Christianity and the Death of Civilization

Millions of people make an unconscious link between Christianity and civilization, as if they are synonymous. This page seeks to show how very different they are.

Once upon a time there was a mighty civilization. It knew democracy and republican government. It had city government, public works, and a public water supply. It built roads for thousands of miles. It enjoyed the highest material culture the world had ever seen. It contained more knowledge, science, wisdom and of course wealth than any city had ever known. The city ruled the majority of the known world for centuries and spread peace, prosperity, trade and justice wherever it raised its standard.

Then it became Christian and it entered a thousand years of ignorance, squalor and filth, dragging the civilization of the whole of Europe down with it. The world had entered The Dark Ages.

Was this just a historical coincidence? It is possible. What is not possible is to maintain the fiction that Christianity is the same thing as Civilization. Before Christianity Europe knew civilization, although “the Holy Land” didn't, Christianity came along and civilization went away. To make out that Christianity made the world civilized is a travesty.

Before Constantine converted the Empire to Christianity the Roman Empire had already passed its peak.

Rome emerged from relative obscurity, a successor to the Etruscan civilization, the history lost in the myths typical of a preliterate society.

The early organization of Rome was a traditional monarchy but the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, was overthrown and a republic established, in 509 BCE.

It was under the period of the republic that Rome grew to be a mighty civilization. The keys to that growth of civilization include the institutions of law. Secular law. Romans did not make any attempt to infer that their laws were ordained by their gods, or even that their gods cared unduly what the people did. Laws were instituted for the good of the people. The laws came from the senate and people of Rome, and it was the people and their government which applied that law. Government under law, government of the people by the people, for the people. It is a formula that rarely fails to deliver progress.

Of course Rome was not a perfect civilization and a perfect society. It had slavery and institutionalized class and sex inequalities. However these were not as severe as those in many other societies either at that time or subsequently. Women were able to make a significant contribution to Roman life and the success of their civilization.

Rome became a literate civilization. But writing was always a tool, it was never a weapon. The Romans did not invent scriptures or sacred writings. Words were functional things, they recorded laws, stories, histories, shopping lists and plays. They were never imbued with hocus pocus. Nobody ever saw the Latin alphabet as the Words of The Gods. Because of this writing could help to contribute to civilization. In total contrast the Hebrews developed a writing system solely to record the words and laws of their god. What a bloody waste! The most powerful cultural tool it is ever possible to develop and it was used to keep the people on their knees. The Hebrew people became some of the most literate and intelligent people the world has ever seen because of their long tradition of literacy, but because the only things they ever read or wrote were concerned with minutia of the will of their god they achieved nothing.

The Hebrews never became Top Nation, they did well to keep themselves out of slavery as long as they managed it. Nothing was achieved by the people of Israel in terms of science, art, philosophy, trade or war. They didn't invent anything, discover anything of any use or develop any techniques to any degree of sophistication except the art of reading prayers and bobbing their heads. In what way could the Hebrews look down upon their neighbours? Their neighbours built pyramids, created great libraries, hanging gardens, lighthouses, fed and conquered empires, measured the circumference of the Earth and made chariots of iron. The Israelites could recite their Torah. How bloody civilized. Not.

“Apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health...what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Reg,

People's Front of Judea

The Greeks also developed democracy and writing. Writing came along well after the religion of Greek civilization was fixed by oral tradition. There was no need or desire to make scriptures and sacred writing. As a result written Greek was used to meet the needs of the people. Some of the earliest Greek writing known is erotic poetry inscribed on pottery. Greek was also used to record heroic stories, plays and speculations on philosophy, arithmetic and geometry. The Hebrews didn't profane their sacred writing with anything as useful as science. The Greeks did. The Greeks were civilized, the Hebrews were not, the Hebrews used their written culture to the glory of their god and the poverty of their own material culture.

To the Hebrews it seems being civilized was all about believing in the right god. That was about it. The gentiles didn't believe in YAHWEH so they were uncivilized barbarians. The philistines didn't believe in the right god so they have come to be remembered as the ultimate uncultured barbarians. That is a travesty. The Israelites had no great shiny civilization or culture to contrast against what the Philistines had. Like the Vikings who terrorized the Anglo Saxons eleven centuries later the Philistines were a people who traded and raided via the sea. The archaeological remains of both Viking and Philistine sites shows they were every bit as sophisticated and cultured as the people who feared them.

