Excellent post. Thank you. You've outlined succinctly some of the imponderables involved here (I've been battling a nasty cold, or I'd have responded sooner). If I may ===========>
Donn summarises my view precisely.
You have obviously invested a great deal of time and study in this, which I do respect. That makes it very hard for you (and of course simple but worthless for me) to dismiss your suspected connection as neither coincidence nor significant, but simple selection bias.
Paul had at least one hallucinatory experience. Hence, "Pauline" Christianity.
Positive step? Negative step? Depends on your POV. The last 2000 years might have been a healthier time had Rome adopted a Hellenistic worldview instead of adopting Roman Christianity. If the empire had been an Epicurean, materialist place, instead of encouraging mysticism, we might have hotels on Mars by now, who knows?
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Personally, one chief reason why I conclude that Christianity ended up having pathetically little to do with the thinking of one altruistic and crucified rabbi was Roman culture's own habits. In other words, once Theodosius had this idea that he was going to trump Constantine's conversion to Christianity by making Christianity the religion for everyone else in the country as well -- not just permitted but actually mandated! -- the fix was in. They were right back to imperial power again; only instead of Zeus and Hera, it was Yahweh and Mary. Same tyranny, just changing the drapes. Instead of the Christians in the arena, it would be the polytheists. YAWN.
Sure, one rabbi was able to change (something of) civilization's treatment of the hungry and the sick, but his example was unfortunately unable to help deep-6 the habits of imperial Empire. I see precious little that differentiates the Roman Emperors of yesteryear from the Popes and Bishops of today. No wonder authoritarianism and tyranny became the modus operandi for institutionalized Christianity for nearly two millennia.
Perhaps, yes, a more Hellenic ethos, vintage 5th century b.c.e., might have forestalled that. But ultimately, it was arguably Rome's own imperial habits that turned Christianity into the brutal jackboot it became. If it hadn't been Christianity, it would probably have been something else just as handy instead. Candidly, I view Rome's Tiberius, Pilate (who was apparently NOT the cuddly guy palmed off on us in GJohn), Nero, Theodosius and half a dozen others of these Roman despots as among the most profoundly destructive figures humanity has yet known. They established a model that has had deadly consequences for centuries. No question that other cultures had their deadly tyrants too, but this gang had a long-term impact from which the world is still reeling.
In addition, the other nasty thing that happened was the overlaying of hagiographic and abracadabra nonsense on the Jesus bio. Philological analysis of the earliest strata of the Synoptics and the restrictive four corners of the 7 authentic Paulines with the multiple non-apologetic references in places like Josephus XX and Tacitus, etc., suggest a figure who was mainly involved in teaching homely parables about people needing a second chance and attempting the occasional folk healing. It was only his disgust at the grubby financial frenzy in the Temple that got him nailed, and he never revived. These materials have no hint of a Virgin Birth, or of John's [paraphrase] "I'm the only way", etc., etc., etc. But these latter ingredients are what the imperialists in Rome found so deadly useful in perpetuating their jackbooted ways.
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Was Martin Luther prone to delusions? He had a pretty clear view (IMO) about the level of corruption in the Catholic Church. No delusion there. But he was also an anti-Semite.
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He wasn't effectively introducing a new deity, though, was he? So I'm not sure he's relevant here.
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Was Henry VIII deluded? Not about god. He knew who was in charge. But was the Anglican Church ever a force for good? Good novels, maybe. Where would Austen or Trollope be without Anglicanism?
Calvin? Knox? Good? Bad?
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Again, I don't see how any of these figures introduce a new deity of some kind(?).
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I did look into Spinoza. He's a fascinating figure. Some encyclopedias without the remotest notion of what atheism is (perhaps they're too cowardly to bother to understand?) will glibly reference Spinoza as an atheist. Closer scrutiny, though, shows that that characterization is only applied because he's not a Christian (big deal!). In fact, Spinoza explicitly writes of a deity that does exist and that "lives" everywhere in nature and the animals. This is a recognizable doctrine and is utterly distinct from atheism (which is already a known doctrine in Spinoza's day, as shown in the German pamphlets of Matthias Knutzen). In fact, Spinoza is a pantheist.
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The enlightenment thinkers in general?
Joan of Arc (one who apparently did "see things" ) - a good force or a bad one? Depends on where you stand politically.
