Rodney Stark > Quotes

“Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable--the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars. ”
― Rodney Stark

“Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these principles.

These were the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian Europe and no where else.”
― Rodney Stark

“Slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition. ”
― Rodney Stark

“Many critics of the Crusades would seem to suppose that after the Muslims had overrun a major portion of Christendom, they should have been ignored or forgiven; suggestions have been made about turning the other cheek. This outlook is certainly unrealistic and probably insincere. Not only had the Byzantines lost most of their empire; the enemy was at their gates. And the loss of Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy, as well as a host of Mediterranean islands, was bitterly resented in Europe. Hence, as British historian Derek Lomax (1933-1992) explained, 'The popes, like most Christians, believed war against the Muslims to be justified partly because the latter had usurped by force lands which once belonged to Christians and partly because they abused the Christians over whom they ruled and such Christian lands as they could raid for slaves, plunder and the joys of destruction.' It was time to strike back.”
― Rodney Stark, God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades

“Imagine a society’s discovering a vaccine against a deadly disease that has been ravaging its people and continues to ravage people in neighboring societies, where the cause of the disease is incorrectly attributed to improper diet. What would be the judgment on such a society if it withheld its vaccine on the grounds that it would be ethnocentric to try to instruct members of another culture that their medical ideas are incorrect, and to induce them to adopt the effective treatment? If one accepts that one has the good fortune to be in possession of the true religion and thereby has access to the most valuable possible rewards, is one not similarly obligated to spread this blessing to those less fortunate?”
― Rodney Stark

“Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and the impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services.”
― Rodney Stark

“Because God is a rational being and the universe is his personal creation, it necessarily has a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension. This is the key to many intellectual undertakings, among them, the rise of science. ”
― Rodney Stark

“The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They sincerely believed that they served in God's battalions.”
― Rodney Stark, God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades

“No doubt Western modernity has its limitations and discontents. Still, it is far better than the known alternatives—not only, or even primarily, because of its advanced technology but because of its fundamental commitment to freedom, reason, and human dignity.”
― Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity

“No doubt it was “unenlightened” of the crusaders to have been typical medieval warriors, but it seems even more unenlightened to anachronistically impose the Geneva Conventions on the crusaders while pretending that their Islamic opponents were innocent victims.”
― Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity

“In fact, all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies—even many of the Northwest American Indian tribes had slaves long before Columbus’s voyage.46 Amid this universal slavery, only one civilization ever rejected human bondage: Christendom. And it did it twice!”
― Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion

“...current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by 'post-World War I British and French imperialism and post-World War II creation of the state of Israel.”
― Rodney Stark, God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades

“In any event, should you doubt that your knowledge of Western history is distorted by the work of these distinguished bigots, consider whether you believe any of the following statements: The Catholic Church motivated and actively participated in nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic violence, justifying it on grounds that the Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion, until the Vatican II Council was shamed into retracting that doctrine in 1965. But, the Church still has not made amends for the fact that Pope Pius XII is rightfully known as “Hitler’s Pope.” Only recently have we become aware of remarkably enlightened Christian gospels, long ago suppressed by narrow-minded Catholic prelates. Once in power as the official church of Rome, Christians quickly and brutally persecuted paganism out of existence. The fall of Rome and the ascendancy of the Church precipitated Europe’s decline into a millennium of ignorance and backwardness. These Dark Ages lasted until the Renaissance/Enlightenment, when secular scholars burst through the centuries of Catholic barriers against reason. Initiated by the pope, the Crusades were but the first bloody chapter in the history of unprovoked and brutal European colonialism. The Spanish Inquisition tortured and murdered huge numbers of innocent people for “imaginary” crimes, such as witchcraft and blasphemy. The Catholic Church feared and persecuted scientists, as the case of Galileo makes clear. Therefore, the Scientific “Revolution” occurred mainly in Protestant societies because only there could the Catholic Church not suppress independent thought. ► Being entirely comfortable with slavery, the Catholic Church did nothing to oppose its introduction in the New World nor to make it more humane. Until very recently, the Catholic view of the ideal state was summed up in the phrase, “The divine right of kings.” Consequently, the Church has bitterly resisted all efforts to establish more liberal governments, eagerly supporting dictators. It was the Protestant Reformation that broke the repressive Catholic grip on progress and ushered in capitalism, religious freedom, and the modern world. Each of these statements is part of the common culture, widely accepted and frequently repeated. But, each is false and many are the exact opposite of the truth! A chapter will be devoted to summarizing recent repetitions of each of these statements and to demonstrating that each is most certainly false.”
― Rodney Stark, Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History

“Science arose in the West—and only in the West—precisely because the Judeo-Christian conception of God encouraged and even demanded this pursuit.”
― Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity

“Thus it is that the statement on the Jews issued by Vatican II in 1965 was nothing more (or less) than a forceful restatement of the traditional church teachings in language appropriate for the time. Unfortunately, this particular manifestation of anti-Catholic history lives on with renewed venom in recent indictments of Pope Pius XII as Hitler’s collaborator in the Holocaust, which also is said to be quite in keeping with the pope’s support of Franco and the Spanish fascists. Ironically, this historical libel has mainly been propagated by alienated Catholics, while the most compelling support for the pope has come from Jews.”
― Rodney Stark, Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History

