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Absolutely no doubt about it. The Greeks developed some great political and philosophical ideas, but Athens didn’t last long because they didn’t have a religion that would enable them to hold on to it.

Christopher Dawson has written several excellent books on this subject.

Put it another way. Christianity develops the idea of free will, which is dependent upon moral behavior, within a rational universe. Islam has zero idea of free will, and Allah is not rational. Confucianism was a reasonably good way of running things, which let people rise through the ranks by virtue of their scholarship, but it did not have Christianity’s ideas about free will and moral choice.

So you think it has some merits to say that we stand on the pillars of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome?

That the Christian idea about morals was wedded to the “western” logical thoughts of the Greeks to put it simply...

(I need to post here more. My English is deteriorating...)

Nobody can ever accuse the Chinese of being stupid. They were inventing gunpowder, fireworks and great works of art at the same time western civilization was in the Dark Ages producing little more than crayon quality art, Viking raids and peasants with pitchforks and flails to fight them off.

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.

Very incisive post on your part.

I must recommend the book Fortunate Sons by Liel Leibovitz.

It is an amazing story of 120 Chinese children who came to the U.S. 150 years ago. They came here at the young age of 5 or 6 living with adopted American families and stayed for 15years before being called back to China.

They went to Yale and Harvard and interacted with the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain. They went back to become leaders in China.

But their Western education and technological ideas were no match against the ingrained Chinese culture and feng shui.

We often ask is the man or the times that determine history? Perhaps the better question is whether it is the culture or the religion?

I’ve yet to read a better book elucidating Kipling’s ballad of “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.”