Western Philosophy For Indians

[ramana]

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There is no doubt about the fact that many if not all of the foundations of western law have been influenced by Christian doctrine. Having said that, western law itself was a layered cumulative sum of pre-Christian and non-Christian practice.



Original Christianity most probably started out as an anti-establishment Judaic movement that borrowed from previous Judaic memes to mobilize Jews against the Romans [as is every revolutionary movement forced to borrow from pre-existing memes]. These tools were found useful by other disgruntled sections of Roman society and elite who combined to use it against the Roman establishment. So another shrewd elite saw a chance to mobilize such disgruntlement to secure his own power and modified Christianity as an imperial doctrine.



But layered within the doctrine remains memes from the earlier days that are seized upon by elite factions from time to time to use for their own bid for power or hegemony. This was the case for Reformation in Europe and to an extreme in the colonial USA. They focused on the supposed universalist aspects to seek independence from Europe and monarchy, and ultimately also for the Abolition. All of it was a combination of undermining some other authority as well as mobilize support from sections of population.



The so-called progressive values in "western" society are firmly based on ideas that have lain inside the European culture from pagan times, and a lot of the structures are based on Roman and Greek concepts - which also got interlaid with European Christianity.



But significant to note is that those "progressive" ideas were almost always the result of "revolutionary changes" and at the hands of dictators - like the Parliamentarians under Charles I in England, Napoleon, or French Revolution, or the "religious pioneers" settling USA (Penn's first draft Constitution for his settlement for example) - and they inevitably drew inspiration or justified their changes by appealing to rare memes in the body of concepts that had entered or remained in Christianity (although not all of whose origins are in Judaism).