Christians do all these things:
feeding the poor, healing the sick, sheltering the homeless, and loving your neighbors, even if they are a transsexual undocumented Muslim immigrant and a lesbian Black-Asian Buddhist.
They do more of that than secular liberals. Listen to liberal Nicholas Kristof:
"I have little in common, politically or theologically, with evangelicals or, while I'm at it, conservative Roman Catholics. But I’ve been truly awed by those I’ve seen in so many remote places, combating illiteracy and warlords, famine and disease, humbly struggling to do the Lord’s work as they see it, and it is offensive to see good people derided...
I must say that a disproportionate share of the aid workers I’ve met in the wildest places over the years, long after anyone... sensible had evacuated, have been evangelicals, nuns or priests. Likewise, religious Americans donate more of their incomes to charity, and volunteer more hours, than the nonreligious, according to polls. In the United States and abroad, the safety net of soup kitchens, food pantries and women’s shelters depends heavily on religious donations and volunteers.”
~ Nicholas Kristof
"these areas are only now being evangelized. "
Here's an idea... don't.
The Book of Jonah ...
I think you're reading Jonah wrong. Why hide your lamp under a basket? Jesus told Christians to: ... go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Even without that, we know from history that Christianity remade western civilization into a better one than what the Greeks and Romans left.
The Christian West: A Superior Culture
March 2015By Terry Scambray
Terry Scambray lives and writes in Fresno, California.
The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. By Vishal Mangalwadi. Thomas Nelson. 403 pages. $16.99.
 Vishal Mangalwadi sees America and the Christian West (what’s left of it), for what they really are: the greatest places in the world to live.
One day, as Mangalwadi and his wife, Ruth, were driving through Minneapolis on the interstate, they heard sirens behind them. Traffic screeched to a halt as drivers pulled over to let an ambulance and police cars speed by. Ruth’s eyes welled up with tears. “How much they care for their people,” she said. She thinks the same thing when she sees traffic stopping for a child to get off a school bus. In India, where the Mangalwadis were born and raised, children need an adult to protect them when boarding or exiting a school bus so as to prevent them from being run over by the bus or by an erratic, speeding driver. Between personal observations like these in The Book that Made Your World, Mangalwadi, an Indian social reformer and author of eighteen books, provides an absorbing and thorough argument for Western civilization and what sets it apart from other cultures.
Consider these points: The Arabs, with their streamlined “Arabic numbers,” copied from India, failed to develop double-entry bookkeeping, a credit and debit system “vital not just for entrepreneurs, but crucial for the wealth of a nation.” So too the Greeks had the world’s first democracy, and the Romans had a gilded republic, yet neither survived for long. China had gunpowder and more and better ships earlier than the Europeans. Amazingly, China also had a printing press hundreds of years before the West, and “by A.D. 972 had printed 130,000 pages of the sacred Buddhist writings, the Tripitaka.” For that matter, “Korean printers invented moveable metal fonts at least two centuries before Gutenberg invented them in 1450.” Why, then, didn’t printing have the momentous effect in China or Korea that it had in the West? Mangalwadi writes, “Printing and books did not reform my continent because our religious philosophies undermined reason.” As other historians, philosophers, and anthropologists have noted, none of these cultures had a god like the God of the Bible, who is interested in human destiny. By contrast, the Greek and Roman gods were frivolous and capricious, and Buddhism offers awe and silence in the face of the unknowable. Neither picture of the cosmos affirms that men have inherent value. Christianity certifies this with the doctrine of the Incarnation, in which God’s Son deigned to become a man for the salvation of mankind.
The Judeo-Christian God is also a creator, a maker. This gave license for Western man, in imitation of his God, to make things. Mangalwadi quotes medieval historian Ernst Benz to the effect that “Christian beliefs provided the rationale, and faith the motive energy for Western technology.” Thus, it is not an accident that medieval monasteries developed plows capable of deeply churning the soil, so necessary for drainage and productive agriculture. And though the water wheel was invented earlier, medieval monks made it efficient with the invention of the crank, “the most important invention after the wheel.” The flywheel was invented by Theophilus, a German monk who was also a skilled metallurgist, general craftsman, stylish writer, Bible scholar, and theologian. Mangalwadi writes that Theophilus’s seclusion made him more biblical and less influenced by the common disdain for physical labor and snobbery toward technology that was inherited from Greece and Rome. Against this background, Mangalwadi argues that the Renaissance’s re-assertion of classicism delayed the development of Western technology.
