Tom Holland & AC Grayling • History: Did Christianity give us our human values?

today we're debating history did Christianity give us our human values the big conversation partners I'm sitting down with today are Tom Holland and AC grayling Tom Holland is an award-winning historian author and broadcaster the author of several popular books on classical history such as Rubicon and in the shadow of the sword his latest book Dominion tells the story of how Christianity and most specifically its central story of the crucified son of God came to shape the values of human dignity and equality in the modern Western world in ways that modern Sekulow often fail to realize ac grayling is master of the new college of humanities in London and is a well-known philosopher author and broadcaster himself his most recent book the history of philosophy traces the various schools of thought that have shaped modern culture as an atheist an advocate of humanism peace critical of the place of religion in society and fundamentally disagrees with Tom Hollands view of the unequaled historical value of Christianity to the West so Tom and Anthony welcome along to the program Hugh it's great to have you both with me today this is a big issue spanning literally millennia so we're going to be doing a lot in a very short amount of time on today's program really really looking forward though to our conversation today I start with you Tom tell us a little about what you sketch out in the opening to Dominion which is the way that you actually personally changed your mind on the value of Christianity as you investigated classical side of history in in some of your works well I think I think it's less of the value than the significance or the argument is not about whether God exists it's not even about whether Christianity has been a good or bad thing although I think that the the values by which we judge whether it's good or bad are themselves broadly Christian but this was a perspective that I was not entirely given to embracing and that goes back essentially to my childhood as I think for so many people's relationship to this issue does because it's very personal I think that in itself is a measure of how significant the influence of of Christianity is on us actually that the degree to which we are shaped by it from our childhoods but I was as a child I was brought up an Anglican I went to church I sang in choir I went to Sunday school but to be honest I found it kind of dull the thing I really enjoyed the thing that really kind of got my blood moving was the classical world and I liked it for the same reason that I had earlier been obsessed by dinosaurs namely that it was big it was fierce it was extinct and to be honest I would have you know I was very much on the side of Pontius Pilate I the Eagles the togas the glamour of it and Jesus kind of slightly dull in comparison I mean a loser really and so it wasn't the tie you know there was a kind of dramatic moment where I lost my faith it was just like a kind of dial going slightly down a dimmer switch and it was essentially blotted out by the Sun of my fascination with the classical world and say when I in due course came to write history it was the Romans it was the Greeks that I wanted to write about but I found the experience of living in the minds of people like Caesar people like they need us the king who dies at Thermopylae people who I had deeply admired as a child kind of almost hero worship I found it increasingly unsettling Caesar was renowned among the Romans for his quality of clementa his clemency his mercy but this was a man who it is said slaughtered a million ghouls and enslaved another and was kind of sheared through the streets of Rome for it and I began to think that actually these are so remote from me so alien that actually the kind of assumption I'd had that these were the the seedbeds of my own values my own assumptions probably wrong and so essentially over the past decade and a half really I've been kind of maneuvering myself towards writing a book which was where I think ultimately the values of humanism of secularism of liberalism that I hold actually come from and this was a quest that was sharpened for me by writing a book about the origins of Islam where I was essentially making the argument that a lot that that Muslims believe about the origins of Islam are actually mythic are back projections and it was a repeated complaint of Muslim critics that I would never dream of doing the same to my own beliefs and values so in this in a sense the minion is is an attempt to do that and to kind of trace the thread back of my liberal humanist values and to see where it leads through the labyrinth and ultimately it leads back to to Christianity and I've come to the conclusion that in almost all the essentials myself my friends the society in which I live in the whole of the West is so saturated in Christian assumptions that it's almost impossible to kind of remove ourselves from them and you say almost that in the book that it's it's almost that it is so widespread that we almost don't notice it it's the kind of water whisks yeah well the metaphor that was a kind of on my mind when I was writing the book was you know if the West is a goldfish bowl then it's essentially the water that we swim in is Christianity but then after I'd finished the book another metaphor struck me when I watched the HBO series Chernobyl Amman the explosion of the the nuclear reactor in in the Soviet Union and what you saw there when when the reactor smashes open you literally see the air ionizing so you can see the radioactivity leaking but the point of the story of course is that that reactivity is leaking units reaching Kiev it's reading Scandinavia it's reaching you know the the sheep farms of Cumbria and people are breathing it in and being affected by it and don't even realize often that they're being affected I mean I surely would perhaps approve of the comparison of Christianity to radioactivity but I'm not saying that Christianity makes your hair drop out of pills but but but it changed you in ways that you may not appreciate and just quickly sketch out why that central idea you say this in the book is so important you say the belief that the son of the one god of the Jews had been tortured to death on a cross became so enduringly and widely held that today most of us in the West adult - just how scandalous it originally was why why is that image so important at the center of Christianity well the cross today is probably the most internationally recognizable cultural symbol that humanity has ever devised but the symbolism of it has been turned on its head what the cross symbolized for Rome and for those who was subject to Rome was the power of the greatest empire on the face of the earth to torture to death anyone who opposed its rule and governors of Roman provinces had the right to burn rebels to throw them to the Lions or to crucify them and of these three faiths crucifixion was regarded as the worst as in a sense being the that the the the archetypal punishment for a rebellious slave and the reason that it was so horrible was it was physically excruciating there was no one way of committed of doing a crucifixion you can be hung upside down you could be impaled or you could have nails smashed through your bones and to stay alive on a cross you would have to pull yourself up and down so you would feel the metal scraping against your bone the whole time birds would flock around your head you'd be unable to beat them away you'd be unable to stop them as they pecked out your eyes you would be naked and so hours perhaps days of excruciating agony would be endured but worse than that from the kind of the Roman point of view it would be public you would be a kind of billboard advertising your own humiliation and the power of the authorities that were putting you to death and so the idea that this symbol of all symbols should in a sense have kind of been upended that from degradation the notion of triumph from from humiliation glory from from from death life and that more than that the idea that someone who suffers the death of a slave emerges to become it turns out to be in a sense the the creator of all heaven and earth and of all humanity what that means in the long run is that it gives a dignity to people who previously would would not have been afforded dignity by anyone it embeds at the at the heart of the West the idea that in the victim can triumph over the person who is victimizing him and that the lowest of the low might in a sense be the highest and these in the context of of certainly of Roman culture it's hard to emphasize just how radical a concept that is and therefore just how much of a kind of a detonation it is under the assumptions of Roman power and the measure of how fast that explosion was is that now by and large we tend to take for granted foot you know the lowest of the low do have a dignity fascinating stuff I'm sure Antony you can have a lot to say about some of those issues I was interested to see that your own book the history of philosophy also begins by talking about Christianity but in far less glowing terms in a sense than Tom's one of the quotes