What is Civilization?

Civilization,

noun

1] An advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in human society, marked by progress in the arts and sciences, the extensive use of record-keeping, including writing, and the appearance of complex political and social institutions.

2] The type of culture and society developed by a particular nation or region or in a particular epoch: Mayan civilization; the civilization of ancient Rome.

3] The act or process of civilizing or reaching a civilized state.

4] Cultural or intellectual refinement; good taste.

5] Modern society with its conveniences: returned to civilization after camping in the mountains.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

civilization

n. (also -isation)

1] an advanced stage or system of social development.

2] those peoples of the world regarded as having this.

3] a people or nation (esp. of the past) regarded as an element of social evolution (ancient civilizations; the Inca civilization).

4] making or becoming civilized.

Concise Oxford Dictionary

So, it's quite clear then, it has nothing to do with religion.

Not even bloody Webster can weave Christianity into the definition:-

civ·i·li·za·tion

Function: noun

1 a : a relatively high level of cultural and technological development; specifically : the stage of cultural development at which writing and the keeping of written records is attained b : the culture characteristic of a particular time or place

2 : the process of becoming civilized

3 a : refinement of thought, manners, or taste b : a situation of urban comfort

Everybody knows that civilization is nothing to do with religion, and yet, well, they act as if the possession of certain religious beliefs and practices is what really counts on the civilization score. The Romans might have had glass, concrete, democracy, a republic, a clean public water supply a huge urban population living in prosperity but they were in a way heathen savages, weren't they? They sometimes allowed their boobies to show in public and they didn't go to church.

This idea is a nonsense. Rome was civilized for several hundred years before Christianity arrived in the Roman Empire, but only a few decades after. Christianity came from an outpost on the edge of the empire, a land of little promise and little civilization where the natives spent far more time than was good for them obsessing about religion and hardly any time at all doing civilized things like attending plays, doing geometry and having baths. Their cuisine was rather heavy on the bread and wine and their washing habits seemed to end at the ankle.

What did Christianity contribute to Roman culture and civilization? Nothing but sexual prudery and a martyrdom complex.

To be fair to Christianity one contribution to posterity was a change in the attitude to the sanctity of life of the new-born. As to whether this was really an advance or a giant backward step is another matter. Rome didn't have a big problem with orphans and unwanted babies. They were exposed on the city dump and either died or were adopted as slaves, either way the problem was gone by morning. Is the Christian concept of the sanctity of such life a great asset to a civilization? Even today Christians seem to be obsessed with keeping up the supply of unwanted children by restricting the availability of contraception and abortion. Is God, man or civilization really honoured by having unwanted children as a burden on society?

What evidence of civilization is there before Christianity?

This is the dome of the Roman Pantheon. A temple to religious tolerance and inclusivity. It was built to house all the gods of the Roman Empire so that the people of the empire could come together rather than be driven apart by religious differences. It consists of the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built. The technology used to make this structure was subsequently lost in the Christian era when the statues of the gods were taken away and the pantheon was consecrated as a church to the one small-minded, intolerant and fundamentally less civilized Christian god.

Before Christianity came along the Romans put their energies into building clean water supplies for their cities and roads to link them so their soldiers could ensure Pax Romana, peace and prosperity under Roman, secular, law.

After Christianity came along none of that really seemed to matter any more. It didn't save people's souls so it wasn't important. What really mattered was painting the saints in a way that the people could tell which one was which and deciding just exactly how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

The people were just souls. They didn't matter, nothing had to be done for them, unless it helped the souls of those doing the charity. This world didn't matter, only the Kingdom of God mattered.

The concept of civilization had dribbled away. No republic, no democracy, no civic sense, being civilized was just doing what was deemed to be godly.

This was the start of the period of human history known as the Dark Ages. Civilization spluttered to a halt.

The Burning of the Library at Alexandria

Theophilus, God love him, is the Christian most often associated with the definitive act of destruction of ancient wisdom, the Burning of The Library at Alexandria. We cannot, however, be fully certain that there was either a single definitive library at Alexandria at this time or a single definitive act of arson.