“While the other world religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guide to religious truth.”
― Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success

“Christianity was oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the superiority of the past. At least in principle, if not always in fact, Christian doctrines could always be modified in the name of progress as demonstrated by reason.”
― Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success

“That new technologies and techniques would be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships--although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies. ”
― Rodney Stark

“Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the rise of science is not that the early scientists searched for natural laws, confident that they existed, but that they found them. It thus could be said that the proposition that the universe had an Intelligent Designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories and that it has been successfully put to empirical tests again and again.”
― Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity

“IN 1710, THE ENGLISH FREETHINKER Thomas Woolston (1670–1731) expressed his confidence that religion would vanish by 1900.1 Voltaire (1695–1778) thought this much too pessimistic and predicted that religion would be gone from the Western world within the next fifty years—by about 1810.”
― Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion

“It is difficult to know how anyone, even the most bitter anti-Catholic, could truly have believed any of this! By itself, the biography of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) makes a travesty of all these claims. In 1148, the Maimonides family pretended to convert to Islam when the Jews of Córdoba were told to become Muslims or leave, upon pain of death. Note that when most historians mention that in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the Jews of Spain to convert to Christianity or leave, they forget to mention that the Muslims had imposed the same demand in the twelfth century. Nor do they mention that many Jews who opted to leave Moorish Spain rather than pretend to convert settled in the Christian areas of northern Spain. In any event, after eleven years of posing as converts, the Maimonides family became so fearful of discovery that they fled to Morocco where they continued their deception. Thus, throughout his adult life, the most celebrated medieval Jewish thinker posed as a Muslim.64 His story clearly reveals that, as Richard Fletcher has put it so well, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.”
― Rodney Stark, Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History

“SCIENCE AROSE ONLY IN Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was possible and desirable. And the basis of their belief was their image of God and his creation. This was dramatically asserted to a distinguished audience of scholars attending the 1925 Lowell Lectures at Harvard by the great philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), who explained that science developed in Europe because of the widespread “faith in the possibility of science... derivative from medieval theology.”
― Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion

“For example, at the fall of Rome there was very extensive slavery everywhere in Europe; by the time of the “Renaissance” it was long gone.”
― Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion

“The Byzantine governor assembled an army considerably larger than that of the Normans and rebels. He then sent a herald to the opposing camp offering either the Normans’ safe return to Lombard territory or battle. In response, an enormous Norman knight smashed his mailed fist on the head of the Byzantine herald’s horse; the horse fell dead on the spot. (Yes, this actually happened, historians agree.)23 The battle began the next day.”
― Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity

“Now, shouts of “Dieu li volt!” (God wills it!) began to spread through the crowd, and men began to cut up cloaks and other pieces of cloth to make crosses and sew them against their chests. Everyone agreed that the next year they would set out for the Holy Land. And they did.”
― Rodney Stark, God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades

“As the world learned of the horrors of the Nazi death camps, Pope Pius XII was widely praised for his vigorous and devoted efforts to saving Jewish lives during the war. In 1943, Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel, wrote: “the Holy See is lending its powerful help wherever it can, to mitigate the fate of my persecuted co-religionists.”77 Moshe Sharett, soon to be Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister, met with the pope during the last days of the war: “I told him that my first duty was to thank him, and through him the Catholic Church, on behalf of the Jewish public for all they had done in various countries to rescue Jews.”78 Upon the pope’s death in 1958, Golda Meir, a future prime minister of Israel, noted his efforts on behalf of the Jews of Europe, calling him “a great servant of peace,”79 for it was well-known among that generation of Israelis that Pope Pius XII had made many personal efforts to protect and shelter Jews from the Nazis.”
― Rodney Stark, Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History

“only One True God can provide an adequate religious basis for the moral order. Divine essences such as the Tao do not command us to love one another. The “first mover” does not forbid us to covet another’s spouse. Paul Tillich’s conception of God as the “ground of our being” is not a being and therefore is incapable of having, let alone expressing, moral concerns. As for the little “beings” who populate pagan pantheons, they seem to concern themselves only with their own welfare and to ignore what people do to and for one another. Only monotheism serves as a basis for morality, for compelling and significant “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots.” This certainly is not to suggest that pagan societies lack morality, but to acknowledge that their moral orders are not justified on religious grounds.”
― Rodney Stark, Cities of God

“the truly fundamental basis for the rise of the West was an extraordinary faith in reason and progress that was firmly rooted in Christian theology, in the belief that God is the rational creator of a rational universe.”
― Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion

“Keep in mind that democracy merely gives power to the people; it does not ensure that power will be used wisely or humanely.”
― Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity

“The European Middle Ages collected innovations from all over the world, especially from China, and built them into a new unity which formed the basis of our modern civilization.”
― Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity