[ExI] Existential hysteria [Mirco Romanato]

[Tara Maya]

On Aug 3, 2014, at 10:36 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 3:40 PM, Mirco Romanato  wrote:
>> The main big advantage of Christianity, at the time, was it cared of every
>> human life whatsoever. So they adopted abandoned, orphan children (Romans
>> would have, at best, taken them as slaves), they didn't practices exposition
>> of the infants (so they had less dead children and more surviving one). They
>> were altruistic and cared of their own and other's poor. And when plagues
>> hit the cities, the clergy of the other gods flew away in the country
>> leaving their own and every one else to die.
>> Christians were willing to risk and die to take care of the others. So, in
>> the end, after very plague, more people were cared and exposed to the
>> behavior of Christians. Some would convert, some would change their attitude
>> to them from negative to neutral to friendly.
> 



Buddhism and Jainism also value all life, including all non-human life.

I'll argue that the best thing Christianity did for Europe was enforce monogamy. This indirectly led to the eradication of slavery (until the Europeans joined back into the African slave trade a millennia later) in Europe, because by Roman law, the child took on the condition of the mother:  A slave woman gave birth to a slave, a free woman to a free child. So men preferentially married free women. The upper class, because they were limited to one wife, could only monopolize one free woman each, leaving enough free women for lower class men to marry them. (Daughters who were born slaves often had to be freed by the owners in order to marry.) Thus, within a few centuries, Europe went from having a huge slave population to having no slaves left. 


Tara Maya
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