ShushersRdamned
Member
That is not why they were called slaves - it simply attracted attention.
90% of their pay went to korea.
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Good Christians
- Thread starter Nakosis
- Start date
90% of their pay went to korea.
Sahjananda
New Member
Religions belong to the evolutionary process of human consciousness. Human beings have the potential to outgrow religions. All religions have their positive side but also their limitations, their dark side. There is no point of wasting our energies by looking at their dark sides but learning from their limitations and moving forward. Every religion needs humility to accept its limitations and negative deeds it has done in the human history. These negative deeds are done out of ignorance, fragmented understanding of truth. Jesus said,' Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing'.
Unveiled Artist
Veteran Member
I can't honesty say I respect Christianity because it's political influence is not just history. It's still happening today with people loosing their businesses because of the church. Our US government is influenced that it doesn't see equality over religious discrimination of the freedom of others.
I can't inwardly have, how to say, spiritual acceptance of Christian views and implications of those views. I'm not keen of denominational behavior. Pastors yelling in sermon about free Masons because they knew I was catholic.
I can't respect human sacrifice in any sense of the term. I'm not keen of Roman and Greek history. I side with the Jews in that regard.
Many christians as people have done a lot. As a large group their independent values are peer pressure to follow the whole. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if christians were told by god to kill others.
Probably no one would say no out of fear and pressure. I see that as immoral.
From my independent spiritual experience, I've not have most of these directly made me have grudges on people in the church. The idea of history and setup I cant respect regardless. Love the sinner, hate the sin.
I can't inwardly have, how to say, spiritual acceptance of Christian views and implications of those views. I'm not keen of denominational behavior. Pastors yelling in sermon about free Masons because they knew I was catholic.
I can't respect human sacrifice in any sense of the term. I'm not keen of Roman and Greek history. I side with the Jews in that regard.
Many christians as people have done a lot. As a large group their independent values are peer pressure to follow the whole. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if christians were told by god to kill others.
Probably no one would say no out of fear and pressure. I see that as immoral.
From my independent spiritual experience, I've not have most of these directly made me have grudges on people in the church. The idea of history and setup I cant respect regardless. Love the sinner, hate the sin.
Serenity7855
Lambaster of the Angry Anti-Theists
Do you worry over what others think of you? Do you sometimes say or do things to draw attention to yourself? Do you replay conversations in your mind, wondering if you left the right impression? If so, you might be struggling with the vice known as vainglory. To sing ones own praises is a sin, and could effect your illegibility to enter into the kingdom of God, if sincere repentance is discarded. I hate to throw a spanner in the works, however, am I not right in saying that the Bible makes it very clear for us to do our alms in private, the alternative will earn the sinner no reward from God. I have not read the entire thread, however, if the first few posts are anything to go by the there are a few here that maybe in trouble, unless they repent. Anything that we do to help our brother is done in the name of Jesus Christ and it is He that receives the Glory and gives it to His Father in Heaven.
Here is just three scripture to verify that I am not being intentionally argumentative but that I am speaking by the authority of the word of God. There are many more. I like the one from Matthew as it pulls no punches telling it as it is.
John 12:43
42 Nevertheless, many of the leaders believed in Him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess Him, for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue. 43 For they loved praise from men more than praise from God. 44Then Jesus cried out, “Whoever believes in Me does not believe in Me alone, but in the One who sent Me.…
Thessalonians 2:6
5 As you know, we never used words of flattery or any pretext for greed. God is our witness! 6 Nor did we seek praise from you or from anyone else, although as apostles of Christ we had authority to demand it.
Matthew 6:1-4
“Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
2 Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
3 But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
4 That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.”
Contention is not of me, saith the Lord, but it is of the Devil that stirreth up the hearts of men, to contend one with another. There can be no excuse for those who use violence to force their beliefs, indeed, it is incumbent for the Christian to demonstrate his love for God by avoiding it otherwise he cannot call himself a Christian, which means to live a Christ Centred Life and follow His example to us.
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Christianity's monopolies on power is just part of the question. When we talk about the impact of Christianity, we have to consider the net impact.
On, say, health care and medicine, we have to consider that, because of Christian doctrine, studying human anatomy through dissection was illegal or impossible through most of the history of Christian Europe. Surgeons only started saving more people than they killed around 1900; one can only wonder how much earlier that point would have been if doctors had been able to properly study the human body earlier.
