doesn't fit with common experience.
You grew up in an irreligious home. But among other things, your dissertation is part of a religious
quest. You want to know the answer to the questions, What does the high priesthood of the metaphysical
naturalist school think? What's orthodox for them and what's not?
On another topic: I want to challenge something implied in a few of your notes, namely, that
Christianity has been a source (in the West) of unparalleled oppression and violence and that if Christians
had their way, they'd subjugate everyone. This is a popular view and, like most popular views, it's mostly
false. Secularist ideologies have led to much more hardship, political oppression, economic chaos and
mass killing than any Western theological system has.
Let me say at the outset that there's no point in trying to "explain away" the violence that has been, and
still is, perpetrated in Christ's name. Self-defense is one thing and just war theory is generally accepted,
but torching people because they don't accept a certain theological point of view can't be defended from
the New Testament.
But history is complicated, and no responsible historian I know of claims that theology was the only
motivator behind the witch trials and various inquisitions. Instead they point to tensions and uncertainties
created by the usual suspects: political challenges (nobles versus lords, lords versus princes, princes
versus emperors, emperors versus the pope), economic change, devastating disease, bad weather and the
need to explain the origins of these problems. It's universally accepted (except among some teachers who
imbibe their knowledge from TV docudramas) that the exceedingly brutal "wars of religion" had much
less to do with religion than they did with political power and the desire of unleashed young men to rape
and pillage. (Ditto for the conquistadors in the New World.)
Also, very few people were executed for religious reasons without trial. Of course, the evidence
gathered at the trials was usually bogus. (At Salem, George Burroughs was found guilty of being a
warlock partly because he had an unusually large number of toads living on his property!) But trials were
conducted, and a lot of people were set free. At Salem over 100 people were accused; about 20 were
executed. Once the hysteria subsided, the authorities acknowledged publicly that those executed were
innocent, and money was given to their families. This is all quite pathetic, but the image one has of
Puritans out to fry all disbelievers is false. The famous "heretics" Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams
were not executed.
If in the Middle Ages the big boys in the church were out to snuff the theologically impure, they did a
crappy job of it. It's generally recognized now that theological orthodoxy was probably in short supply
among "common" people in much of Europe, which was overwhelmingly rural. Old pagan beliefs were
mixed with Christian ones. Thus the current celebrations of Christmas and Easter, holidays ("holy days")
that contain both Christian and pagan elements.
Europe began to become a more humane place at precisely the time literacy was spreading, partly as a
result of the Protestant Reformation. The more people could read the New Testament for themselves, the
more they-or at least some-could see that Jesus never asked his disciples to toast the hard-hearted.
But even if the inaccurate cliches about Christian violence were correct, systematic mass slaughter
without trial has been an innovation (since the advent of Christ) of secularists. We see it first with the
mass killing by drowning (les noyades) of the anti-Christian fanatics of the French Revolution. We see it