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spork's avatar

This is a really good post! Now that Christianity is weak you may be underestimating how much it held back progress in earlier times (who opposed "test tube babies"?) but this doesn't undermine the point that a safely Christian society kept in check the proliferation of other "idols" of worship and largely prevented today's "my sacred" vs "your sacred" conflicts, like Tolkien fanatics vs. inclusivity fanatics. Maybe the sort of sacred we need would look like Churchill-at-war-style martial nationalism, which is strong enough to unite us across many differences but doesn't get in the way of innovation. I'm not suggesting that martial nationalism is benign, but neither is Christianity, nor is any other serviceable sacred alternative.

One data point that I would add to your list of 48: it's usually in bad taste to call sacred things "sacred" because it makes explicit the irrationality that accompanies sacred things. Exceptions to this are fully established religions that have embraced and explicitly doubled down on certain irrationalities. Star Wars fans can get livid at the poor treatment of their favorite characters by the new movies, but they don't want to say that Luke Skywalker is sacred and should not be desecrated, even though that's how they feel.

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Andrew Luscombe's avatar

And once again, geographical expansion is not the change being discussed - it is about ways in which the culture exists, such as companies forming, voting, not for profits, family sizes, inheritance practices, etc.

Modern Christianity holds sacred Jesus, God, the Bible, churches, marriage, families, saints, the Virgin Mary, some relics, some days of the year, equality before God, etc. It holds the following to be generally not sacred - civilian administrations, companies, animals, (cows, pigs, etc.), personal appearance as long as the privates are covered, lending, status that isn't directly related to religion, ancestors, most occupations, inheritance, etc.

The idea is that the Christian set of sacred classifications stood less in the way of the significant cultural changes we saw in the last few hundred years than other religions would have by directing people's natural need to hold things sacred away from interfering in day-to-day practical matters towards less problematic areas.

You say people don't have a need or tendency to see some things as sacred. Maybe so. I don't know how much variation in it there is, or whether this averages out within a culture or what. I don't know if Robin is right, but that's what the topic is here. All I'm saying is that the topic is not people wandering across the prairies in covered wagons, but ways of living and organising while also nearly 100% believing in Christianity.

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