It seems Mr. O’Donnell is completely ignorant of the history of Asia — the names Ghengis Khan and Timur Lenk spring readily to mind, as does the Durants’ judgement that the Muslim conquest of India was the bloodiest war in all of history. And even the Aztecs program of human sacrifice alone, even without their wars, probably managed to kill more people than all of the lethal activities carried out by or blessed by the Latin Church, their part in the 30 Years War included.
‘What’s So Great About Christianity?’ Ask D’Souza
by Gary Bauer
D’Souza begins by busting the myth, pushed by so many atheist writers, that Christianity is on the wane in America. Armed with compelling statistics, D’Souza shreds the secularization narrative by explaining that while liberal church affiliation has plummeted in recent years, there has been significant growth in traditional Christian churches. And though we most often hear of Western Europe’s abandonment of Christianity, overall, there is “a global revival of religion,” and, contrary to popular opinion, Christianity, not Islam, is the fastest-growing religion in world today.
D’Souza then gets to the business of explaining just what is so great about Christianity. In a powerful passage, D’Souza highlights how Christianity has changed the world:
“The sublimity of Christ and his disciples completely reversed the whole classical ideal. Suddenly aristocratic pride came to be seen as something preening and ridiculous. Christ produced the transformation of values in which the last became the first, and values once scorned came to represent the loftiest of human ideals.”
Through Christianity, a new set of values (humility, compassion, charity, etc.) arose that served as the underpinning of the West’s most crucial institutions (monogamous marriage, family, basic human rights, etc.) and of American democracy. It is no accident that history’s great movements of conscience-abolition, desegregation, pro-life-have had firm roots in the faithful, who believe that all are equal in the eyes of God.
After stopping to debunk the lie that religion, and in particular Christianity, has been the source of most of the bloodshed throughout history (for example, only about 2,000 people were executed for heresy in the 350 year Inquisition, while the atheist regimes of Hitler, Mao and Stalin alone killed more than 100 million people), the author moves on to address what is for many the foremost obstacle to belief: The problem of evil.