Christianity
The Modern Era: Delusions and the Fallibility of Religion
Abstract
Toynbee reminds us an old and persistent view is that Christianity was the destroyer of the civilization it grew up in. Gibbon thought so. James Frazer did, Julian the Apostate did, and Toynbee joins Gibbon in supposing Marcus Aurelius perhaps did too. But Toynbee keeps persuading us history shows Christianity is eternal. Civilization is the means and religion is the end. A civilization may break down and break up, but the replacement of one higher religion by another will not be a necessary consequence. Christianity will endure and grow in wisdom and stature as the result of a fresh experience of secular catastrophe. Toynbee sees Christianity as the spiritual heir of all religions. Modern Day Christianity 2010 AW! Guide. Links to the principle AW! pages on it.
The Modern Era
© Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Thursday, 14 January 2010
- Inventing a Religion Mikado worship 20 kb
How the Japanese rulers manufactured a religion to serve their own purposes, Mikado-worship. Bushido was unknown until the end of the nineteenth century! The word appears in no dictionary before the year 1900. Japan had its chivalrous people but Bushido, as an institution or a code of rules, had never existed. The Japanese ruling class built a new religion for the Japanese. The new Japanese religion of loyalty and patriotism emerged into the light of day, and the feats accomplished during the last war show that the simple ideal which it offered was capable of inspiring heroic deeds, and foul ones too. How could a foreigner imagine that people who made such positive statements about their own country were merely exploiting credulity? Onlookers had no reason to suspect, and even if they did, original sources were out of their reach. What Christians and Jews do not or will not accept is that their own religions were no less phony.
- Christianity and Civilization 23 kb
Toynbee reminds us an old and persistent view is that Christianity was the destroyer of the civilization it grew up in. Gibbon thought so. James Frazer did, Julian the Apostate did, and Toynbee joins Gibbon in supposing Marcus Aurelius perhaps did too. But Toynbee keeps persuading us history shows Christianity is eternal. Civilization is the means and religion is the end. A civilization may break down and break up, but the replacement of one higher religion by another will not be a necessary consequence. Christianity will endure and grow in wisdom and stature as the result of a fresh experience of secular catastrophe. Toynbee sees Christianity as the spiritual heir of all religions.
- Jesus Cults 23 kb
The comet was the ultimate sign of the times. It signified the end of the world for the believers. That the signs of the times told of the end of the world was the belief of the Essenes at the time of Jesus and it was the belief of the first Christians who adopted much of Essene philosophy. Everyone would die except for the saved, the perfectly holy people—the Essenes initially, then the Christians. A characteristic of these cults is the cult of personality of some charismatic leader, almost invariably male, who uses the childish naievety of his followers to boost his own ego, status and lifestyle.
- Archbishop James Ussher and the Age of the World 7 kb
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth” on October 23, 4004 BC. That is what Archbishop James Ussher says in Annals of the World, first published in Latin in 1654, then in English in 1658. The book is popular with fundamentalist Christians for whom it is a chronology of the world based on biblical revelation rather than the false science of evolution.
- Christianity and the Nazis 129 kb
Christians have been desperate to distance themselves from European fascism and Nazism, and apologists like to argue that fascist leaders were not practising Christians. Yet, all the Nazi leaders were born, baptized, and raised Christian, mainly in authoritarian, pious households where tolerance and democratic values were not valued. Catholic Nazis, besides Hitler, included Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Joseph Goebbels. Hermann Goering had mixed Catholic-Protestant parentage, while Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, and Adolf Eichmann had Protestant backgrounds. Roughly two-thirds of German Christians repeatedly voted for candidates who promised to overthrow democracy. Protestants had given the Nazi party its main backing leading up to 1933. Evangelical youth was especially pro-Nazi. 90 percent of Protestant university theologians supported the Nazis. Christians were Nazis and took part in Nazi atrocities. Any who turned to outright criticism of fascism made their last appeals from the death cell.
