Breitbart;
“Christmas is essential to our understanding of Western Civilization and our values,” said Breitbart News’s Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour on Sunday.
Mansour made her comments while co-hosting Breitbart News Sunday alongside Breitbart Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon during a special Christmas Eve live broadcast on SiriusXM.
“The symbols and celebration of Christmas have shaped our history [and] Western Civilization,” said Mansour.
Reflecting on “the dawn of Christianity,” she noted Christianity’s “transformative” impact on the old pagan world and the culture of Germanic barbarian warrior tribes.
Chivalry – rooted in ethical monotheism – spread the concept of valuing all human life as having dignity, said Mansour:
Chivalry was introduced to Western feudalism [via Christianity]. It made feudalism actually livable and bearable. What chivalry called for, what the concept of chivalry was, it was about the defense of the weak. It said that the strong had to be champions of the right and the good against injustice and evil. That was the code of chivalry.
This only came about because of the Judeo-Christian West, and I say Judeo-Christian for a very specific reason; all of this is rooted in the ancient Jewish scripture, what the Christians would call the Old Testament. You can see it right from the beginning. The God of the Old Testament, the God of Jewish scripture instructs that every single human being has worth and dignity — even the foreigner, even somebody outside of your tribe, even the widow and the orphan. They all have worth and value — the weakest among you as well as the strong. This is a radical concept, and it is from the Jews that we have monotheism, and it is from that that Christianity evolved.
“The idea of protection of the weak and innocent,” said Mansour, entered Western culture via Judeo-Christian ethics, which radically “changed the way that we have looked at the rights of the weakest among us.”
Bannon agreed, noting that the “Rough Roman justice” of the old pagan world had “no sense of you as a person or an individual.”
Christianity’s spread to the Germanic lands on the frontiers of the Roman Empire, noted Mansour, set the stage for the evolution of conceptual human rights and created the foundation for the Western values we cherish today. read more
It is hard for us to imagine what the world would be like without Christmas – because that would be a world without Christ. It would be without the concept of Christ’s love and God’s willingness to allow reconciliation of a rebellious creation through willingness to sacrifice His one and only unique Son.
It is easier to consider a world w/o Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and Islam because they did not transform the world so much as just ripple humanity a little bit.
The totality of Christianity, (ethics, philosophy, theology) in practice lead to a worldview that builds and nurtures the individual thus facilitating the growth of community.
My world would’ve been totally different if I had not accepted Christ as my Lord and Saviour when I was 19 years old 45 years ago. I have no idea who I would’ve become or even if I’d still be alive. And one things for darned sure I would’ve never met my wife or scared her into not marrying me if I hadn’t been saved. As hard as things have been at times I’m extremely thankful and grateful for God saving me, it made all the difference in my life. A world without God would be Hell and that would suck!
And I pray for those who have never known the peace that being a Christian brings to a life. Those who know the love of Jesus are able to face and cope the hard circumstances that come to us all with more grace and acceptance. We can look to a deeper meaning and peace to guide us. We are able to resist bitterness and blame more readily. We accept that the world is not all about “me”, but instead is all about God and his love for everyone (even those “me” doesn’t like).
Judeo-Christian? So that whole “new covenant in my blood” was just old school “did not have sexual relations with that woman.” I’ll bring Muhammad the good news.