As an antidote to another poster's habit of starting threads about all the things she thinks are wrong about Christianity, let's look on the postive side.
Christians:
See, this explicitly says Christians, not Christianity. Some of these people may have been motivated by their interpretation of Christianity, some of them by their inherent decency which didn't abide or conflict with their Christianity, and some even in spite of what the church (or, at least, their church) at the time was saying, but it's difficult to extricate the Christianity from people and give the credit to that particular element of their character without their explicit expression to that effect.
invented the nursing profession. The first nurses were monks and nuns, and the modern, secular nursing profession was founded by committed Christians.
Nursing existed in ancient Greece, ancient China, pre-Christian Northern Europe and the Americas in various guises - Christianity took it on, in some instances suppressed the older traditions, arguably acquired it as another element of social power it wanted to control, and then modern secular society 'reclaimed it'. There have been any number of highly worthy Christians who followed nursing traditions, who developed nursing traditions, but Christianity definitively did not 'invent' nursing.
invented modern, representative democracy. It arose entirely within Christendom, and is still largely confined to traditionally Christian countries.
Christians invented modern, representative democracy as a reaction to the autocratic right of kings that the institutional Christianity of the times was in favour of... again, might have been Christians, but institutional Christianity was on the other side, and individual Christians went either way.
were the first religion to abolish slavery. Most of the 18th- and 19th-Century campaigners against slavery were active Christians, and were inspired in their campaign by their faith.
The slave trade had existed for millenia, pre-Christian and for centuries withe explicit Christian and church backing. Some Christians, at the same time as well-meaning people throughout Christendom were exploring enlightenment values, were indeed at the forefront of abolishing slavery, but they weren't alone, and only some of them claimed to be motivated by their faith, whilst a significant number of those fighting to keep slavery were doing so for explicitly Christian motivations.
Give to, and volunteer with, charities and good causes more generously than the gerneral public.
I've seen figures both ways on this, but I suspect it does fall in favour of the religious slightly on total numbers. I'm not sure what it would be 'per capita' as it were.
O.
