The nonstop pronouncements of idiocy coming out of the Trump administration are nothing short of astonishing. The latest example arrives from Trump’s ambassador to Israel, or maybe that should be Israel’s ambassador to the United States.
“If there hadn’t been a Judeo-Christian foundation, Western civilization would never have existed,” said Mike, who apparently missed every history class in high school.
Western Civilization began in ancient Greece and continued for centuries in the Roman Empire, and neither was Christian. Christianity did not exist as an organized religion until a century after the crucifixion of Christ. The organized life of the early Christian church emerged from Antioch.
It is true Christianity later played a role in shaping Western civilization, influencing its cultural, political, and social institutions, but it was not the genesis of Western Civilization as Huckabee claims.
Mike overlooks that major cultural contributions also arose from Christianized Germanic peoples, including the Longobards, Franks, Goths, and Burgundians. Furthermore, pre-Christian pagans—specifically the Celts and Germanic groups—also shaped Western Civilization.
It is also true that Judaism played a role in the development of Western Civilization through its teachings and foundational texts, but it is not, as Huckabee would have you believe, solely the basis for Western Civilization.
Mike would never admit the role played by Islam in the development of Western Civilization. Muslim intellectuals have made substantial contributions in the areas of physics, medicine, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, philosophy, and geography.
The contributions of al-Khwarizmi (algebra), al-Zahrawi (surgery), al-Razi (pediatrics), Ibn Sina (medical scholarship), Jabir ibn Aflah (trigonometry), Ibn Rushd (revival of Aristotelianism), and Ibn Khaldun (modern sociology, historiography, demography, and economics) helped usher in the European Renaissance, but this is largely omitted in the West.
Huckabee might want to take a look at the “Evolution of Civilization” mural on the ceiling of the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress. It depicts the substantial Islamic contributions to physics and the foundations of Western science.
In the nineteenth century, Islamic scholarship was considered a pillar of Western Civilization, but today the religion is portrayed as uncivilized, backward, and brutal (this is certainly the case for aspects of Sunni Wahhabism and other Salafi sects, but Islam is largely peaceful despite efforts in the West to define it as terroristic and violent).
Mike Huckabee is a Christian Zionist fixated on the eschatological “Gathering of Israel,” a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Huckabee’s rigid religious theology and its affinity with Zionism, a nationalistic political ideology, presuppose all positive aspects of Western Civilization are rooted in Judaism.
The historical record, however, reveals this is not the case, as Western Civilization is an amalgam of moral codes and doctrines, and not a single collection of axioms intrinsic to the Old Testament and Judaism.
Article posted with permission from Kurt Nimmo
