So we’re taking the splinter approach then! Fair enough!
I am willing, for the sake of argument, to agree that the Socinians were integral, critical, to modern society not being Mad Max. If not for the Socinians the planet would be covered in deserts. This is to be taken as fact.
The question then becomes where this peculiar formation called ‘Christianity’ may legitimately be attributed with the achievements of the Socinians.
I’m thinking not - as rat avatar pointed out it doesn’t appear that the Socinians relied on Christianity for their ideas on how to prevent Mad Max. It appears that they pulled from non-christian sources to get these ideas, which would make the ideas not a byproduct of Christianity - or at least not enough of a contributor that Christianity can be painted as the font from which these ideas were sourced.
About the only way I can think of to credit Christianity with the actions of the Socinians without consideration for the fact their ideas didn’t come from Christianity is to not pay attention to the source of the ideas of all - to consider Christianity a collection of people rather than a belief system and then announce “at least one guy who published on the subject was a Christian, so Christianity as a whole gets credit because all we’re saying when we say ‘Christianity’ is a collection of people.” Of course doing this switches us back to the ‘big tent’ method of analysis, wherin intellectual honesty forces us to remember that while some small amount of non-Mad-Max effects have come out of Christianity, the by far largest byproduct of Christianity is poop. Millions and millions of people who spent time in bathrooms over the centuries, simply titanic amounts of poop, which we attribute to Christianity because Christians produced it. Seriously, aside from carbon dioxide poop is probably the hugest byproduct of Christianity. (If we use the ‘Christianity gets credit for anything its people do’ analysis approach, anyway.)
That is a bit of a straw-man, you are the one that claimed that *due to some unique * aspect of Christianity resulted in this conceptualization.
What you have provided is that there was one group that tended this way, ignored cites that they took inspiration from the Greeks then claimed that because they were diverse there was no way to disprove it.
Are you really suggesting that other groups didn’t have diversity? Are you also ignoring that for large portions of Europe becoming Christian was not a choice, and that it was forced on the public by force and often the gospel was presented in a language they didn’t speak?
You haven’t show anything special about being Christians being special related to human rights. It is not that they aren’t ‘real’ Christians and that is just a strawman.
Just because John Locke happened to be Christian doesn’t mean that it arose due to Christianity. With the demonstrations on this happening in similar forms around the world you need an argument that doesn’t just depend on the warming of the heart to justify that claim.
No, I did not claim that it was some unique aspect of Christianity. I claimed that Christianity produced it. That is a very different claim. I have no idea if it is unique to Christianity, in fact I said I could probably conjecture 100 different belief systems that could accomplish it - How about ‘human rightsism?’ a belief system that says all humans have rights. That would be a good start maybe. What I did say is that no other belief systems DID produce human rights. Maybe they could, maybe they couldn’t, who knows? I know which one did though.
I think that I have shown very specifically where Locke got his ideas. It was from a branch of Christianity. Socinianism may have gotten some ideas from the Greeks, but it really got its ideas from the Radical Reformation movements like the Anabaptists. Their primary ideas came not from Greek philosophy, but rather as a return movement to original Christianity and a rejection of church institutions. Of course, a lot of first century Christianity has a very strong Greek bend, especially John, so I guess that indirectly it links to the Greeks, but only via earlier Christian thought. It’s hard to conclusively exclude Greek thought from Radical Reformation works, but it’s clear that it was hardly the dominant line of thought. If we read Fausto Sozzini’s works, they are clearly rooted in Christian logic.
You just said that Christians are diverse with differing moral and world views, which directly conflicts with your claim here.
Socrates’ argument for staying in jail was very similar to social contract, and of course Christianity has connection to Greeks, as it partially borrowed from them and the Sumerian’s
The base ideas behind social contract are nearly as old as philosophy itself, and in fact there were some similar ideas in the pagen tribes of Northern Europe who were destroyed due to claims of heresy.
Mostly what you are describing here is reading historical works of merit, which is in now way exclusive to Christians.