Science flourished in the fertile ground of Christendom because Christians saw that their rational God had made a universe of uniform laws on which men with their own rational minds — again in imitation of the mind of the super-intending God — could rely. Mangalwadi quotes Augustine, who wrote that we could not understand and believe in Christianity “unless we possessed rational souls.” Logic and reason are thought to be a contribution of the Greeks, but Mangalwadi argues that they forfeited that contribution because logic and reason in classical Greece descended into sophistry and from there into cynicism about its capacity to discover the truth. Thus, a proliferation of cults and mysticism followed the decline of Greece and continued into the rise of Rome. Mangalwadi compares this decline to the West’s current descent into postmodern solipsism and new-age occultism.
It took Christianity to retrieve logos, the Greek word for “reason” or “animating principle,” when the evangelist John opened his Gospel with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” With this, John characterized Jesus as the animating principle of the universe and the source of reason as expressed in a most fundamental trait of mankind: language.
For all the revealing history in The Book that Made Your World, language is its real subject. Mangalwadi’s view is that God spoke to mankind in the Bible, though the Bible’s impact was limited at first because it was written in Latin. Later, Bibles were translated into the vernacular. Leaders like King Henry VIII thought that “reading the Bible would make Englishmen docile and obedient.” It did the opposite. People began insisting that the Word of God was a higher authority than the Church or the crown. This change had an explosive effect in the West, leading to the development of constitutional republics modeled on the distribution of power in the Old Testament, when Moses ruled with the guidance of the elders who themselves were bound by the Ten Commandments.
Mangalwadi relies on respected science historian Edward Grant to support his contention that European medieval society, with its moorings in the Bible, was unique in its creation of a particular religious person, “the medieval schoolman,” who used logic as a primary tool to study divinity. No earlier culture had created such a rational person with the intellectual “capacity for establishing the foundations of the nation-state, parliaments, democracy, commerce, banking and higher education and various literary forms, such as novels and history.”
Mangalwadi critiques postmodernist “versions” of history, expressed by influential thinkers like British armchair anthropologist James Fraser, author of The Golden Bough, and his acolyte Joseph Campbell, both of whom claim that Christianity is one among many myths, manifestations of human wishes for significance in a meaningless cosmos. Dan Brown’s widely popular DaVinci Code relies on both perennial disaffection with Christianity and faddish relativism to spin his sinister fantasy of a misogynistic and corrupt Church. Christianity, however, as the most enduring and influential institution in history, could never have been built and sustained on the quicksand of relativism and corruption — it would have buried itself long ago.
That Christianity is synonymous with Western civilization and its distinctive attributes like science and technology should not be a surprise. Unfortunately, it is to most people. Even when eminent British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead told a Harvard audience in 1925 that modern science was a product of Christianity, his remarks were greeted with surprise. Likewise, Mangalwadi’s rich and illuminating presentation of the impact of Christianity will enlighten many people.
Those in the great community of the educated-but-misinformed, including those in the academy and editorial offices, will see Mangalwadi as “triumphalist,” “Eurocentric,” or whatever is the current knee-jerk taunt. Regardless, he is operating in the tradition of historians like Christopher Dawson, James Hitchcock, and Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, as well as those currently writing on the topic, like Rodney Stark, Alvin Schmidt, and Thomas Woods. These men work to undo the damage done by the false narrative that plagues the West, aptly described by Orwell: “For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on.” Mangalwadi is doing his part to mend our precarious perch.
http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=0315-scambray
..... So where did the idea of equal rights come from?
The 19th-century political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville said it came from Christianity. "The most profound geniuses of Rome and Greece" never came up with the idea of equal rights, he wrote. "Jesus Christ had to come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal."
The 19th-century atheist Friedrich Nietzsche agreed: "Another Christian concept ... has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights."