from the introduction is Christian zealots are smashed statues and temples defaced paintings and burned pagan books in an orgy of effacement of previous culture that lasted for several centuries it is hard to comprehend still less to forgive the immense loss of literature philosophy history and general culture this represented so in a way your book starts it with a very different view of of the significance of Christianity when it comes to our culture of history do you want to tell us a little bit about how that Keys into your your overall thesis in the world sure so let me make a general point first and then a particular one so that the general point is this if you look at the larger picture into which the story of Christianity fits then you you notice that it is Christianity is in all its various forms based on a sort of reprise of what had been very commonplace tropes in the mythologies of the Middle East right back to Sumerian time so right back to 4500 BC and earlier you know the idea of the dying and resurrecting God or the immortal who suffers for having done something for mankind like Prometheus on his rock and so on again and again the theme has come up and Christianity is just a version of those you know God making a mortal maiden pregnant who gives birth to some extraordinary figure who does various things including going to the underworld and coming out and joining Zeus on the limbus or God in heaven it these are very very familiar stories and they lie it's a very thin covering over a scaffolding which is fundamentally classical so many ancient Greece also Rome what those two great civilization inducing epochs did was to transmit but refine much that had come to them in the way of art and architecture and government but it added I mean if you think about the contribution made by Greece in philosophy and science and theater and poetics and political theory and even sports and games and it's extraordinary the vocabulary the conceptual framework of pretty well everything that we think the mind of Europe was was forged and and articulated in classical civilization that's the general point the particular point is this if you ask if you address the particular point that the the trauma is raising about the the sort of ethical outlook of European civilization post Theodosius the first post 380 ad when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and and you you ponder the question of what exactly is it about Christian ethics the Christian ethical outlook which is new or novel now in the very very early church in the sort of apostolic writings if you address them with the question how should I live how should I behave the answer you get is a very extraordinary one give away everything you own take no call for tomorrow don't marry if your family disagree with you turn your back on them now this is the outlook over of people who believe that the parousia was imminent the Second Coming was just about to happen and indeed you know in many hundreds maybe thousands of people went off into the deserts and got themselves on top of columns and what-have-you in order to try to live that that existence the complete denial of the world and when it turned out that um the parousia was taking a bit longer than people thought they were consulting their new moms and finding that you know time was ticking by they needed more content they needed something that applied really to the question of relating to your neighbors and and having a life which was in some sense intrinsically good where did they get it from they got it from the classical ethical tradition imported pretty well wholesale from stoicism is one of the leading sources for it because of course the Stoics had come up with the idea of the cosmopolitan outlook that everybody is and everybody is a citizen of the world on equal terms and and and merits respect very interesting I mean so essentially you're saying that in the general point Christianity was simply another version of the religions that have gone before and on this particular point you feel ultimately it only survived because it imported those Greek and classical philosophy is ultimately because it's yes and not just the ethics but also the metaphysics because you must remember that some Paul said that the Saints shall see no corruption they weren't rot in the graves and when the church building began in the in the 4th century and thereafter and lots of saints and martyrs were bagged up to be taken as relics into churches so that movements could be performed by them they found that they had corrupted in the grave they had rotten and so the the original Jewish inception of what happens at death namely the Jew lie in the grave and you wait until the Trump sounds and the graves open and you come out with some horses with a new body I keep telling people that I like that bit about support because I want a suntan and a six-pack a song but when that wasn't going to work out there had to import fire Platonism and Neoplatonism the Platonic doctrine of the immortal soul this was a very late entry into Christian metaphysical thinking for fifth century and of course that was the period to when the Canon was agreed and fundamental doctrines the Nicene Creed under Constantine the activity against the the heretics in order to try to get some sort of compromise going this comes very late and it comes on the back of having to import a lot of thinking and from then on and I end on this point from then on pretty about everything that you care to think of in the in the intellect of Europe including the work done by our again on Augustine and Aquinas and everybody else is predicated on Greek philosophy all the way through so it's no surprise to find in 18th century somebody like human saying if only I had had Cicero put into my hands as a child instead of the Catechism how much better off home had been there's quite a lot to respond to that some but maybe we'll begin with that general in particular issue that Anthony sees Christianity looked a lot like actually previous religions it wasn't as a radical departure as as you think it was and and was ultimately unlivable initially and had to import the the classical views well I mean I think I think there's a slight tension here in in in Antony's argument on the one hand he is saying quite correctly that Christianity as it emerges is hugely influenced by the cultures of the world into which it was born among which Greek philosophy is absolutely apart on the other hand Christians roam around smashing and destroying this culture I mean which is it it seems to me that it is evident that nothing comes from nothing Christianity does not emerge in a vacuum Greek philosophy is certainly an important aspect of it right from beginning Paul uses stoic terms in his letters when he's groping after trying to explain what it is that he means about the law of God that previously had been written on the tablets of stone given to Moses that's now written on the heart and he gropes after the the stoic concept of conscience to explain that but I think to imagine that Christianity is is is simply a kind of cladding over essentially a Greek temple is to ignore the obvious fact that the great influence obviously on Christianity and indeed influence isn't the word in a sense Christianity is is a street as a river diverting from a previously existing River is is that of the Jewish Scriptures you day is most the the Jewish Way of the of leading a life and Jewish scriptures in turn bear the stamp off of other influences they bear most salient Lee I think from the point of view of the way that Christianity will subsequently emerge they bear the stamp of Persian dualism and that's crucial because what that does is to moralize the world that's the great innovation of Persian imperialism is to cast the that the entire world is something that is divided between realms of of darkness and light between lion truth between evil and good so that also is a part of the fabric of what emerges as Christianity and then of course there is the the Roman Empire itself which provides a kind of globalized state of an order that had not ever before existed in the Mediterranean and the effect of Roman imperialism is on one hand it churns up populations through the process of of enslavement the transportation of Jews and Greeks and Persians and so on so that's one measurable effect the other is that it establishes a vast infrastructure along which people like Paul can travel he can take the roads he can take the ships um and so it's all these elements for the first time I kind of brought together but Christianity does I think reconfigure it in in in an incredibly radical way and as I say it is I think this astonishing idea that a crucified criminal who suffered the death of a slave is in some way a part of the one God who has created heaven and earth and Paul says that this is a stumbling block to the Jews why is it a stumbling block to the Jews well partly because of course the idea that that in some way a human being could be part of the one God of the Jews is is it kind of blasphemy to the Jews but it's also that this idea of there being a new covenant and this is a this is where Paul provides for people