One reason why the current Christian church is becoming irrelevant is the simple fact that it has collectively forgotten what Christianity is. Christian churches are heavy in the preaching of Marxist ideals and anti-Western sentiments. Real Christianity was not mono-focused on the poor, nor did it advocate redistribution of wealth; a hatred of capital; moral relativity and the embracing of Islam as a brother 'faith'. All of this is a modern invention by left-wing Church leaders who have misshaped and deformed their own ideology beyond the point of comprehension. No follower of Augustine or Aquinas would recognize most of the modern churches and would view them with disdain.

It is in vogue to believe that the secularists, Marxists, and Statists, many of them educated at the best 'schools' in the world, are infallible. This zeitgeist has infiltrated and corrupted most churches. Social engineers can lead the human race from is supposed 'misery'; restoring in the words of the Great Prophet Obamed, 'hope and change' to humanity. Not only can the human be engineered out of its acclaimed 'miserable existence'; but even Mother Earth can be healed and allowed to smile once more. This irrationality and mysticism is legion. It is the poverty of ignorance. And most churches support it. What created the modern world has little to do with the power of socialist engineering and tinkering. It has to do with the reason and rationality found in Christian culture.

Most would argue that Christianity leads to nothing but irrationality, a hatred of science, child-abuse, war and intolerance. This viewpoint is as incorrect and devoid of factual history, as it is sweeping. The mountain of evidence points to the contrary. Compared to other theological and spiritual movements, Christianity is the only framework in the history of man to generate three key insights which encouraged Europe to create the modern world. The first is that the pursuit to understand faith can only be fulfilled through reason and inquiry. The second is that free-will and the right to life, to own property, and to manage one's own 'fate', is central to living. These two cultural insights lead to the third tenet bequeathed by Christianity, namely a belief in progress, a good future, and the optimism that positive change is possible – not only spiritually but materially.

No other system concocted by man ever generated these three key points which was the basis of the European supremacy in culture, spirituality, and ethics.

Any theology worthy of the name, is basically a science of faith. Rationalizing about God is the only method to derive spiritual insights. If you believe in God, and the Christian Bible for example, you are forced to use reason to defend it. The Bible is full of contradictions, strange statements, and opaque meaning. The Church as an institution, has layered interpretations to the original theology, based on some sort of reasoning and defended by varieties of 'logic'. The history of Christianity is in part one long argument and set of debates about theological dogma, insights, meanings, acts and reasoned guesses as to what a divine being might have wanted or indicated. No matter what your stance is on religion there is no denying that the interpretation of Christian scripture forces the use of analysis and techniques of inquiry.

No Eastern philosophy, many of which are so much in vogue in the self-hating parts of the Western world, has produced a philosophy remotely similar to Christianity. None has produced the number of theologians which pushed Western rationality along through the ages. Indeed no theologians have ever existed in the East. A rather disturbing fact for those who believe that mysticism is 'reason'. This is one reason why Asiatic systems are impoverished.

Only Zen Buddhism contains the Golden Rule but precious little else that makes Christianity so complicated and yet so open to ideas, reform, and progress. Buddhism and Taoist ideals, along with Confucianism, contains many polytheistic traditions, with the elitist forms of these constructs ofering little more than ritualized mysticism. Instead of concrete belief systems, the three main Asiatic frameworks rely on abstract mystical spirituality which is mentally refreshing but does nothing to create systems of thought and action to invent a modern world political-economy. These systems believe in a supreme essence and not a divine being or spark and both are essentially conservative philosophies with more than a hint of fatalism and predestination. Mysticism does not lead to rationality.

Compare the solitary irrational and mystical habits of the Oriental faiths with the Christian leader Tertullian, who said in the 2^nd century AD;

“Reason is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason – nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason.” and “..faith must precede reason and purify the heart and make it fit to receive and endure the great light of reason.”

No mysticism here. Clement of Alexandria another famous Church leader agreed with Augustine, stating in the 3^rd century, “For indeed it is not safe to commit these things to bare faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason.”

In the 5^th century AD, Saint Augustine reasoned that astrology is false because pre-destination does not exist. In the 12^th century Aquinas and others celebrated reason as the means to gain greater insight into divine intentions. Indeed for 1000 years after the gentle decline of Rome, the Church was instrumental to bring the rationality and logic of Christianity into the secular society. Without Christian culture and the attitude to progress, the modern world would never have been created.

Christianity is markedly different in its approach to reason than either Judaism or Islam. Both of these world-views approach scripture as law to understood and to be implement. It cannot be challenged. This negates of course, logic or argument. Both Judaic and Islamic philosophy place the emphasis on the fundamentalist nature of their ideology. Christianity does not. Only Christianity can be called 'orthodox' in the true sense of that word with orthodox meaning 'correct'; and dox 'opinion'. To have a correct opinion means that you have to use logic and argument to support it. It does not rely on power, arbitrary authority or injunctions from a moon deity.

The assumption of progress and a better future permeates Christianity. Not so the other spiritual frameworks. All other ideologies of faith, excepting Judaism, assume that history is an endless repeated cycle. Augustine and the Church celebrated both material and spiritual progress. This lasted well into the early modern period, interrupted by the two-generational tyranny of the counter-reformation, when the Church tried to quell the Protestant revolution by despotic and fascistic means. Nevertheless in spite of all its problems, issues, wars and less than desirable legacies, the Christian church[es] demonstrated a strong belief that the human was special and was a manifestation of God's gifts of rationality, intelligence and free will. We are not animals, we are not angels – but we are unique.

Progress and modernity flow out of Christianity. There is no real argument which refutes this. The pity is that today, the church has turned against itself and rejected its own heritage. As churches fail, and their pews sit empty, this base fact will be lost on those mis-managing what was once the basis of a great civilization.

Source:  Rodney Start, and the Victory of Reason.