While the other world religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guide to religious truth.
Plutarch (AD 46–120) estimated that Julius Caesar’s campaign in Gaul yielded at least a million slaves.
But following these Stone Age discoveries, progress was slow. It is estimated that in terms of the standard of living, things were pretty much the same for the next seven thousand years.1 People ate a...
Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these princi...
When the Greeks were free they created a civilization advanced beyond anything else in the world. When Rome imposed its imperial rule all across the West, progress ceased for a millennium. The fall of...
What is a peasant society? It can be defined many ways, such as when most people live in rural areas and farm for a living. But that’s not what Marx, Weber and the others had in mind. For them, peasan...
The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the culti...
Nevertheless, the more odious restrictions – such as being confined at night to ghettos, or even being expelled from a nation – were placed upon them by the state, not the Roman Catholic Church.
Because God is a rational being and the universe is his personal creation, it necessarily has a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension. This is the key to many inte...
Does not ensure that power will be used wisely or humanely.
Sad to say, it is no surprise that the massacre of Antioch is barely reported in many recent Western histories of the Crusades. Steven Runciman gave it eight lines, 30 Hans Eberhard Mayer gave it one,...
It is well known that the Chinese had gunpowder by the thirteenth century and even cast a few cannons. But when Western voyagers reached China in the sixteenth century the Chinese lacked both artiller...
How many victims were consumed by these ceremonies? In 1487, well before any contact with Europeans, the Aztecs inaugurated their great new Templo Mayor. The day began with four lines of victims, each...
This chapter does not mourn the collapse of Christendom, although it is hard not to be nostalgic for its many virtues, especially for the international character of the elite who ruled both its politi...
Then they calculated the relationship between Protestantism and these measures of industrial capitalism. The results were zero: Catholic and Protestant nations did not differ!
Liberation Theology led nowhere because it was neither a revolutionary nor a religious movement, but involved a weak, self-cancelling mixture of each.
Humans will tend to adopt and retain those elements of culture that appear to produce better results, while those that appear to be less rewarding will tend to be discarded.
Even more important, Islam holds that the universe is inherently irrational—that there is no cause and effect—because everything happens as the direct result of Allah’s will at that particular time. A...
There is at least as much, and probably much more, variation on these matters among the Protestants of various types included in these merged ‘Protestant’ groups, than between the ‘average’ Protestant...
The only common feature of the three successful Reformations was their rejection of papal authority; otherwise they were quite at odds.