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Many of the values we hold today as self-evident and immutable are values that we did not hold dear until quite recently, and find their origin not in Biblical moral codes but in the development of values from the Enlightenment onward. Examples:

Individual autonomy - each person owns himself. Slavery and lesser forms of ownership are morally repugnant. Same with torture, once a ubiquitous practice.

Racism - discrimination based on race is morally repugnant

Misogyny - abuse of women was universally tolerated within the lifetime of most of the people on the board. Only until very recently was spouse abuse considered worthy of punishment by the state, and victims worthy of protection. Likewise, self-ownership of women, including the idea of rape as a tort against the state rather than the woman's owner (husband or father) is quite recent

Children - Economically valuable and emotionally worthless to economically worthless and emotionally valuable. Infanticide was once a VERY common practice, practiced by most people except for the very rich. Even in the 18th century it was quite common to find the corpses of abandoned babies everywhere one went. Abuse of children was completely ignored until early in the 20th century. Early orphanages were quite literally death camps, where 50-95% of children died due to neglect, abuse, or over-work. Jewish law permitted the murder of infants under the age of one month, and the execution by stoning of disobedient children. Now child abuse is unthinkable, let alone infanticide, to the point where even spanking is a crime in many developed countries.

Democracy - not a new concept, but one developed quite apart from the Judeo-Christian tradition and only realized in full in the last 250 years.

Capitalism - once barely tolerated as a necessary evil, now lauded as God's own system of exchange, even though the scriptures never advocate anything but collectivism.

The humanism of the enlightenment has more to do with the genesis of what we consider our most cherished values than does the Bible. The Bible tells us not to worship false gods and where not to rub our genitals. The Enlightenment helped us learn to live in peace and stop murdering our children and raping our wives and enslaving minorities.

Morality is evolving. We're watching it happen right before our eyes, but with our historical myopia, our new morals seem so obvious and eternal. They weren't obvious a hundred or two hundred years ago. It's obvious now that rape, infanticide, genocide, slavery, racism, sexism, torture, and now even homophobia are great social evils. This was not obvious to our ancestors.

I think perspective on these brand new morals does a great deal to dispel the notion that we need to have our morals handed to us by any omniscient third party. We seem to be figuring it out on our own. And the world has never been a safer, more peaceful place.

Apologies to Dr. Pinker.

I see Steven Pinker sold another vial of snake oil to an eager reader.

MrStakhanovite wrote:I see Steven Pinker sold another vial of snake oil to an eager reader.

Well, your detailed refutation has me convinced. Fraud! Fraud!

Buffalo wrote:Well, your detailed refutation has me convinced. Fraud! Fraud!

It doesn’t require a detailed refutation to be honest, Pinker suffers from some of the same problems Kuhn does, you can’t spin a tale of human history as some simple cause and effect, it is too messy and complicated to be that easy.

MrStakhanovite wrote:

Buffalo wrote:Well, your detailed refutation has me convinced. Fraud! Fraud!

It doesn’t require a detailed refutation to be honest, Pinker suffers from some of the same problems Kuhn does, you can’t spin a tale of human history as some simple cause and effect, it is too messy and complicated to be that easy.

While Pinker cautiously attempts to find causes and effects for the radical decrease in violence and atrocities in recent history (making use of multiple regression analysis to at least isolate correlated variables, pointing to developments such as literacy sparking greater empathy, the role of strong governments, democracy, free trade, etc), I didn't attempt to discuss such causes and effects in this thread. I am only pointing out the fact that the moral values discussed in the OP are of very recent origin.

Buffalo wrote:While Pinker cautiously attempts to find causes and effects for the radical decrease in violence and atrocities in recent history.

All I saw was some scientist doing bad history in trying to justify his ideas about evolutionary psychology.

Buffalo wrote:I didn't attempt to discuss such causes and effects in this thread. I am only pointing out the fact that the moral values discussed in the OP are of very recent origin.

Huh…

Buffalo wrote:The humanism of the enlightenment has more to do with the genesis of what we consider our most cherished values than does the Bible. The Bible tells us not to worship false gods and where not to rub our genitals. The Enlightenment helped us learn to live in peace and stop murdering our children and raping our wives and enslaving minorities.

Besides being grossly simplistic about what the Enlightenment was and was not, your argument is nothing better than this:

Roy Porter (actual trained and highly regarded historian) feels that modern Western medicine is dependent on a unique view of the Self. This unique view of the Self originated in modern times from Descartes, who constructed this idea with the help of his very devout and informed French Catholicism. So, you can thank Catholicism for making modern medicine what it is today.

