Once the Lutheran churches were secure, Luther, like most other leaders of the Reformations, believed in freedom of conscience only for those who agreed with him.
My explanation is that England led the way in science for the same reasons that it led the way in the Industrial Revolution31 – its substantially greater political and economic liberty had produced a...
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...
Immodesty’ in dress was outlawed. A woman was jailed for arranging her hair at an ‘immoral height’.
IN 1710, THE ENGLISH FREETHINKER Thomas Woolston (1670–1731) expressed his confidence that religion would vanish by 1900.1 Voltaire (1695–1778) thought this much too pessimistic and predicted that rel...
Given the American example, it should always have been obvious that the sacred canopy claims are silly. In the United States, in the most fully pluralistic nation that probably has ever existed, relig...
For there is another truth: to the extent that other cultures have failed to adopt at least major aspects of Western ways, they remain backward and impoverished.
Christianity was oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the superiority of the past. At least in principle, if not always in fact, Christian doctrines could always be modifie...
Charging interest on loans was thus defined as the ‘sin of usury’, and widely condemned in principle while pretty much ignored in actual practice. In fact, as already noted, by late in the ninth centu...
By the same token, Martin Luther’s efforts to provide religious education for the German peasants and urban lower classes failed completely because the lessons were conceived by a university professor...
Capitalism was a very Catholic invention: it first appeared in the great monastic estates, way back in the ninth century.
Until well into the twentieth century there even were legal bans on the sale of Bibles in most nations of Latin America, which led to the widespread belief that only Protestants accepted the Bible.
So much, then, for the mystery of how Muslim culture was somehow lost or left behind. The notion that in the medieval era Islamic culture was advanced well beyond Europe is as much an illusion as rece...
Science arose in the West—and only in the West—precisely because the Judeo-Christian conception of God encouraged and even demanded this pursuit.
Property is insecure. In this one phrase the whole history of Asia is contained.
No doubt it was unenlightened of the crusaders to have been typical medieval warriors, but it seems even more unenlightened to anachronistically impose the Geneva Conventions on the crusaders while pr...
Most assumed this was due to the fact that church services (with the exception of occasional brief homilies) were in Latin, a language that almost no one in the pews could understand. Thus, it was bel...
It is a commonplace to identify Martin Luther as the ‘father of individualism’.
In 2004 there were only 5,116.19 Why? Because they have been replaced by Latin Americans! In many Latin American nations today, native-born evangelical Protestant clergy far outnumber both foreign mis...
Given these attitudes and lack of attendance, it is hardly surprising that the German masses (and most Europeans) were ignorant of even basic Christian facts.