To be fair, confirmation bias is something we all deal with and I can see how you would come to this conclusion but there is lots of other ‘prior art’ and actually direct tracked influences like the Greeks that demonstrate that this is not an artifact of a particular religion but seems to be a fairly human trait. This fits in with our understanding of empathy that even extends to some other mammals.
I see no evidence that “Christianity produced it”, it just happened to be written down by Christians.
That’s like saying that Harvard doesn’t produce research, just people that work for Harvard.
It’s splitting hairs. When we can trace back a specific line of thought (like human rights) and point out exactly where those ideas came from and how they built off of other ideas, then I think it’s fair to say that those other ideas are progenitors of the latter ideas.
We can trace human rights directly from 1st century Christian thought. We could wind our way through the one and a half millenia and end up with human rights. How is that not Christianity producing it? It’s the combined works of hundreds of authors attempting to discern a Christian view of the world and out pops human rights, but in your mind, that’s not Christianity making the idea, it’s just apparently the work of humans in a vacuum. It’s a denial of what was actually occurring.
While it’s valid to say that Christianity took those ideas from the Greeks, it’s not valid to say that somehow we get to skip 1500 years of Christian thought and Fausto Sozzini emerges from a Greek ether. His ideas were very Christian in character and echoed many of the ideas of Western Christendom of the time. Just as Locke’s were. It wasn’t Locke saying, “I’m going to read Aristotle and create this system of thoughts and I happen to go to church on Sunday.” It was Locke saying, “This is what other Christians are saying Christianity should be and I agree with them and wish to elaborate on the point.” They are very different things.
Sure, I can try. I think that Locke can clearly trace his thinking to the Socinians. Their theology was largely formulated by Fausto Sozzinni. Sozzinni was essentially an offshoot of the Radical Reformation. The Radical Reformation was itself largely formed by Thomas Muntzer’s ideas. Muntzer got his ideas from both a study of first century Christianity (I guess we could just stop there, but I like this line of thought. Muntzer was an ‘end of the world’ person. He believed that the end of the world was imminant and that Christ was returning at any moment. He believed that it was necessary then to make the world into a place that Christ would want and to do so by any means possible. This meant making it fair and just, but if you had to do so by violent revolution, so be it. We can also see Conrad Grebel showing up in Sozzinni’s works and via Grebel trace him to Zwingli and Erasmus, but that is a different path.) and the works of Henry Suso and Johannes Tauler-Dominican mystics of the early 1300s. They themselves were students of Meister Eckhart. Meister Eckhart was influenced by Henry of Nordlingen who was both mystic and a fan of Aquinas. Obviously Aquinas had Aristotelian tendencies, but he was grounded in Christianity through and through. Aquinas though disagreeing in some aspects was largely impacted by Augustine. Augustine himself practically invented western Christianity and his basis is largely scriptural with his own twists. I think there are a lot more twists, turns and branches that we can throw in, but it’s pretty obvious that we can track Locke’s conclusions firmly to a distinct path of Christian theology at least as old as Augustine and likely older.
First, the vast majority of Christians do NOT evangelize. Those are just the ones you notice (nava’s comment on noise is pertinent).
Second, I think Penn Jillette is right – if you sincerely believe that only those people who have taken Jesus as their lord and savior are going to heaven and everyone else is going to hell, then if you don’t spend your life trying to save souls you are no true Christian.
But you may be surprised that a lot of people who believe themselves to be Christians do not believe in hell at all, and many who do, don’t think they can know who is going there.
There are fundamentalist sects who firmly hold that Roman Catholics are going straight to hell. Maybe most of them think that, I don’t know. The point I’m making here is that one of the most common fallacies of non-Christians is that they think the most obnoxious people who call themselves Christians speak for all Christians. They don’t. Not in the slightest way.
There were also many southern churches that were pro-slavery. One of the sole purposes of the SBC forming in 1845 was to defend slavery, and they had plenty of scriptural support to back up their contentions, both old and new testaments. It took them 150 years to renounce their racist roots and apologize for it.