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fubarobfusco comments on What is moral foundation theory good for? - Less Wrong
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Oh, really? I was not aware that, say, Galatians 3:28 was a passage censored or denounced by the entirety of medieval clergy. Perhaps you're, ah, slightly exaggerating?
"The last two thousand years" is the most hilarious bit of the above for me, given my view that the "progressive agenda" as broadly understood (or not understood at all, if you happen to be sam0345) basically appeared with Christianity, as its key part that was quite involved in its growth. See Robert Nisbet's History of the Idea of Progress for a conservative-progressive account, or Zizek's works on Christianity (The Fragile Absolute, The Puppet and The Dwarf, etc) for a communist one.
One of the curious things about early Christianity is that it is a religion of converts. For the first few generations, Christians were not the children of Christians, and they were not people who had converted under threat of violence as was common later on. They were adults who had converted from the religions of Judea, Greece, Rome, or Persia. The idea of conversion may have descended from the idea of initiation, found in Mithraism and in Greco-Egyptian mystery cults.
Christianity rather readily incorporated ideas from Greek philosophy, Jewish mysticism (of John the Baptist and the Essenes), and Mithraist mythology (the idea of a resurrected savior who was the son of God, which is not found in Jewish messianic beliefs). It opposed itself explicitly to Jewish legalism (the Pharisees, progenitors of Rabbinic Judaism) and nationalism (the Zealots / Sicarii / Iscariots).
If anything new — such as "the progressive agenda" or specifically the universalism and tolerance expressed in Galatians 3:28 — did appear with Christianity, we might ask, how did this new thing emerge from Christianity's antecedents and influences? We can be pretty sure that despite their mathematical advances, the ancient Greeks did not have a formal basis for morality, for instance ....