Encouraged by the Scholastics and embodied in the great medieval universities founded by the church, faith in the power of reason infused Western culture, stimulating the pursuit of science and the ev...
For example, at the fall of Rome there was very extensive slavery everywhere in Europe; by the time of the Renaissance it was long gone.
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.
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...
However, as in Scandinavia, the Church of England clergy are unionized and recently forced the Church to rescind a rule defrocking clergy convicted of felonies, on grounds that such convictions might...
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...
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 Because they have been replaced by Latin Americans!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...
It is a commonplace to identify Martin Luther as the ‘father of individualism’.
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...
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...
Property is insecure. In this one phrase the whole history of Asia is contained.
Science arose in the West—and only in the West—precisely because the Judeo-Christian conception of God encouraged and even demanded this pursuit.
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...
The Church never endorsed the notion of the divine right of kings. That was first proclaimed by James I of England (1566–1625), a Protestant after whom the King James Version of the Bible is named. In...
The Industrial Revolution was the culmination of the rise of Western civilization that began in Greece twenty-seven centuries ago. It was the product of human freedom and the pursuit of knowledge, whi...
The reason so many innovations and inventions were abandoned or even outlawed in China had to do with Confucian opposition to change on grounds that the past was greatly superior.
Thus it was that, beginning in about the ninth century, the growing monastic estates came to resemble well-organized and stable firms that pursued complex commercial activities within a relatively fre...
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.
SCIENCE AROSE ONLY IN Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was possible and desirable. And the basis of their belief was their image of God and his creation. This was dramatica...
To sum up: the Reformations resulted in state churches that were even more repressive of individuals than the Catholic Church ever attempted to be. The Reformations did not contribute anything to reli...
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