> It can reasonably be argued that the very idea of taking care of the poor, etc, only came into Western civilization because of Christianity.
You can try that argument but it's not very convincing. I think you could do equally well arguing that slavery is the fault of Christianity, or warfare or various other things humans have sometimes done and sometimes not done...
The ancient Greeks (so, significantly before Christianity and also influential for "Western civilization") have a whole bunch of goddesses representing the idea of specific kinds of being nice to others. Plutarch is like "Philanthropy is a good idea".
> You can try that argument but it's not very convincing. I think you could do equally well arguing that slavery is the fault of Christianity […]
You can also argue for a Flat Earth, but all your arguments given would be bad: given that slavery existed before Christianity arrived on the scene, and early Christians (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa) argued against it, that would contain a bunch of bad arguments as well. The history of Western thought as outlined in (e.g.) Siedentop's Inventing the Individual shows how Christianity moved the needle from slaves to serfs to individual freedom:
This can further be expounded on in Brundage's The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession illustrating how everyone—pauper to Pope—was afforded a fair shake at justice (due process in law) going back to (at least) the Middle Ages:
> The ancient Greeks (so, significantly before Christianity and also influential for "Western civilization") have a whole bunch of goddesses representing the idea of specific kinds of being nice to others.
And how many orphanages did the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans have? (Versus leaving children outside to die from exposure.) Or hospitals:
> The declaration of Christianity as an accepted religion in the Roman Empire drove an expansion of the provision of care. Following First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE construction of a hospital in every cathedral town was begun. Among the earliest were those built by the physician Saint Sampson in Constantinople and by Basil of Caesarea in modern-day Turkey towards the end of the 4th century. By the beginning of the 5th century, the hospital had already become ubiquitous throughout the Christian east in the Byzantine world,[3] this being a dramatic shift from the pre-Christian era of the Roman Empire where no civilian hospitals existed.[1]
The current-day 'Western values' are Christian values. The most recent instance of non-Christian values being practiced in the West would probably be Nazism, and before that Nietzsche's observation that you either accept a supernatural entity and have (e.g.) Christian values, or you have nihilism and morals are arbitrary (in After Virtue, MacIntyre outlines why any one system (by Kierkegaard, Marx, Kant, Hume, etc) is just as arbitrary as any other (agreeing with Nietzsche in the binary choice that is available)).
> The current-day 'Western values' are Christian values. The most recent instance of non-Christian values being practiced in the West would probably be Nazism
I'm sure this feels right to you, but to get there you have to decide that the actual "Western values", which have little to do with Christianity, are instead somehow Christian, while the contrary practices of some Christians aren't.
The Nazis were mostly Christians, it could hardly have been otherwise given how Christian Germany was at the time. Yes, some Nazis wanted to destroy Christianity (and all of them wanted a Church subservient to their politics, but that was true everywhere, it's why the Church of England even exists) but on the whole they're a product of Christianity, even if that's uncomfortable for you.
You can try that argument but it's not very convincing. I think you could do equally well arguing that slavery is the fault of Christianity, or warfare or various other things humans have sometimes done and sometimes not done...
The ancient Greeks (so, significantly before Christianity and also influential for "Western civilization") have a whole bunch of goddesses representing the idea of specific kinds of being nice to others. Plutarch is like "Philanthropy is a good idea".