I wonder whether we are using the terms "rational" and "rationalism" in different ways. To me, "rationalism" means one of two things. When talking about the hi

I wonder whether we are using the terms "rational" and "rationalism" in different ways. To me, "rationalism" means one of two things. When talking about the history of philosophy, it's the opposite of "empiricism", the idea that we can know important things by means of pure reason without observation of the world around us. When not talking about the history of philosophy, it means something like "trying to believe things to whatever extent there are evidence and reasoned arguments supporting them, and no further" (notable subtype 1: "rationalist" used to be a common term for a particular sort of atheist; notable subtype 2: "rationalist" these days often means "person who hangs out on the Less Wrong website"). But you're talking about "a strong organizational and legal structural framework", which is the sort of thing that might be designed rationally or that highly rational people might turn out to like, but having one versus not having one doesn't seem like the sort of thing I would want to call "rational" or "rationalism", and it doesn't seem particularly opposed to Christianity as such. When the Roman empire embraced Christianity it didn't abandon the idea of the "res publica", or stop having an elaborate code of law. The only specific thing you point to is that it stopped imposing extra taxes on Christians and murdering them when they wouldn't pay, which seems to me a good thing however wrong Christians are (I agree that they are very wrong), and not obviously "irrational" in any sense I recognize. I do not see how the stories in the Bible are any more irrational than the stories told in the Roman polytheist traditions about their gods. Could you explain?