Most of the world thinks differently to us: Universalism is based on irrational ideas about human nature (Daniel Dieppe, 17 April, 2026, The Critic)
The reality is that we can trace the philosophical cause of our weird Western thinking to Christianity. The fundamental equality of all human beings stems from the belief that all are “made in the image of God”. Welcoming the stranger is encapsulated in The Parable of the Good Samaritan. Our intrinsic sense of guilt is a word-for-word reading of the fall and the Christian doctrine of original sin from Genesis 3. As the historian Tom Holland concluded in Dominion:The Making of the Western Mind, we “are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”