One has to wonder why, if the moral law is so basic and anyone could come up with it, we have any problems at all?
It’s like common sense… that is anything BUT common.
A lot of people seem to not realize that fundamental Christian beliefs are the building blocks of what made Westerns civilization. Asians as a whole are as intelligent or more so. It was the biblical teachings especially those of the New Testament that propelled Western Europeans and eventually Americans to lead the world and set us apart. The concepts of individual freedom, nuclear families, respect for authority while also being an independent individual free to make one’s own choices and on and on were concepts pioneered by the West and based on biblical teachings.
Westerns Europe was obviously deeply religious at the time that most modern culture and political theory was being developed in that part of the world and it was carried over to the US.
I am not going to argue the premise that western societies built the most advanced modern civilizations, biggest economies and widest ranging global impacts, it didn’t happen in a vacuum.
Middle eastern societies shut themselves off from the rest of the world in response to what they saw as the decadence of the west following the crusades from the west and the Mongol invasions from the north and east. These happened in about a 200 year window. So early to mid 1300s, Muslim writers advocated for a more strict focus on Islamic teachings and a “turning away” from western influence and thought. These were the societies that first used the quadrant and sextant for navigation on the open seas.
The above remains one of the main reasons the Arab civilizations remain so far behind the rest of the world. Two good reads are: “Closing of the Muslim Mind” and “The Arab Mind.”
Following the voyages of Zheng He, China entered a period of self isolation. Zheng He’s voyages included ships that dwarfed those of the west with crews of 4-600. Fleets had crews in the 20-25,000 man range. Voyages went all the way to the Cape of Good Hope, but were cost prohibitive. So in the mid 1430s, China burned its fleets, locked its doors and turned inward in a renewed Confucian focus in response to threats from the growing Buddhist faith.
If the East and Middle East had remained active, it could have potentially set off an arms and land grab race that would have been epic to say the least.
The west was very shrewd in what it borrowed as far as navigation and cartography. Add to that a population hungry for everything new and better as economies were growing but monarchical systems were clamping down on individual and religious liberties and we have the wide open Western Hemisphere ripe for the taking.
That said, the forming of modern western societies based on Christian values is one of the reasons for their stability in my thinking. The belief in man’s free will, the belief that with free will and liberty man will flourish, the 10 commandments and basic morality based on Natural Law from God might have been the perfect storm of the time period. Throw in the popular enlightenment belief that government should only be in place to protect liberties. Then add in the desire to have the state out of the church’s business not as a political statement but rather because Protestants, puritans, quakers and other non-Anglican and non-Catholic believers would no longer abide the tyranny over their beliefs.
