More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rodney Stark
Read between
January 1 - January 8, 2020
We know that he aroused bitter opposition and was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate. We know that his disciples testified that he rose from the dead. We don’t know much of anything else except, of course, that his teachings and his example changed the world.
The central idea is, of course, that Christian faith offers a sedative for suffering in this life by promising that we will be fully compensated in the next, when “many that are first will be last, and the last first” (Matt. 19:30). Atheists like to ridicule this aspect of faith as “pie in the sky.”1 What is almost always missed is that Christianity often puts the pie on the table! It makes life better here and now. Not merely in psychological ways, as faith in an attractive afterlife can do, but in terms of concrete, worldly benefits.
Women were especially drawn to Christianity because it offered them a life that was so greatly superior to the life they otherwise would have led.
Check out this quote.
conversion flows through social networks.
DURING THE SUMMER OF THE year 64, the emperor Nero sometimes lit up his garden at night by setting fire to a few fully conscious Christians who had been covered with wax and then impaled high on poles forced up their rectums. Nero also had Christians killed by wild animals in the arena, and he even crucified a few.
No such thing as nominal Christianity
“Christianity must have reproduced itself by means of miracles, for the greatest miracle of all would have been the extraordinary extension of the religion apart from any miracles.”
Check out this quote.
paganism was “no more than a spongy mass of tolerance and tradition.”3
Check out this quote.
Muhammad expected that Jews and Christians would accept him as the prophet who fulfilled both faiths. Frustrated when they rejected him, as soon as he possessed sufficient means to do so, Muhammad attacked the Jews in Mecca and Medina; and eventually he forced the male members of the last Jewish clan in Medina to dig their own mass grave, whereupon all six to nine hundred of them were beheaded and the women and children were sold into slavery.
Then, in 1354 once again mobs “ran amok, destroying churches... and attacking Christians and Jews in the streets, and throwing them into bonfires if they refused to pronounce the shadādatayn ”
The churches shall be uprooted, and the altars overturned, and the celebrations of the Eucharist shall cease, and the hymns of praise, and the sounds of calls to prayer shall be abolished; and the heads of the Christians, and the heads of the congregations of the Jews, and the great men among them, shall be killed.
In addition, local authorities were ordered to seize each Christian man, to pluck out his beard and to tattoo a black mark on his shoulder. When few Christians defected in response to these measures, the Khān then ordered that all Christian men be castrated and have one eye put out—which caused many deaths in this era before antibiotics, but did lead to many conversions.37
Check out this quote.
Christianity became a European faith because Europe was the only “continent where it was not destroyed.”44
Check out this quote.
Thus, it is the accepted myth that during the Crusades an expansionist, imperialistic Christendom brutalized, looted, and colonized a tolerant and peaceful Islam. These claims have been utterly refuted by a group of distinguished contemporary historians.
it is utterly unreasonable to impose modern notions about proper military conduct on medieval warfare—both Christians and Muslims observed quite different rules of war.
by the time of the First Crusade, Christendom had been fighting a defensive war with Islam for more than 450 years!
To sum up: Western history consists of four major eras: 1) classical antiquity, then 2) the Dark Ages when the church dominated, followed by 3) the Renaissance-Enlightenment which led the way to 4) modern times. For several centuries that has been the fundamental organizing scheme for every textbook devoted to Western history,9 despite the fact that serious historians have known for decades that this scheme is a complete fraud—“an indestructible fossil of self-congratulatory Renaissance humanism.”10
As the distinguished medievalist Warren Hollister (1930–1997) put it in his presidential address to the Pacific Historical Association, “to my mind, anyone who believes that the era that witnessed the building of Chartres Cathedral and the invention of parliament and the university was ‘dark’ must be mentally retarded—or at best, deeply, deeply, ignorant.”
the truly fundamental basis for the rise of the West was an extraordinary faith in reason and progress that was firmly rooted in Christian theology, in the belief that God is the rational creator of a rational universe.
The purpose of magic is the same as that of technology and science: to allow humans to control nature and events in a reality permeated with misfortune.
Christianity is a theological religion. It isn’t satisfied with mystery and meditation, but relentlessly seeks to ground its entire system of beliefs in logic and reason.
The truth is that not only did Christianity not impede the rise of science; it was essential to it, which is why science arose only in the Christian West!
The great British philosopher concluded his remarks by noting that the images of God and creation found in the non-European faiths, especially those in Asia, are too impersonal or too irrational to have sustained science.
It thus could be said that the proposition that the universe had an Intelligent Designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories and that it has been successfully put to empirical tests again and again.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) once remarked, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible:
In the case of religion, people do not flock to faiths that ask the least of them, but to those that credibly offer the most religious rewards for the sacrifices required to qualify. This has been demonstrated again and again.
For a variety of reasons, various Christian churches have greatly reduced what they ask of their members, both in terms of beliefs and morality, and this always has been followed by a rapid decline in their membership and a lack of commitment on the part of those who stay.
Perhaps no Christian denomination asks as much of members as does the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Witnesses continue to grow rapidly.
Not Christian
A pluralistic equilibrium exists when power is sufficiently diffused among a set of competitors so that conflict is not in anyone’s interest.
The term secularization was coined by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who defined it as the “disenchantment of the world”—
In making faith more costly, [repressive states] also make it more necessary and valuable. Perhaps religion is never so robust as when it is an underground church.”
As Augustine pointed out in his Confessions, the basic Christian message is so simple that it can easily be grasped by children, while its theological ramifications are sufficient to challenge the most powerful intellects.
As one of China’s leading economists put it, “in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”42 Neither do I.
