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http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/parable-of-the-madman/

I think sensitivity to this explains some of the fear around atheism/materialism and in general arguments that go against traditional structures: there’s a fairly massive and not necessarily illegitimate slippery slope fear.

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This isn’t even a matter of straightforward belief – I often seem to find more of an intuitive echo with Christian beliefs/traditions than the Christians I know have with those beliefs/traditions, I think because my temparement and my reading habits (in particular of poetry) give those ideas huge amounts of aesthetic weight for me. It also helps explain for me how I have very different feelings about Christianity and other religions, despite having studied several and being fascinated in general. Buddhism, for instance, sometimes seems to have a feel of ‘truthiness’ on certain individual points, but I find the central Christian story immensely powerful at a gut level. It is just linked with such thick layers of early memory, aesthetic experience and (mostly second-hand) intellectual speculation that it overflows with a sense of meaningfulness.

There’s an echo of this in the really enjoyable experience of reading a book when you’ve read several sequels/copies/pastiches – the move from the fragmentary to the more complete and original can be deeply satisfying.

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They confined him to house arrest for being an asshole about the Pope.

A a general rule of thumb, being an asshole about an absolute ruler gets you worse than house arrest in most time periods.

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Namely, the consistent link is of course the revealed stability of ‘human nature’/evopsych/game-theoretic patterns of human behaviour, and furthermore the recognition that these thinkers were able to approach their subjects, if not with the benefit of modern analytical tools, data and theories, at least with less burdensome cultural baggage.

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Plus Galileo is already about the best example supporters of the conflict thesis can come up with, which is kinda lame in comparison to the evidence such an epic conflict should have left if it had been a thing. Which is part of why it’s no longer taken serious in actual academic history. But then somehow Internet atheists are much less skeptical of their own origin myths than of the Christian ones …

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And yes, that is unfair, times were different then. But times were also different when the bible was written, which makes the unfairness a sadly necessary part of any useful comparison.

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However, what I take the Beatitudes and the Cross to have added to Western culture, among other things, are the roots of a conviction in the human dignity of all (however often betrayed in practice)–even women, children, poor men, and slaves–and a flowering of the eleemosynary impulse. Sure, the Stoics revered the slave Epictetus, and Julian the Apostate tried to adapt Christian-style eleemosynary institutions for his abortive revival of paganism, but as Konkvistador says upthread, the Western tradition of social justice is largely a Christian inheritance. Those truths were new when first told in Rome, even if they seem so obvious now that atheists are disinclined to credit Christianity for them, in a sort of reverse of the error of ignoring implicit background you point out in Chesterton and Libresco, and one akin to charging Christianity with Albertus Magus’ celestial spheres but not crediting us with Fr. Copernicus.

I think there’s something else here, too. The mainstream of Christian thought has historically been very far to the left economically, and very far to the right culturally. I came into the Catholic Church in large part out of enthusiasm for the lefty stuff, but I’ve found that submission to the righty stuff has immeasurably improved my own personal life. I’ve heard similar tales from cultural righties who’ve learned to unclench around their fear of giving of their wealth to Those People after submission to the lefty stuff. That’s in no way anything like a respectable “argument,” just an anecdotal report that “it worked for me.” If I’d cooked up my own entirely lefty-friendly UUism, I’d be, IMHO, less well-targeted toward eudaimonia today. Catholicism told *me* truths I didn’t want to hear, but needed to hear. Others have had similar (admittedly anecdotal) experiences.

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