Posted on 01/14/2019 7:21:14 PM PST by Jim Robinson
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization, Occidental culture, the Western world, Western society, and European civilization, is a term used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems and specific artifacts and technologies that have some origin or association with Europe. The term also applies beyond Europe to countries and cultures whose histories are strongly connected to Europe by immigration, colonization, or influence. For example, Western culture includes countries in the Americas and Australasia, whose language and demographic ethnicity majorities are European. The development of western culture has been strongly influenced by Christianity.[3]
Western culture is characterized by a host of artistic, philosophic, literary and legal themes and traditions; the heritage of various European peoples. Christianity, including the Roman Catholic Church,[4][5][6] Protestantism[7][8] and the Orthodox Church,[9][10], has also played a prominent role in the shaping of Western civilization since at least the 4th century[11][12][13][14][15] as did Judaism (particularly Hellenistic Judaism and Jewish Christianity).[16][17][18][19] Before the Cold War era, the traditional Western viewpoint identified Western civilization with the Western Christian (Catholic-Protestant) countries and culture.[20][1]
A cornerstone of Western thought, beginning in ancient Greece and continuing through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, is the idea of rationalism in various spheres of life, especially religion, developed by Hellenistic philosophy, scholasticism and humanism. The Catholic Church was for centuries at the center of the development of the values, ideas, science, laws and institutions which constitute Western civilization.[21][22] Empiricism later gave rise to the scientific method during the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.
Ancient Greece is considered the birthplace of many elements of Western culture, with the world's first democratic system of government and major advances in philosophy, science and mathematics. Greece was followed by Rome, which made key contributions in law, government, engineering and political organization.[23] Western culture continued to develop with the Christianisation of Europe during the Middle Ages and the reform and modernization triggered by the Renaissance. The Church preserved the intellectual developments of classical antiquity and is the reason many of them are still known today. Medieval Christianity created the modern university,[24][25] the hospital system,[26] scientific economics,[27][22] natural law (which would later influence the creation of international law)[28] and numerous other innovations across all intellectual fields. Christianity played a role in ending practices common among pagan societies, such as human sacrifice, slavery,[29] infanticide and polygamy.[30] The globalization by successive European colonial empires spread European ways of life and European educational methods around the world between the 16th and 20th centuries.[citation needed] European culture developed with a complex range of philosophy, medieval scholasticism and mysticism and Christian and secular humanism.[31][page needed] Rational thinking developed through a long age of change and formation, with the experiments of the Enlightenment and breakthroughs in the sciences. Tendencies that have come to define modern Western societies include the concept of political pluralism, individualism, prominent subcultures or countercultures (such as New Age movements) and increasing cultural syncretism resulting from globalization and human migration...
The Confederacy was, in many ways, a movement to preserve Western Civilization from the early communist movement. The defeat of the Confederacy opened the door to the rise of the Progressive Globalist ideal that ravaged the 20th century. Soon after, we saw the rise of Marxism, unionization, the birth control movement, the women’s suffrage movement (which was NEVER really about voting), an “economic crisis” leading to the formation the Federal Reserve, the Great Depression (the excuse for the New Deal), environmentalism, etc.
But before any of that could happen, the traditional, deeply Christian, Old South had to be eradicated. Slavery was the excuse.
The Barbarians are inside the Gates!!
And rampaging across the floor of The United States House of Representatives.
They would if they could.
It is as long as whites will not stand up for themselves. They use race as a battering-ram and will push us off a cliff with it unless we say no more.
If whites don’t get up off their knees Western Civilization will be destroyed.
Eradication of Christianity is the core motivation of the left.
These people are nuts, without self-awareness or appreciation for history. They cried when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhist statues of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, and cheer when we tear down statues in the US. Personally, not a big fan of the ‘confederacy’, but whitewashing history is always a mistake. Much better to turn these monuments into opportunities to teach where you can see a statue and download any number of podcasts to your phone and learn about it from a variety of perspectives.
Did our predecessors do everything right? No of course not. But neither do we. And we have the benefit of hindsight. If we don’t accept that our predecessors made mistakes, and erase them from history, then the lessons are lost to the future. But at the same time, it’s folly to ignore the incredible human achievements, sacrifice, progress that Western Civilization has fostered. People want to crow about carbon, but seriously consider where we would be without it? We’d be dying at age 40, we’d have poor sanitation, few medical advancements, difficulty traveling, slow growth economies, poor communications. I for one do not wish to live in 1819 or even 1919. I like 2019. We should celebrate and honor our achievement.. and this has nothing to do with race or sex etc. Knowledge is available to all and meaningful human progress can come from anyone.
In fact I think it was Christopher Hitchens who noted that if you look around the world, the countries that do the best are those that have free and liberated women - while the worst countries have oppressive policies towards woman, and others. Freedom is our great advantage. It’s a shame that today’s left not only can’t recognize this but want to roll it back.
Exactly - I tweeted to Romney and McCarthy that it’s sad when supposed Republicans go all Fahrenheit 451 on us and agree with an Ocasio lunatic that it’s OK to demonize our language and history.
???? Do you even grasp that his words were taken out of context and that he is 100% right?
The left hates Western Civilization because it includes Christian elements, and because the constitutions of the countries guarantee freedom, although that freedom is increasingly restricted by those same governments as they move leftward.
In the 60’s students chanted “hi ho, western civ’s got to go”
“Without Western Civilization there would not have been civilization on this planet.”
Not so. But it would have been very different. Like Imperial China or Japan. Or Ancient Persia. Or perhaps like one of the many civilizations which have come and gone, some of them lasting longer than our Western Civilization has, but equally advanced, up until the Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century.
Some cultures, some ideas, some products, some pets, some trees, some restaurants ARE superior to others. To deny this is to deny reality.
Ask a simple question, get trampled by a herd of dummiephants. Did I grasp it? Uh, yeah It’s so far out of what was actually said that no one should be upset. Then again, would you sit down for an interview with ANY msm outlet? Not me. Guess I should have given my comment the old “/S” huh?
“Certainly a case can be made they are objectionable, right?”
Not to those of us with Confederate ancestors, any more than a statue to Washington would be objectionable today had London won the Revolutionary War.
London issued two emancipation decrees during the War so the same morality game beloved by the statue smashers would be in effect.
I have one CSA soldier in my line, my g-grandfather’s oldest brother. But I have a dozen Revolutionary War soldiers in my ancestry, as well as a few 1812 vets.
Sometimes, when using one’s own brand of humor, the “/S” comes in handy...apologies.
I also recognize I have an innate ability to come across as crude and rude...working on it for years but not much luck.
Where does the hateful leftist tyranny stop?
It doesn’t, but at some point it begins to eat itself.
Bumpier
The deconstruction - then destruction - of Western Civilization and Biblical Christianity, the twin pillars of personal liberty, has been the goal of the fellow travelers at least since The Frankfurt School of Adorno, Marcuse, et al.
The current attacks are the harvest of their long sowing in their Long March Through the Institutions - including so-called Christian seminaries. The Neocon pseudo-Republicans have long been complicit in this.
Yes, they are in the process of that already.
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