You're trying to imply that a good life in a modern liberal democratic state is due to Christianity because Christianity is present in those countries, but life didn't get good in them until Christianity was subdued by Enlightenment values and secular humanism. What those desirable countries, which includes many nations of Western Europe, have in common, is several centuries of the moderating influence of humanist values, something the Islamic nations, especially in the Middle East, haven't had, and the main reason that they're still cutting off hands, dropping people from high towers, throwing acid in one another's face, and burning one another alive in cages. There is no reason that the Christians.
Islam and Christianity are pretty much the same religion on paper. Each reveres a Semitic desert god who is an angry, petty, vengeful, jealous, judgmental, capricious, prudish, strongman requiring worship and submission under threat of cosmic reprisal.
Believers of each attend temples (Mosques or churches) and obey paternalistic, misogynisitic clergy.
Both religions embrace magical thinking, mythology, dogma, the supernatural, and ritual.
Each feature demons angels, prayer, an afterlife, a judgment, and a system of reward and punishment after death.
They each think they have the right to determine who should be allowed to diddle whom how, who should be able to marry whom, and what women must do regarding their bodies.
Both are patriarchal, authoritarian, misogynistic, sexually repressive, anhedonisitic, atheophobic, homophobic, antiscientiific, use psychological terrorism on their children, have violent histories featuring torture, genocide and terrorism, and demand obedience and submission.
Each consider faith a virtue and reason a problem.
Each advocates theocracy over democracy.
I could go on, but you get the point. So why are Islam and Christianity rendered so differently in the countries where they dominate? Secular humanism in the West is the difference. Before that, Christians were as barbaric and brutal as the Muslims, putting people in large metal kettles and boiling them alive, or extracting admissions of impiety using the rack, the pear, and whatever other brutal torture they could conceive. Humanism eliminated that
If you switched the ideologies out, and put Christianity in Saudi Arabia and Islam in America, you would have Christian Arabs cutting off hands and heads, and American Muslims going door to door asking if you know Mohammed. America would still be a secular state with a Muslim majority forced to tolerate "infidels" thanks to humanist values, and Saudi would still be a brutal, intolerant theocracy, but a Christian one instead. There is no reason to believe otherwise.
And when the Muslims finally ban these practices, it will be because they have traded their Abrahamic practices for humanist values.
No, the origin of the US was a rejection of Christian values regarding statecraft.
If you want to see the Christian model for government, daily life, and the role of individuals, look to the Middle Ages, when Christian theocratic government was common. If you want to see the reaction to that and its rejection, look to the Enlightenment versions of those things, which you are crediting to Christianity..
I just had a lengthy exchange with another RF poster who was insisting that secular humanism was an outgrowth of Christianity. I disagreed, and refuted his claim by showing how secular humanism was a rejection of Christian values. The two have almost nothing in common beyond it being wrong to kill or steal.
Likewise here. The principles that define Americanism look nothing like those that define Christianity. When two modes of thought are related, they look alike, as Christianity and Islam do.
Christianity says there is one God, and its Bible commands us to worship it only and obey the Sabbath. Americanism says worship any god or no god.
Christianity teaches,
- "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."- Romans 13:1-2
- "Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient" - Titus 3:1
- "For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king" - 1Samuel 15:23
Americanism is grounded in revolution against just such a governing authority, and includes democracy, free citizens with guaranteed rights, and sees them as autonomous citizens rather than them being viewed as subjects of a god and king.
Christianity is all about sin, redemption, and obedience. Americanism is about freedom and the pursuit of happiness. You didn't find those things in the Christian era, The Age of Faith. The Age of Reason, which followed, is a rejection of that model, just as reason itself is a rejection of faith, and faith a rejection of reason.