in the Empire a notion of shared citizenship an idea that there is no Jew or Greek that draws on stoic models that is echoing the brute fact of Roman imperialism but is enabling them to feel that the the God who had loved the Jews now loves all of humanity and it's that kind of reciprocal relationship that God loves you that you can love God that will prove incredibly potent in in in in in fostering this what will emerges is some kind of remarkable revolutionary movement but Paul also says that the crucifixion is folly to the Gentiles the folly to those who are not Jews because he recognizes the shock of the blasphemy that he is affecting Antony's quite right that of course there are indeed examples of mortals being raised up to the heavens and there's a very obvious one that Paul in who shadow Paul is is is wandering the empire because the fastest-growing cult in the 1st century AD is not Christianity it's the cult of a DV filius son of the god Augustus Caesar who is the adoptive son of Julius Caesar who has brought peace to the world and who has ascended into heaven after his death and sits at the right hand of his father so the scale of the blasphemy that bull is offering the Galatians and the Corinthians and the Romans is immense he's saying that actually the real son of the god the real son of God was a criminal crucified by the Romans but more than that everyone in a sense because of Christ's sacrifice can be children of God and he's saying that to the slaves to the Tanners to the people in the mines to the prostitutes in the bars and this is such a radical recalibration of assumptions of the Greeks and Romans that it's that it's the elites who matter that these kind of people at the bottom have no significance whatsoever what do you make all that oh well I mean tom-toms being very emphatic there about a point which again is just another commonplace of the period the reason why augustness could be you know described as the Son of God was because the concept of the Son of God was so widespread all the heroes were fought but yet the word is here oh yeah but I'm in red crucified so just paraphrase let's just see that people took that the view of somebody who is in somewhere extraordinary someone who stands out who has a great impact does some amazing thing or it's extremely significant must be the son of a god because a mortal just couldn't do it and I mean this goes way back Priam a Homeric view of the egregious individual to use that term neutrally now just to go back to it to the point of our contradictions there's no contradiction between saying that the early Christians tried to efface a pagan culture they failed they smashed a lot of temples and they burn a lot of books we only have the second which evidence do we have for that what what both let me give you an example we have seven of these Gillis's plays and we know the titles of 70 we have something like you know a dozen or so of Euripides who and we know the lives that we don't have them because Christians destroyed them well because the the transmission of these things through antiquity we know right up until the time Cicero right up until the time of dodging his lyosha Slater on how many of these documents had and then we started visas are Christians who destroyed them well we know the Christians destroyed a great deal of the material culture of dignity I mean all you have to do is just read about the first couple of decades after 380 under Theodosius the first but but do we have anything in whom you don't mention you don't mention the Theodosian attacking so let's make it I suppose it's a writer of 529 ad hold on a second time you had a wrong go there right up to a 529 a deer winch it just didn't enclosed the School of Athens after 900 years of Plato's Academy was closed and the philosophers were driven out there'd been a systematic attempt to try to a face that the record and and the remains of classical civilization in order to impose the Christian view on it it didn't work in the end because in the end Christianity had to absorb and adopt it look at Aquinas that the reason why termism is the official religion the the official philosophy beg a pardon of the Roman Catholic religion is because Aquinas had to take over the Aristotelian corpus wholesale so you know that in itself is and enough of an example but you know you you you're trying to stress this idea there was something really exceptional about the picture of Jesus as you know he was poor he was a carpenter's son he was tortured Ida slaves death and so on and this somehow is very special on the contrary it's it's just another example of a debate which is been going on for quite a long time in the Classical period about the position of the individual and the relationship that individuals have to others so for example in classical Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries the idea of how you treat a slave I mean if you were to read some of the accounts of this of manumission and of the right improper method of of dealing with your household servants and so on you would see that our ideas of respect and and of kindness and liberality oh yes I mean that there are plenty of examples have you read Xenophon and economicus talking about how the wife in the household in order to have a good relationship with this day's must treat them well and so I mean that this well and then and then just just the clincher on this one isn't traum says that that he cannot understand the mindset of the Caesar or finds them alien but you find them alien in some way so I find Hitler's mentality after 1500 years of Christianity equally difficult to sympathize with or indeed the general was it Tilly who who was at the sack of Magdeburg in 1630 I mean any number of examples of exactly the same kind of atrocity and that that occurred during the Christian period could I I just want to come back to this idea that crypt banzer Christians roamed around destroying copies of Aeschylus we have no evidence for this whatsoever there's nothing in the Theoden code that prescribes that classical works should be destroyed uh indeed we know that classical works were regularly copied by the monks that Antonia so dismissive of in the introduction to his book much later on much later on several centuries but you say you say remember that by this time the Roman Emperor of the East had been transformed into fully Christian Byzantium no more interested in a careful and full preservation of pre-christian culture than any other part of Christendom and you say that insofar as the classical texts survived it was down to the Muslims the Iliad was first translated into Arabic in 1904 who do you think was copying the Iliad how do you think we have Homer who is doing it it's because Christians absolutely recognize that this is part of the fabric of their culture as well that all good things as Oregon says are part of our heritage now usually I do know better than I you will know been far better than I that the historian region of the Middle East of the North Western Middle East which was one of the first areas to be overrun by the behind the Muslims if you look at the library lists in the century of Baghdad the record kept there of the texts that had been preserved and were available and which were translated that was the pay period of translation if they had the Arab and Persian scholars would know so it's Christian monks who were translating them well but it's a Syrian and Greek speaking monks who were doing the translating because venereal rates you have the text with great respect it was the it the the forget the name of the caliph now who had a dream and said that these texts must be translated from the Greek into Arabic and and indeed that was the moment when but he was great contribution was made by their V so hold on one second that that that list that that library lists and preserved technical and medical and astronomical and mathematical texts from from the Greek absolutely almost nothing at all of the literature of the essays of the theatre of the plays and some of the philosophical texts for something like five centuries about the only thing that was known of Plato was the Timaeus and this was because in the Latin West in in the Latin West but we're talking about you know you're saying that in that in in in the Eastern Roman Empire they were no more interested in a careful and full preservation of pre-christian culture than any other part of Christendom and yet they were CRO transcribing the Iliad they were transcribing that you know the texts of the of the Athenian tragedians that we have they were doing it they were transcribing Thucydides and Herodotus I mean if you simply this is simply not true no but your president you'll be very selective there but if you don't use them not being you don't go on it and only on the sage Greek classics that you were saying that the Christians of Byzantium had no interest and I go one reason for that I go on in that passage to say that the monks did begin to do those translations later several centuries later it was the fundamental basis off the Roman classical education and that passed through even when they've been Christianized them that's why they continued to