“…the French Enlightenment. If John Adams is correct and Helvetius was the first person to really believe in human equality, then the idea arose, not in Christendom, but in secularism. Worldviews can and do change. There is no reason to think that the ideas of the modern world are related to Christianity.”
So you’re saying these ideas were autochthonous developments that bore no relation to Christianity whatsoever. You claim they sprang up out of the native earth of Christendom and had nothing to do with what preceded them? Frankly, given the powerful role played by religion and the church at that time, I think that’s more than a little ridiculous.
The greatest help that the ideas of egalitarianism and universal brotherhood ever received was when Gutenberg invented the printing press and translations of the Bible became widely available. People could then read it for themselves and make their own decisions as to the meaning. As with so many other aspects of white culture, traditional Christianity was, in that way, another casualty of technology; it was steamrollered by Progress.
“If egalitarianism is taken in its modern sense then that’s impossible [that there are many gospel passages that extol universal brotherhood and egalitarianism], because the modern idea didn’t exist in the ancient or Medieval world.”
Human equality isn’t a difficult concept, and it hasn’t changed at all in two thousand years. All are one in Christ (Galatians 3:28), and according to Christian creation myths, all are of the same blood. Apparent divisions such as race and gender therefore are all illusions. God values all equally, with the implication that so should we, since life should be lived in imitation of Christ.
“Christianity has ceased to play a role in the modern world.”
Someone should tell the Pope this, and the Christian Zionists who keep sending money to Israel, and also the 70% of Americans who still call themselves Christians.
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Editor’s note: I have relocated, to this day, the above entry (originally posted a couple of days ago) because Frost has added still another reply in his discussion with the commenter Denvilda at The Occidental Observer, added as my 1st comment in the comments section, below.
One reply on “Latest Frost exchange”
This is Frost's latest comment:I have to give you credit, Denvilda. Your reply is sophisticated, though still, in my view, not sophisticated enough. Responses from the deep thinkers on this forum would typically have been either 1) Gutenberg was a Jew. Case closed. or 2) The printing press was only a Jewish hoax, or if not a hoax, invented only so that Jews could dominate the publishing industry (hat tip: Rerevisionist).
I believe the history of the West has been driven by technological development, and this is especially true of Gutenberg’s invention, which it is widely agreed to have played a key role in the Reformation and in producing the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment. I will go so far as to say (and have already said here) that science is indeed opposed to the Christian worldview, so in that sense you are right, there have been some changes. But overall, even as dramatic as have been the successes of science, these changes have only nibbled around the edges of the Christian worldview. The core of this worldview remains: a belief in free will, in universal brotherhood, in Christian morality (the value of repentance, forgiveness, love as superior to hate, etc.), in the world as a moral stage wherein takes place a battle between Good and Evil, in the separate existence and special value of a human soul as opposed to other animals, and many more things that I will omit for the sake of brevity.
I think you aren’t taking into account the innate conservatism of man. Even when changing his mind about certain things, he still tries to keep a hold of his old ways of thinking. Consequently, during the Enlightenment, we saw not the complete rejection of all that had gone before, but compromises such as deism, which allowed men such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to remain deeply religious while still adapting to the changes. Science and the technological mindset may eventually cause Christianity to wither away completely, but it’s far from dead yet. I reject your view that anyone who isn’t a medieval Christian isn’t really a Christian. I think that people can read the Bible and understand for themselves what it says, and they would mostly agree with my characterization above. Morality comes from religion, and the religion of the West was, and remains, Christianity.