(Richard Carrier Blogs) – Richard Carrier:
Novelist Tom Holland just wrote an article for The Spectator titled “Thank God for Western Values,” declaring the “debt of the West to Christianity is more deeply rooted than many might presume.” Everything he says is false. …
Dignitas and its related ideas, even in the sense of the common worth of persons, was already a widely known pagan concept. So Christianity can’t claim to have invented it. And valuing freedom, rights, and autonomy was all a pagan idea. Invented legally by Greek and Roman constitutionalists, and developed philosophically by Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics. The Enlightenment laureates who brought them back from the dead, to re-paganize Christianity with them, did so against opposition from Christian authorities. The “taboos” we inherited from Christianity are, rather, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, even racism and anti-semitism, and an unhealthy obsession with monogamy and a pathological phobia of human sexuality in general. In other words, garbage we need to get rid of; not praise or be thankful for. …
jf 