copy them and the reason why this matters is that this is such a basic point and it's a matter of fact that it's a matter of semantics there anybody we can week ago great scholar and a professor and you would think that that this would be a simple thing for him to go and check this is a myth that essentially is propagated in the 18th century the the figure who underlies it is Gibbon with his account that the the Serapeum is destroyed by by bigoted Christians who destroyed the library and this is to put it mildly not exactly what happened okay there are new madness effects so that takes a quick response from mastery to matters of fact which are independently verifiable the first is that in the continuation of the passage that tom is quoting from I say that the monks began to do copying and disseminating later about three centuries after the Theodosian moment it really got under way that quite a lot of preservation of the texts that we have are owed to the the Muslims to Arab and Persian scribes who did a great deal of translating and were retranslated later 11th and 12th centuries as when for example the Aristotelian corpus came back into into the West that's that the the first matter of fact the second matter of fact is you can have a look you can have a look at the at the amount of publication of copying of transmission in the I would say the three centuries between more maybe the four centuries between the 4th and the 8th centuries of the Common Era how much publication there was how much copying and how much transmission how little was known in that period you know when people talk about a Dark Age just now of course fashionable to say it wasn't the Dark Age just huge amout going on and so on but how little was published how little was discussed how little was known in that paid and that is a matter of fact which is verifiable that quick response and then we'll go to our break and we'll come back to it okay I mean I think this is really important monks were systematically copying they were copying vert they were copying Virgil in the Latin West they were copying Horus they were copying of it that's why they survived in the in Constantinople they were copying Homer they were copying Herodotus they were copying through cities that's why they survived the idea that there was a systematic campaign by evil Christians to eliminate the the the the the legacy of classical civilization could not be less true and and and and this is so clear and transparent history the fact that it stupefies me that Anthony could even begin to think otherwise and I think the reason that he thinks otherwise is that it's a myth that he has a huge stake in and we can trace the origins of this myth because the baddies in this are the monks and this essentially is an 18th century updating of Protestant propaganda which decreed that monks could never do anything and that much you know the the the the bigoted religious people of the Catholic Dark Ages had plunged Christendom into darkness and Protestantism was all about bringing God's people back into light essentially this enlightenment myth-making is a recalibration of that but instead of casting the early church as the model of light that has to be restored by now pushing the frontier back and saying that it's Greek philosophy but it depends entirely a myth we will come back to that will allow you will allow you to respond down on the question whether that had been being invested in in in taking a view I'm afraid of to Quaqua argument okay there let's let's uh let's go to our first break we're talking about history did Christianity give us our human values Tom Holland and AC grayling are my guests if you listen to unbelievable Justin brierley on premier Christian radio and enjoy the conversations between Christians and skeptics then this is the perfect app for you for the latest updates podcasts videos articles bonus content and much more download premier Bolivar today [Music] welcome back to the show we're asking did Christianity give us our human values today as we look at history and Tom Holland has written a very large book on that Dominion traces really the history of Christianity in the Western the way it came to shape our modern values ac grayling master of New College of Humanities in London has also written a book on the history of philosophy and the way the various schools of thought have shaped modern culture and well we had a lot of disagreement in that last section gentlemen we're going to move on slightly from that the question of what exactly the first Christians did with antiquity and and sort of move on to the question of just how far Christianity did ultimately shape the values that many people in the West hold dear today now you were mentioning Antony that as far as you're concerned the slavery motif of Christianity in the way it brought the common people and the lowest person into this idea of being a human with dignity and intrinsic worth and so on wasn't necessarily somehow unique or radical to Christianity you believe that was starting to happen generally in the culture that he came out of well I wouldn't argue that the idea was that we're all equal and that we shouldn't for example you know have slaves and so on because after all slavery existed right up to the 19th century perhaps still exists in many different disguises today so I'm certainly not arguing that nor am i arguing that any period of history has been without its atrocities and cruelties and then justices on the contrary it always has but if we think about the question of value if we think about the examination of ethical ideas and ideals that the really striking moment in human history is the axial age so we're talking about the 6th the 5th centuries the 4th century before the Common Era it's a striking fact about that period that in in at least three great civilizations of China of India and the burgeoning civilization of classical antiquity and there were thinkers who addressed the question of how should one day of how to relate to one's fellows and what kind of society should be construct and it's it's a striking fact that three near contemporaries Socrates Gautama who became the Buddha and Confucius who all lived sort of within a generation of one another none of whom were prophets or preachers or religious figures who claimed inspiration from divinity but who addressed themselves to the question of the good life the nature of the good itself and the good society and the the Wellsprings of thinking therefore about the ethical lie with them and in our own tradition in the Western tradition if you look at the Socratic challenge which is what sort of people should we be what values should shape and color our lives that that question he put to his contemporaries in which have generated that great debate the first really significant ethical treatise is Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics it was one application of the Socratic idea that the life considered and chosen the thought about the thoughtful life had a chance of being a good life the Epicureans the cynics but particularly the Stoics or all of whom derives something from the Socratic moments of the Stoics for example were very impressed by the kind of restraint and dedication due to the thoughtful life that Socrates had advocated and they are the originators of this idea of cosmopolitanism the idea that we are all equal we are all the same we're all a part of the same world and that this therefore places certain kinds of obligations on us now one thing that people are not conclude on this point one thing that people misunderstand in reading and studying the ethical thought especially of the post Aristotelian schools but even a manslaughter and Socrates it is best illustrated in the following way when the authors of the Federalist Papers in the late 18th century were talking about a bill of rights and about remembrance of the Constitution in in America in the new United States the had a debate about whether or not to include a provision that protected freedom of expression and the argument that was put against that was why I have a positive permission to express yourself freely when we have it by nature we don't need it you don't need to make it make a positive provision for this because it implies that we don't have it already or that we need permission to do it now that idea that there is is commonplace through through the Classical period it wouldn't have occurred to a male Greek citizen of Athens because plenty of other people excluded the Zeno and the women and the slaves and so on but if you were a male Greek citizen of Athens in adulthood it wouldn't have you wouldn't have dreamt that you didn't have a right to your say in the Agora it was just an assumption one of the greatest values in the ethics of classical antiquity was the value of friendship the idea of your bonds with others and your obligations to them and your duty to protect their honor and well-being and so on that was a very very key concept and indeed the great discussion in both Plato and Aristotle of friendship Harris not devotes two entire books of the compy and ethics to this generated a huge discussion which actually caused Augustine and