Now the problem is this, since the enlightenment is an antecedent to modern moral values, is it a necessary one or a sufficient one? The most cautious answer to that question is that it is a necessary one, but Christianity is a necessary antecedent to Anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements here in America, since both are steeped in biblical language and scriptural citations. Should we thank Christianity today for ending slavery in America?

Nobody knows if the enlightenment was informed by European religion or if European religion was informed by the enlightenment, or if they both informed each other. There are simply to many variables and unknowns, and you shouldn’t construct some grand narrative of western history as some kind of evidence for your worldview when there isn’t such a clear cut answer.

MrStakhanovite wrote:

Buffalo wrote:While Pinker cautiously attempts to find causes and effects for the radical decrease in violence and atrocities in recent history.

All I saw was some scientist doing bad history in trying to justify his ideas about evolutionary psychology.

Show me.

MrStakhanovite wrote:

Buffalo wrote:I didn't attempt to discuss such causes and effects in this thread. I am only pointing out the fact that the moral values discussed in the OP are of very recent origin.

Huh…

Buffalo wrote:The humanism of the enlightenment has more to do with the genesis of what we consider our most cherished values than does the Bible. The Bible tells us not to worship false gods and where not to rub our genitals. The Enlightenment helped us learn to live in peace and stop murdering our children and raping our wives and enslaving minorities.

The Enlightenment is the turnaround point. I didn't attempt to articulate some sort of unifying grand cause. Do you have any beef with the actual OP, or just with Pinker?

MrStakhanovite wrote:Besides being grossly simplistic about what the Enlightenment was and was not, your argument is nothing better than this:

Roy Porter (actual trained and highly regarded historian) feels that modern Western medicine is dependent on a unique view of the Self. This unique view of the Self originated in modern times from Descartes, who constructed this idea with the help of his very devout and informed French Catholicism. So, you can thank Catholicism for making modern medicine what it is today.

Now the problem is this, since the enlightenment is an antecedent to modern moral values, is it a necessary one or a sufficient one? The most cautious answer to that question is that it is a necessary one, but Christianity is a necessary antecedent to Anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements here in America, since both are steeped in biblical language and scriptural citations. Should we thank Christianity today for ending slavery in America?

Nobody knows if the enlightenment was informed by European religion or if European religion was informed by the enlightenment, or if they both informed each other. There are simply to many variables and unknowns, and you shouldn’t construct some grand narrative of western history as some kind of evidence for your worldview when there isn’t such a clear cut answer.

No one is claiming that Christians and their modern ideas are absent from the reforming process, but the point is, these values are not expressed in the Bible and do not originate there. Furthermore, they did not originate from any priestly source, but rather in the flow secular thought from the Enlightenment onward. (Christian doctrine has followed these developments, not lead them.) And most of the new moral values are actually in opposition to the Bible.

These morals were formulated quite recently, which discredits the idea that values need to be handed down from on high. We're reasoning them out as we go.

I'm unclear about the idea that Christianity could have been a necessary antecedent to reform. The atrocities of the holocaust helped spark anti-genocide movements, but only because the violence and more importantly the global awareness of the violence were so shocking. Is that what you mean?

Buffalo wrote:Show me.

I thought I did, but I’ll do it again with what you wrote.

Buffalo wrote:The Enlightenment is the turnaround point. I didn't attempt to articulate some sort of unifying grand cause. Do you have any beef with the actual OP, or just with Pinker?

I’m taking issue with what you wrote. Look at what your claiming:

Buffalo wrote:No one is claiming that Christians and their modern ideas are absent from the reforming process, but the point is, these values are not expressed in the Bible and do not originate there.

Now compare it with my counter-example of what you are doing:

MrStakhanovite wrote:Roy Porter (actual trained and highly regarded historian) feels that modern Western medicine is dependent on a unique view of the Self. This unique view of the Self originated in modern times from Descartes, who constructed this idea with the help of his very devout and informed French Catholicism. So, you can thank Catholicism for making modern medicine what it is today.

And of course, the lesson is this:

MrStakhanovite wrote:Nobody knows if the enlightenment was informed by European religion or if European religion was informed by the enlightenment, or if they both informed each other.

Compare again with what you wrote (bolded mine):

Buffalo wrote:No one is claiming that Christians and their modern ideas are absent from the reforming process, but the point is, these values are not expressed in the Bible and do not originate there. Furthermore, they did not originate from any priestly source, but rather in the flow secular thought from the Enlightenment onward. (Christian doctrine has followed these developments, not lead them.) And most of the new moral values are actually in opposition to the Bible.

