A friend is currently reading Peter Watson’s “Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud”, a book which promises to make you erudite about all of human religion, philosophy, and various “-isms”.
The book plays to people’s vanities. When humanity as a whole has arrived at no consensus about the validity of Torah, Vedas, or Marxism, it’s more than a little presumptuous to think that one can arrive at an objective appraisal of these systems by reading a little book. But this is exactly what the readers of this book claim to have achieved.
I flipped through the book and read a number of random passages, and the author certainly strives to appear unbiased. But the book is filled with speculation, half-truths, and even outright lies. One particularly startling passage was when the author solemnly reported that “Christianity arose from the Greek system of philosophy known as Gnosticism”.
I thought that people stopped making this absurd claim. Having read several books on the topic, it is clear that there is absolutely no support for this lie (rather, Gnosticism was a perversion of Christianity). And most people have stopped parroting it. Such casual repetition of untruth damages Watson’s credibility; although he makes the same sort of errors in talking about the Vedas and Quran.
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Even if we dispense with the claims about “Gnosticism”, there is a more subtle form of this error alive today. I recently came across this quote on a Christian web site, which many people would take for common sense:
“Christianity began as a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. When it went to Athens, it became a philosophy. When it went to Rome, it became an organization. When it went to Europe, it became a culture. When it came to America, it became a business.”
But this isn’t common sense; it’s simpleton’s thinking. It presupposes that all cultural advancement is an evolution or “progression” forward; from backwards, ignorant thinking to more enlightened thinking. Anyone with a modest IQ can look at the history or Greek philosophy, and see that it was Greek philosophy that was influenced dramatically by Judaism in the form of Christianity, rather than the opposite. And why not?
The truth is, all of these things were deeply diseased when Christ arrived. The nature of our personal relationships, our philosophies, our political organizations, and our business practices were hopelessly corrupted.
The quote implies that Christianity drew sustenance from, was built upon, and adapted to, these human institutions. Nothing could be further from the truth. These human institutions were built imperfectly upon the foundation set by Christ before time began, and by the time Christ arrived, they were hopelessly corrupt and diseased. Christ reformed and healed them, and breathed new life into them in the form of Christianity. And this isn’t just theology: it’s plain facts for anyone who cares to actually look at the history.
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