What has Christianity truly contributed to humanity

[arewethereyet]

All humans have a personal morality. Groups of humans for a societal morality and these are both innately subjective. Christians.. or religious people have an addition objective morality from their diety/religious doctrine. It informs their very core beliefs and thus impacts their actions. I attribute my job, my location and my blessings to God. How can you prove I go to the soup kitchen because I'm just a good person and not a Christian? I don't think you can.

These days I'm reading The Dyer's Hand, a collection of essays by W.H. Auden. It's clear from these pages that Auden is a learned, wise, and compassionate man. Full of love for others' wisdom and goodness. 

Judging from what was said earlier in this thread, it will be easy for people here to claim that his Christian faith has little or nothing to do with his personal goodness -- even though the way he expresses himself is Christian through and through. People can always claim that he's just a good person and would have done all these good things even if there were no Christianity in the world at all. 

As you rightly point out, it's not possible to prove what degree of a person's goodness is separable from his religious beliefs. 

However, we all know that every human being exists in a society. No one grows up independent of moral systems, ideologies, worldviews, etc. etc. The fact that Auden's great compassion finds a vocabulary and a structure in Christianity means that whatever spark of goodness he had as a child found a method and a tradition which nurtured it. If he had grown up in a military setting or a Wall Street family, he might well have lacked the means to organize and build on his natural instincts. 

An individual's capacities and talents are only developed when that person's culture provides the means to do so. This is true of abilities in math or the arts or of the Christian virtues -- compassion, love, etc. 

Auden was fortunate in that he had good Christian models and opportunities. No doubt there are also bad Christian models who don't produce the kind of man he turned out to be. But the idea that his development and achievements are detachable from the structure of thought that produced them is just silly. He grew into his goodness through the medium of Christianity.

If the author you speak of had been a military brat or the child of a 'Wall Street' family (whatever that is) they could not have been a naturally good person because the military and/or Wall Street background would have prevented it?  Is that your perception?