Christianity has its big flaw, namely its basic polytheism, the same flaw that ironically Abraham was trying to remedy long before Christ's time. But it is important for our clear thinking about values and their sources to recognize that Christianity, as a system of thought and of living, also has some large strengths. It has lasted roughly two thousand years, and its clear predecessor, Judaism, has lasted at least a thousand more. 

My own model of human history argues that each meme complex/culture shapes the social behavior of its carriers and that the behavior then directly controls the survival odds of the society programmed by that meme complex/culture. From this model, one can easily infer that any values-system that has lasted over a hundred generations and grown in numbers of adherents must have some strengths. That value-system must foster behaviors in its adherents that work in the real world, or the generations of believers would have dwindled away and died out long ago. 

Christianity has many strengths, but let's talk about just three for now. 

In the first place, Christians are urged to downplay the importance of material things. Jesus said a camel would get through the eye of a needle before a rich man got into heaven. From all accounts, he himself had few-to-no possessions and wanted none. True, the churches all over the world are great hoarders of stuff, but their rationalizations for this materialism ring hollow even in the ears of small children. They lose credibility with their followers any time they visibly grow in materialism. It is too clearly not Jesus' way.  

And philanthropy has become a respected tradition in most Western societies. We tend to respect wealthy people much more when they give generously to the needy of their communities and of the world. And many of them do. Even bosses of organized crime consolidate their grips on their communities by giving to the poor. Is this guilt or human decency? Whatever we see as the motive, charity was certainly not a virtue practiced by many. if any, in pre-Christian times. Charity meant a few shekels to the beggars on the sidewalk when one was feeling good. Organized charities before Jesus were all but unknown. 

Charity, even at a very basic level, helps to knit a society together more tightly and to reduce the odds of a revolution breaking out even in hard times. At the same time, it improves the odds that the society's citizens will close ranks and pull together, even fight side by side, when threatened by a tyrant, especially if the tyrant can readily be painted as an enemy of the very Christian values that make a compassionate, sharing way of life possible. Thus, the survival odds for the tribe and its way of life are raised. 

A second big strength of Christianity is its insistence on our trying to extend our empathy for other human beings beyond the circle of our families or our tribes. All other human beings are our brothers and sisters, and I must grant every one of my neighbors the same consideration in all things that I would wish to see granted to myself if the positions of myself and my neighbor were reversed. This is Jesus' Golden Rule in its simplest form, and every child can understand it. "How would you feel if you were in her shoes?"  

When we show respect and kindness even to outsiders, we proselytize for our way of life on the subtlest level. It was far more the decency of the priests and ministers, than the pain inflicted by the soldiers, that caused Western values to spread. 

In the calculations of cultural survival, one of the best defenses a society and its way of life can have is a good offense. In cultural terms, the priest did far more damage to the culture of the aboriginal community in which he set up chapel and school than any of the soldiers or traders ever did. But in an objective analysis we are also driven to admit here that he did a great deal of good for the spreading of his own Western way of life. 

Perhaps a side note is in order here. Like it or not, let us say clearly here that Western values now run this planet. Walmart, McDonald's, and so many like them are everywhere now. Almost everyone at the U.N. wears Western garb to the General Assembly. 

On the other hand, the big majority of us in the West are ready to try our best to educate and integrate - other cultures with our own and our own with other cultures. We know -implicitly today, I think - that we can't go on in the future as we have in the past. War, rapacious capitalism, and cultural imperialism have to stop.  

It is not a nice picture of Western imperialism we are painting at this point. But I contend that it is a real one, and it is only by looking at things as they are that we have any hope of learning how societies work and so of empowering ourselves to use our knowledge wisely and to do better in the future. To gradually move into a global way of life that is simply more efficient: a way of life for all of us that is vigorous, but that still has set war aside for good. Hard. Not impossible.   

A third large strength of Christianity, probably its largest strength, is the personalness of the Christian way of relating to God. This was Jesus' big breakthrough. "Don't pray in a rote-memorized, public, superficial way. Instead, talk to God as you would to me." And there is the crucial thing that Jesus did. He made each adherent's way of relating to the divine and thus, to the values of his religion, personal. At the same time, he created for every citizen a form of therapy that enabled them to let off the hurt and frustration of living in close communities with fewer blows being struck. It doesn't work perfectly all of the time, but one shudders to think of what life was like for so many ordinary folk, living without the restraint of compassion or the outlet of prayer, before Jesus' time. He gave us a way to let the poison out. 

Violence, especially domestic violence, once was the rule. But gradually, over generations, people are learning a way of life in which they don't take their frustrations out on each other. They talk out their problems, or they talk to God and calm down. All of this makes complex, industrial society with all of its forms of alienation a little easier to bear. That trend again raises the odds of the Western way of life surviving and growing more vigorous each generation.     

Granted, in modern times, many in the West are losing or have lost their faith in God. But the numbers and sincerity of believers have wavered about before. What is important to see is that we are part of a two thousand year old human social trend and that the values that have given us our present complex and affluent way of life are the ones that Jesus taught. Love your neighbor. When that gets hard, talk to God. You'll get a lot of anger out of your system, and once you calm down, you'll start to see ways that your family's problems or those of your whole society can be eased, reduced, and finally eradicated. Love and a privately accessed back-up system that supports love in every human heart and renews it even when events do not - these have served us well. They have enabled the progress we have made so far, and they are what must see us through if we are to survive at all.   

But to close, let me re-iterate the major point made in my last post, and integrate it with what is being said in this one: Jesus was not a god. He had a spark of something in him that seems divine to us even now. But it was only a bigger spark, or flame if you like, than lies in the rest of us. He differed from you and me in degree, not in type. Worshipping Jesus as a partner-God is a way of going down the broad road to perdition. Definitely the wrong direction. We can feel a personal connection to God without viewing Jesus as God too. We were instructed to talk to God as we would in private to a good friend. That we can do. And it works. 

A way of talking to God in private and with total candor, that is the big gift that we got, as a whole species, from Jesus. It made, and it still makes, our salvation from the hell called "war" possible. 

The rest is up to us.