You don’t understand what I’m saying. You, Pinker, and no one else can sit down and separate all the necessary/sufficient/unnecessary causes that get a civilization’s intellectual and moral status quo from Classical Greece to the Middle Ages, or from the Enlightenment to the 21st century. You don’t know enough to even seriously make the claim that that Christianity had no necessary influence on the enlightenment, but that didn’t stop you from making that claim.

Buffalo, when you were a Mormon did you uncritically swallow down everything Hugh Nibely published like it was divine milk?

MrStakhanovite wrote:
You don’t understand what I’m saying. You, Pinker, and no one else can sit down and separate all the necessary/sufficient/unnecessary causes that get a civilization’s intellectual and moral status quo from Classical Greece to the Middle Ages, or from the Enlightenment to the 21st century. You don’t know enough to even seriously make the claim that that Christianity had no necessary influence on the enlightenment, but that didn’t stop you from making that claim.

Buffalo, when you were a Mormon did you uncritically swallow down everything Hugh Nibely published like it was divine milk?

You don't really seem to be addressing my OP at all. Your example about modern medicine is particularly irrelevant to the topic of this thread, which is not, by the way, that "Christians have contributed nothing good whatsoever." And comparing Nibley to Pinker is silly. Pinker is a perfectly good scholar and thinker. Even if you don't agree with his assessment of the causes of the decrease in violence and social injustice, it's a fact that they're quite recent, as are the moral values behind them.

Have you read the book in question?

There are serious problems with your analysis. Take just a few of your claims:

Slavery and lesser forms of ownership are morally repugnant. Same with torture, once a ubiquitous practice.

First, slavery. Historically slavery died out after the sunset of the Roman Empire in the West, concomitant with the spread of Christianity in the realms of the Western empire. But, I'm not going to make the case that this was all Christianity's doing (though I do think there is a connection). Slavery was reintroduced in the late middle ages for various economic reasons. This version of slavery was eventually eliminated from British realms by a group of committed Christians, the most prominent of which was William Wilberforce. In the U.S. slavery was both defended and attacked on Christian grounds, thus guaranteeing that whichever side won, it was going to be based in large part on a particular interpretation of Christianity. My point being that your analysis of the demise of slavery as a triumphalism of Enlightenment values, ignoring Christian involvement, is naïve and self serving.

As for torture, it was still a widespread practice in the 20th century, though almost exclusively in purely secular states such as Stalinist USSR and Maoist China. You may not like their form of Enlightenment, but they claimed as philosophical foundation the strand of Enlightenment that came from Hegel and Marx.

discrimination based on race is morally repugnant

Yes it is. And the largest push against it in the United States was by a movement which was largely Christian, with a healthy contingent of Jews joining in for solidarity. The Civil Rights movement as such would not have been possible without the black church. Were they calling to repentance fellow Christians? Absolutely! But that is what Christians do, they call each other to repentance because they are not behaving properly. The "Dr." in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a doctorate in theology.

Infanticide was once a VERY common practice, practiced by most people except for the very rich

I hate to break it to you, but infanticide is still a very common practice. The difference is that we do it pre-birth and call it abortion. The only reason that people killed babies and not fetuses before was lack of technology, not some desire to kill infants. People did try and abort babies prior to modern medical techniques because in logical terms it's easier and more desireable to get rid of the kid sooner rather than later. The reason they tended not to do this is because it often resulted in a dead mother, not just a dead baby. I grant that modern abortion is superior because it results in only one dead person, not two, but it's still institutionalized infanticide.

And, here is one where Christianity did have a visible impact. Christians, unlike their pagan neighbors, by and large did not engage in the practice of infanticide. Rodney Stark hypothesizes that lack of infanticide gave Christians a superior breeding advantage in two ways. First, the obvious is that more Christian babies survived. But secondly, more female Christian babies survived. Infanticide tended to preferentially kill female babies as they were seen as financial liabilities, while males were financial assets. But, this put pagans at a substantial breeding disadvantage because the capacity for a society to produce a new generation is mostly dependent on the number of females, not the number of males. I also hardly need point out that from a feminist perspective, this was giant leap forward for women.

I could go on, but I'm getting bored. Your post is really nothing more than revisionist history and is transparent wishful thinking where your new side of village atheism magically creates all that is good, while those dumb believers are responsible for all that is evil in the world. It's bad thinking and bad history.