Here before me is the book "Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization," which its author, Alvin J. Schmidt, sent to me after he had read my column of Dec. 27, "
Predictably, the books dealing with Christianity can fill up a sizable library. But for the first time in 2000 years, such a book has been written by a sociologist studying, on the basis of ample documentation, how the teaching of Christ created the socio-cultural transformation of the civilization that became known as Christendom.
The evolution of attitudes to Christianity in Christendom may be outlined as follows.
Dante (1265-1321) represented the universe in accordance with the Bible and the sciences of his day, ascending to the sciences of Greco-Roman and Eastern antiquity. But sciences advance and make previous scientific truths outdated, or false. In the 15th century, astronomy, geology and other sciences began to advance rapidly and make the astronomical, geological and other scientific truths of Dante’s time outdated, or false.
In the past three centuries, the admiration for science has turned into scientism, that is, the belief that there are no truths outside science, and hence Dante’s poetry as well as the Bible, including the teachings of Christ, are outdated, or false, and hence worthless.
As a Russian votary of scientism says in a 19th century novel: "A competent chemist is twenty times more valuable than any poet." As for Christianity, he thought it beneath his dignity even to mention it.
The votaries of scientism have never understood that no science answers or will ever answer which is better: to make every man, woman and child happy or to exterminate all mankind as harmful bacteria.
Nay, to the votaries of scientism, while Dante’s poetry is just an entertainment at the very best, Christianity has been harmful. Indeed, the votaries of scientism have been seeing the history of the past half-millennium as a life-or-death struggle between the light, truth and progress of science vs. the darkness, lies and evil backwardness of "religion."
This is the key delusion of scientism that Professor Schmidt has to disprove.
It is true (and Professor Schmidt cites this little-known fact) that the founder of modern empirical and experimental science, Roger Bacon, was imprisoned in 1278 as a heretic "for fourteen years," that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600, and that Galileo Galilei was forced by it to denounce his empirical confirmation of the discovery by Copernicus (who though a Catholic was never persecuted) that it is the earth that rotates on its axis, not the universe, including the sun, that revolves around the earth.
What should be an independent observer’s reaction to this scientistic vision of a "life-or-death struggle of religion against science"?
It is preposterous to assume that every individual or every group that speaks "in the name of Christ” has been his true follower. Christ himself warned against the use and abuse of his name. Nothing is further from his teaching than the burning alive by an institution, using his name, of those who allegedly have deviated from the Bible as this institution understands it.
Christ denied anyone’s right to use force with respect to anyone else, even in response to force, such as used in the arrest and crucifixion of himself! The Roman Catholic Church of 1600 read the Gospels, but did not see what Christ had said and done. Facing the powerful, well-organized and armed Roman Catholic Church, Bruno was in the moral position of Christ facing his executioners.
Professor Schmidt reminds us that in contrast to the Catholic Church of the period of an active Inquisition, the Lutheran Church never persecuted scientists, but "in the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries," "bolstered science." A friend of mine, a Lutheran pastor, drew my attention to the fact that it was the Lutheran Church that first published Copernicus. And the "Calvinists founded the Royal Society of London in 1645."
The Reformation in the English-speaking countries, in the north of continental Europe or in Germany has been as much entitled to consider itself the follower of Christ as has been the Catholic Church in Italy, France or Spain.
Besides, it is necessary to bear in mind the historical background of the time when the Inquisition was active. Recall the Star Chamber and the Tower in England. Absolutism was often engaged in (religious) persecution and aggressive wars, torture and public executions tantamount to public torture. In the 20th century, Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany surpassed in cruelty the West-European medieval absolutism.
Hence the Catholic Church in the period of an active Inquisition was not unusually cruel, but it failed to live up to – in 1600, for example – Christ’s teaching of tolerance, love and kindness in contrast to the mores inherited from the pre-Christian world. The Roman Catholic Church conformed to this heritage instead of transforming itself.
Indeed, what were the mores of the world in which Christ was born?
