jcon wrote:

Terry Cross wrote:

Christopher A. Lee wrote:

On Fri, 9 Dec 2005 16:38:06 -0500, Josef Balluch
<josef.balluch@sympatico.can> wrote:

In a message sent 'round the world, words of truth poured fuel on the
fire with the following:

http://www.worldmag.com/subscriber/displayarticle.cfm?id=11322

A reasonable religion

INTERVIEW: Author Rodney Stark on how Christianity changed politics,
economics, and much besides

by Marvin Olasky

...

The veteran Baylor professor discussed with WORLD how the
Christian sense of progress led to political, technological, and
economic advances.

...
Association is not sufficient to establish causation.

Then the veteran Baylor professor was lying through his teeth.

What colour is the sky on his planet where there weren't the dark
ages, persecution of Bruo, Servetus, Gallileo etc?

We are already aware of the changes the Atheism brought to the world in
the last century.

You mean doubling the human life span, or were you referring to
something else?

I am referring to that sect of Atheism that calls itself Marxist
Communism, Maoism, etc. that has brought so much misery, squalor, and
conflict to the world.

TCross

Only Christians believed....

http://www.worldmag.com/subscriber/displayarticle.cfm?id=11322

A reasonable religion

INTERVIEW: Author Rodney Stark on how Christianity changed politics,
economics, and much besides

by Marvin Olasky

Rodney Stark's latest book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity
Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House,
2005), is scheduled for publication next Tuesday. It's a useful
corrective for folks in Austin, Boston, and other blue spots who
think of Christianity and rationalism as opposite historical forces
and philosophical concepts. The veteran Baylor professor discussed
with WORLD how the Christian sense of progress led to political,
technological, and economic advances.

http://www.worldmag.com/subscriber/displayarticle.cfm?id=11322



A reasonable religion



INTERVIEW: Author Rodney Stark on how Christianity changed politics,
economics, and much besides

by Marvin Olasky



Rodney Stark's latest book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led
to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House, 2005), is
scheduled for publication next Tuesday. It's a useful corrective for
folks in Austin, Boston, and other blue spots who think of Christianity
and rationalism as opposite historical forces and philosophical
concepts. The veteran Baylor professor discussed with WORLD how the
Christian sense of progress led to political, technological, and
economic advances.





WORLD: How is Christianity unique in emphasizing the idea of progress?

STARK: The other great faiths either taught that the world is locked in
endless cycles or that it is inevitably declining from a previous
Golden Age.

Only Christians believed that God's gift of reason made
progress inevitable-theological as well as technical progress. Thus,
Augustine (ca. 354-430) flatly asserted that through the application of
reason we will gain an increasingly more accurate understanding of God,
remarking that although there were "certain matters pertaining to the
doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp . . . one day we shall
be able to do so."

Nor was the Christian belief in progress limited to theology. Augustine
went on at length about the "wonderful-one might say
stupefying-advances human industry has made" and attributed all this
to the "unspeakable boon" that God has conferred upon His creation, a
"rational nature." These views were repeated again and again through
the centuries. Especially typical were these words preached by Fra
Giordano in Florence in 1306: "Not all the arts have been found; we
shall never see an end to finding them."


WORLD: But a lot of us learned that Europe fell into the "Dark Ages."
How did that historical understanding originate, and what's wrong with
it?

STARK: The Dark Ages have finally been recognized as a hoax perpetrated
by anti-religious and bitterly anti-Catholic, 18th-century
intellectuals who were determined to assert their cultural superiority
and who boosted their claim by denigrating the Christian past-as
Gibbon put it in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, after Rome
came the "triumph of barbarism and religion." In the past few years
even encyclopedias and dictionaries have begun to acknowledge that it
was all a lie, that the Dark Ages never were. This always should have
been obvious since by the end of the so-called Dark Ages, European
science and technology had far exceeded that of Rome and Greece, and
all the rest of the world, for that matter.