Contemporary atheist Luc Ferry says the same thing. We tend to take the concept of equality for granted; yet it was Christianity that overthrew ancient social hierarchies between rich and poor, masters and slaves. "According to Christianity, we were all 'brothers,' on the same level as creatures of God," Ferry writes. "Christianity is the first universalist ethos."
The Confession of Richard Rorty
A few intrepid atheists admit outright that they have to borrow the ideal of human rights from Christianity. Philosopher Richard Rorty was a committed Darwinist, and in the Darwinian struggle for existence, the strong prevail while the weak are left behind. So evolution cannot be the source of universal human rights. Instead, Rorty says, the concept came from "religious claims that human beings are made in the image of God." He cheerfully admits that he reaches over and borrows the concept of universal rights from Christianity. He even called himself a "freeloading" atheist: "This Jewish and Christian element in our tradition is gratefully invoked by freeloading atheists like myself."
At the birth of our nation, the American founders deemed it self-evident that human rights must be grounded in God. The Declaration of Independence leads off with those bright, blazing words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident -- that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."
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They borrow ideals like equality and rights from a biblical worldview but cut them off from their source in the Creator. They are freeloaders. Christians and Jews should reclaim those noble ideals, making the case that they are logically supported only by a biblical worldview.
Atheists often denounce the Bible as harsh and negative. But in reality it offers a much more positive view of the human person than any competing religion or worldview. It is so appealing that adherents of other worldviews keep freeloading the parts they like best.
An Atheist Decries Humanism
To track down additional cases of freeloading, we can eavesdrop on atheists' in-house debates. For example, John Gray regularly castigates his fellow atheists and materialists for their habit of freeloading. Logically, he points out, materialism leads to reductionism -- the conclusion that humans are nothing but animals. But most materialists do not want to accept that bleak conclusion. They want to grant humanity a higher status and dignity; they want to believe that humans have "consciousness, selfhood, and free will," Gray writes. That high view of humanity he labels humanism -- and he denounces it as a prime example of freeloading.
"Humanists never tire of preaching" the gospel of human freedom, Gray complains. But "Darwin has shown us that we are animals," and therefore "the idea of free will does not come from science." Instead "its origins are in religion -- not just any religion, but the Christian faith against which humanists rail so obsessively." Thus humanism "is only a secular version" of Christian principles.
We could say that humanists do not want to live within the confines of their own materialist box. So they smuggle in ladders from a biblical worldview to climb out of the box.
Gimme That Old-Time Philosophy
Perhaps the most egregious example of freeloading is a movement to hijack the explicitly religious dimensions of Christianity. For example, there's a new field that uses philosophy to treat psychological problems. Labeled Philosophical Counseling, it is touted as an alternative to the care provided by therapists, priests, and pastors.
These are atheists who want the psychological comfort of Christianity, while rejecting its content.
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In A Brief History of Thought, Luc Ferry diagnoses several "substitute religions." Many atheist ideologies offer spirituality for secular people, he says: "If religions can be defined as 'doctrines of salvation', the great philosophies can also be defined as doctrines of salvation (but without the help of God)."
An example is Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life." Hadot says accepting a philosophy is like a religious conversion: It involves "a total transformation of one's vision, life-style, and behavior." It "turns our entire life upside down." You literally stake your life -- and your eternity -- on a set of ideas being true.
In the ancient world, when philosophy was still young, its life-transforming power was widely recognized. The philosopher was not regarded as an expert in an academic field but revered as a "spiritual guide," Hadot says. "He exhorted his charges to conversion, and then directed his new converts ... to the paths of wisdom." Hadot seeks to recover that spiritual role for secular philosophy.
So does philosopher Alain de Botton, author of Religion for Atheists. Botton is founder of a school in London where students study philosophy not to earn an academic degree but to ponder "the most serious questions of the soul." One class, titled "Filling the God-Shaped Hole," helps people fill the vacuum in their lives when they abandon traditional religions.
The common thread running through these examples is that they are all attempts to fill the God-shaped hole with something other than God.
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Don't accept a God-substitute .... seek the real thing.
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