some others in the Christian tradition a great deal of trouble because the Christians are taught to love everybody so you can't love one person more than anybody else so can you have friends and Gustin agonizes over this in the in the confessions so I mean it's very interesting to go back behind some of the the tropes that have been appropriated by people who think that their ethics is Christian to the source of those I think alive which is classical which as you say as far as you're concerned if Paul was doing anything he was simply building on what was already an established basis on in terms of those those those ideas what's your view on that did did did Jesus and Paul change what Aristotle and Plato I know that Anthony did did not take the chance to argue that the way the Spartans or the Athenians treated their slaves should be regarded as in any way the wellspring of our own views on human rights or equality today and he also doesn't make what is of course the obvious point in this that that that Aristotle believed that barbarians were naturally suited to be slaves of Greeks and in arguing that he was absolutely part of the that the current of the age because by and large different people tended to view themselves as superior to their neighbors I mean the true of the Jews definitely true of the Greeks absolutely true of the Romans and the assumption is is that foreigners by and large are suited to be slaves of of the Greeks or Romans or whoever happens to be the Americans with that we'll come to that so it's not the same thing just so um when Paul says that there is no Jew or Greek there is no slave or free there is no man or woman the justification he offers for this is actually founded in the idea of slavery being set aside that someone who suffered the death of a slave has triumphed over power has triumphed over the kind of mastery but in the classical sense is the expression of the right to hold a slave and I want I want to focus on one particular aspect because I think that this is kind of very measurably influential on the way that we conceptualize things of the day and that's the issue of sex okay and so there's a common idea that Christian sexual morality is kind of repressive puritanical boring square something that we we have to jettison an absolutely the idea that that Paul is some kind of hung up guy who just turns up and you know Greeks and Romans are all having great fun and all geez and stuff and Paul turns out like the massive party pooper and ruins everyone's entertainment but actually pause the the the doctrinal sexuality that Paul preaches is deeply founded in his idea that that slavery is something to be overcome and that that that everybody has been liberated by the sacrifice of Christ because what he is is is saying is that every of very human being by virtue of of Christ's sacrifice and death now has a value and he specifically says that they have a bodily integrity and that every man every woman every child has that their bodily sacral T is a reflection of if in the case of a woman of the church and in the case of a man of of Christ himself and so that's to give a dignity say to a household slave that he'd never been given before because they could be used a sexual object but absolutely they were expected to be used as sexual objects the Romans had the same word for urinate and ejaculate and essentially the mouths the vaginas the anuses of of slaves were regarded as akin to urinals they these are are objects in which bodily fluid can be ejected by the master and that is that that is they're all absolutely taken for granted so the radicalism of poor line and ultimately Christian teaching is to say no that's not that that isn't true everybody's body no one has the right to have that done to them and more importantly that then means that there is an obligation on the male citizen the master the Lord to control his sexual appetites because he is not allowed to do that and so Paul's idea of of lifelong matrimony as a kind of image of the marriage of Christ in the church embodies it sets in train a radical radical reconfiguring of the way that people in what will emerge as Christian civilization come to think about sex and come to think about marriage and I think by and large pretty much everyone now takes those assumptions for granted and we can see that I mean you know in the 60s in particular there was this kind of sense that Christian route is boring let's get ready to activate our sexual revolution let's go back to kind of the head anism of pagan days let's be dying I say of course the Greek god Dionysus was a rapist all the Greek gods were regular rapists it enshrined the idea that males have the right to use their inferiors in any way that they wanted and that was something that essentially over the course of 1780s nineties we know what the consequence of that was and we see that now with the me to movement which essentially is an attempt to reimpose Christian sexual morality and the paradox of this and there are so many paradoxes that surround this is that women who go on marches in its support of me to will dress up in the in the costumes of of handmaids from Margaret Atwood's novel and the TV adaptation of it and that of course is written as a parity of Puritanism yet essentially what they are demanding is that men who control themselves controls themselves and essentially behave as Puritans and the truth is that that me too would only work it would only have the resonance that it does if most men accepted the validity of what women protesters were saying and I think that by and large they do and I think that that is I mean if that is not evidence of the saturating effect of Christian teaching over 2000 years I don't know what is oh okay so I'm completely with Tamar on the in supporter of the Michu movement and I think then should be restrained and they should be courteous and we should be equal and so on but I have to say I don't really recognize but very much of what trama saying there about the poor line view on these matters after all it is Jesus himself in the Gospels who talks about monogamy and one flesh and so on some Paul says don't marry unless you're about to burn a few if you incontinent then then marry and also women they've got a shut up cover their heads and sit at the back of the church and not speak so his attitude towards women wasn't very good and the doís to say nerve of you know christian heretic rats all through the Middle Ages and afterwards have the the presence of slavery another this is not an 18th century myth in the 19th century white Americans were enslaving lack Africans of black people for Overman African origin and treating them with the same kind of view that you say Aristotle treated the barbarians that this they just fit for slavery that's all they are they're second-class human beings or third-class human beings Christianity if after fifteen hundred years if it hadn't managed to pervade infector or radiate our culture sufficiently to stop Chris Lavery until the 19th century seems to have been an extremely weak force I mean everything that you attribute to and uses the kind of charge against pre-christian civilization can be iterated endlessly our alas and tragically in our theories well so it's absolutely true that that in the Caribbean and in in the the American colonies slaves do start increasingly to be African and so what gradually happens over the course of the 18th century is that slavery becomes racialized and so the issue of whether there is a fundamental difference between the white slave owners and the back slaves becomes an issue that people across anglo-america have to debate now ultimately the stress of this the evident fact that if there is no greek or jew then there is no black or white is one that comes to rack the consciences first of Quakers then of evangelicals and then ultimately the whole span first of British and then of American society and it reflects a conviction that the heart will be illumined by the spirit but the law of God will be written on the heart and if we want to read it properly we have to look into our heart and we have to it we have to do what that law is then telling us and that is what animates the Quakers that is what animates the evangelicals so over the span of a century what had been a kind of mad minority opinion by the beginning of the 19th century is can I'll sing Parliament's is convulsing presidencies and over the course of the 19th century we'll see slavery something that every as a Muslim Sheikh said to a royal naval officer when he the naval officer demanded that he abolished slavery said but why would we every every age has accepted slavery yes but but but essentially this kind of that is bread of a radical Protestant idea of the flame of the spirit illumining the heart and enabling people to see what is what what should properly be done that is something that has that because first of all Catholics and then Muslims are not Protestant it's been kind of universalized but essentially the impetus behind it is this kind of radical Protestant interpretation of how the spirit can move people to act properly that in turn of course draws on the mainstream of Christian inheritance now