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Again, though, not an introducer of a new deity of some kind.
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"Visionaries" appear in spheres other than the religious. Industry, science, gardening.
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And it's the visionaries in the political and the social and the cultural that I've been concentrating on exclusively all along, not the theistic/religious at all. The political and the social and the cultural is what I started with, and that's what I've been pursuing every step of this process. It is not part of any plan for them to constantly emerge as theistic pioneers in addition. That very surprising pattern emerged with all the subtlety of a 2-by-4 well into my reading. I was expecting some other pattern to emerge instead: they might all be from outside the privileged classes, or they might all be involved in politics, or they might all be outside the intelligentsia -- or inside the intelligentsia -- or they might all be from big families -- or from small families -- etc., etc. It just never occurred to me that they'd all turn out as theistic pioneers in the bargain. That was not part of any game plan, certainly not mine.
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Some cultures are more prone to acceptance of religious vision- the middle east and America for two. But how do we judge which ones were right? In science it's simple. In industry it is harder- now we are aware of planetary climatic effects, the industrial revolution doesn't seem as good an idea as it did to the Victorians. In religion or morality it's even harder to say what is positive. Values that worked well in the neolithic may be distinctly survival negative today,for instance.
History is contingent. An idea may flourish in one political climate, wither in another.
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Or even be counter-productive. Your example of Victorian England is instructive. Obviously, industrialization was already hiking up tuberculosis. So there was that downside from the start. But the notion that that might be a canary in the mine that would ultimately lead to global climate change never occurred to anyone back then, SFAIK.
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We are where we are because of a billion chance events. You have selected a handful, labelled some as positive, others negative, as seen from where you stand, looking back. That's called "Texas Sharpshooting".
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Actually, "selected" is misleading here in the way you use it. What I selected was a handful of basic other-centered ideas by which modern culture functions, and then I tried tracing those ideas back to their earliest human source. So the individuals were never pre-selected at all. Instead, the principles were: principles found in documents like the U.N. Charter, the reforms of Alexander II, the reform bills of 1830s Britain, the Droits de L'Homme, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the laws of 17th-century Holland, the Magna Carta, Justinian law, the speeches of Pericles and the laws of Cleisthenes and Solon, the Golden Rule, the Torah, the laws of Hamurrabi, the reforms of Urukagina and Enmetena, and so on. These principles come down to over-arching guidelines like protecting the weak, feeding the hungry, sheltering the traveler -- many, many more, but all treating on the larger principle of treating all equally, in essence. It's the principles and not the practice that I concentrated on. (The practice has been woefully skimpy.)
What I realized was that most of these principles go back hundreds of years -- thousands in many cases. Some of them cannot be traced to their point of origin, but more than a few can. It was those that are traceable that got me interested. What made those few pioneers tick? What got them through the day?
From that, the next step was to analyze just what the pioneers who emerged in this process all had in common. (Heck, maybe they were all left-handed; we wouldn't know.........)
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I am of the opinion that both selfishness and social altruism are aspects of human behavioural genetics and have been so since our days up trees in Africa. Similar characteristics are evident in our chimpanzee cousins. Colonial insects show related traits, but tied to rather different genetics. Genes are selfish, but selfish genes are capable of producing cooperative social creatures
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No question, and I'd suggest that may be one good reason to suppose that David Sloan Wilson may not be that far off in his extensive recent research on group selection.
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, who can be nice to their kids while building atom bombs in working hours. Behaviour is complicated.
I see no need to seek to explain this in terms of the numinous, or any external visionary input. Even if we did, we might see Terry Pratchett's comic notion of idea particles sleeting through the universe and occasionally hitting a fertile brain as an equally possible cause. (Of course TP is kidding, but is his idea any less likely than your own?)
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Actually, my supposition is that such empathetic/altruistic ideas are somewhere embedded in every brain. It just takes the right conditions to tease them out of one.
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I truly think you are pursuing a blind alley here, but of course I can't prove that and I might be wrong. I'd advise you to be more diligent in seeking counter examples to your hypothesis and to try to take a wider view of what you consider "positive" changes. Some of those you suggest seem to me (like my Joan of Arc example) to be very subjective.
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Actually, I do deal with potential counter examples in the 12-part OP (Sections V and following).
