Christianity Without Christ, or Why We Might Have Needed Homer Instead
Western civilization, for all its achievements, may be suffering from the slow poison of its own founding myth. Not the myth of democracy. Not science. Not even capitalism. But the moral architecture beneath it all: Christianity — or, more precisely, Christianity without Christ.
Modern secular society, especially in its bureaucratic and ideological form, is arguably a distorted remix of Christian ethics. It has retained the sentiment — compassion, forgiveness, universal love — while discarding the structure that gave those values their gravity: transcendence, soul, judgment, God.
Compassion becomes indiscriminate policy.
Forgiveness becomes the evasion of justice.
Humility morphs into weakness.
Sacrifice turns into compulsory taxation.
Universal love devolves into borderless confusion.
This is the gospel of guilt without the promise of redemption. A civilization driven by pity, paralyzed by moral overreach, and increasingly hostile to strength, hierarchy, and earned dignity.
But what if we had chosen another founding text?
What if, instead of the Gospels, our civilization had been built upon Homer’s Iliad?
Homer gives us a different kind of sacred code:
Honor, not guilt.
Fate, not redemption.
Strength, not apology.
Loyalty to kin, not abstraction.
Gods who are wild, flawed, but real.
The Iliad teaches us that human greatness comes at a cost — and that life’s meaning is forged in action, not in passive goodness. Achilles, for all his flaws, chooses his destiny. He doesn't turn the other cheek. He knows he will die, but he walks into fate with his eyes open.
If Christianity whispers, “The meek shall inherit the earth,”
the Iliad answers, “Only those who stand and fight will be remembered.”
It’s no surprise, then, that the secular West — having discarded its God but retained its guilt — is now collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
A society that:
mistrusts strength,
rewards victimhood,
and moralizes weakness
… cannot survive long. Especially when it tries to export pity as policy — turning welfare into a right, criminality into a misunderstanding, and responsibility into a collective burden.
What we witness today may be the final stage of a mutation:
a secularized Christianity, stripped of its spiritual anchor, bloated into ideology.
Meanwhile, the few who still carry the Homeric flame — who value strength, beauty, excellence, tragedy, loyalty — are cast as relics or threats.
Perhaps it is time to recover the balance.
Not to destroy compassion, but to temper it with clarity.
Not to abandon justice, but to anchor it in reality, not guilt.
The future may depend on remembering what came before the cross:
The spear, the shield, the song of fate.
The story of flawed men who still dared to be heroes.
Not victims. Not bureaucrats.
But humans, facing the abyss with open eyes.