Evangelism in a Post-Christian Age Part 2 

Humanism, says the Collins dictionary is: interested in the welfare of people; belief in human effort and ingenuity rather than religion. Hi gadfly, Why is it mythical to be interested in the welfare of people? Christian humanists would disagree with you. Being interested in the welfare of people is very real. The sermon on the mount Is a very woke and humanist speech that was interested in the welfare of people but didn’t have the political will to action that welfare. The political will of Christianity is inherently authoritarian, governing by totalitarianism, so it was unable to action the sermon on the mount and make it political reality. For that to happen in the West, we had to wade through 1,500 years of Christian authoritarianism, as vividly described by Tom Holland in Dominion, until we socially and politically evolved to the democracy revolution of liberal social democracy governed by secular and humanist parliaments. The greatest story ever told is democracy. Democracy is the single most important characteristic of the modern West. Why is it mythical to believe in human effort and ingenuity? Believing in and actioning human effort and ingenuity is everyday reality.

@@alanmill793 Secular humanism. Combine materialism and humanism. That's where the contradiction lies. Read "Straw Dogs" by John Gray, atheist professor from London School of Economics.

@@alanmill793 Humanism and materialism are incompatible. Read Straw Dogs by atheist John Gray. I've read Holland's book. Your synopsis of it made me chuckle. It's central thesis is that secular humanism is entirely contingent on Christian ideas. I mean, this is true. The only reason you like the ethics of the sermon on the mount is because you're the product of a culture influenced by 2,000 years of Christian philosophy. Human rights, according to Holland, was because of Bartolome de las Casas. Modern democracy, according to Holland, is a product of protestant churches decentralizing power. I can give citations once I get home to my library if you want.

@@christiangadfly24 Thanks for the reply gadfly. There's a lot to unpack here. Part 1 I’ve read Tom Holland’s book too. I describe his thesis as a Christian version of terra nullius and it’s as lacking as the terra nullius that Eddie Mabo dispatched on behalf of the Indigenous people of my country, Australia. OTOH, I think Tom has written an excellent book detailing in depth how Christianity and other totalitarian ideologies have been, are and always will be failures as a universal and inclusive socio-political ordering principle. Clever pop culture references though. The authoritarian and totalitarian persecution carried out by Christendom is nothing to chuckle about. Whether you like it or not, humans live in a material world that we bump into every day and we have an emotional and political response to this world. Humanism is a political and emotional attitude towards the welfare of people. Politics is a practical product of human existence. No one has ever supplied a shred of credible objective evidence for the existence of any of the alleged gods, and so we deal with the existence of humans that we have and our so far limited understanding of consciousness. Humanism is compatible with the practical world we live in, so is democracy compatible with the practical world we live in and human existence. So is authoritarianism and totalitarianism capable of occurring, unfortunately, with practical human existence. We are surrounded by the evidence of this in the practice of everyday life. Humans live in the West, the East, the North and the South and we all have the same functional capabilities as we are products of the same evolution by natural selection. The results different people get from those same capabilities varies across time and cultures. Humans are a social species by necessity as we are useless at self-sufficiency and rely on living socially and cooperating with others. This means we need to have rules for social living, aka moral values, which are encompassed by the Golden Rules - Don’t do unto others what you don’t want done to you, and Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As far back as archaeologists look, we see humans living socially. Social living is not optional, it is necessary therefore we ought to abide by the rules of social living, aka moral values. This is how we get an ought from an is and ground moral obligation in a non-optional reason. Even sociopathic totalitarians need the help of other people. Theism can't ground moral obligation in a non-optional reason. This is the political reality of human life. There are two elephants in the Dominion room. The first is the humans who lived for hundreds of thousands of years before Jesus came on the scene and were using the same intelligence and evolved characteristics all over the planet with similar hopes and fears. The second is the major transformative power of democracy in the West, in particular the second wave in post Renaissance democracy. No new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating elements found in the previous one. Each generation builds on the many generations that came before. Our very distant cave dwelling hominid ancestors of various species evolved empathy, compassion and reasoning. Archaeological finds demonstrate that Neanderthals and very ancient Homo Sapiens were humanists as they treated others of their group with compassion and dignity. Compassion and dignity were not invented by Jesus. They were developed by humans hundreds of thousands of years ago and passed down the generations to us via many different cultural identities. Christianity was one of many of those cultural identities. Ideas of freedom and equality and tolerance were also not invented by Jesus. Just in the West there were three major slave revolts in the 100 years before Jesus, revolts driven by ideas of wanting to be free, to be treated equally and to be tolerated and live with the dignity they had as humans. I respond to Humanist values like in the woke sermon on the mount because I am an evolved human. I would have responded as a human just the same if I was born in Australia 40,000 years ago as I do born here 7 decades ago.

@@christiangadfly24 Part 2 of 4 When Christianity and the divine right of kings replaced the Pagans and the divine right of emperors in the West, it merely replaced one totalitarian political ideology with another and it absorbed many of the ideas and concepts of the Pagans. As A C Grayling pointed out (before Tom Holland wrote Dominion) in response to a claim that the UK is a Christian country; “we are defined by the following words - and therefore concepts - of classical Greek and Latin origin: democracy, liberalism, equality, equity, Senate, values, history, morality, comedy, tragedy, literature, music, academy, alphabet, memory, politics, ethics, populace, geography, energy, exploration, hegemony, theory, mathematics, science, theatre, medicine, gymnasium, climate, clone, bureaucracy, dialect, analogy, psychology, method, nostalgia, organ, encyclopaedia, education, paradox, empiricism, polemic, rhetoric, dinosaur, telescope, system, school, trophy, type, fantasy, photography…take almost any word denoting political and social institutions, ideas, learning, science and technology, medicine, and culture, and it derives from the language - and therefore the ideas and the history - of ancient Greece and Rome.” Regardless of what we think of their social and political customs. A thoughtful person takes worthwhile ideas from where ever they find them in order to progress. As Tom Holland noted, once Constantine converted and Christianity acquired state power, the enemies of Christians became other Christians and thus it has remained so and will always remain so unless Christianity is regulated by secular government. The reason Jefferson built a wall of separation between church and state was to stop Christians persecuting other Christians. Protestant churches did indeed decentralise power from Rome, but they still established authoritarian power structures in those decentralised states and fully supported authoritarian secular power structures in their own states. Modern democracy is a product of kicking the clerical class off the levers of political power and letting monarchs dramatically know via regicide that they were not above the law of the common people and that their divine right was BS. The common people were sick to death, literally, of the baseless ideological violence and centuries of warfare of their Christian overlords, both temporal and clerical, causing endless chaos and destruction and death, ruining lives and dragging down progress on implementing those humanist values the Christians did indeed have. Christianity inherited humanist values from humans who came before them including the Pagan authoritarians who had not implemented their humanist values broadly across society and then Christianity also failed to implement those values broadly across society as Holland details in depth. Creating a term for an issue does not create the issue, it’s a reaction to an already existing issue that is unnamed. Secular institutions existed before the term secular was created in the mid 1800s. Feminist issues and the desire for women’s rights existed before the 1950s when women created the term feminism for the “problem without a name.” Homosexuals existed before the word was coined in the mid 1800s. The desire for human rights existed before de las Casas created the term human rights, after Christianity had failed for 1,500 years to describe the problem with a name, mainly because Christendom was not interested in universal human rights, it was interested in the rights of the elite in the clerical and aristocratic classes who wielded the power in society. Christianity did not invent secularism. The ancient Roman republic and empire were what we now term secular, ancient Greek democracy was secular, Confucianism was and still is secular. There have been secular Hindu and Buddhist republics, etc etc.