there is one very big difference between attitudes toward slaves in the pre and the post Christian period Aristotle's father-in-law had been a slave he rose to be the ruler of the city-state in which to which Aristotle went after studying with Plato that was a not uncommon thing not to become a ruler of a city-state but to be freed and to become eventually to become citizens and to be able to play a full role I cannot imagine a black slave in 18th or early 19th century America ever been given that opportunity and this is after 1,500 years of Christianity I mean I'm afraid to say that to look at the Quakers of the evangelicals of the 18th and 19th century not a moment too soon that their conscience has come to prompt them to do something about slavery but it seems to me itself to be a proof of the fact that the conscience the outlook the ethics of the the Christian period in that respect as in many others do you think then the impetus against slavery was not primarily a Christian one but but was something more of a rationalist enlightenment sort of philosophy coming to bear even if it was having a Christian expression yes I think so because you know within the the towards the end of the first third of the 18th century that a Quaker forget his name now but he would say the Hyuga know who had gone temporarily to England and then on to North America and he was a teacher and in the evenings he taught the children of slaves and found that it was that what he'd been told about the lower intellectual capacities Nosara love of black children than my children was just simply false and it was he who began to agitate a bit among among the Quakers at that period and this is it's it's not an accident that this is in a period of time when the the grip of the major religious denominations like for example the Catholic Church or the the Calvinists over the minds of people and their insistence that they adhere to a particular way of looking at things this was the period when that was loosening and so it made it possible for people then to think differently even about those doctrines so essentially the argument is because we were becoming less Christian in a way less dominated by Christianity that slavery was ultimately overturned was your couldn't be I mean it's so fundamentally it's so clear that the anti-slavery movement is is an evangelical one and absolutely you know there were there were any number of freed black slaves who toured around Britain who were became lions of the hour who were celebrated and fated absolutely they were I mean what happens though is that is that this great evangelical impetus which sees Parliament petitioned which sees castle ray the the Foreign Secretary rather like trees and may having to go in the go she ate breaks it when she doesn't believe in it he had to go and negotiate at the Congress of Vienna to argue that slavery should be abolished even though he didn't particularly believe in it the castle race genius is that he is able to persuade the Catholic powers that they too should have a stake in that because he couches it in the language of Rights which derives from Catholic canon law going back to the 12th century so he's able to do that it is also the case that he is able to draw on elements within let's call it the Enlightenment tradition which absolutely also recognizes that you know people are born free and equal but in turn I think it's important to us wait where do these ideas come from and I think that that this really is the kind of the nub of the disagreement between us that Antony sees this the Enlightenment has a kind of a radical break with with what has gone before that there is a kind of middle age of superstition and darkness that intervened when all these book burning monks appeared and started ransacking everything and then in the 18th century praise the Lord the light comes on and everyone is enlightened my perspective is that the Enlightenment is simply another iteration of a series of convulsions that have racked Christian civilization and our bread of deeply Christian theological concepts and it's in that sense that that the international law that emerges to deal with the abolition of slavery is able to fuse Protestant Catholic and enlightenment traditions because ultimately all those traditions are bread of the same matrix it's interesting this point that that you obviously Tom believes you simply can't stand outside of Christian history even things that seem on the face of it to almost go against you know Christianity the Enlightenment even modern-day 80s and the secularism I think Tom would argue or find their roots in the Christian revolution if you like I know that that's the thing I disagree with well what I don't disagree with of course is that you know especially from let us say about the time of Gregory in the seventh up until the Reformation so that from the early 11th century up until the beginning of the 16th century the the church in the West was incredibly powerful and it wielded a great deal of temporal Authority and influenced hugely the politics and society of the time but if we're really talking here about the intellect of Europe we're talking about the mind of Europe Tom's subtitle is something like the making of the West making of the West mind or something in the British version yeah and and the idea that from the Renaissance have recovery of classical texts and outlooks and the huge influence on it I mean you can take you can take little examples think of the Lord's Prayer the remoter prayer comes out of the Gospels right it's it's it's apostolic our Father our time how to be thy name thy will be done in earth is a kingdom Viking because I will be done again and and we know that it that one of the cardinal sins is pride that is that your own will you can stand on your own feet and in Islam means submission so you know in these young religions Christianity and Islam this idea of submission to God and not relying on your own intellectual or your own powers but there in the Renaissance say this when I worked in several hundred years before the Enlightenment we're talking about a very long development of liberation really from this hegemony over the mind that the church had tried to impose we get something like Pico della Mirandola oration on the dignity of man on the idea that human beings and the human mind and they endeavor to understand without reliance on ancient scriptures and so on you you look at the philosophical revolution and scientific revolution at 16th 17th centuries - precisely predicated on the idea of the kind of inquiry premise on observation and reason setting aside the authority whether of the church or of some great figure of the past like Aristotle because they they you know the Revolution was against any form of authority in 1492 a year in which Columbus much of the surprise of the people who lived in America have discovered America and when was that the driving away of their of the Muslims from from Spain a very very significant thing happened in that year which is unnoticed it's like a little you know my size mammal in the age of the dinosaurs that tom has always loved so much and this was a publication of book hold on the errors of clinic by a man called Leon Cheney who had gone through the natural history of cleaning and they discovered many many many errors there and this was in itself revolutionary because for so long people had looked at authorities that the fact that so few people were literate that things that were written scriptures it is written in his it's the therefore has greater authority and in the Renaissance you had the repudiation of that and the insistence that we should look again and think again and make use of our own powers that's what led eventually to the liberation of the European mind from efforts to control it by dogma so lost again to respond to that Tom but but first of all this this idea of the hegemony of the mind you know that essentially the Renaissance and then they liked him or three young people probably think I think Antony is being suckered by the marketing of intellectuals that has persistently gone on over the course of European history this is like go on expert is not the Renaissance there were many Renaissance is an earlier Rene sauce in the twelfth century for instance saw the university system established that Antony presides over to this day and that is again absolutely expressive of an idea that there exists there exists a God who has created humanity and has given him sufficient logic to fathom the laws with which God has structured the universe now this is again is not in any way a given the idea that there is a single Creator who has fashioned the entire cosmos and who has structured it by laws and that we know from the evidence of the original covenant and then the new covenant that he is happy to submit himself to laws even though of course he reserves the right to exact miracles if he wants to nevertheless this this is an understanding of how the universe functions that facilitates what by the 19th century for instance will come to be called science no no trauma now come on okay firstly they've grown and and then again if we go back to the Carolingian age again we