"Human," it always confounds me when modern "progressive" liberals like yourself falsely assert that the Christianization of Western Civilization,
with it's inherent normative morality rooted in creator God's special and general revelation, is so morally depraved that only immersion into erroneous relativism (with its sweeping immorality), faulty pluralism, and/or atheism can "save" it.
This is pure nonsense to the point that even making such a statement is to make an irreparably flawed assertion. Your position is historically, logically, philosophically, theologically, and every other epistemological domain-ly patently false. The agents of corruption that constructed it (and we know who they are) have been and are presently still engaged in a disingenuous gross revisionism.
To start with, they ignore the benefits wrought from the application of God's normative morality and special revelation to humanity while disingenuously altering history and epistemologies to further their own false and corrupt ideology. The truth is that Christianity slowly, but progressively, largely negated the practice of pagan human sacrifice, [satanic] occultism, and later human slavery that permeated the wicked pagan cultures of Europe which Christianity largely replaced.
In fact, it was the local cultural practices of pagan human sacrifice stretching back into antiquity carried over that was often responsible for the common people's "local enthusiasms" in executing the up to 60,000 people accused of witchcraft (not just women as 20 percent were men) during the 400 years from 1400 to 1800 that the unfortunate practice existed.
As the eminant sociologist and historian Rodney Stark explains in 'For the Glory of God' (see the section 'God's Enemies'):
"Some of the most famous episodes never took place, existing only in fraudulent accounts and forged documents, and even the current 'scholarly' literature abounds in absurd death tolls."
He notes that:
"The frequency and intensity of witch-hunting was highest where and when: (1) Serious efforts were made to suppress magic and sorcery, and there was a high probability that satanism would be imputed to such activities, and (2) there was substantial conflict among religious groups representing credible threats to one another's institutional power, causing the withdrawal of tolerance for religious nonconformity, and (3) weak central ecclesiastical and/or political governance prevented "national" elites from curtailing local enthusiasms."
Christianity, by any actual historically accurate standard, stands apart from the excesses of paganism and false religious systems such as Islam but let's put that into historical perspective by comparing it to the modern democide perpetuated by the
twenty-two "enlightened" state atheistic governments of the 20th century which murdered 153,368,610 people and engaged in the sweeping persecution and oppression, in one form or another, of about one-third of the world's population (see Vox Day and also Rummel's statistics of democide from 1900).
Not that this is a problem for state atheists which has no
ultimately meaningful reason for not engaging in such sweeping democide as it posits that humans are but accidental complex bacteria smeared across a rock in a dying universe that is expanding to the point no biological life will ever be possible in it again.
And obviously witch burnings, pagan genocide, Muslim genocide, state atheist democide, etc...
violate God's new covenant normative morality; a fact the modern "progressive" liberals choose to ignore because to acknowledge the truth interferes with their futile attempt to "justly" condemn the Christian worldview (or at least a genuine exegesis of it) and their "slow march" to replace it with their false and immoral ideology.
Understand that one's chances of surviving unscathed from religious persecution in 1600 Christianized Europe was EXPONENTIALLY greater than escaping persecution as a religious person under state atheism in the 20th century where you could be thrown into a hard labor prison for a "tenner" (e.g. ten years of hard labor) with a 50/50 chance of survival for merely suggesting that God might actually exist (or that an American car might operate mechanically better than a Soviet one).
Unfortunately, the oppressive leftist mentality has gained traction in the U.S. and Europe where failing to facilitate a normatively immoral event when ordered to do so by a homosexual can result in the financial ruin and possible imprisonment of moral small business owners with some European countries literally persecuting one for merely expressing an accurate exegesis of scripture... a very
UNliberal act that violates the human rights of moral people under natural law to a free moral conscience that aligns with God's normative morality not to mention their religious liberties bringing us back to the observable behavior of modern "progressive" liberals as agents of corruption, revisionism, and oppressors of the moral.
And we haven't even touched on the large body of reality that these agents of corruption, revisionism, and oppression have knowingly omitted from the texts they produce which are designed to propagate their ideology.
