What Does Christianity Contribute



I came across another of the never ending discussions about the contributions of Christianity to societies with democracy, high standards of living and low crime rates. This one was from Mark Toole, a Methodist who writes a lot about his conservative brand of Methodism.

Toole discussed a recent article by an atheists who challenged those claims Christianity is a major contributor to better societies. The claim comes from observations that Canada and Europe have moved significantly toward secularism and are in the same league with the Christian U.S. when measuring these valued attributes of good societies.

Toole claims we should give the Christian histories of these societies credit for their successes. That is, even though they are now trending secular their history is Christian.

Here we start dealing with social science issues that cannot be agreed upon by everyone. The way most social scientists would deal with this is to say religions come from society's values, not visa versa. Thus, Christianity did not and is not sovereign. Societies adopt religions that re enforce values already present.

The values found in any society are those which allowed survival. A society without any rules of behavior dies off because members kill and rob each other. Survival requires cooperation. Cooperation requires some form of self sacrifice, delaying one's own gratification for greater gratification later.

It's simply not possible to establish that Christianity builds better societies than other religions or no religion.

Comments

  1. Matt NoahFebruary 21, 2020 at 7:48 PM

    Hmmm, countries with non-Christian building blocks:

    Russia: hahaha
    China: hahaha
    Venezuela: hahaha
    North Korea: hahaha
    Iran: hahaha
    Iraq: hahaha
    Saudi Arabia: hahaha
    Mexico: hahaha
    Cuba: hahaha

    USA: shining city on a hill

    Gee, I guess you're right about all those wonderful communist and socialistic countries.

    Until Europe started practicing socialism and atheism, the same could have been said about their societies in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, England, etc

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jon LindgrenFebruary 21, 2020 at 8:24 PM

    Matt--I'm trying to understand here. You are saying that socialistic and communistic countries cannot be Christian countries? What is the scriptural basis for that?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Matt NoahFebruary 22, 2020 at 7:32 AM

      When did you start caring about the scriptural basis for anything?

      Delete
  3. Jon LindgrenFebruary 22, 2020 at 8:05 AM

    Matt "When did you start caring about scriptural basis for anything?"

    Gosh. Just asking. Is that improper?

    ReplyDelete

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