Secularism and Christianity

[perpetualdawn]

Most of us are blind to the huge cultural legacy and influence of Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions.

Our modern dominant secular culture is literally built on a foundation of Christianity. Like it or not, that's our cultural roots. The modern ideas of atheism and secularism are literally born out of a mainly Christian culture, maybe a bit of Jewish thrown in there. It makes no sense to condemn Christianity as being wrong or evil or something, that's like saying all of your ancestors were wrong, hating your grandma etc.

What we think of as secularity, atheism, is mostly just an extension of Christianity. Christianity 2.0. Christianity with Jesus and the bible erased.

Every generation builds on the past. The Christians, Jews, Muslims are/were just doing their best with what they understood about the world. Don't hate the greeks because they didn't understand Newtonian physics. Don't hate Newton because he didn't know about relativity. All of these paradigms are lenses for looking at the world. Some of these lenses have had major upgrades, and some of us are ready to move on from them, but some of the old ideas are still useful and are worth looking at. We still teach Newtownian physics even though we have more accurate models now. The physics is just an analogy here for religion/spirituality, because it's a more concrete thing to talk about.

Like a lot of BLers, I used to be super anti-organized religion, but as I've gotten older I have a different perspective. There have been so many problems that could be blamed on these religions, but reality is super nuanced, and it's impossible to say that the world would have been better off without them.

Do you know that before Abrahamic religions, most societies practiced sacrifice? Sometimes it was human sacrifice. They used to sacrifice to clean the village of the cumulative sins. Do you know what it means that Jesus died on the cross for your sins? It sounds like nonsense, that line always drove me crazy, but now I understand - he literally died on the cross for our sins so that we could stop sacrificing animals and children to the gods to make them happy. His was the penultimate (second-last) sacrifice. Now whether or not he was real is irrelevant. It's the culture that's important here.

Now Christianity made the ultimate (as in final) sacrifice, we have Christianity with the religion scrubbed away. That's modern atheism/secularity.

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I was going to post this on the heated thread on the Psychedelics forum about LSD being a tool of the devil, as a response to some of the anti-organized religion sentiment going on in there. I suspect theres a bit less of that sentiment going on here in P&S, nonetheless I thought it's a better fit here topically. I don't participate much in this P&S forum, so I hope this post isn't out of context.

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[Foreigner]

What we think of as secularity, atheism, is mostly just an extension of Christianity. Christianity 2.0. Christianity with Jesus and the bible erased.

I'm not sure I would go that far, but I do agree that Christianity still informs everything we do, including scientific research. I do a lot of ethnobotanical research and when I read papers written about certain plants by Russian scientists, or African scientists, or even Chinese scientists, the analysis sounds a lot different than the American and western European papers. A lot of the herbal institutions in the U.S. got gutted, partially because of business interests and partially because of the burning times. Herbalism and witchcraft were seen as one. And I think that plays out in how the U.S. does its research now.

When it comes to paranormal topics, you can't even find much depth in American research. They just won't do it. Whereas the Russians have done all kinds of consciousness experiments, research into auras and living energy fields, etc. It's not that Christianity never touched Russia but it's that Russia is part of the eastern diaspora (like China and East Asia) where Christianity never really got as big of a foothold. In places like the U.S., you can't do anything groundbreaking without first considering the repercussions of the religious right. In other countries it would be absurd to hinder research based on offending religious people.

Here in Canada, we have that British propriety that is reinforced with Catholic guilt. It's in everyone. So it's ironic that people bash religion yet their values, social attitudes and cultural norms are all informed by religion.

 

[perpetualdawn]

Here in Canada, we have that British propriety that is reinforced with Catholic guilt. It's in everyone. So it's ironic that people bash religion yet their values, social attitudes and cultural norms are all informed by religion.

Yes, well put. Exactly what I'm getting at. A lot of what I wrote here originated from listening to CBC Ideas episodes BTW. (CBC is our public broadcaster - Canada's BBC)

 

[Foreigner]

Yes, well put. Exactly what I'm getting at. A lot of what I wrote here originated from listening to CBC Ideas episodes BTW. (CBC is our public broadcaster - Canada's BBC)

I would go further to say that really it was Europe that has messed up the world, and it was mostly Britain, France and Spain. Christianity went everywhere and supplanted everything it could. I think of a country like China, which more or less stayed within its own territory despite being a regional hegemon, and I wonder why such a small place as Europe came to dominate the world. It's kind of mind blowing. What would the world be like if Europe never went that route?