The Government on His Shoulder?

Quotes:

The Book That Made Your World — How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization

“The Bible created the modern world of science and learning because it gave us the Creator’s vision of what reality is all about. That is what made the modern West a reading and thinking civilization. Postmodern people see little point in reading books that do not contribute directly to their career or pleasure. This is a logical outcome of atheism, which has now realized that the human mind cannot possibly know what is true and right.” — Vishal Mangalwadi

Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion

“In fact, all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies—even many of the Northwest American Indian tribes had slaves long before Columbus’s voyage.46 Amid this universal slavery, only one civilization ever rejected human bondage: Christendom. And it did it twice!”

The WEIRDEST People in the World, Joseph Henrich

In 19th-century Switzerland, other aftershocks of the Reformation have been detected in a battery of cognitive tests given to Swiss army recruits. Young men from all-Protestant districts were not only 11 percentile points more likely to be “high performers” on reading tests compared to those from all-Catholic districts, but this advantage bled over into their scores in math, history, and writing.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Repeatedly, whether crashing through the canals of Tenochtitlan, or settling the estuaries of Massachusetts, or trekking deep into the Transvaal, the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity. Repeatedly, though…it was Christianity that…provided the colonized and the enslaved with the surest voice. The paradox was profound. No other conquerors, carving out empires for themselves, had done so as the servants of a man tortured to death on the orders of a colonial official. No other conquerors…had installed…an emblem of power so deeply ambivalent as to render problematic the very notion of power.

George Sciallabba

Perseverance in virtue will sometimes require self-sacrifice. And self-sacrifice seems to require some transcendental justification or motivation, of which the most common, and perhaps the most logical, is belief in the existence of God.

And there is the quick of my discomfort: the suspicion, powerfully and plausibly albeit tactfully and tentatively expressed, that the ideals I most prize are at bottom inadequate. I confess I see no alternative to living with this suspicion, perhaps permanently.

Yuval Noah Harari, Author of Sapiens

“Most legal systems in the world today are based on a belief in human rights. But what are human rights? Human rights…like God and heaven, are just a story we’ve invented. They’re not objective reality. They’re not a biological fact about Homo sapiens. Take a human being, cut him open, look inside, you will find the heart, the kidneys, neurons, hormones, DNA. But you won’t find any rights. The only place you find rights is in the stories that we have invented and spread…they may be very positive stories, very good stories. But they are still just fictional stories that we have invented.”

“Human rights are as fictional as the God who underwrites them.”

Glen Scrivener, The Air We Breathe

Imagine there’s another guest on the TV show. Plato is brought in, blinking at the studio lights and baffled by the technology. He’s asked whether he agrees with the claim: “Some lives are worth more than others”. The ancient thinker frowns: what is the debate exactly? It is trivially obvious to the father of Western philosophy that lives are of unequal value. Some are men, and some are women; some are Greeks, and some are barbarians; some are free, and some are slaves. There are rich and poor, wise and foolish, strong and weak. All that we see in nature is difference. Compare any two people concerning any one attribute and what will you conclude? This one has more than that one. This, of course, is the definition of unequal. To insist that two people are equal really, when every human trait betrays inequality, raises the question: Equal how? Where is this magical realm where their “equality” exists? Can you show it to me? If Plato was being polite, he might say, “Your faith in ‘equality’ fascinates me, and I’d like to be able to see what you see. Clearly ‘equality’ is very important to you. You live your life in the light of this belief, and I can respect that. But to me it looks as if you’ve just decided to believe in something with no reason or evidence. I’m afraid I’m not convinced.”

The Flight From Humanity, Rushdoony

"The gospel of Sir Thomas More was his Utopia, wherein man's mind imposed its idea on all of the world of matter. For More, wives were to be selected after being inspected naked; their minds were not important enough to count, So unimportant was matter or particularity, so little was it the world of spirit, that wives were to be chosen without regard to the unity of mind and matter, naked on inspection like cattle. For Aristotle, women were misbegotten males, an inferior form of humanity (more material), and Plato wondered as to whether women could be called reasonable creatures. Aristotle held that men, slaves, women, and children all have souls. However, "although the parts of the soul are present in all of them, they are present in different degrees. Women thus have less soul than men and are thus more material. As a result, the neoplatonist tradition has tended strongly toward a hostility to women as the principle of sensuality and materialism. The implicaton of More's principle, which he applied to his daughter, was that women are at best essentially flesh rather than spirit, and hence, like cattle, to be inspected physically before marriage.

The feminist movement, despite its serious errors, has some justification, in that the neoplatonist movement has consistently treated women with contempt. In the Bible, women are presented as no less intelligent than men, nor any the less capable of redemption; the question is one of authority, not of humanity or dignity, whereas in the neoplatonist tradition women are seen at times almost as a different species or at best a very inferior form of man.

The influence of Hellenic thought on Islam is a marked one, and women are the victims of it. Islam is a good example of men setting up a sexual order for their gratification, all the while insisting that men are rational and spiritual, and that women are coarse, materialistic, and sensual in nature. They are also supposedly inferior to men. The Bible teaches, not the inferiority of women, but their subordination, a very different thing."

Richard Halverson

“The fact is, the birth, crucifixion, and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ are celebrated worldwide by folk of every race, language, and color, every year. And believing in Jesus, they have been delivered from the most evil, disastrous, frustrating, debilitating habits and life forms possible. The real problem with Jesus Christ is not that folk can't believe in Him—but that they won't believe in Him.”