Full Article and my commentary



On the otherwise rather repugnant Disney Channel, there's a very clever cartoon series called Phineas and Ferb, probably the most creative and original animated TV show since Rocky and Bullwinkle.  It involves a mad scientist, Heinz Doofenshmirtz, who builds fiendishly malevolent machines, but always equips them with self-destruct buttons, which all too often spoil his evil plans.  This gets me to thinking, in my non-linear way, about Western Civilization.  Does it, too, come with a self-destruct button attached?  Christianity and Western Civilization are practically coterminous, so what you say about one tends to apply to the other.  At base, Christianity is universalist.  It considers itself to apply to all of mankind, like Islam and Buddhism — it explicitly doesn't restrict itself to one nation or race.  That is, anybody can join, and its rules of morality apply to all people and between all people, not just Christians.  Other religions are definitely not universalist.  Shinto is for Japan and Japan alone.  Judaism is for the Jewish people, and is essentially hereditary.  You have to be born into Hinduism.  (Before you e-mail me, yes, I know that there are counterexamples to all of these assertions.  People have converted to those last three, and there are sects of Christianity — I think it's the case with Amishism — that are effectively not universalist. But the generalization is valid.)