There is no doubt that Christians under Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria, there were committed acts of the utmost heinousness, following the instructions of Emperor Theodosius. Pagan temples were ransacked, looted and defiled. During this time Theophilus attacked and destroyed the Serapeum, home of at least part of the library of Alexandria. Also the Museum, literally THE original and definitive museum, temple of the muses, was destroyed by Theophilus's Christian mob.

The great library at Alexandria was a collection of the knowledge and written culture of the entire known world. Under the decree of Ptolemy III all visitors to the city were required to give up any written material they had in their possession to the library scribes who would make a copy for the library, or rather a copy for the original owner and the original for the library. This was the mechanism by which there came to be assembled the greatest collection of human knowledge in the ancient world. By the time of Theophilus the library had been collecting scrolls, papyruses and codices for over five hundred years and it was widely regarded as by far the largest and most complete record of human knowledge ever assembled. Civilized men build, stock and use libraries. Alexandria was a civilized Hellenic Pagan city taken over by an uncivilized Christian mob.

The burning of books is never the activity of civilized men. It is a crime against humanity, and more, it is a crime against posterity. It is an act that can never be forgiven.

Civilized men do not burn books. Tyrants and fanatics burn books.

(Books defined above as being the only extant copies of a work, surplus copies are just bits of paper, regardless of their content.)

To attack culture, knowledge, science and wisdom of the ancient world as it was stored in the greatest collection of books ever assembled was an act that transcends the power of our language to condemn. All the words we have to describe such acts and to express our disapproval are fundamentally flawed, they suggest that such acts are beyond the capacity of “civilized Christians”.

Vandalism. Barbarism. Philistinism. Such words are tragically wide of the mark. There is only one word which can express the nature of such an act: Christian.

We have seen arrogant destruction of culture many times throughout history. Almost always this destruction is led by fanatics who consider themselves to be superior. Such fanaticism is not always the preserve of the Christian although I could fill many pages with a catalogue of similar acts perpetrated against American, African, Australian, Nordic and Celtic cultures across the time since the Dark Ages and continuing into the present. Non-Christian culture has been systematically denigrated and destroyed by Christian missionaries with a sickening zeal. Fanaticism has come also in the name of Allah, Marx, Mao and Pol Pot.

Onward Christian Soldiers

Christian history, and lets face it, virtually all the history taught in Christendom is shot through with unstated heavy bias in favour of Christianity, has a problem with savages that don't keel over and die when the Christian soldiers advance. How can Christians square the circle and proclaim their own superiority and yet admit they were bested by heathen savages? They try to make out that the heathens won because they were soulless brutes. American film audiences cannot cope with the idea that sometimes the people win because there's more of them and they have better weapons rather than the fact that they are better people. This is not an allowable thought. Victory belongs to the side with the better morals, surely? That is the only acceptable way of looking at matters. And of course the side with the better morals must be the Christians and the Americans, or failing that the Jews. If no Americans were actually involved in the battles they make do with casting Americans as the heroic moral victors and English actors to play the bad guys.

This is not a new phenomenon. It happens even in British history. Anglo-Saxon schoolchildren sit neatly in rows with their blue-grey eyes and flaxen hair as they listen to the teacher tell how their brave Christian King Arthur routed the nasty heathens from across the sea. Excuse me? Those children are descended from the heathens, Arthur's Romano-Celtic Christian descendants were ethnically cleansed by the Anglo Saxon invaders in the next century. Arthur's lot lost. We won. Keep that “heroic Arthur” shite for the Welsh thanks very much. Arthur never was my people's king. My people rode and sailed with Hengist and Horsa long before the tribe succumbed to the dread curse of Christianity.

Of course that doublethink is of nothing compared to some of the history teaching that goes on elsewhere. In Australia white Australians are led to believe it was the British who murdered the aborigines and somehow it was only a decade after most of the aborigines were dead before those same people morph from being nasty colonial British to being their resourceful, peaceful, heroic and thoroughly Christian Aussie ancestors.