You'd have to look far and wide, for example, to find any reference whatsoever in their literature to the fact that it was against the law for men in the early, middle, and high periods of Europe to abuse or fail to provide for their families and men were both fined and jailed for this; or the fact that a million Europeans were kidnapped and enslaved off the coasts of Europe by North Africans during the Atlantic Slave Trade and that white slavery was so common that Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in a single decade and black freemen bought and sold both black and white slaves right through the Civil War; etc... etc... etc...
All random examples, of course, but they illustrate how seriously flawed the literature produced by modern liberals today is in
their disingenuous attempt to indoctrinate rather than instruct... exactly what they accomplished with you
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These agents of corruption and revisionism fail to acknowledge the genuine liberty derived from God was reflected in Christianized Western Civilization upon the metaphysical foundation of the Christian worldview (politics notwithstanding).
It was
because the Western Civilization of their era was rooted in the Christian worldview which depicts God as a real, rational, responsive, dependable, moral, omnipotent, etc... that the world was rational and knowable in a way that produced an authoritative normative moral liberty (the benefits of which are being lost as the nation drifts from God), the rise of modern science, etc...
leading civilization away from the pagan debauchery these modern "progressive" liberals are redirecting Western Civilization back into [emphasis added].
The texts of conservative scholars clearly explain why the prevailing epistemologies in civilizations outside Europe stifled their progression in these areas (e.g. a cyclical approach to time, an astrological approach to the heavens, metaphysical views that either deified nature [animism] or denied it [idealism]), why state atheism failed, and why modern "progressive" liberal erroneous relativism and pluralism are presently failing Western societies and leading them into negative socio-economic and metaphysical consequences.
Since I already have Stark out here, let's stay with him for now. He points out:
"The identification of the era beginning in about 1600 as the 'Enlightenment' is as inappropriate as the identification of the millennium before it as the 'Dark Ages.' And both imputations were made by the same people- intellectuals who wished to discredit religion and especially the Roman Catholic Church, and who therefore associated faith with darkness and secular humanism with light. To these ends they sought credit for the "Scientific Revolution" (another of their concepts), even though none of them had played any significant part in the scientific enterprise.
One of the first steps in this effort was to designate their own era as the 'Enlightenment,' and to claim it was a sudden and complete disjuncture with the past. To this end, the 'Dark Ages' were invented. Among the very first ever to do so, Voltaire (1694-1778) described medieval Europe as hopelessly mired in 'decay and degeneracy.' This became the universal theme. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) wrote of previous centuries:
'Europe had relapsed into the barbarism of the earliest ages. The peoples of this part of the world, so enlightened today, lived some centuries ago in a condition worse than ignorance.' A century later, when Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) popularized the idea of the 'Renaissance,' the 'Dark Ages' were a historical certitude, not to be shaken until late in the twentieth century.
Moreover, it was not enough to blame the 'Dark Ages' on Christianity; religion must also be denied any credit for the rise of science. Hence it was necessary to discredit the achievements of the Scholastic era. In keeping with this aim, John Locke (1632-1704) denounced the Scholastics as hopelessly lost in a maze of trivial concerns, as 'the great mintmasters' of useless terms as an 'expedient to cover their ignorance.' In similar fashion, one after another of the philosophes condemned Catholic scholarship until the word 'scholastic' became an epithet- defined as 'pedantic and dogmatic' according to any edition of Webster.
With the past out of the way, the central aspect of the campaign by the likes of David Hume, Voltaire, and their associates consisted of wrapping themselves in the achievements of science to authenticate their condemnation of religion in general, and Catholicism very specifically. Franklin L. Baumer noted that 'the Enlightenment was a great Age of Faith. Then he asked, rhetorically, 'But faith in what?' Not religion, but 'belief in man's power.' And the proof of this power was science, which, to paraphrase Laplace, made God an unneeded hypothesis. Never mind that the actual discoveries had been made by 'serious and often devout Christians.'
