Beliefs by their definition are subjective
Again, no. They are not.
"The sky is blue" is not a subjective statement. It is objective.
The only thing which is subjective is any given individual's perception of that statement.
You seem to believe that it is only because of Christianity that people didn't do those "bad" things. People knew those things hurt others and most likely didn't believe those things were right yet still continued to convince themselves they were okay for selfish purposes until Christianity gave them a better "prize" than whatever selfish thing allowed them to believe that sacrifices and other things were okay.
"Christianity didn't stop these things."
Followed immediately afterwards by...
"Christianity stopped these things because it offered a better alternative."
You realize that is a self-contradictory position, right?
You act as if things like infanticide or blood sport were widespread
Infanticide was
incredibly wide spread in the Roman empire, and the pagan world in general. As a matter of fact, it was probably rather similar to abortion today, if not worse.
That's actually where the practice of "presenting" a child to its father immediately after birth originates. It was the father's responsibility to inspect the child, and make sure that it was up to the standards of his household. If he were to deem it to be insufficient or unwanted, it was his right to kill the child.
This was usually done by leaving it to die in the wilds, which was viewed as being "okay" because the parents could always fall back on the excuse that they did not kill the child with their own hands, or that someone else might happen along and raise the child instead (The reasoning sound familiar at all?).
The practice was not made into a Capital offense until after Constantine made Christianity the Empire's official religion in the 4th Century.
Now, granted, this might not have stopped the exposure of infants wholesale in the Middle Ages (people are still assholes, after all). However, Christianity
did, at the very least, care enough to widely preach against the practice, as well as to establish the first orphanages for abandoned children.
Those attitudes also stuck around until social circumstances improved enough that the practice could be ended outright (only to be replaced by the 'out of sight, out of mind' evil of abortion a few decades later, unfortunately :roll: ). Countries who wanted to gain favor with the West during the Colonial and post-Colonial period largely did so by following suit, and adopting Western style legal codes which banned these and other practices.
Likewise, Roman bloodsport was, in many cases, a
mandatory and expected part of public life, and subsidized from the highest echelons of Imperial power as such. They were prolific enough to drive several species of Mediterranean mega-fauna to extinction, in point of fact.
Like infanticide, the games were only officially banned in the 4th Century, when Christianity became the religion of the Empire.
Christianity did not end slavery
Christianity ending the holding slaves in Europe as a common practice, for the simple reason that it was generally forbidden to "own" another Christian.
Slavery did not really make a return until the Colonial Era. Frankly, even there, it actually started not as slavery, but as a (failed) attempt to basically introduce the Feudal system to the New World. It only reached the point of becoming full-on institutionalized chattel slavery afterwards, in a period of history which coincides with the weakening of religious power, and the dawn of the "Enlightenment."
Not all Native Americans believed in "mass human sacrifice"
Thousands (and possibly
tens of thousands) were sacrificed on an annual basis in S. and C. America. In N. America, there is evidence to suggest that the practice was at least as wide spread as it was among the pagan Germanic and Celtic tribes of Europe.
Humans grow with time as a group. We learn to become more cooperative and less selfish as we age.
You're aware that
a lot of people still do these things even today, right? They tend to be most common in culturally non-Christian (or, at the very least, non-Abrahamic) regions.
Hunter-gatherers, for example, have practiced infanticide since time immemorial, and some still practice slavery. Infanticide tends to still be common in rural China and India as well. A number of African peoples also still practice human sacrifice, some of them in countries which might otherwise appear to be rather outwardly "civilized."
For that matter, who says that evil is incapable of being "cooperative" anyway?
Again, I think you under-estimate the influence Judeo-Christian moral values have actually had in shaping your view of the world.