Civilization and Christianity does not help an army win a battle. I'm sorry if that shatters some illusions but its true. Victory on the battlefield does not always go to the side with the “truest beliefs”. The Roman Empire declined and collapsed because it could no longer maintain military superiority. Rome was sacked several times by tribes whose names have become shorthand for unchristian savagery: Vandals, Goths and Visigoths. The possession of a forum, aqueducts and several hundred year old civilization did not help the Romans on the battlefield any more than the possession of decent petticoats and whalebone stays helped Custer's men or the possession of colour TV, Hendrix and Kentucky Fried Chicken helped in the jungles of 'Nam. In battle civilization doesn't matter: weapons, numbers and morale counts. With sufficient numbers the Zulus can massacre Queen Victoria's poor bloody infantry and the heathen atheist Vietcong can see the Americans retreat from Saigon in humiliation.

Christianity did not cause the decline of the Roman Empire as such, but it did nothing to prevent it and it almost certainly accelerated the trend toward decline by channelling so much energy into unproductive religious efforts. There was little or no scientific or engineering progress in the Christian era and no improvements in military tactics or weapons. When an empire stands still it will fall behind, and once it stops winning battles it very soon finds losing wars becomes inevitable.

The idea that civilization and Christianity are synonymous is ridiculous and does not stand up to a moment's scrutiny. That is why Christians try to avoid stating it quite so baldly, but they have succeeded in making the idea very widespread through subliminal means. Christian civilization is about wearing clothes, being ashamed of nudity, sexual hypocrisy and promoting the breeding of orphans. Christians measure their success by the numbers of rows of well scrubbed faces of children in orphanages learning how to read the Bible and feel inferior to the white men. Sub Saharan (that is a weasel-word meaning black) Africa is full of these scrubbed up Christians who sing so nicely and look so contented in their Christian monogamous moral marriages and die like flies from AIDS for reasons the Christian care-workers really don't want to think too much about.

What is true civilization?

• Sewage systems and clean water supplies.

•Education for all, especially girls.

• Honest government and a lack of corruption.

• Democracy.

• Law and order for all, not just the rich.

• Equality of treatment and a lack of systematic discrimination between ethnic groups, classes or castes.

• Toleration of difference, without toleration of intolerance.

• An infrastructure system that all can use to aid internal and external trade.

• A respect for knowledge, culture, learning and science.

Where does the Ten Commandments fit in that? Pah. Most of the Ten Commandments form no part of any legal system in a civilized state, those that do can all be traced back to pre-Christian secular legal systems such as that of Rome or the Code of Hammurabi (circa 1700 BCE), other cultures developed moral and legal codes without reference to YAHWEH. There is no strong evidence that any laws of any Christian state were directly attributable to the so-called Laws of Moses.

Civilization existed well before Christianity. Rome and Greece were far more civilized than most of Europe until after the Middle Ages. Many aspects of modern secular civilization were in place in Greece and Rome hundreds of years before Paul ever reached Rome.

Morality does not come from religion. Roman law did not cover all the aspects of the Ten Commandments, but then neither do the legal systems of modern Christian states. The bulk of European legal heritage is Roman and it predates Christianity. The only distinctly Christian aspect of European law was the ban on usury, lending with interest, which helped delay the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism by several centuries. This was an idea taken from the Old Testament (Deut. xxiii, 20). Christians decided which bits of the rather more long winded laws of Moses were to be interpreted as absolutes and which were merely guidelines or total anachronisms in God's New (but rather hazily codified) Covenant with mankind. It seemed the Church was able to work out which parts of the old law were still valid without the need for God to carve (or indeed smash) any tablets of stone. Which was handy, wasn't it?

The stuff about menstruating women being unclean was put aside. The idea of stoning people to death was dropped. It seemed now the injunction not to kill didn't mean you couldn't have a state or Church-sponsored executioner and the democratic experiment that was the inflicting of multiple sub-lethal injuries adding up to a death that was really the Will of God was just a bit passé, and perhaps just a bit too Jewish. It seemed now God didn't care about the abomination of growing two crops in the one field or wearing mixed fibres or eating pork, except of course on a Friday. The unchanging God has to move with the times, doesn't he? Kid seethed in its mother's milk anybody?

