George

'... the modern forms of consciousness encompassing abstract right, modern science, and autonomous art could never have developed apart from the organizational forms of Hellenized Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church, without the universities, monasteries, and cathedrals.'

I know that you are quoting. However, I strongly disagree. This is one of the conceits of Christianity - i.e. that the advancements of the modern world could not have evolved without it (that's if I'm correctly following your train of thought).

The pagan world of Old Europe, the Middle East and North Africa had a thriving intellectual class. For example, the druids of Old Europe have been reduced in modern thought and Harry Potter books to sorcerers with funny hats and crazy priests who read entrails and oversaw sacrifices; but they were actually the educated class that comprised doctors, lawyers, architects, artists, scientists and writers, who had as much of an impact on their societies as the professions, the arts, advertising, public relations, and the music and film industries have today. As their societies succumbed to the takeover of Christianity, the former druid professions were subsumed into the religious orders, which monopolised all intellectual thought.

The educated classes of ancient Judea wrote much of their texts in Greek. The name ‘Jesus’ is a Greek derivative of ‘Joshua’ meaning ‘messiah’. The real or mythical Jesus would have drawn much of his teachings from pagan Greek philosophy. There are also gaps in his life story that indicate he may have travelled widely throughout the pagan world, including India.

Also, the successive sackings of the library of Alexandria, the most notable being the Christian destruction in 415 AD (and the brutal murder of the mathematician, philosopher and astronomer, Hypatia) brought to an end an almost thousand year old fountain of pagan cultural thought and scientific knowledge.

There is much more I could write about this, but word length and posting limits precludes this. Suffice to say that Christianity did not represent any break with the pagan past. It simply drew on the pagan past to create its new Christian world order.

Graham Y

"Christianity exported monotheism to the pagan world, which provided a more scientific way of looking at existence than spending your whole life trying to avoid offending a tribe of arbitrary gods, or buying them off with sacrifices."

No, that is a misrepresentation of Greco-Roman paganism, actually the opposite was true. Christianity's superstitions and primitive cosmology set back science for a thousand years.
Lucretius' remarkable poem on "On the Nature of Things" is indicative of the sophistication of 'pagan' intellectual traditions. It was the rediscovery of those traditions that provided the catalyst for the Renaissance and the gradual removal of Christianity's stifling influence.

Graham,

I think that you are wrong in saying that people "hate the bible".
If like me they reject its alleged factuality and false positioning as an arbiter of morality, then its effect on human behaviour ought be no more esteemed than any other reference book.

For that is what it is - merely as reference book amongst many others, and alluding to the nebulous concept of some kind of supreme being.

Man is responsible for his own outcomes, not some mythical ruler.

Killarney,

Thank you for your post. The readers here are free to choose between Habermas’s and your interpretations of the historical facts, some of which you list. However, I doubt it that he would have been unaware of them before coming to the conclusion that I quoted.

I am not an expert on these matters, and as far as Habermas is concerned, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes him as, “one of the most influential philosophers in the world” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/). This, of course, does not imply that his insight must be better than yours.

Killarney
“I reject domination”

You reject political feminism, do you? You reject equal pay legislation, sex discrimination legislation, and taxpayer funding of abortion, do you?

Yuyutsu
> “you cannot argue that you cannot argue”

>> Sure I can! My argument would then be incorrect

It is enough for me to point to the fact that it is common ground between us that your argument is incorrect.

So we have established EITHER
a) that you cannot argue that you cannot argue
b) that it is incorrect to deny it.

QED.

“All you need then is to present just ONE such axiom.

Okay, how about this one: “man acts”?

George, GrahamY
It is true that many of our conceptions of right originated in Christianity. But that doesn’t mean that they could or would not have come about otherwise.

History is full of scientific advances, and other ideas, happening more or less simultaneously, or at least independently; and the same may have been true of conceptions of right.

Christianity may indeed have retarded moral progress for a thousand years, as it retarded intellectual progress.

Habermas is not justified in saying abstract right, modern science, and autonomous art “could never have” developed apart from [Christianity]. His evidence is only that it did.

'Christianity may indeed have retarded moral progress for a thousand years, as it retarded intellectual progress. '

Oh dear Jardine you are obviously blinded to the dumbed down secular university trained generation today. Facist, socialist, feminsist religion has led to the slaughter of millions. We have managed to kill industries with Green madness, normalise homosexual behaviour and embrace Islam. Great ' intellectual' progress. Give is a break!