What mattered was that, in the words of Peter Gay, 'science could give the deists and atheists great comfort and supply them with what they wanted- Newton's physics without Newton's God. "Indeed, although Voltaire and his circle were careful to acknowledge Newton's commitment to a Creator (albeit only to a remote and impersonal Prime Mover), subsequent generations of 'Enlightenment' ideologues took great pains to further minimize Newton's faith.
The leading scientific figures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries overwhelmingly were devout Christians who believed it their duty to comprehend God's handiwork. Turning to an assessment of the 'Enlightenment,' I show it to have been conceived initially as a propaganda ploy by militant atheists and humanists who attempted to claim credit for the rise of science. The falsehood that science required the defeat of religion was proclaimed by such self-appointed cheerleaders as Voltaire, Diderot, and Gibbon, who themselves played no part in the scientific enterprise-a pattern that continues."
^ And continues with people like yourself "Human." How ignorant of modern "progressive" liberals to revise the truth solely for propaganda purposes and redirect humanity back into the mire of sweeping immorality with it's inherent grave temporal and eternal consequences. Better to raise normatively moral people who build normatively moral societies (materially speaking).
And speaking of that normative moral human liberty, it wasn't the intellectuals of the Enlightenment that brought about abolitionism. The Humanists longed for the glories of Greece and Rome and asserted the superiority of pagan classicalism largely indifferent to the fact that these were slave societies. A virtual Who's Who of Enlightenment figures fully accepted slavery. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Voltaire, Baron Montesquieu, Comte de Mirabeau, Edmund Burke, David Hume, etc... The vast majority of the intellectuals of the "Enlightenment" fell far short of matching the extent and passion of abolitionist commitment spreading through Christian circles.
It was people of intense Christian faith (both Protestant and Catholic) who opposed slavery because it was a sin against the Imago Dei of God who endows all normative moral liberty (not to be confused with immorality). This is reflected in the Declaration and founding father's publications though they had to compromise with the minority of Americans that would not relinquish slavery to ensure the unity of the union. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay noted that there had been few serious efforts to dismantle the institution of slavery prior to the Founding Fathers in world history and it's worth nothing that Washington and other founding fathers freed their slaves before their deaths though your fetish Jefferson did not even though it's obvious from his writings that he too knew and agreed human slavery was morally wrong leaving it for the next generation of young men to achieve:
The Founding Fathers and Slavery (Founding Fathers) -- Encyclopedia Britannica
Tossing out your long litany of misinformed condemnations directed at the Christian worldview, we return to this idea modern "progressive" liberals like yourself have that immorality is equitable to and/or a suitable replacement for normative morality.
It's not, never was, and never shall be for human beings.
There is nothing "enlightened" about such a false assertion that when acted upon ultimately results in judgment. Immorality, by definition, is immoral and has already been judged by the one true holy creator God.
A society that falls into wickedness can temporarily legislate all of the immorality they choose to and seek to use the government as a tool to persecute the moral but no government's de facto (and temporary) authority ever supersedes God's de jure (and eternal) authority. All such a negative deviation accomplishes is to beg God's judgment.
Sexual immorality is a corrupting and corrosive influence both in the lives of those who practice it and the societies they live in. If you ever take a sociology 101 class, you'll learn that people interact and this interaction causes social change which itself affects people. To put it in a more scholarly way: people's beliefs, attitudes, decisions, and behaviors affect society influencing cultures, structures, and institutions, for better or worse, which, in turn, affects people.
Given the importance of people's beliefs, attitudes, decisions, and behaviors to their own lives, the lives of others, and society; it is imperative that they be rooted in the only objective absolute truth that exists (e.g. Creator God's special and general revelation). Each person has a view of the world which includes their conception of reality, the universe, the world, morality, etc... that they exercise (affecting society). Their worldview may or may not align with truth which is found in correspondence. If it does, then society benefits from their clarity but if it does not then their distorted reality negatively affects society.
Sexual immorality is a corruptive deviation from normative morality that negatively affects both people and their societies.
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