Thoughts On Christianity
There's nothing that irritates me quite like the fashionable anti-Christian bias that pervades lefty types. This kind of curmudgeonly thinking is a sure fire way to get me to bite. Recently, during one of the debates the above attitude sparked, I was accused of being a "Christian apologist" by some soft-left woolly thinker. How ridiculous. I'm not apologising for anything. First of all, let me declare that I am not a Christian. I do believe that Jesus existed, and that he was crucified. I do not believe that Jesus was the son of God, and nor do I believe that he rose from the dead. Thus I cannot be a Christian. I respect and admire many Christian principles that have absorbed into Western society, however such principles are not exclusively Christian, and were around long before Jesus's time. Any number of spiritual movements could have endowed our society with similar principles.
Where Christianity differs from the other major world religions is that, at a practical level, it has tolerated the growth of secularism.* This, I believe, has allowed Western philosophy and science to develop at a much faster rate than other, more ideologically rigid societies. The absolute truths of the Church have been openly questioned, and disproved in many a mind, at the tacit behest of the same Church. I believe that this is a major reason why Westerners are taught to question as a matter of course. This questioning nature is largely absent in many parts of the world - perhaps most notably in the big Asian cultures of China and Japan, although it's found in India. The Westerner's propensity to question is a huge factor in our scientific pre-eminence. Due to this, Western societies have modernised at a much faster rate than the rest of the world. Hence the highly developed nature of our societies.
So, as for being a Christian apologist, I declare openly that I am nothing of the sort. I am proud of our traditions, and Christianity is an aspect of those traditions. I am glad that over time, Christianity has proven itself to be a flexible faith, a faith that does not attempt to control those that don't accept its truths and version of history. A faith that has allowed its own stature and power to be dimished in return for the society it exists in to rise. This may not have been intentional on the part of the Church, however it's undeniably the history of Christianity and the West. To that extent, I greatly appreciate and respect the Christian faith.
*That's not to say that the Church never tried to resist the march of science - Galileo springs to mind - but it is undeniable that the Christian West is mainly secular these days.
Where Christianity differs from the other major world religions is that, at a practical level, it has tolerated the growth of secularism.* This, I believe, has allowed Western philosophy and science to develop at a much faster rate than other, more ideologically rigid societies. The absolute truths of the Church have been openly questioned, and disproved in many a mind, at the tacit behest of the same Church. I believe that this is a major reason why Westerners are taught to question as a matter of course. This questioning nature is largely absent in many parts of the world - perhaps most notably in the big Asian cultures of China and Japan, although it's found in India. The Westerner's propensity to question is a huge factor in our scientific pre-eminence. Due to this, Western societies have modernised at a much faster rate than the rest of the world. Hence the highly developed nature of our societies.
So, as for being a Christian apologist, I declare openly that I am nothing of the sort. I am proud of our traditions, and Christianity is an aspect of those traditions. I am glad that over time, Christianity has proven itself to be a flexible faith, a faith that does not attempt to control those that don't accept its truths and version of history. A faith that has allowed its own stature and power to be dimished in return for the society it exists in to rise. This may not have been intentional on the part of the Church, however it's undeniably the history of Christianity and the West. To that extent, I greatly appreciate and respect the Christian faith.
*That's not to say that the Church never tried to resist the march of science - Galileo springs to mind - but it is undeniable that the Christian West is mainly secular these days.
posted by James Waterton at 5:56 pm
1 Comments:
Nice post, and thank you for being sane, but I'd like to respond to two things you said.
1) "Christian Apologists", the way the term was originally intended, are individuals who explain Christian principals and offer a reasoned defense of the faith. There's no apologizing, in the modern sense, involved. The term has a long tradition, and great thinkers like Francis Bacon have had the label applied to them. Though I'll admit that it's just as likely the person you were arguing with was equally unaware of this and was accusing you of apologizing for Christianity.
2) To get nitpicky, the Galileo story isn't actually as clear-cut as everyone thinks. He was going against the prevailing science of the era, and that's more what got him in trouble than anything else, because it put him up against the Jesuits, the largest group of scientific philosophers in the western world. It's not like the Catholic church was accepting Aristotelian astronomy as an element of canon. Moreover, Galileo wasn't willing to say that he could be wrong, which while admirable, is not indicative of good science. (Though in his defense, the principles of empiricism hadn't then been formalized) Since science is a discipline of modeling phenomena, it has no monopoly on truth and it's inappropriate as a researcher to suggest your results are the One True Way.
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