have a Renaissance because this again is structured by the idea of alka win and the the sponsorship of education that learning is part of the fabric of that God has given humans and against this kind of humanist idea that all of wisdom is there to be absorbed so these are the idea that there is a single reformation is as big an item mistake assume that there is sorry it's a single relational says as big a mistake assuming that there is a single Reformation there again there are many reformed RTO nays over the course of Christian history because this idea that society has to be remade that the people who've walked in darkness have to be brought to see a great light that the world has been lost to superstition and idols must be overthrown this is part of the core narrative it's part of the core myth making of Christians right from the beginning it's what fuels the conversion of Europe in the in the early Middle Ages it's what underpins the great process of reform RTO initiated by the papal reformers in the 11th century this idea that all of Christendom can be refashioned it's certainly a fundamental part of the reform RTO of that sorry of the Reformation when it's the Catholic Church that becomes the object that gets cast as the object of superstition and we've seen the same cycle happening with the Enlightenment where it's Christianity itself that comes to be car but it's still a Christian narrative that is being exemplified even if it's a very birdly anti-christian let's try and get this right okay so the the the development of schools of higher learning in the medieval period was a rediscovery after all as I said earlier for nearly a thousand years from the institution of the schools of Athens in the in the 5th century a university system in all but name existed schools of higher education they were closed by a Christian Emperor in 529 in Athens and it took some time before the idea the necessity of a more advanced education we even did any education to come back into the picture the medieval universities were were law law medicine and theology this was because the growing centralization of power required bureaucrats required educated people who could write who could manage taxation who could who could run a kingdom so you know this wasn't just a matter of of trying to understand God's plan for that for the universe this was a this was itself a rebirth of a an educational ideal that had been founded in classical antiquity on the question of Renaissance again you know Trump talks about using a particular kind of the mythos here about what what happened when and it is now the sort of fashion among among historians to find any number of Renaissance ah's and Reformation and so on and indeed in a way there were but let us remember that pet rock is the person who made a very explicit claim to the effect that his age was the one in which they had rediscovered and were bringing back into the light the great values that had been suppressed and lost during the darkness of the period that he described as the age between the the middle age the medieval period so this was a self-conscious recognition by people like Petrov and all those who therefore went mad looking for manuscripts and digging in you know old library collections and so on order to get to get mentioned the texts that were found in these anyway where were line readings this I have not I have not denied and and a you you didn't read out a little bit of the thing where I said that later on if we give how do some thanks that the little that did remain of classical literature was preserved for us by monks later on we won't go back to that argument we've just got a little time to conclude our discussion and and what I do want to finally land on is is right up to date really is what you represent today Anthony which is the modern incarnation of particularly kind of secular atheistic sort of humanism and what when I've seen you speak on this and what you write about in the book really makes it look as though it's it's sort of a given that once we simply recognize who we are as humans we will inevitably treat each other with dignity with respect with equality and so on we don't need Christianity as it were to give us those values they would have at some level come to us by simply using our reason and intellect and so on whereas Tom in his book says well you know the Beatles if you like work with a pop equivalent of the humanists of the 60s all you need is love John Lennon's you know him too secularism imagine there's no heaven imagine there's no religion we'll all be a wonderful brotherhood of man and again his point is they simply missed the point that all of that is utterly steeped in the judeo-christian ethic that their culture comes out of it's impossible to escape that humanists are essentially Christians but they've they've simply rejected the the kind of supernatural elements of of of what Christianity gave and what's your response overall to that and then we'll have mean it's just it's just an assertion which which you know has no it fails to recognize that the the the mind the ethical mind of Europe the whole framework of of its of its concepts it's very vocabulary comes to us from classical antiquity it comes to us from from the what I called earlier the Socratic challenge it comes to us from the effort made by the Aristotelian school and by the Stoics principally to think these things through the idea that that we are that we owe something to one another because of our humanity has never prevented people being cruel and vicious and selfish greedy you know today as ten thousand years ago but the the roots of our best thinking about these matters and how we're to relate to one another lie in our commonalities as human beings I mean I often describe humanism as the view that most sympathetic and generous view about what it is to be human human nature in the human condition both very difficult to understand but the great diversity of human experience requires a kind of sympathetic pause in order to try to work out what it is about somebody else's choices and desires one can accept or must not accept and so on this is the idea of applying reason and consideration to that and in that sense humanism secular humanism is is a result of that enlightenment thinking the the scientific approach the the rational approach owes more to that than any particular judeo-christian route very much so and I would say its roots its deepest roots lie in what but I in fact imprint calls the first in alignment which is the period of classical antiquity I I think it's a tendency on the part of intellectuals and perhaps particularly philosophers to overemphasize the significance of philosophy clearly it's important and I think mediated through Christianity Greek philosophy has has obviously had had a profound influence on the way that people in the West think but I think that the key thing about Christianity which was recognized by Oregon in the in the in the 3rd century is that as well as as as providing a framework for the transmission of philosophical ideas there is a kind of mythic quality to Christianity Oregon says that he contemplates the fact that the creator of the world was born and cried for milk and he finds his so sweet we find he doesn't know what to do with it he just feels struck down by it and I think that it's it's it's it's it's the parables that Christ tells it's the the notion of the Nativity it's the drama of the passion it's these mythic resonances that have have been transmitted down the generations and in an absolutely saturating effect children have been brought up in these stories they have then told their children and so on and for centuries and centuries and century Christianity was essentially the only game in town and even up until what the 1950s or 60s essentially there were Jews and there were Christians and there were those who had ceased to be Christian the question then is to what extent are humanists have they emancipated from themselves from Christianity are they are they indeed part of a kind of a global movement I think I Keynes famously said that the things that that people tend to think is is often due to kind of weird stuff that an economist years before had said I think that's true of all of us I think it's that essentially we think the way we do because of stuff that theologians centuries and centuries ago made an argument all because of kind of mythic passages in in in ancient Scripture so I think the idea of of humanism the idea that humans have a kind of unique dignity that have a kind of special status ultimately I think it goes back to Genesis I think it goes back to that narrative that God creates man and woman in his own image and that is something that then passes through into the bloodstream of European culture and we to this day continue to take for granted and say the emphasis on the kind of the idea of the human the idea of the of of of the the the of human rights and the values and the dignity of humanity I think that this is a deeply Western and therefore a deeply Christian idea I just want to read a list of of where international human conferences have been held over the air we have a army we have Oxford we have