WORLD: Could you be specific? What were some of the "Dark Ages"
innovations that show the folly of considering Greek and Roman culture
the apex of civilization until recent times?

STARK: How about the perfection and widespread use of waterwheels,
windmills, and pumps, the invention of the compass,

stirrups, the
crossbow,

canons,
From chinese technology
effective horse harnesses, eyeglasses, clocks,
chimneys, violins, double-entry bookkeeping, and insurance? This list
doesn't begin to do justice to this era that historians of science now
refer to as an age of remarkable innovation and discovery.

Perhaps the most revealing instance involves the "story" that in order
to gain backing for his great voyage west, Columbus had to struggle
against ignorant and superstitious churchmen who were certain that the
earth was flat.

Truth was that all educated Europeans, including
bishops and cardinals, knew the earth was round. What produced church
opposition to the Columbus voyage was that Columbus believed the
circumference of the earth was only about one-fifth of its actual
distance. Thus, the church scholars who opposed him did so because they
knew that he and his sailors were bound to perish at sea. And they
would have done so had the Western Hemisphere not been there to
replenish their food and water.


WORLD: So Christians were pro-science, but you suggest that the Muslim
conception of God held back the rise of science in the Islamic world?

STARK: Allah was not conceived of as creator of a universe governed by
"natural" rules, in contrast with the prevailing Christian conception
of Jehovah as the Great Clockmaker. Instead, their image of Allah
encouraged Muslims to focus their attention on interpreting divine laws
governing human behavior, not to search for the divine "secrets" that
govern the universe.

WORLD: You say the Christian doctrine that sin is a personal
responsibility made a difference in the extension of liberty and
economic opportunity in the early modern era.
STARK: The admonition "Go and sin no more" is absurd if we are mere
captives of our fate. Christianity teaches that we have free will and
therefore must be relatively free of compulsions.

This theological
insight led directly to doctrines that opposed repressive states,

slavery,

and other forms of exploitation and in favor of private
property and freedom of conscience. These freedoms often were not
achieved, but their clear basis in Christian doctrines did result in
some relatively free, early European societies, initially in the
medieval Italian city-states, and in the eventual spread of democracy.

WORLD: You argue that the problems of the Spanish empire display, among
others things, the disadvantages of having a state church. How?

STARK: In two primary ways. First of all, a "kept" church is lazy. When
clergy do not rely on the laity for their support, they tend to neglect
their pastoral duties. In the case of the Spanish church, because
everyone was by law a Roman Catholic, nothing needed to be done to
convert them or even to attract them to Mass. In fact, the state
collected the church tithes so the clergy had no need to bestir
themselves even for money. And that's why until very recently most
people in Latin America were only nominal Christians, if that.

The second great shortcoming of state churches is that they are
captives of their political rulers. By treaty the King of Spain chose
all bishops and cardinals, not only in Spain, but in the empire.
Moreover, no church pronouncements, including papal bulls, could be
published in any Spanish area without prior consent of the king. As a
result a whole series of 15th- and 16th-century papal condemnations of
slavery were unknown in Spain and Latin America and were ignored by
historians until the past decade or so.

State interference in religious affairs was not unique to Spain.
Whether ruled by despots or merely by politicians, where there is a
state church the state can never keep itself from interfering in
religious affairs. In Scandinavia, where Lutheran state churches
prevail, parliaments revise doctrines and even concern themselves with
details such as the contents of hymn books. Indeed, in Sweden pastors
of the state church (and of other churches as well) are now prohibited
from reading in public any portion of the Bible that is critical of
homosexuality.

WORLD: You've emphasized in your writing the advantages of church
competition and religious entrepreneurship. Are those advantages also
contributing to the recent growth of Christianity in Latin America,
Africa, and China?

