I would like to recommend How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas Wood and Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark.
I want to especially concentrate on the Christian view of charity, because charity is the highest of all morals. As Paul wrote in 1Cor 13, without charity we are nothing, and all good we do is nothing.
Charity was virtually non-existent before the start of the Christian culture. In pre-Christian Roman culture, it was non-existent. It is a common routine to abandon babies so that they starve to death. There were no human rights for slaves. There were to charity organizations for the poor. People enjoyed gladiator shows for entertainment.
The Spartans are infamous now for their brutal disposition toward deformed, weak or otherwise undesirable babies, leaving them outside to die of exposure. But if we look at Stoicism, a school of thought that arose several centuries before Christ, we see altruistic charity as a core value, promoting the value of doing good for one’s fellow man without expecting anything in return. And of course, charity and alms for the poor were a cultural institution in Jewish societies long before the time of Christ, institutionalizing charity through the tithe.
Other cultures were not much better. The Hindu culture believed innthe caste system. The poor were being punished for their previous lives. Bad karma. So why construct charity organization to alleviate their suffering.
That’s a very naïve view of Hinduism. Here’s a verse a Hindu friend offered up once in a conversation where we Christians (I was a Christian at the time) were propounding our “invention” of charity:
Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer in sacrifice. Whatever charity you give, whatever austerity you practice, do it as an offering to Me.
Gita:9.27
Hindu scriptures, many of which predate even the oldest
Hebrew texts, never mind Christian ones, coalesce around these ideals: self-control, detachment, purity, truth, charity, nonviolence and deepest compassion toward all creatures.
And here’s a bit from the Tamil
Thirukkural that predates the consolidation of Catholic institutional charity:
- Duty is not for reward
Does the world recompense the rain-cloud?
- The worthy work and earn wealth
In order to help others.
- How rare to find in heaven or earth
A joy to excel beneficence!
- He only lives who is kin to all creation;
Deem the rest dead.
- The wealth of a wise philanthropist
Is a village pool ever full.
- The wealth of liberal man
Is a village tree fruit-laden.
- The wealth of the large-hearted
Is an unfailing medicine tree.
In Buddhism, all is God. Suffering is a mere illusion. So since suffering is an illusion, why show compassion for those who only appear to suffer?
Atheism is more modern, but it has been the worst. Over 100 million people have been killed in the 20th century by atheistic regimes - Nazi Germany, Communist China, Soviet Union, Kmer Rouge.
Atheism is the lack of belief in God or gods, or, more strongly, the belief that there exists no God or gods. Atheism may well fail to provide a moral argument against mass killing, but it’s a category error to expect such – atheism is not a moral framework; moral frameworks get built on top of atheism, and they can be quite diverse. What you are suggesting here is similar to saying that “vegetarianism” killed 6 million innocent people in the 20th century at the hands of vegetarian regimes… Hitler’s vegetarianism also did not provide a moral imperative against his evil goals and plans.
Theism, on the other hand,
does have points where it
entails mass killing. Moses and the demand from God to exterminate the Midianites in Numbers 31, for example, or calls in the Qur’an and Hadith to “kill the infidel”, or one who abandons Islam. That isn’t the whole of theism by any means, but those are cases which are conspicuously missing, necessarily, from atheism. Since there’s no god to take your cues from, your killing desires are you own.
True, as we are entering into a post-Christian society we still see some remnants of compassion and morals. But this is only because people hold onto the Christian memory while rejecting its foundations. Frederic Neitzchie criticized his fellow atheist for not taking atheism to its logical conclusion. Since, to him, there is no God, who is to say that love is better than hate. To him, all that mattered was the will to power. Along with Darwinianism, only the fit survives. The best thing for the unfit is that the unfit die quickly.
This is a naïve view of evolutionary biology. Social contracts and commitments to reciprocal and even altruistic behaviors are not liabilities in many cases, but tremendous advantages. Groups that share food with the weak and the sick outcompete groups built on naïve self-interest, as the aid given leads to recovery and subsequent contributions by the recovered to the resources, security and survival of the group. Love is an evolutionary advantage over hate in a great many instances.
The more that our species only consists of the fit, the quicker we will evolve into the superman species. So for the good of our evolutionary destiny, we should encurage the unfit to die off. Darwinsts see no place for charity.
This is very crude caricature of the dynamics of evolution. Charity and altruism are currently active and vigroous topics of research in evolution. Here’s an
article published last year about studies and research that show altruism in chimpanzees, for example. Here’s an
earlier article along the same lines.
It is only in Christianity that we see compassion for the less fortunate. We do not see atheistic or Buddhist counterparts of Mother Theresa.
The evidence shows otherwise. Catholicism definitely deserves singular credit for the sustained levels of energy and scope of the charitable enterprises it enables. It has played an important, civilization-shaping role in that regard. But here you are simply being parochial, and over-reaching badly. Humans (and even other non-human species) have innate dispositions to compassion, charity and altruism. Again, you might suppose God is the reason for that, but in any case, it’s a pervasive feature of human psychology, not something invented by Christianity. Catholicism deserves admiration and gratitude for the good charity it has enabled and provided over millenia now, but it kind of hollows out the righteousness of even that charity if it comes with claims that it invented the principle and the practice.
-Touchstone
