Perhaps most of us can assess something like this and decide for ourselves on the available evidence as to its truth and relevance. What the author claims seems, to me at least, a minor issue. I get it that you do not agree. More generally aside from outright lies and pure stories, there are always analogical levels of interpretation. Presumably, if an unbeliever, you're irate at many of the world religions.
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Well, I was 9 at the time and it was probably the first "science" book that I had read and got excited about.
And no - never been impressed by any of the major religions - although (possibly influenced by Philip Pullman) I do wonder if there was a completely normal bloke in the middle east at the relevant time who suggested it might be good to stop being complete shits to each other...
It's not Philip Pullman, it's living in a Christian society. The Enlightenment growing out of the Reformation meant that all the foundational atheist thinkers had deeply sentimental views of Christianity, which is how you get the Jefferson Bible (yes, a deist), and that Pullman quote and many more like it. "Well if you strip away all the things I don't like, this philosophy is very compelling" is only a conclusion you could come to when you already are predisposed to like the philosophy.
"...nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..." - Douglas Adams
this is a fashionable sentiment, but as Nietzsche (a man who cannot be accused of having much sympathy for Christianity) pointed out: The notion that a slave, humiliated and crucified, was as worthy of mercy and equal was nothing short of a complete overturning of the moral order of the world. Far from obvious it was radical and subversive. The kind of modern atheist who doesn't see this does so because he has Christian values so deeply in his bones he doesn't even realize it.
Given the prevalence of slavery within the first 1800 years of Christianity's existence, I don't think we can credit it with a value system that has sympathy for the fundamental humanity of the enslaved. More credit goes to the Enlightenment.
> I don't think we can credit it with a value system that has sympathy for the fundamental humanity of the enslaved.
We can because there is a difference between introducing a new moral grammar into the world and what people do with it. The claim is not that Christians as people were any more moral or less power hungry than people tend to be, it's that from that point on in world history, they had to be hypocrites, precisely because something had metaphysically changed.
The Enlightenment doesn't stand in contradiction to this, it's the culmination of it, which was most visible in particular among the American abolitionists. Who more than anyone else staked their claims on Christian (and Enlightenment) grounds.
And as a practical point when it comes to today's issues. Pay attention to what the post-Christian secular America looks like. Because unlike the British humanists who thought equality was just common sense, you're going to be in for a wild ride, which Nietzsche did tell us.
But the slaves were told that there was an afterlife, and that they had a better chance of going there than rich people. That must have been nice to hear for them.
Yup. Which was why some (probably Nietzsche, but AFAICR several people before him too) called Christianity "a religion for slaves": It's very very useful for elites throughout the ages, from Roman patricians to current techbroligarks, to fob the plebs off with "Your reward will come in the afterlife!"... So they don't make a ruckus about getting any reward for their toil in the present. Or, as Marx (no, not Groucho) put it: "Religion is an opium for the masses"; means the same thing.
>I do wonder if there was a completely normal bloke in the middle east at the relevant time who suggested it might be good to stop being complete shits to each other...
As far as I know, what we know as established historical fact is that:
- there indeed was a bloke
- he splintered from being a follower of another more famous bloke at the time who was executed by the romans for becoming too popular with the masses
- he preached the world was about to end (as in, in their listener's lifetime)
- he also pissed off the romans enough to be executed.
Everything else is left to guess!
>>>I do wonder if there was a completely normal bloke in the middle east at the relevant time who suggested it might be good to stop being complete shits to each other
There wasn't any such bloke. I mean there was such bloke, but his qualities were completely opposite(Jesus was a violent man) to what he actually was and by various redactions and fusion of stories of initially opposing factions that were fighting over the actual seat of Jesus.
Jesus was a leader of militants(his power was spread not with peaceful words, but with sword and quite violent words - just like modern terrorists do - one of such passage has been slipped through redaction and left in the Bible) of a very violent sect(which itself was lead by John the Baptist), that were terrorizing everyone else(not in open, but when blended among other people, exactly like cult of assassins in Assassin's Creed games) and his capture was a shock and possibly betrayal and apparently those militants for some reasons(Roman military might - obviously) were unable to mount a rescue mission and because of that all the magic stories and Fairy tales, that we know as Bible were invented. You can see development of same myths to failures of modern religious fanatics - the same "magical" explanations why they have failed over and over again.
PS I do not hate Christianity, but I like cold hard Truth more than sweetest and softest Lies.