What has Christianity truly contributed to humanity

[Angrboda]

Historian Tom Holland argues that the concept of human dignity and existential equality come out of the Christian tradition.

Donald Trump argues that he won Arizona.

[Belacqua]

These composers explicitly rejected the notion of any gods or religious dogma.
They all wrote religious music :Bartok, Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, Brahms, Debussy, Delius, Kabalevsky, Khachaturian, Mahler, Maxwell Davies, Mozart, Orff, Paganini, Prokofiev, Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rorem, Rubinstein, Anton, Saint-Saens, Schubert, Schumann, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Smyth, Strauss, Richard, Tchaikovsky, Vaughan Williams, (also worked for the Church of England), Virgil Thomson, Verdi, Wagner

What is your source for this? How do we know that all of these composers "rejected the notion of any gods or religious dogma"?

[Thumpalumpacus]

These composers explicitly rejected the notion of any gods or religious dogma.
They all wrote religious music :Bartok, Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, Brahms, Debussy, Delius, Kabalevsky, Khachaturian, Mahler, Maxwell Davies, Mozart, Orff, Paganini, Prokofiev, Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rorem, Rubinstein, Anton, Saint-Saens, Schubert, Schumann, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Smyth, Strauss, Richard, Tchaikovsky, Vaughan Williams, (also worked for the Church of England), Virgil Thomson, Verdi, Wagner

You dolt, I mentioned not a single other composer.

You're having a term-limits-are-not-constitutional moment (again!). Your mental brittleness and inability to take in opinions you don't agree with mark you as a fool unworthy of serious consideration. Ta-ta, dumbfuck.

[GrandizerII]

We keep hearing, from Christians mainly, that Christianity has been, for the most part, a positive force in the world.

I dispute that, and would be happy to have anyone post anything good that Christianity has contributed to humanity or the world in general.

Of course, anyone can feel free to dispute, debate, or otherwise shut down any claims.

Also, feel free to list anything that Christianity has done to damage the planet or humanity.

This thread is open to all varieties of Christianity, from Catholics to Mormons to Johos.

And...


GO!

There are a lot of things to be frustrated about when it comes to the bad stuff Christianity has brought to the world, but if we're suggesting Christianity over the past couple millennia didn't bring anything positive to the world, then that frankly comes off as an incredibly biased thing to suggest.

Besides the literature, art and music and hospitals it has inspired, individual people themselves have changed for the better because of it. And there are some nice morals and philosophies to find in Christian works.

One might say the devil is in the details, and that ultimately nothing good has come out of Christianity perse, but then one might as well say Christianity doesn't do anything at all in this world, good or bad.

So maybe after this bit of rambling, I should now ask: What is Christianity exactly? And what counts as contributing to humanity/world? If the contribution itself is not original, is it still a contribution? Must we filter out all other influencing factors before we can say Christianity has contributed anything?

[Fake Messiah]

Besides the literature, art and music and hospitals it has inspired, individual people themselves have changed for the better because of it.

When it comes to literature and music, it is a thing of personal taste. Maybe someone likes Christian bands and Left Behind books, but I find it to be trash. Even when it comes to historical stuff. There are some nice Christian statues and paintings, but so are pagan ones.

And Christian hospitals are businesses and are places where they torture people and fire doctors because they break religious taboos, and it is hard for me to focus on patients who don't get tortured because that's not how it goes.

And there are some nice morals and philosophies to find in Christian works.

But probably not toward Jews, gays, heretics, peasants, and some others.

[The Grand Nudger]

Christianity has been claiming credit for the things it appropriated for so long that people believe it, and not just christians.

The paintings? Modeled after classical works. Philosophies? The god of classical theism. Classical, in both cases, means pagan. Christianity didn't give us the golden rule, christianity did not come up with the idea of hospitals, it did not gift us with math, it didn't even preserve our..or it's own, history. Music isn't christian, it's simply sung by them....and they've never really been big fans of any of this shit, anyway. Sing the wrong song. Like the wrong pictures. Ask for the wrong medical care. Ponder how 1+1+1=1. Remind them of what really happened, and what they really did...and they'll make that crystal clear in every age.

[Bucky Ball]

These composers explicitly rejected the notion of any gods or religious dogma.
They all wrote religious music :Bartok, Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, Brahms, Debussy, Delius, Kabalevsky, Khachaturian, Mahler, Maxwell Davies, Mozart, Orff, Paganini, Prokofiev, Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rorem, Rubinstein, Anton, Saint-Saens, Schubert, Schumann, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Smyth, Strauss, Richard, Tchaikovsky, Vaughan Williams, (also worked for the Church of England), Virgil Thomson, Verdi, Wagner

What is your source for this? How do we know that all of these composers "rejected the notion of any gods or religious dogma"?

I'll let you do your own research.

[Astreja]

Historian Tom Holland argues that the concept of human dignity and existential equality come out of the Christian tradition.

Even if it did, the Christian establishment of the past centuries wasn't very good at implementing those concepts.  It took the Enlightenment and, to borrow a term from Karl Popper, piecemeal social engineering, to make any inroads.

[Bucky Ball]

Historian Tom Holland argues that the concept of human dignity and existential equality come out of the Christian tradition.

It did not. 
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/digni...gaHistDign

Genesis 1:27
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Proverbs 22:2
The rich and the poor meet together; the Lord is the Maker of them all.

Genesis 1:26
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Leviticus 19:33-34
“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

It didn't come from Judaism either, but it certainly didn't come from Christianity.
"“Dignity” derives from the Latin dignitas. And while most Romans used dignitas only in its merit sense, a few, and Cicero in particular, had a proleptic understanding of dignitas that anticipated today’s moral-political sense."

"n Ancient times, the concept of dignity usually referred to respect for individuals with a high social status: a Greek king or a Roman senator, for example. It was the Stoics who first developed the idea of a dignity attributable to the human being per se, i.e. independently of individual characteristics"

https://academic.oup.com/book/5774/chapt...m=fulltext

"Originally, the Latin, English, and French words for “dignity” did not have anything to do with a person's inherent value. It aligned much closer with someone's “merit.” If someone was “dignified,” it meant they had a high status. They belonged to royalty or the church, or, at the very least, they had money."

https://solidarity.net.au/marxist-theory...00%20years.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Historian Tom Holland argues that the concept of human dignity and existential equality come out of the Christian tradition.

Even if it did, the Christian establishment of the past centuries wasn't very good at implementing those concepts.  It took the Enlightenment and, to borrow a term from Karl Popper, piecemeal social engineering, to make any inroads.

Your point is well taken. The gap beyween theory and practice persisted for centuries. That said, the Enlightenment did not provide substitute a rational substitute for the religious claim of existential equality; it simply took the Christian ideal for granted, much the way secularists still do. Before Judeo-Christian ideas took hold, the notion of human dignity simply did not exist in pagan cultures. The weak and poor were universally held in contempt. The very notion of a cruxified savior was inconcievable. Nietzsche astutely characterized it as "slave morality" from a classical perspective. The sermon on the mound has no non-Christian parallel in the West., IDK about other parts of the ancient world.