STARK: In 1881-82 William F. Bainbridge, a prominent American Baptist,
visited all American Protestant overseas missions (in those days they
were still all coastal and easily reached). He found that in some
places the denominations had cut up an area and granted each group an
exclusive mission field, but in other places all the denominations
competed for converts. He observed that the missionaries were far more
successful where they competed. This remains the case. Consider that
for centuries Roman Catholics had an exclusive right to missionize
Latin America, at the end of which most of the continent was
unchurched. Then Protestant missionaries were allowed to enter. The
result has been not only the conversion of millions to active
Protestantism, but also to so greatly revive Roman Catholicism that it
now is growing, too. Meanwhile, the Christianization of Africa is being
accomplished by hundreds of competing denominations, most of African
origins.


WORLD: What do you think the shape of Christianity will be in 2050?

STARK: By then Christianity may well be the dominant religion in China.
Latin Americans probably will be as churched as North Americans. Africa
will be more than half Christian. As for Europe, it will be well along
in a major revival of religion, one way or the other: Christian or
Islamic.

http://www.worldmag.com/subscriber/displayarticle.cfm?id=11322



A reasonable religion



INTERVIEW: Author Rodney Stark on how Christianity changed politics,
economics, and much besides

by Marvin Olasky



Rodney Stark's latest book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led
to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House, 2005), is
scheduled for publication next Tuesday. It's a useful corrective for
folks in Austin, Boston, and other blue spots who think of Christianity
and rationalism as opposite historical forces and philosophical
concepts. The veteran Baylor professor discussed with WORLD how the
Christian sense of progress led to political, technological, and
economic advances.





WORLD: How is Christianity unique in emphasizing the idea of progress?

STARK: The other great faiths either taught that the world is locked in
endless cycles or that it is inevitably declining from a previous
Golden Age.

Only Christians believed that God's gift of reason made
progress inevitable-theological as well as technical progress. Thus,
Augustine (ca. 354-430) flatly asserted that through the application of
reason we will gain an increasingly more accurate understanding of God,
remarking that although there were "certain matters pertaining to the
doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp . . . one day we shall
be able to do so."

Nor was the Christian belief in progress limited to theology. Augustine
went on at length about the "wonderful-one might say
stupefying-advances human industry has made" and attributed all this
to the "unspeakable boon" that God has conferred upon His creation, a
"rational nature." These views were repeated again and again through
the centuries. Especially typical were these words preached by Fra
Giordano in Florence in 1306: "Not all the arts have been found; we
shall never see an end to finding them."


WORLD: But a lot of us learned that Europe fell into the "Dark Ages."
How did that historical understanding originate, and what's wrong with
it?

STARK: The Dark Ages have finally been recognized as a hoax perpetrated
by anti-religious and bitterly anti-Catholic, 18th-century
intellectuals who were determined to assert their cultural superiority
and who boosted their claim by denigrating the Christian past-as
Gibbon put it in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, after Rome
came the "triumph of barbarism and religion." In the past few years
even encyclopedias and dictionaries have begun to acknowledge that it
was all a lie, that the Dark Ages never were. This always should have
been obvious since by the end of the so-called Dark Ages, European
science and technology had far exceeded that of Rome and Greece, and
all the rest of the world, for that matter.


WORLD: Could you be specific? What were some of the "Dark Ages"
innovations that show the folly of considering Greek and Roman culture
the apex of civilization until recent times?

STARK: How about the perfection and widespread use of waterwheels,
windmills, and pumps, the invention of the compass,

stirrups, the
crossbow,

canons,
From chinese technology
effective horse harnesses, eyeglasses, clocks,
chimneys, violins, double-entry bookkeeping, and insurance? This list
doesn't begin to do justice to this era that historians of science now
refer to as an age of remarkable innovation and discovery.

Perhaps the most revealing instance involves the "story" that in order
to gain backing for his great voyage west, Columbus had to struggle
against ignorant and superstitious churchmen who were certain that the
earth was flat.

