It just seemed to me that I had already answered.

>>Pericles, Thanks for your response, but I don't see how I have regressed at all.<<

But this is a little puzzling.

>>Yet when I said that in that time period God as creator was the prevailing view, that was not meant to imply that it was blindly followed or ill considered.<<

Of course it wasn't "blindly followed or ill considered", which indicates either stupidity or carelessness.

Any society, anywhere in the world, is constrained by the limits of its knowledge. Think for a moment of the Australian aborigines, and their society in the era we are discussing. Their perception of their own origins gave rise to their own stories, the exact same thing that happened with other religions. Only the stories were different, because they had a different environment to sixteenth century Europe.

It would be highly uncharitable of you to describe them as "blindly following", or their acceptance of those stories "ill considered", when they knew no differently.

It was all they knew. A given.

>>I'd suggest they saw that as consistent and logical with their experience of the world.<<

As indeed would I, both for Christians and for the Aboriginal people. Why would they think any differently, without some form of external stimulus?

>>You say the Christian framework was the only one around. Not so. There were others in other parts of the world.<<

These others were called "heathens", I believe.

>>Some of the descendents from these places are now risking their lives in boats to get to enjoy the types of freedoms that we live under here. I don't see high numbers of people beating down any doors trying to go the other way.<<

That is, I would suggest, an entirely different question.

Except, of course, there is a parallel back in the sixteenth century, when the Huguenots risked their lives to "enjoy the types of freedom" they could find in other countries, from England to the New World.

But so what? That isn't relevant to the topic here.

Pericles,
As someone with a Huguenot surname, I am very proud of the achievements of those who spread the teachings of Calvin and the Reformers to various parts of the world. Whatever country these teachings went and took root are today, largely as a result of these teachings, the nations that we most associate with the ideals and benefits of Western democracy.

Which brings us right back to that as-yet-unanswered question, doesn't it Dan S de Merengue

>>Whatever country these teachings went and took root are today, largely as a result of these teachings, the nations that we most associate with the ideals and benefits of Western democracy.<<

That could, of course, have been i) coincidental, ii) largely accidental iii) marginally related or even iv) totally unrelated.

But just so that we can investigate it further, would you mind revisiting the following.

You had asked...

>>Do we then say the profound influence of the West's particular lines of thought supplied by the West's dominant religion to be only incidental and of little consequence?<<

Which prompted me to ask, whether perhaps you could pinpoint for us those "particular lines of thought", so that we might become more able to connect the dots.

Any thoughts?

Pericles,
You have a number of distinct categories there. What is the difference between coincidental and unrelated?

To your last question about lines of Christian thought and connecting the dots, apart from a few that I've already mentioned I thought that Chris Berg gave some insight into some of these.

Take, for example, the religious assumptions which underpinned the development of liberal philosophy. The very modern-seeming idea of human rights comes from the concept of "natural rights" - rights drawn from God. ... Locke came to [his] conclusions from an explicitly Christian mindset. ... For Locke, humans are equal - men, women, workers, shopkeepers, peasants, kings, smart people, stupid people, the physically strong and the physically weak - because they are all capable of knowing God. ...one short passage in the Bible ("give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's") put medieval Europe's church and state in opposition, and undermined the centralised authority characteristic of other civilisations. 

That's the point at which Berg and I part company, Dan S de Merengue.

>>The very modern-seeming idea of human rights comes from the concept of "natural rights" - rights drawn from God<<

He offers no support to this, you will note.

This opinion of his, however, is one that I share:

"Almost all thinkers in the formative centuries of Western liberal democracy were convinced (or simply assumed) there was a God, and He was a Christian God. The non-theist exceptions were… exceptional. Their religious faith couldn't help but shape their worldview."

In the sense that they knew no better. Or, perhaps less controversially, no different.

But that is still a long way from "therefore the rights came from God".

Pericles,
I thought Berg's article was fairly well supported for one of its length. That you say he doesn't offer evidence for his contention makes me recall the question raised by Mark Duffett earlier, 'Pericles, did you even read the article?'

I would admit that writing a national curriculum for history which faithfully and adequately covers all significant factors within the last two thousand years of our history would be quite a challenge. But your view of history seems particularly blinkered where God or Christianity is concerned.

I'm happy for you to tell me why this isn't so.