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If the Western Missionaries exported Socrates instead of Jesus?

The tragedy of history is not simply that lands were conquered and resources stolen; it is that minds were disciplined into obedience. This is the deepest wound of colonialism: not the plunder of wealth but the pacification of thought. And this was no accident. Empire’s genius was to chain the body with guns and the mind with scripture, to enslave not only the limbs but also the conscience. The colonized were told that their suffering was holy, that poverty was blessed, that the meek would inherit the earth — but only after death. What kind of philosophy is this but a sanctification of powerlessness? What could serve the conqueror more perfectly than a religion that teaches slaves to love their chains?

History provides numerous examples of this strategy. In Latin America, friars baptized entire populations while conquistadors butchered them. The priests promised eternal salvation as a consolation for the slaughter of the present. In Africa, missionaries established schools that taught children not to ask questions but to memorize catechisms, replacing tribal memory with biblical verses. In India, Christian preachers ridiculed Vedic and Dharmic traditions, teaching generations to despise their own heritage and bow before imported revelation. Everywhere the pattern was the same: Socratic questioning was absent, Galilean obedience was omnipresent.

The difference between Athens and Galilee is the difference between liberation and domination. Athens was a city where debate was the lifeblood of civic life. To be a citizen was to speak, to question, to challenge. The Socratic method was democratic to its core: it taught that truth emerges not from blind belief but from relentless cross-examination. Galilee, by contrast, produced a creed of silence and submission. Jesus demanded faith without evidence, obedience without argument, loyalty without proof. He did not cultivate citizens, but followers; not thinkers, but believers. That was his fatal appeal to the empire. For the colonizer, Socrates was dangerous; Jesus was useful.

We must not underestimate the scale of this theft. The West kept Socrates for itself — to generate science, industry, democracy — while exporting Jesus to others. This double standard is one of the great hypocrisies of modernity. The very West that congratulates itself for the Enlightenment, for its culture of questioning, for its scientific revolutions, systematically denied that very spirit to the peoples it colonized. The Enlightenment was not global; it was provincial, hoarded within Europe’s borders, while the rest of the world was fed a steady diet of Galilean obedience. To call this a civilizing mission is an obscenity. It was a mission of pacification, a campaign of intellectual disarmament.

What might the world have looked like had Socrates, not Jesus, been exported? Imagine a Latin America filled not with churches but with academies of debate, where indigenous traditions could have fused with Socratic inquiry to create new philosophies of freedom. Imagine an Africa where dialectic, not catechism, had been taught in mission schools — how quickly colonial authority would have been unmasked as a fraud. Imagine an India where, instead of being told to despise its own intellectual past, children were encouraged to link the logical rigor of Nyaya with the skeptical questioning of Socrates. Such civilizations might have leapt ahead, building societies of reason and resistance rather than submission and stagnation. But the empire never permitted this. It could not survive the spread of Socratic fire.

The result is that today, in vast swathes of the world, faith still reigns supreme over reason. Obedience to sacred texts is still valued more highly than evidence or argument. Political and religious authorities still hide behind dogma, discouraging dissent and branding doubt as heresy. This is not an accident of culture; it is the inheritance of empire. Generations were trained in submission, and the habit of obedience has become entrenched. The Socratic spirit was deliberately denied, and its absence continues to cripple.

The West will, of course, deny this. It will say that it brought civilization, education, literacy, and progress. But what kind of education is it that forbids questioning? What kind of civilization demands that the colonized abandon their own traditions for the imported creed of obedience? To teach a child to read only so he can memorize scripture is not enlightenment but indoctrination. To build schools that forbid questioning is not progress but regression. The West’s so-called civilizing mission was nothing more than a campaign to replace free thought with unquestioning belief.

It is time to say openly what has long been obvious: the savior exported by the West was not a liberator but a jailer. Jesus of Galilee, in the hands of the empire, became the perfect warden of colonized minds. He trained generations to accept poverty, to sanctify suffering, to bow before authority, to endure injustice. He became the great anesthetic of colonialism, dulling the pain of exploitation while preventing the cure of rebellion. The Socratic spirit, which might have ignited revolutions of the mind, was withheld because questioning is the one thing an empire cannot endure.

If the West had truly cared for humanity, it would have unleashed Socrates upon the world. It would have armed the colonized with questions instead of catechisms, with dialogue instead of dogma, with inquiry instead of obedience. It would have trusted that truth, freely pursued, is stronger than authority, unthinkingly obeyed. But the West never cared for liberation. It cared only for domination. And domination requires obedience, not thought. That is why Jesus, not Socrates, was sent.

The lesson for today could not be clearer. Liberation will never come from blind faith, from submission, from obedience to ancient texts. Liberation begins with the courage to question. It starts with the refusal to accept revelation as truth without proof, with the willingness to challenge authority, and with the determination to think critically. Socrates, not Jesus, remains the model for freedom. His method, not the Galilean gospel, is the true path to liberation. The world will remain chained until the Socratic spirit is universal, until every human being has the right and the courage to ask: Why should I believe you? What evidence do you have? Who gave you authority over me? These are the questions empire fears most, because they dissolve the very foundation of power.

And so the task of our age is to recover the legacy that was stolen, to spread the Socratic spirit to every corner of the globe, to demand that reason replace revelation and debate replace obedience. Only then will humanity be free of the long shadow of empire’s greatest fraud — the export of Galilee instead of Athens, of obedience instead of questioning, of Jesus instead of Socrates.

The true savior of the oppressed world was never the crucified preacher who demanded faith, but the old Athenian gadfly who demanded questions. That is the gospel we need, and the one empire feared too much to give.