Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind... ravi
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Notice something interesting? If you have one of our western gods, you don't need love, knowledge, or pity---I would substitute compassion or better sympatico or fraternity. God takes care of all that, so we are free to mercilessly hose each other for fun and profit, enjoy life long loathings, and proclaim the most palpably ignorant statements imaginable as absolute truths. God takes care of the rest. It's perfect.
As far as I can tell from my historical searches, there is only one thing that Christianity added to the world of the mind, and I am not all that sure oI believe it: the Christian concept of time is linear. Of courset they ruined it with the Last Judgment, but if you ignore that minor detail, the idea that we have a future, perhaps a fate, perhaps a destiny determined by fortune (medieval addtions), but more likely something we choose, and in that sense perhaps some form of progress is I think unique. Of course I don't get credit for this thought, because it belongs to Octavio Paz. I wish I could supply a quote, but I seem to have lost one of my favorite books of all, Children of the Mire. In it Paz proposes that the Christian cosmos was our first linear, and therefore historically bound time. The time of the Greco-Roman antiquity was a stasis, a ritual time that attempted to regain an originary perfection, the mythological time when gods and men walked the earth together. Notice for example that before the flood, even the Jewish god walked with Noah. After Noah, he vanished into the figure of dreams.
What is interesting about Paz is his poetry is extremely hard cut, like quartz, but his essays are purely lyrical like a guitar. It makes for a very strange dialectic.
CG