Slavery

If Greece and Rome were so civilized why did they allow slavery? We could ask the same of the United States of America. Christianity wasn't exactly hot off the blocks when it came to the abolition of slavery. Slavery was abolished in the Britain 1807 and in British colonies by 1833 and India by 1838, by 1848 in French possessions and in the USA in 1865. Serfdom was abolished in various countries across Europe from the sixteenth century culminating in the emancipation of Russian serfs in 1861. Do I need to point out how long Russia and Britain had been Christian before this happened? And what of America? Don't Christians always like to bang on about how America was founded by Christians on Christian principles? The simple fact is that Christianity is not antithetical to slavery. Much of the Bible tells believers how to treat slaves. To claim credit for Christianity for abolishing slavery because many of the proponents of abolition were keen Christians is rather disingenuous, most of the opponents of abolition were Christians too, as were most of the apathetic uncommitted.

Civil Rights

If slavery isn't a big plus point for Christianity what about civil rights? I surely can't deny that Martin Luther King Jr was a Christian, can I? No. Of course not. King was a Christian, as were most of the reactionaries resisting civil rights changes. King could hardly have got to be a respectable leader of the African American community through any other method than through a Christian church. His rhetorical style clearly showed a lot of Christian roots but his cause and his message were fundamentally secular and political. As a preacher from that tradition it was inevitable that the song he sang sounded like a hymn, but if you actually read his 'lyrics' he doesn't sound so very different to secular social protesters such as Bob Dylan. The aspiration is political, some of the metaphor is Christian. Martin Luther King Jr was a great civilized man. Christians sometimes can be civilized.

Ascribing all moral sensibilities and drive to religion is crazy. How can you account for the moral outrage, drive and commitment shown by atheists? Religion has got a tendency to demand a name-check on every good thought. It is a parasite.

Imagine it is a stormy night and your friend is out in the storm. A Christian would immediately express his concern for the friend via God, in the form of a prayer, it is the only way to think that thought without tripping up his religious guilt circuitry. When the friend returns safely home he thanks his god as a reflex verbal tick and then comes to thank him in earnest and sincerely believe his prayer was answered. If it was an atheist waiting at home the concern would be the same, the empathy would be the same, the verbal tick on finding the friend returning home might be just the same but there is no need to credit the safe return to any god, the friend just returned home, end of story. The Christian sees the whole story unfolding with his god as the hero. His god did nothing! He also sees the story as reaffirming the rightness of his belief and the moral superiority he has as a Christian, he saved his friend's life after all, by his warped reckoning. Yet another bit of proof to show how right and good he is to be a Christian. Thank God he isn't a heartless uncaring atheist who would have let his friend die! How happy he is to be a Christian. How much better he is for believing in Christ. Guilt. He must now spread the good news to somebody else.

That is how religion gets hold of people. Every good thing is a gift from the only true god. Every good act the believer does is because he is a believer. Every bad act he does and is ashamed of is because he doesn't believe hard enough. Heads God is Great, tails he should have more faith! Every way the coin lands God wins. Shit happens. Praise the Lord!

It is hardly any surprise that believers who have got in the habit of attributing every good thing in their personal life to God and their belief are likely to do the same thing with public life, politics and history. Every good thing is a God thing. God bless this holy SUV! Thank the Lord for the gift of capitalism! Millions of Americans sincerely believe that God wants to Bless America, has got a good reason to Bless America and America is great because America is Christian. They never ask themselves why they believe that.

Literacy and Religion

Is the rise of literacy due to religion? In some parts of the world literacy became widespread because writing was used as the primary instrument of religious instruction and as the virtue of religious instruction is never questioned by those with a faith it followed that such cultures would become literate. Writing has the power to be a tool of civilization and culture, but that role is not carved in stone. (Groan)

The earliest recorded Greek alphabetical writing is a poetic inscription on a piece of pottery. With an alphabetic system of writing in which every phoneme had its own character anything that can be said can be written. This is by far the best possible way of recording thought across time. Both the Greeks and the Hebrews developed an alphabetical writing system but the uses to which they put this phenomenally powerful tool were very different.

The Greeks had hundreds of years of oral tradition with their religion when they developed writing, so had the Hebrews. The difference came when the Hebrews seized upon writing as the means to record their religion. For some reason that isn't entirely clear the Greeks never developed a strong urge to create written records, scriptures, of their religious teachings while for the Hebrews that was all they did with their writing system.