London we have Oslo we have Washington we have Paris we have nerd Vike kir hoot in the Netherlands then we have Mumbai then we have Mexico City then we have Amsterdam then we have Brussels and we have Buffalo in the USA we have Oslo we have Hannover we have London we have Amsterdam we have Boston we have Paris we have Oslo we have London we have Amsterdam Mumbai aside all of those are in countries that are deeply you know our predominantly Christian in ten most of those are Protestant I think that in its essentials humanism is a kind of a very soft Protestantism it's it's it's it's a godless Protestantism and it is in that sense as culturally contingent has everything else in the vast range and span of human civilization and I don't ultimately see what the problem is with acknowledging this I mean if you don't believe in a God it no more matters that that you as an atheist might be informed by Christian opinions than that you as a human being are are an ape I mean it's you saying doesn't seem to me if you miss is divorced from from the judeo-christian ethic or yes I am because I mean if I were able to identify you know focal humanistic traditions in non-christian societies then you might believe that humanism is something that could quite easily come out of reflection and consideration and so it happened in classical antiquity in Greece it happened in there in the thinking of Aristotle and the post Aristotelian still you believe it happened in China two centuries before Christ that Maude's earth the founder of the most movement taught love your brother that love your neighbor is yourself this idea it's a very very very fundamental humanist principle that one the Jains and the Buddhists in India centuries before Christ were teaching the same thing not only compassion and all-embracing compassion but not just for the human beings for all life for animal life I've been something more tender in its outlook even than the Christian view these are recognisably and focally humanistic impulses that we're recognizing in these different traditions they don't owe anything to only one particular tradition they come out of they out of this sense that we have as human beings have been connected to one another there's a marvelous remark in one of Hustlas essays where he encouraged went for a walk on the North Somerset coast and they came to a village where the day before been a terrible storm and a boy had been swept out to sea and the fishermen in the village had risked their lives to try to save him a Coleridge asked him well why did you do that why did you risk your lives to do that and the fisherman said it's because we have a nature towards one another and that encapsulates something human that doesn't require myth doesn't require myth in the case of the Jains and the buddhists and the most it just requires a sense about common and shared humanity but the idea that humans have rights that they have a peculiar dignity is a myth and it seems to me so evident that this myth is is Christian in its origins the idea that you know you by cherry-picking fragments from other cultural traditions you can demonstrate that the beliefs that you hold as someone living in London in 2019 you and all your fellow humanists all of him with the single exception of one city have all been held in basically Christian countries you I mean listen Yuma nism is so derivative of Christianity and yet because like Christianity wants to claim a universal mission just as as Christians claimed as evidence for this that in a Greek philosophy was part of its inheritance so likewise you have changed in this mass exercise of cultural appropriation picking stuff to demonstrate that the entirely contingent views that you personally haven't that I have - are somehow not bred of the culture in which we've emerged but are in fact somehow universal I mean it's it's I mean Thomas is engaged in an active of attempted appropriation to one tradition in one part of the world of things that are manifestly and obviously predate by many many many centuries across the globe ethical impulses which humanism happens to capture I would ask Tom this and this is a surprising question maybe to nominate for me one thing just one thing that Christianity has introduced that doesn't have some source some parallel some analogy in in previous and in other civilizations one novelty one innovation in thinking about anything ethical metaphysical or anything you like and I must have racked my brains over this often enough and I cannot think of one would love to hear if there is once you accept that challenge absolutely I think the the the ideal of lifelong matrimony I think that's a very distinctive Christian concept I think the the category of what by the 19th century is coming to be categorized as a homosexuality and heterosexuality I think they have no precedence I think the notion of secularism the idea of there being religions I think all these are entirely exclusive to Christian civilization I think the concept of science as it emerges in the 19th century I think is entirely exclusive to Christian civilization I think the idea that human beings are created in the image of God if that is obviously something that Christians should share with with Jews but that is a it gives a degree of dignity to human beings that no other cultural tradition that I'm aware of even remotely approximates to so I think that all of those that are essentially what I'm talking in giving that is I am talking about what makes Western civilization distinctive and one of the things that absolutely makes Western civilization distinctive and it's an inheritance of its Christian past is its assumption that its values are universal this has been fundamental to the way that Christians have understood their faith that that it is for all of humanity and to this day the heirs of that cultural tradition want to believe that their values are not contingent but somehow are the property of all humanity we are down to our last few minutes gentlemen well how would you like to conclude things well just by reminding trom that the the Stokes were Universalists that if it is true that no other culture had ever privileged monogamy then this can scarcely be regarded as a particularly great achievement um I can't I couldn't really think of of anything of major significance the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual I mean that was a distinction that was drawn as early as the Pentateuch and we have to stone to death people who lie a man who lies with their manners with the woman and Sansa there some kind of it's not I don't think we've got time to get the thing is that that you see that's his classic example of the way in which even Antony this dogged atheist who rejects the fact that he is anything to Christianity his assumptions about homosexuality and heterosexuality are so deeply rooted that he assumes that a man sleeping with a man is equivalent to the category of homosexuality it isn't I appreciate we don't have time to argue why but I would just say that those of you watching who want to know why homosexuality is a distinctively Christian category by Dominion well it wasn't a great contribution in that way these thing to me I'm not talking about whether it's a good or bad I'm talking about you know this is this is the thing I'm not offering value judgment I'd be saying what the a little you've given me so little that you can claim is distinctively Christian contribution to well I think sexuality of relations between the sexes of the category of the secular the idea of I think these are fairly revised innovation but it's a bit it's a bit like saying you know we've introduced we've created a problem and and we can ameliorate the problem slightly about doing such as such I mean secularism is a great example the church in medieval times wanted to get the temporal powers off their backs and so they introduced the idea of secularism they're very asymmetric movies they did it goes back to I mean back to the aging theology and then ultimately back to back to back back to the Gospels I mean it's it's these are you know I hate almost everything that you and I and justice Justin think is down to theologians fragments of scripture from long long ago I think you really want this to be the case thank you you really do anything countries from doing what I I think that you that everyone should do which is to look at the evidence and arrive at a decision I agree in lettuce Lyonya final so anyway then yeah well look it's been really marvelous I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this very passionate discussion between the both of you Antony and Tom thank you very much I know you are going away disagreeing on this but I'm very glad that we had the chance to air our conversation today thank you very much for Joanne thank you handshakes for more debates updates and bonus content sign up at the big conversation dot show

Channel: Unbelievable?

Views: 163,556

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, AC Grayling, Tom Holland, Dominion, humanism, history, Christian, The Big Conversation

Id: 7eSyz3BaVK8

Length: 82min 15sec (4935 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2019