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...
While the other world religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guide to religious truth.
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.
Plutarch (AD 46–120) estimated that Julius Caesar’s campaign in Gaul yielded at least a million slaves.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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 implications of these fertility differences have been fully explored by Eric Kaufmann of the University of London in his book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010). Kaufmann noted that be...
Tawney added an additional twist by suggesting that ‘nascent capitalism . . . [shaped] Calvinism’s attitude to enterprise and the accumulation of wealth, not vice versa’.
IN WHAT CAME TO BE KNOWN as his farewell address, Muhammad is said to have told his followers: I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god but Allah.’1 This is entirely consistent w...
Only One True God can provide an adequate religious basis for the moral order. Divine essences such as the Tao do not command us to love one another. The first mover does not forbid us to covet anothe...
Does not ensure that power will be used wisely or humanely.