RE: What has Christianity truly contributed to humanity
July 28, 2023 at 5:07 pm
(This post was last modified: July 28, 2023 at 5:09 pm by Belacqua.)
(July 28, 2023 at 10:45 am)Aegon Wrote:(July 27, 2023 at 7:57 am)Angrboda Wrote: Donald Trump argues that he won Arizona.
What? Lol. I don't even care about this topic all that much but this is an absurd response. I imagine a historian has better ground to stand on for his history opinion than Trump does for his electoral opinion.
People flippantly dismissing Holland's book simply show that they don't really care about the issue.
Holland has a double first degree from Cambridge. His subject was literature at that time, but you don't get a double first in any subject if you're not a serious scholar.
Since leaving Cambridge he has written several books about ancient times. These have all been well reviewed and won multiple prizes. He reads the original sources in Greek and Latin. He has said that while researching the era, he found that he was surprised by his reaction: he really despised the values of the time, and wondered why our own values are so different. After much research, he concluded that Christianity changed things.
He is of course not saying that Christianity is perfect, or has ever fully lived up to the values he admires.
He wrote an entire book demonstrating his point, that the values of the classical world were different from ours, and not something we'd want to go back to. And how the thing that made the difference was Christianity.
It has been very well reviewed. When I read it I wished it had gone into more detail, but it was clearly written with a more popular audience in mind. It's not one of those big fat scholarly books that cost $150.
There are of course other scholars who disagree with him. That's because for whatever position it's possible to hold about history, there are going to be scholars who disagree with it. However, both Holland and those who disagree are capable of laying out reasons, and making strong arguments for their positions. Just saying that Holland should stop drinking, or comparing him to Trump, is not a mature response.
