Vincent Carroll > Quotes

“Boys were disposed of when they were deformed; girls when they were inconvenient. The result was a society-not just in Italy but in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa-in which males outnumbered females by 30 percent or more. Most families simply refused to raise a second girl. Consider the instructions written by a man named Hilarion to his pregnant wife around the year Jesus was born: "If you are delivered of a child, if it is a boy keep it, if a girl discard it." Such orders were so ordinary, so unexceptional, that they didn't require a single word of justification. Christians, on the other hand, had a starkly different attitude: female infants were to be cherished equally with males as gifts from God.”
― Vincent Carroll, Christianity On Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry

“To put it plainly, women enjoyed higher status and more autonomy among Christians than among pagans, and could expect better treatment from their husbands. Pagan Roman women were "three times as likely as Christians to have married before age 13," according to the sociologist Rodney Stark.3 Christian women also exercised far more choice in whom they wed, and were less likely to be forced into an abortion (a frequent cause of death for women of the time).”
― Vincent Carroll, Christianity On Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry

“Augustine countered with the long view: Empires rise and fall in the natural order of things, but the church's mission stands apart from any passing secular institution. Because the true church endures, it is government's duty to take instruction from religion, not the other way around. This view could reinforce arrogance and absolutism in the church, and eventually it did. Yet Augustine's political theory also provided a basis for ideals of human freedom and individual rights.”
― Vincent Carroll, Christianity On Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry

“By clearly delimiting the role of secular powers, Augustine helped set Western Christendom on a course in which the believer's duties to God (however interpreted) might trump his obligations to the state. It is impossible to understand the West's unique tradition of the dissenting conscience without granting Augustine his due.”
― Vincent Carroll, Christianity On Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry

“The concepts of mercy and humility were not just unappreciated in pagan culture, they were ridiculed by men of the highest learning. The idea that God put us on earth to love one another-that the duty of charity demolished family and community boundaries-was radically offensive to many wellborn pagans.”
― Vincent Carroll, Christianity On Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry

“Major imperial shows could deploy thousands of pairs of combatants, not to mention all manner of animals and wild beasts-hounds, lions, bears, bulls-battling one another, or humans, to the death.
Christians deplored this entertainment, and not merely because there was always the chance that they might themselves someday wind up as prey. Rather, they were repulsed by the way this spectacle debased human life.”
― Vincent Carroll, Christianity On Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry