chesterton has a lot of interesting things to say about Pagans also http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/heretics/12/, and his book The Everlasting Man is worth reading for the way that it uses pagan tropes to point towards Christianity.

[nautilius]

Sure. But do you go around claiming that the apple just sprang into your hand without a tree to grow from? That's the argument the post I replied to made.

And the common cherrypicking strawman again in this thread. No one claimed that Christianity is indistinguishable from Paganism, much like no one claims that the apple is indistinguishable from the apple tree.

[trees101]

I'm not sure I follow your apple/tree analogy. But I would say that Christianity is true, and that therefore other truths, no matter what their source, would point in the same direction. So ideas (such as dying/rising gods) could potentially arise in paganism, yet still have some truth, and then be subsumed by Christianity.

I highly recommend GK Chesterton's book "The Everlasting Man", its a short read and still worthwhile even for atheists or those of other faiths as the author is brilliant.