Thoughts in a Haystack

Whew, talk about self-deception.

Lane Palmer is playing the "What if Jesus Had Never Been Born?" game over at The Christian Post.

If Jesus had never been born, education and science would look very different and much more primitive, and most likely the United States of America would have just been an unrealized historical dream.

Palmer may be right about the US. Without all those Christian conquistadors rampaging throughout South and Central America, slaughtering the natives for immense amounts of gold, the English and French might not have been inspired to wipe out the natives of North America ... with the able assistance of Americans.

But education and science? Palmer doesn't try to defend that himself but refers to a really silly website, which says this:

Education? From the beginning of Judaism, from which Christianity is derived, there was an emphasis on the written word. But the phenomenon of education for the masses has its roots in the Protestant Reformation. In America, the first law to require education of the masses was passed by the Puritans. For the first 200 years in America, children's reading instruction was in the Bible. ...

Scientific Law? Christianity is based on the notion that there exists a rational God who is the source of rational truth. This gave rise to the possibility of scientific laws.

Right! Nobody had education before Christians. Oh, wait! Where did we get the word "Academy" from? And, of course, the education of the masses didn't start, strangely enough, until after the Enlightenment, which Christians often lament. Before then, education was limited to the clergy and some of the nobility, while everyone else was told to accept their God-ordained place in life.

And isn't it suprising how those nasty pagan Greeks were able to do so much science without any idea of scientific laws?

So, basically, if you only consider what Christians have done, it's easy to show they did everything.
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