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Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Why Ancient Faiths Cannot Survive

Christianity cannot survive contact with modernity. Islam survives contact with modernity primarily by rejecting everything associated with "women's rights." 

Insofar as Islam does not deny "women's rights", it loses. 

Insofar as Christianity does not deny "women's rights", it also loses.

"Modernity" is primarily that worldview which treats women as the political, economic or social equal of a man. Technically speaking, original Christianity only allowed woman to be the spiritual equal of man. Women have an equal opportunity to salvation, but that equal opportunity to salvation for women was achieved by totally different means than salvation was achieved for the man.

In Christianity, a man is saved by sacrificing his life for his wife (Eph 5:25), while a woman is saved by the bearing of children (1 Timothy 2:15), sacrificing her needs and wants for her children. The first part of that sentence, Eph 5:25, is emphasized by every Christian church, the second part of that sentence, 1 Timothy 2:15, is completely ignored by every Christian church.

1 Timothy 2:15 is replaced with the modern creed, "Every woman should be able to reach self-actualization." This is why Lindsay Clancy hits a dissonant note. She strangled her three children, thereby violating 1 Timothy 2:15, but living out the modern creed. The man who refused to hold her as innocent was a Catholic Haitian immigrant. He may not have held out because of his Catholicism, but he certainly did not give in to the creed of modernity.

Christianity cannot survive having the second part, the woman's source of salvation, replaced with the modern creed. Now, you may argue that Catholic Faith not only allows, but encourages, women to live celibate lives as nuns or sisters. True. But those same nuns and sisters are required to give their lives in service to those around them. Those women exchange service to a particular set of people (their own children) for a universal set of people (all children, all people).

Christianity cannot survive contact with the modern creed because the modern creed, which includes women holding their own selves as more important than anyone around them, is antithetical to Christian belief. In a similar way, Islam cannot afford to grant women that kind of equality. Islam is built around the idea that women exist to service and serve men. Again, the modern creed does not allow for service to other, it only allows for service to self. 

Every ancient faith system was built around a subsistence-level society, wherein all members of the society have to care for one another. Modernity assumes a surplus-goods society in which people can afford to worry primarily about themselves because the tools-network is sufficiently robust to allow the tools to substitute for human care. Selflessness, to the point of giving one's life so another might live, is no longer a required attribute for successful community. 

Modernity still expects the man to give his life for the community, but no longer expects anything close to that for the woman. But every ancient faith system was built around some aspect of requiring women to put the life and needs of the children (Christianity) or her husband (Islam) ahead of her own. This ancient requirement, when levied on women, is blasphemy within the modern system.

But this can be extrapolated further. Again, ancient faiths assumed children had duties towards their parents, just as parents had towards their children. This web of duties was the necessary foundation for all subsistence-level societies. Five-year olds were expected to work, just as their parents did, to support the family as a whole.

The first group to lose their responsibilities were the children. Because children competed for adult jobs, mandatory schooling laws were passed to force children out of the workplace and out of the job market. They lost their responsibility to be economically responsible for family life. As children were squeezed out of the marketplace, the role of motherhood (and women) also lost its central place in family and community well-being. Mothers used to contribute by having children. Now, having children became an economic burden, not a benefit.

So, women were introduced into the marketplace so as to secure their importance in the community. But this meant male dominance as bread-winner was now weakened, suborned. The last major Catholic voice that insisted women were saved through the bearing of children was St. John Chrysostom, Father  and Doctor of the Church (347-407 AD). Even Pope St. John Paul II emphasized women being saved through marriage, vocations to religious life and widowhood, but he did not mention being saved through bearing children. The Catholic Church has been silent on this passage for sixteen (16) centuries. 

Thus, it was not well-suited to deal with a situation in which women having children simply... stopped. No other Christian denomination in the last 1000 years has made this passage a centerpiece of the Gospel teaching. Once the community made child-bearing economically peripheral, there is literally nothing to tie women to anyone at all. So, just as children's contributions to society were marginalized,  because children's contributions were marginalized, so women's contributions were also necessarily marginalized. Children are not expected to sacrifice, women are not expected to sacrifice, for anyone.

That leaves only the men who are still expected to sacrifice. But now we have AI, and waiting in the wings, robotics.

Once AI-drive robots enter the picture and begin to do all the dirty, life-endangering jobs, men will no longer be expected to sacrifice either. Even as we speak, the non-AI drive tool-set has become so strong that even men's sacrifice is being slowly relegated to the waste bin of history. 

The fear of AI may well be founded in a puzzlement concerning what any society can look like if no one at all is expected to sacrifice to maintain that society. Can the society be maintained? If it *CAN* be maintained without any human person undertaking any level of sacrifice, then what does that look like, and what does "society" mean?

Obviously, Christianity, and it's message of crucifixion, will simply not be understandable, it will have absolutely no meaning in such a social milieu. If we don't have any poor, there is no one to sacrifice for. If AI-driven robots do all the work, none of us make up in our body what is lacking in the suffering of Christ, for the sake of His body (Colossians 1:24).

None of the Abrahamic religions, none of the ancient faiths, whether Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Taoism or any other "ism" can be understood within a society that does not have any significant, meaningful physical suffering or danger for any substantial number of its members. If you want to suffer, you will have to go to Mars or the Moon, and even that will only be true for a century or so. 

We don't have a language, or a vision, or a way of understanding this kind of society. But that is what robotic AI promises - a society in which no one is expected to make any significant sacrifice. And, to be fair, the society we currently inhabit is so radically different from even the life of the 18th century, that they would consider us completely free from all meaningful suffering. The past is a different country. We are living in the past.