The Greeks used their writing system for everything it could be handy for. They used it to record myths and legends, histories, new dramas and old ones, to record poetry, to make shopping lists, for great fiction and for ferry timetables, to record philosophical discussions and their efforts at proving theorems of geometry. The Hebrews used their writing system for little more than recording the history of their people and their religion. Almost everything the Hebrews wrote ended up in the Bible. There a few songs and a few poems, some history, a lot of myth, some prophesy and a lot of their god's laws. The Greeks were much more laid back about the uses to which they put writing and they never developed an inappropriate reverence for the written word. The tradition of magic words and books that can do magical things owes nothing to the thinking of the Greeks. For the Greeks and the Romans after them writing was just a way of recording the speech or thoughts of men, nothing more.

In contrast the Hebrews always had the belief that marks on scrolls and carvings on stones had some kind of ju-ju power, a belief that can be seen in the idea of golems animated by magical words in them, not writing the o in G-d in case the paper it is written on is accidentally defiled and those silly Jewish doorbells that never seem to work.

Bloody thing doesn't work. Is it wired up?

The entire literature of the Hebrew people is shot through with religion and their writing system was virtually never used for science, literature or civilized secular culture of any kind.

Is it perhaps due to Hebrew culture's refusal to depict their god in pictorial or statuary form that has bled off the sympathetic magic that superstitious people believe usually resides in icons and statues and instead injected it into the very characters of its alphabet? If so it was a terrible mistake. I'm sure any sensible god would rather his people worship a Picassoesque likeness of him rather than hamstring themselves in this ridiculous way.

The Romans and Greeks had statues of their gods. The superstitious and simple among them could worship the statues as if they were the gods themselves but nobody ever got hold of the stupid idea that the name of a god written down was a magic talisman, still less the idea that the letters that could make up that name were in some ways holy and not to used in a profane way.

Latin was the language of Rome and so had hundreds of years of history of use as a general language of civilization. However the Christian Church made a very determined effort to wipe away all of that and turn Latin into the language intended for the internal use of the church alone. This was one of the most destructive acts it is possible to imagine, comparable to the creation of Newspeak in 1984. A systematic attempt to remove all secular use from a language.

Where is medieval Latin literature? For hundreds of years latin was a language that linked scholars and literate men across the whole of Europe but they had next to nothing to say. Latin came to be used only for writing and talking about God. When Europeans wanted to communicate about other than religious matters they used their vernacular tongue (perhaps so as not to sully God's own language?) as a result the advantages of a single widespread language across the whole of Christendom was flushed into the open gutters of medieval Europe. Civilization was dead.

About this time a new culture was emerging using a new language, Arabic.

Arabic developed as a language of a new religion. It had the examples of Greek, Latin and Hebrew to act as a guide. At first Arabic was the language of a whole culture. People were taught to read Arabic so they could read the sacred texts but nobody ever told them not to use the language for other purposes. But over time things changed and the Arabic world began to absorb the Hebrew idea that the letters of the language themselves could contain the ju-ju sympathetic magic of their great god. Islam, just like Judaism, forbids the depiction of God, and goes further to forbid the depiction of people and animals. This has led to the sympathetic magic that can find no other outlet being transfered to the text and caligraphy of the holy language itself.

The prohibition on depicting people and animals led Muslim culture to become obsessed with geometry and especially repeating patterns, Arabic geometry was the best around. But the stifling effect of a semi-sacred written language began to be felt stronger and stronger. Religion throttled Arabic culture by invading its written culture and its alphabet. When a written language is reserved for communicating religion to the masses civilization cannot grow strong.

At first Arabic culture fuelled by the spread of Islam (by the sword) had a very powerful civilizing effect. Islamic culture reached heights of civilization similar to that of Rome and Greece. Many classical documents from ancient Greece are now known only through Arabic translations of the original Greek. But the language of the Arabic world was too indelibly stamped with religion, and a single religion at that. There was no protection against the rise of an unstoppable theocratic take-over of the entire culture. Medieval Christendom could retreat into local languages or Greek to resist the tide of the church but there was no such escape possible in the monoglot culture in which the only language was sacred to a single powerful religion.

Part 2 Christianity and the Rebirth of Civilization

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