Truth was that all educated Europeans, including
bishops and cardinals, knew the earth was round. What produced church
opposition to the Columbus voyage was that Columbus believed the
circumference of the earth was only about one-fifth of its actual
distance. Thus, the church scholars who opposed him did so because they
knew that he and his sailors were bound to perish at sea. And they
would have done so had the Western Hemisphere not been there to
replenish their food and water.


WORLD: So Christians were pro-science, but you suggest that the Muslim
conception of God held back the rise of science in the Islamic world?

STARK: Allah was not conceived of as creator of a universe governed by
"natural" rules, in contrast with the prevailing Christian conception
of Jehovah as the Great Clockmaker. Instead, their image of Allah
encouraged Muslims to focus their attention on interpreting divine laws
governing human behavior, not to search for the divine "secrets" that
govern the universe.

WORLD: You say the Christian doctrine that sin is a personal
responsibility made a difference in the extension of liberty and
economic opportunity in the early modern era.
STARK: The admonition "Go and sin no more" is absurd if we are mere
captives of our fate. Christianity teaches that we have free will and
therefore must be relatively free of compulsions.

This theological
insight led directly to doctrines that opposed repressive states,

slavery,

and other forms of exploitation and in favor of private
property and freedom of conscience. These freedoms often were not
achieved, but their clear basis in Christian doctrines did result in
some relatively free, early European societies, initially in the
medieval Italian city-states, and in the eventual spread of democracy.

WORLD: You argue that the problems of the Spanish empire display, among
others things, the disadvantages of having a state church. How?

STARK: In two primary ways. First of all, a "kept" church is lazy. When
clergy do not rely on the laity for their support, they tend to neglect
their pastoral duties. In the case of the Spanish church, because
everyone was by law a Roman Catholic, nothing needed to be done to
convert them or even to attract them to Mass. In fact, the state
collected the church tithes so the clergy had no need to bestir
themselves even for money. And that's why until very recently most
people in Latin America were only nominal Christians, if that.

The second great shortcoming of state churches is that they are
captives of their political rulers. By treaty the King of Spain chose
all bishops and cardinals, not only in Spain, but in the empire.
Moreover, no church pronouncements, including papal bulls, could be
published in any Spanish area without prior consent of the king. As a
result a whole series of 15th- and 16th-century papal condemnations of
slavery were unknown in Spain and Latin America and were ignored by
historians until the past decade or so.

State interference in religious affairs was not unique to Spain.
Whether ruled by despots or merely by politicians, where there is a
state church the state can never keep itself from interfering in
religious affairs. In Scandinavia, where Lutheran state churches
prevail, parliaments revise doctrines and even concern themselves with
details such as the contents of hymn books. Indeed, in Sweden pastors
of the state church (and of other churches as well) are now prohibited
from reading in public any portion of the Bible that is critical of
homosexuality.

WORLD: You've emphasized in your writing the advantages of church
competition and religious entrepreneurship. Are those advantages also
contributing to the recent growth of Christianity in Latin America,
Africa, and China?

STARK: In 1881-82 William F. Bainbridge, a prominent American Baptist,
visited all American Protestant overseas missions (in those days they
were still all coastal and easily reached). He found that in some
places the denominations had cut up an area and granted each group an
exclusive mission field, but in other places all the denominations
competed for converts. He observed that the missionaries were far more
successful where they competed. This remains the case. Consider that
for centuries Roman Catholics had an exclusive right to missionize
Latin America, at the end of which most of the continent was
unchurched. Then Protestant missionaries were allowed to enter. The
result has been not only the conversion of millions to active
Protestantism, but also to so greatly revive Roman Catholicism that it
now is growing, too. Meanwhile, the Christianization of Africa is being
accomplished by hundreds of competing denominations, most of African
origins.


WORLD: What do you think the shape of Christianity will be in 2050?

STARK: By then Christianity may well be the dominant religion in China.
Latin Americans probably will be as churched as North Americans. Africa
will be more than half Christian. As for Europe, it will be well along
in a major revival of religion, one way or the other: Christian or
Islamic.