A good few years ago, I was having a beer in the pub with a mate of mine, an avowed atheist, who occasionally, when the mood takes him, decides to try and wind me up about religion. Personally I think the world would be a better place if we didn't try and force our views on other people, I try not to, but he is a wind up merchant and has always mistaken my reticence to discuss my desire to discuss such things in the pub as a sign of weakness, rather than respectful good manners ( when he reads this, I am sure the statement will wind him up no end, which is a very good thing as far as I am concerned).
Given that my personal creed is largely based on trying to be a decent human being, to do a bit of good if I can and to try a live and let live, I've never really sought to study the bible or any other religious text to justify my actions. I think it is all pretty simple. I get a lot of personal benefit from attending church, not least an hour when no one bothers me in the week. It is good to learn who is not well, who has passed away, etc. Last year, I reconnected with one of my best schoolmates from Primary School when I saw his Mums funeral announced in the parish newsletter. I get why people can't stand the whole thing, and respect that we all walk different roads.
Anyway, back to my mate. He said to me "You do realise that Jesus didn't rise from the dead and the world would have been a better place if all of his followers had just gone back to being fishermen, rather than going around peddling fairytales". I don't know if he expected me to get upset at this notion. Unlike many Christians, I realise that just because various accounts are written in various books, people do make stuff up. But that wasn't the thing that interested me in the proposition. Just suppose they had taken what probably would have been a very logical course of action if they'd followed my mates advice? What would have happened to the world? Well firstly, there would have still been the ten commandments and the Jewish religion. That had been around for a few thousand years and I doubt it would have disappeared.
It is part of the human condition to seek answers. These days we largely do it through scientific practices, but the practice of science in its current form is a relatively new development. It developed largely through the development of education and universities. Oxford University does not have a single founding date or a specific founder. Instead, it evolved organically starting in the late 11th century as scholars gathered in the city to study theology, philosophy, and the liberal arts, driven by the church's need for educated clergy. Oxford is the worlds third oldest university. Bologna is the second.. Again it was founded to teach canon law etc. The oldest is actually in Morocco, the University of al-Qarawiyyin, which is over 200 years older than both, but was a Madrassa, teaching Islamic studies. Oxford added chairs of science in the 1600's. It can be argued that this was the starting point of what we may consider the modern world. That is not to say science didn't exist. You only have to look at some of the ancient wonders of the world to see that very clever engineers had their heads around scientific principles, but centres of excellence are needed for science to flourish and this grew out of places that were originally studying theology.
None of us can hazard a guess how all of this would have developed if Christianity had simply never existed. The fact that there are a myriad of other religions and philosophys such as Budhism, Hinduism, Zoriastrianism, etc that do not really share a common ancestry with Christianity shows that people have always liked the idea of some sort of formal religion. I believe that the mass of people who have followed Christianity for the last 2000 years, especially until the modern concepts of athiesm developed, would have simply found something or someone else to believe in. As no one knows what the alternative future would look like, no one can really say it would be better or worse. My own personal view, is that it would probably be worse, but if we look at China, which is an ancient civilisation, with little Christian infulence, it functions and is an ordered society. I visited China in 1991 and chatting to some of the Chinese people we met, all of whom were authorised party members and heavily vetted, I was fascinated to find that forty years of a Communist government and a state sponsored atheistic state had made them far more superstitious than us silly Westerners.
I was keen to know if they were superstitious. Knowing many Chinese love gambling, I asked about this and sure enough, you can remove religion, but basic superstitions are far harder to deal with. In fact, I think in some ways Christians are far less superstitious ( I know many atheists will disagree on the basis that they see Christianity as a superstition), but I don't know anyone who's day will be ruined if their bus ticket has an unlucky number. In Japan, a country I've not visited but again one that has no Christian tradition, society is far more regimented and organised that in Britain. People kill themselves when they lose face and it is almost impossible to break out of the social strata you find yourself in. It has many good things, it is a very safe society, but I can't say that I fancy living there.
If I think of the countries that seem to have a culture where people enjoy themselves, I think of places such as Ireland and Brazil. All have strong Christian traditions. One of the benefits of Christianity is the concept of big festivals. As I'm the man who wrote a song called "We all love a party", I realised that my upbringing ingrained the concept of having a big party at the drop of a hat. Although Christmas is not a religious feast for most Brits, we still have the muscle memory. Now of course there is a good argument that the Church just nicked the festival from the Vikings and their celebration of the equinox. I don't think too many will argue that dumping the Viking traditions of raping and pillaging, but keeping the party is a good thing.
So to sum up. As it is impossible to argue that Christianity hasn't had a massive influence on the deelopment of society over 2,000 years and we have no idea what would have happened if it wasn't around, we can only speculate. I explored some of these ideas with my mate. He had to conclude that without Christianity it was more than possible that some alternative religion that was less benign may have taken hold and we'd all still be in the dark ages. He changed his position to be that Christianity should have been abolished (along with all of the worlds other religions), when educated people started to decide it was a load of old nonsense. I was surprised at this rather illeberal take on the subject. If people decide religion is not for them, that is fine. I went to a school that tried rather clumsily to brainwash me. The fact that I do not get upset when people say things such as my mate said in the pub indicates they've failed. But a situation where we had the controls on religion that China and the USSR had would be far worse, as far as I am concerned.
The thing I've found most strange of all about religion and faith is that those who try and ram it down your throat are generally those with the least real understanding of it. They often have a complete lack of natural empathy so don't realise how annoying they are to the rest of us. I had to throw one of the out of the studio reception not too long ago for bothering other customers and dishing out religious leaflets. When I asked him to leave, he got quite irate and told me I was stopping him saving people. In actual fact, I found him far more annoying than my mate who tries to wind me up.
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