When I reached an impasse in my research, I was quite discouraged and frustrated because I could not trace any of the other-centered ideas to any pioneering atheist, so I decided instead to go at it from the other direction: Make as exhaustive a survey as I could of the pioneering atheists and see which ones also tackled social justice. Here, I definitely plead guity to having opted for a selecting process that undoubtedly targeted individuals and not ideas or principles. I buried myself in Stein, Beyle, Robinson, Flew, Russell, Ingersoll, Holbach, etc. -- a host of others. There was an abundance of socially enlightened atheists throughout history, going right back to the ancient Greek Democritus -- and I'd wager even further than that. In addition, some of these atheists were pioneering atheists for their culture. The earliest such is ancient India's Brhaspati. But though there are at least 5 socially enlightened atheists in the number of genuine pioneers that I uncovered, duly described in Section V of the multi-part OP, the small number of those that introduce a new ethic are not pioneering in their atheism, and the small number of those that pioneer atheism for their culture do not introduce a new ethical paradigm, even though their social ideas are strikingly ethical.
I should make it clear (as I did in another thread --
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10031207&postcount=492 ) that unless a pioneering egalitarian has devised her/his own spin on the cosmos in addition, whether materialist or theist, I discount that spokesman's own orientation on the cosmos as merely an accident of education and/or environment. Democritus already had the older Leukipppos, the first Atomist, as his mentor, and he accepted the Atomist construct implicitly. Thus, his egalitarianism, which is entirely his own and totally individual for his time and culture, has no bearing on a (borrowed) construct when it comes to his take on the cosmos. It doesn't come from the same "template".
We have examples of egalitarians out there whose egalitarianism and whose spin on the cosmos both come out of the same "template" -- i.e, their own consciousness -- so one can measure that as an organic adaptational phenomenon on the ground. However, the waters are muddied when it comes to Democritus.
At the same time, I'm just as strict when it comes to theists. To those who may admire St. Francis (or Joan of Arc or Knox, etc.), viewed by some as just as splendid as Democritus, I would have to say that I reject the relevance (in this context) of his spin on the cosmos too. It too has no organic evolutionary bearing on his egalitarianism for the same reason. It too is borrowed rather than coming from the same template -- i.e.,, his own consciousness -- as his egalitarianism. After all, St. Francis had already allowed himself to be steeped in the Gospels the way Democritus had been steeped in Atomism, with no self-made take on the cosmos at all, which means that St. Francis's theism also has no direct bearing on his egalitarianism in terms of measuring it as an evolutionary phenomenon.
Perhaps, I didn't make this clear before, but the only cases where I'm ready to perceive a materialist or theist stance as having adaptational significance is when it is as original with an egalitarian as her/his egalitarianism. In both these cases, it isn't.
Here is where a whole phalanx of researchers would be invaluable. I am far from imagining that my list of unbelievers in Sections V and following is anywhere near complete. It would need many hands on deck and a generation or two of concentrated digging to unearth the kind of complete list of unbelievers that professional academe would then have any good reason to trust. All that we can see from this measly decade or so of reading that I've undertaken is the mere beginnings of a pattern, which may or may not be illusory.
Finally, many have already pointed out to me that since belief seems to be the default stance of most humans in history anyway, it is hardly surprising that the biggest altruistic/empathic ideas are all traceable to theistic pioneers. I think that misses one startling aspect, though: The introducers of altruistic/empathic ideas are not just theists, but pioneering theists as well. No question that theists are a dime a dozen. But pioneering theists aren't. They are quite rare in the ordinary scheme of things.
Also, I wonder if anyone realizes just what a jackboot institutionalized Christianity placed on humanity in the past two thousand years. In the earliest documented millennium of the atheist idea, starting in ancient India, quite a number of atheist thinkers are known, and their thoughts have been preserved in one form or another (see Section V). From these documents, it emerges just how drastically the number of atheist thinkers shrank after Theodosius jackbooted Christianity. In fact, the number of extant atheist thinkers in that first millennium b.c.e. are not any less than the number of pioneering theists during the same period. They are roughly equally frequent, or equally occasional. That's how "frequent" pioneer theists really are. So the question of why they should have a monopoly on the social ideas that I endeavored to trace back from documents like the U.N. Charter and the Constitution is still a fair one.
Stone
