We are ONE christian body.
:D
Posted on 03/07/2011 9:00:56 AM PST by Eurotwit
In the West we are doing our best to destroy our Christian heritage but in China, Chinese intellectuals are coming around to the view that it is precisely this heritage that has made the West so successful.
Former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Dominic Lawson, in a review in the Sunday Times of Niall Ferguson's new book, ‘Civilisation: The West and the Rest’, carries a quote from a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in which he tries to account for the success of the West, to date.
He said: “One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world.
“We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had.
“Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system.
“But in the past twenty years, we have realised 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.”
Note the source. It isn't from a religious leader, or some religious think-tank. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is an instrument of the Chinese Communist government which spends a not inconsiderable amount of time and money persecuting Christians and is officially atheistic.
If this is the conclusion it has come to, maybe Europe needs to reconsider whether it mightn't be an idea to encourage rather than eradicate Christianity.
Incidentally, just to drive home the point, Lawson also refers to this data point in Ferguson's book: Wenzhou, the Chinese city which is rated as the most entrepreneurial in the country, is also home to 1,400 churches.
Lawson refers to a quote in the book from a prominent Wenzhou business leader, a Mr Hanping Zhang, who argues that “an absence of trust had been one of the main factors holding China back; but he feels he can trust his fellow Christians because he knows that they will be honest in their dealings with him”.
It has long been accepted that Christianity is one of the core elements of Western civilisation; it is too little understood that it is also one of the secrets of the stunning success of that civilisation.
Sounds like a very interesting book. If you remember, it would be great if you could ping me when it comes close to getting published.
Though my thoughts would be that the Faustian (”western”) will for power has also been a very positive force. It has made us cross the oceans, fly to the moon, seek the next frontier...
But, this will to power must surely be tempered by Christian ethics and belief not to run amok. Tempered by Christian feeling, this will to power is not necessarily a bad thing...
Thoughts?
The Chinese appear to be reinventing the wheel.
“Forewarding article to Barack Obama”
You mean that guy that spent 20 years in “reverend” Wright’s The Church of GD America? That guy?
Absolutely. You can see it all played out in small scale in the French Revolution's attack on Christianity. Reading about the French Revolution is like looking at one of those miniature dioramas of some Civil War battle, except in this case the diorama is of the Holocaust and the Gulag.
One must feel some concern for the health and safety of prominent Wenzhou business leader, Mr Hanping Zhang.
I did bring up Max Weber in a later post, and surely Protestantism brought it whole to a different level with the emergence of the UK, Holland and later of course the United States.
And, funnily enough I do think that has something to do with the much maligned Faustian “will for power.
And, catholic countries are not faring too badly in a global sense. Italy and France are g-8 countries.
It life had been fair, you would have just bought catholic tankers for the U.S. Air Force ;-)
You and your classified documents. lol.
Anyhow enjoy your posts :D
Hmmmmmm
Thanks for your kind reply.
I think.
The Dark Ages began with the fall of Rome in 476 a.d. and ended with the Christianizing of Europe and crusades.
The spread of Islam produced exactly the opposite effect and is probably evident nowhere more than Persia.
Confucianism, as you say, was a reasonably good way of running things, but was undermined by the Mandarin bureaucrats who did much the same thing to the clever inventive Chinese civilization starting in about the 13th century which our atheistic liberals are doing to western civilization today.
Without the moral underpinnings provided by Christianity, a meritocracy, however well-intentioned, is eventually distorted by those who gain control of an amoral legal system to set the rules.
“The Chinese appear to be reinventing the wheel.”
Good on them. It seems like it needs reinventing from time to time.
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
- George Orwell
:D
Yup, LOL. The guy posing as a president of a superpower.
Yes. Absolutely. Aristotle and Plato, and philosophical thinking in general, were pretty much abandoned in Greece, especially after the fall of Constantinople.
The one place where philosophy was regularly practiced was in the Christian West.
There was a golden age of philosophy in the Muslim world, but that was the work of people they conquered. And it didn’t last long. It was in the Christian monasteries and universities that philosophy was preserved and developed.
China had scholarship and philosophy, but without the basis in moral love that Christianity offers. Taoism is contradictory and can even be turned to evil. Confucianism was the main basis of their civilization, but it doesn’t make much allowance for free will among ordinary people.
Each of these works came to a similar conclusion--even in those early years of the Republic.
One should note, however, that to find an American who, over the past several decades, read these important documents, would be rare.
In 1775, Burke advised his colleagues in the Parliament of the astounding economic success of the colonies and traced what he called their "spirit of liberty."
By Frothingham's 1872 history, America'as experiment in liberty, opportunity and prosperity was even more pronounced, and Frothingham discusses "the Chrisian idea of man" as having been essential to its development.
Sadly, Americans have been "dumbed down" by a monopoly education establishment whose controllers effectively censored the ideas of liberty from the nation's schools and public discourse.
That "hiding" of the founding ideas and of such writings from school children and the general public has contributed to an effective "erasing" of the national memory of the truly miraculous progress from tyranny to liberty which took place on the American continent, culminating in the 1776 Declaration and 1787's "People's" Constitution.
The Spanish Inquisition was developed to weed out Islamic 5th-columnists, after a particularly valuable port was ceded to the Moors by a traitor.
It worked so well that the Moors were eventually kicked out of Spain. This was known as the “Reconquista”.
Meanwhile in Northern Europe: after losing the battle of Muhlberg the Protestants - unable to win on the battlefield - started spreading ever-more deranged lies about the Inquisition.
At one point the ‘Black Legend’ grew to such an immense and bloated lie that the Protestants were confidently ascribing more deaths to the Inquisition than the number of people who lived in Europe.
So we see that - if Protestants were to be honest and admit it, they share a lot of history with - for example: the Left Wing Media.
We are ONE christian body.
:D
Eye, mote, beam etc.
Nietzsche? Freud? Marx? All that bunch of stupids?
‘Will to Power,’ which he felt offered a better and more persuasive explanation of human behavior than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology.
A New Messiah? Perhaps like Moamar Qaddafi?
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