It’s true that Christianity implicitly satirizes pagan ideas of sacrifice and heroism, as the Christian myth represents the underclass. The same can be said for Judaism, though, in its positing of an invisible, all-powerful deity that favours the perennially conquered Jewish people and that will eventually overturn the pagan empires.

But most of your article reads like a hyperbolic or a disingenuous whitewash. Your statement that “Christianity is a progressive force throughout history” is sheer ideology, not history.

You fail to distinguish between accidental and intentional benefits. Christianity was often the inadvertent source of progress in the West because the Church’s totalitarianism provided the foil against which heretical progressives could revolt. Eventually, those revolts against Christian theocracy made for the modern revolutions of liberalism. Those heretics preserved not so much Christian wisdom but the neo-Platonic and other pagan pre-Christian philosophies and protosciences that the Church had meant to eliminate.

So, the irony of your ideology is rich. Thanking the Church for modern progress is like thanking Nazism for the Zionist state of Israel.

The logic of the Christian myth doesn’t abolish the concept of animal and human sacrifice, so much as it one-ups that concept. Purportedly, Christianity provides the ultimate sacrifice (the killing of a godman), thus making for an absolute, totalitarian regime that syncretized the Jewish countercultural perspective with the Roman imperial one.

And your statement that “Christianity was the pioneer that showed human beings that they were uniquely imbued with the gift of reason” is preposterous. Those who emphasized reason in the modern period had to circumvent Christian dogmatism, reaching back to the naturalistic, humanistic philosophies and methods of the pre-Christian, Greco-Roman world. Officially, Christianity prescribes faith, not reason. Natural wisdom is supposed to be foolishness to God, and Doubting Thomas was chastised for not relying on the blind faith of children whom Jesus said were ideal members of God’s kingdom.

The Church resorted to reason cynically, to help manage the empire it inherited, and to co-opt the more critical pagan traditions it couldn’t stamp out since they kept cropping up in the Gnostic and Hermetic heresies which led directly to the Renaissance.