A common theme I've made in the last few posts is the premise that if you take the Christianity out of western values, you strengthen them, but if you take the western values out of Christianity, it sends you back to the dark ages. Here I want to explain how and why this works.
As I see it, secularism strengthens western values because it subjects them to a process of strict scrutiny in which theyre expected to justify themselves under their merits. With a free thinking system that requires evidence and rationality rather than tradition or dogma to justify things, we are able to put these ideas under a microscope and subject them to a process that cuts the bad stuff while keeping the good stuff. After all, the good ideas can be justified through reason. Bad ideas can't or shouldnt. Take my goals of morality, which functionally recreate "natural rights theory." Natural rights theory was justified by god creating this stuff, but here, I just look at what the functional goals of morality are, and I came up with things like, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I even introduced a fourth goal, the reduction of suffering, which is strangely missing from the original version. It kinda makes sense given christians are okay with suffering existing if it coerces people toward their moral conclusions, but I'm not personally okay with that. Meanwhile, I also cut the right to property as when I subject it to scrutiny, I find it causes a lot of problems that stop us from actually fixing capitalism. While I recognize some level of property rights existing is good, I dont see them as a goal of morality, or act like the morality is ironclad on them. It's not, and such ideas only seem to exist to justify negative narratives like colonialism and the wealthy having insane wealth. So by scrutinizing these ideas, I end up recreating stronger justifications for the rights that should exist, I end up creating new ones, and end up doing away with dyfunctional ones.
Same with democracy itself. Most rights in our constitution can be justified through reason. Most structures have valid purposes where we can say if we didnt do this, this would happen. And of course, even then I dispute stuff. I think the idea that we need say the electoral college because we cant trust the masses is dumb, is it really better to trust some weird system of oligarchs instead? Is it really better to let land vote over people? I've proposed tons of reforms to the constition over the years, keeping the good parts, while improving on what doesnt work. A reasoned perspective does that.
So basically, any idea worth its salt can be justified in secularism and made stronger. Only bad ideas that dont hold up to scrutiny really dont get supported in my system there.
On the other hand, what if we took the western values out of christianity? Well, it would be a total disaster. Because what is christianity if not for western values? its a bronze age religion justified in myth and authoritarianism. It's just "this is how things are, god said so, now believe or we'll burn you at the stake", and trust me, we've burned a lot of people at the state over the years. Without western values to temper christianity, it becomes illiberal. It mixes religion and state. It imposes itself on all under the force of government. It punishes people for thinking differently. It basically becomes a force of evil in the world.
When people ascribe christianity to western values, I feel like its because for some period of time, people justified things in religious authoritarianism. Like a lot of these ideas invoked "god" because these ideas emerged out of a broader christian tradition and that was just how they did things. But such justifications were always shoddy and awkward. And there are a lot of warts in the ideology (like the work ethic, and an ironclad right to property) that dont make sense and are quite harmful as a result of the historical forces that contributed to them. But again, that's why a more reasoned, secular response is needed now. Because by reducing our dependence on that christian framework, once again, we make those systems better. The good stuff is kept because it's good and serves a purpose, and the bad stuff is phased out.
As such, I see no reason why we need to act like we how some intellectual debt to christianity. Western values arent necessarily christian. THe best parts are quite at odds with christianity, and the worst parts are...the most explicitly christian. Again, you take christianity out of western values and you make western values better. You take western values out of christianity and you get barbarism. It's quite clear what's putting in the work making society better and what isn't.
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