I couldn’t believe this article in The Week:

Of course I immediately asked myself the obvious question: is this a joke? Am I being punked by a Poe?

Nope. Here’s the first paragraph:

We have forgotten just how deep a cultural revolution Christianity wrought. In fact, we forget about it precisely because of how deep it was: There are many ideas that we simply take for granted as natural and obvious, when in fact they didn’t exist until the arrival of Christianity changed things completely. Take, for instance, the idea of children.

Wait, there’s no way he can literally mean Christianity invented children. I mean, who thinks people used to bump naughty bits and never get preggo before Christianity came around? Where would all the people before Christianity have come from? The stork?

Here’s the second paragraph:

Today, it is simply taken for granted that the innocence and vulnerability of children makes them beings of particular value, and entitled to particular care. We also romanticize children — their beauty, their joy, their liveliness. Our culture encourages us to let ourselves fall prey to our gooey feelings whenever we look at baby pictures. What could be more natural?

Yeah, being invested in the well-being of one’s children is taken for granted, for the same reason that breathing is taken for granted: it’s in our nature. It turns out that almost all species feel protective of their kids. There’s a reason you don’t go near a mama bear’s cubs, and it’s not because she’s infused with Jesus. Mothers of almost all species are protective of their progeny, it’s a trait that is easily selected for during evolution.

It turns out there are a load of biological reasons parents of all species, ours included, care about their kids. It turns out, in our case, we’re biologically programmed to be enamored with and to be protective of thing have a rounded head and/or a large head relative to body size (like babies have), a protruding forehead (like babies have), large eyes compared to the rest of their face (like babies have), rounded, protruding cheeks (like babies have), a rounded body shape (like babies have), and soft, elastic body surfaces (like babies have).

The thesis of the piece is that it’s the religion that commands parents to carve off a boy’s foreskin that is the reason we, non-Christians included, protect children. The goal of the article is literally to give Christianity the credit for parental care, even the parental care of non-Christians. The author attempts this by citing certain societies in humanity’s history when children weren’t treated as well (and ignoring all the others), as if that’s indicative of a lack of care in human parents and not societal constructs overriding our natural instinct to care for our offspring:

Well-to-do parents typically did not interact with their children, leaving them up to the care of slaves. Children were rudely brought up, and very strong beatings were a normal part of education. In Rome, a child’s father had the right to kill him for whatever reason until he came of age.

Whoa, parents who didn’t spare the rod. Good thing we have Christianity and its holy book which instructs parents to do just that, eh? Eh?

Awesome, you’ve confirmed that some societies valued children less than others (or had weird ideas about what it meant to value something). And yet here, in a society where children deserving care is taken for granted (just like almost every society before us) when we see books advocating beating children like To Train Up A Child (which has resulted in the deaths of a couple children) they are almost always laced with Jesus-happy scripture (like spare the rod, spoil the child). Plus, if we owed child care to Christianity, we’d expect to see child abuse decrease in the most Christian states. What we see is precisely the opposite:

Ugh, what am I doing? I’m sitting here rebutting the claim that Christianity is the reason we care about and love children. I can hardly think of a more pretentious, transparently false claim.

This is the world into which Christianity came, condemning abortion and infanticide as loudly and as early as it could.

Yeah, because before Christianity we just killed our babies for grins. One can only wonder how the species managed to grow and sustain itself before then, right? If this implication that infanticide was the norm before Christianity strikes you as remotely plausible then you don’t know how population expansion occurs. Also you’re probably too gullible to go outside without a guardian.

But really, Christianity’s invention of children — that is, its invention of the cultural idea of children as treasured human beings — was really an outgrowth of its most stupendous and revolutionary idea: the radical equality, and the infinite value, of every single human being as a beloved child of God. If the God who made heaven and Earth chose to reveal himself, not as an emperor, but as a slave punished on the cross, then no one could claim higher dignity than anyone else on the basis of earthly status.

Yeah, the equal value of every human being – this idea was clearly given to us by a religion whose very own holy book insists women and children are worth less than adult men (Leviticus 27:3-7):

And thy estimation shall be of the male from twenty years old even unto sixty years old, even thy estimation shall be fifty shekels of silver…. And if it be a female, then thy estimation shall be thirty shekels. And if it be from five years old even unto twenty years old, then thy estimation shall be of the male twenty shekels, and for the female ten shekels. And if it be from a month old even unto five years old, then thy estimation shall be of the male five shekels of silver, and for the female thy estimation shall be three shekels of silver. And if it be from sixty years old and above; if it be a male, then thy estimation shall be fifteen shekels, and for the female ten shekels.

Without a book clearly saying children are worth less than adults, how ever would we have arrived at the conclusion that people, including children, are equal? Thanks, Mr. Gobry.

And if Christianity is so keen on equality for all, one can only wonder why slavery’s last holdout was the hyper Christian antebellum South? Perhaps it had something to do with the biblical passages expressly advocating slavery and speaking about the proper way to treat your slaves (including how much you’re allowed to beat them). You know, the ones frequently present on their literature:

Or maybe it’s worth a moment to reflect on why Christianity was at the forefront of opposing women’s suffrage. It might’ve had something to do with the bible plainly painting women as inferior. Ditto for the opposition to mixed-race marriage coming almost purely from Christians. Ditto for equality today for LGBT people, all using propaganda that has scarcely changed from the above poster 170 years ago. You get the gist.

And say, what happened when the modern Catholic Church, rife with Jesus and more invested in the Christian scriptures than adherents of any other religion, was left to police child rape on its own? Oh yeah, they shielded the perpetrators and enabled them to continue raping children.

And now this guy wants to stand here and say that we owe Christianity for equality? He wants to claim that atheists like me owe his religion for the care we give to our children?

Religion of humility. Right.