Professor Schmidt begins his survey of those mores with infanticide. It was universal. In Sparta, every newborn was shown to the relevant official, who determined whether the child was fit for survival (to use Darwin’s phrase) or should be thrown off a cliff to its death. Baby girls were sentenced to death far more often as unfit to become soldiers.
The article "Plato" in my "Encyclopedia Britannica" occupies 16 pages, about as many as does the article "Jesus Christ." Plato described his ideal state (absurdly translated into English as "republic”), in which the principle of infanticide is applied to all dwellers of Plato’s ideal state. Thus, medicine should be used only if a sick person is able to work. If he is so sick that he cannot work, he should not be medically treated, but should be allowed to die as unfit for survival (to use Darwin’s phrase again).
Chapter 2 in Professor Schmidt’s book is entitled "The Sanctification of Human Life.” Indeed, before Christ, it had been no more sanctified than the life of cattle on a cattle ranch, on which Plato modeled his ideal state, more ruthless than Sparta.
The title of Chapter 1 of Professor Schmidt’s study is "People Transformed by Jesus Christ.” The word "transformed” (see it also in the title of the book) is taken by the author from St. Paul (in Romans 12:2 NKJV): "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed. ..."
Indeed, compared with, for example, St. Paul, Plato seems to be a prehistoric creature dreaming up a prehistoric "ideal world.” Curiously, when about 23 centuries later Germany discarded Christianity on the basis of Nietzsche (a disciple of Darwin), that country became strikingly like Plato’s "ideal state.”
Women were transformed by the teaching of Christ no less than men, while the lives of women were transformed much more than men’s.
Bernard Shaw claimed that every man wishes to possess the best women, and every woman wishes to be possessed by the best men. The Old Testament refers to one man who realized to some degree the wish ascribed by Shaw to everyman. According to the Old Testament, King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines and he is reproached because many of these wives and concubines were "strange," that is, foreign, women.
Well, he realized to a high degree every man’s wish as defined by Bernard Shaw. But what about those 1,000 women, his wives and concubines?
Contrary to some men’s boasts that they can possess 10 or 100 women every night, the Torah and the Talmud refer to man’s one intercourse in three days. So, while King Solomon had a new wife or concubine every three days, his wife or concubine would have on the average hardly more than one intercourse in her lifetime, since he would not touch her after her first bloom of youth was gone. New wives and concubines would replace her and her coevals.
In the 1980s, millennia later, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran wrote that if a man has sexual relations with girls under nine years of age, he should not make them his wives but rather should keep them as his mistresses, and those of them whom he mutilates in his sexual zeal he should maintain as invalids because no man will take them either as his wives or his mistresses.
When Christ was born, most women in the world were slaves, owned by male slave-owners. Of course! Men are fitter for survival than women – men are usually physically stronger, and often armed, though some of them can kill a woman with their bare fists.
Monogamy (one husband–one wife) was sanctified by the teaching of Christ and established sexual equilibrium, while Christ’s reversal of the triumph of brutal force established at least the basis for civic equality, for which women have been fighting in the West for over 19 centuries.
Elaborate manners have been developed for a gentleman in Christendom to act not as the master of a lady, but as her servant, opening the door for her, and so on. Sexually, it is not she who is waiting all her life, along with 1,000 other women, for the advent of her master to titillate his jaded body. It is he who courts her and proposes to her, while she may or may not accept his proposal.
This transformation of men and women took centuries, of course, but the origin is traceable to the teachings of Christ.
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My NewsMax.com columns have been accompanied by my proposal to publishers to send them by slow-mail the 130-page beginning of my book, "Out of Moscow and Into New York: A Life in the Geostrategically Lobotomized West in the Age of Terrorism and Post-Nuclear Superweapons.”
Though the proposal was addressed to publishers, hundreds of readers sent me e-mails expressing their appreciation of my columns and requesting that I send them my book, or at least the beginning of it. I have decided to meet their wishes by posting on my Web site my book in weekly installments. Those interested, please let m know (
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