And for most of that history, Christian rules prevented women from practicing medicine. It's hard to quantify the impact of this, but restricting the pool of doctors to half of what it would have otherwise been certainly couldn't have helped the state of health care.
And speaking of women: I happened to be reading an article online about Queen Victoria yesterday. Did you know that commercial anaesthetics became available (at least to people as wealthy as Queen Victoria) for her last two pregnancies, but to use them, she had to overcome the objections of religious leaders who argued that painless childbirth goes against the Bible? History is filled with these sorts of Christian impositions on what would have otherwise been normal, beneficial health care.
So in my mind, the question isn't whether other groups have contributed more to health care; the question is whether the overall impact of Christianity on health care even netted out to positive.
Perhaps the Christians you met were not really Christians after all. Maybe you are looking in the wrong place or talking to the wrong people.
PureX
Veteran Member
Actually, no. WE tend to do this through our use of religion. As well as our use of politics, economics, cultural expression, and pretty much every other 'belief system' that we actively engage in.
Most religions have no such mission.
Yes, but Christianity is just one religion among a great many around the world. And it is unique in it's evangelicalism. Which is what causes a lot of the problems that Christianity is guilty of. And I have always found this evangelicalism puzzling as Jesus was a Jew, and remained a Jew. He preached to other Jews (though not exclusively). And Jews then and now are not evangelical. They have never believed that anyone needs to convert to judaism to 'find God'. Or to 'be right with God'. They have always understood that God was bigger and more inclusive than judaism.
So why have so many of Jesus' followers decided that the religion they have created in his name should be evangelical? Especially when they are so intent on including ancient judaic scripture as part of their own? It makes no sense.
Mox
Dr Green Fingers
Noted some errors in your claims.
1. The US was always a secular nation, in that it has always exercised the seperation of church and state, as is necessary for a free democratic nation to operate.
2. Slavery wasn't replaced with welfare since slavery was effectively abolished in 1865 at the conclusion of the civil war. It was in fact replaced with sharecropping.
3. Black people's problems did not start with the US welfare system. They started when they first set foot on slave ships headed for the new world.
4. Suggesting that welfare systems, ie social safety nets could be replaced by charity, is a viewpoint I would consider extremely naive and/or indifferent to human suffering. Since charity alone could not be relied upon to repeatably guarantee a minimum amount of the necessary funding required.
Ayn Rand Objectivist style notions are frankly infantile and unworkable when applied to the proper running of state.
Certainly work is better than welfare, however without some sort of publically funded safety net, people will starve and suffer deprivation in many disastrous ways, even if charities do all they humanely can.
The cost of withdrawing welfare aside from the human cost, would simply be one of shifting the burden of costs elsewhere, to the police, to the prisons, to the health services, to the court system and elsewhere. As human misery and suffering caused by serious poverty, ends in unemployment crime drug abuse ill health and death. Among other dark and costly things.
Thankyou for reading.
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QuestioningMind
Well-Known Member
Anyone who would attempt to argue that it is preferable to be owned as the property of another person than to be on welfare has a VERY warped sense of morality.
godnotgod
Thou art That
Why do the rest of us have to put up with all the bad stuff, like The Inquisition and Manifest Destiny, and now the aggressive missionary work in all countries and the push to set in stone a 'Christian Nation', in order to have the 'good' stuff, which, unfortunately, is coupled with your allegiance to the Christian doctrine? Why do Christians always make a point of advertising themselves when giving? Why can't they just give and lose the fanfare? It cheapens the religion. If you are hungry, of course you will do anything to get food, even swear your allegiance to a doctrine. It's an underhanded way of getting converts. And when there's disaster relief, what's up with painting the relief buckets with 'Jesus Saves'? I was raised a Christian, and it was pounded into me at every opportunity. Took a long time and a lot of courage to get out from under and get free.
Once, in San Francisco at famed Grace Cathedral, after a Christmas service, Buddhist monks silently handed an orange to some of the congregation as they were leaving. This is pure giving without an agenda, without expectation of reciprocation. The orange was just a symbol.
The problem, you see, is one of insecurity. Because it is a belief -based system, more members means greater security. Unfortunately, conversion is via fear of hellfire, or the receipt of some heavenly reward. That is how the system of Reward and Punishment works.
Alan Watts once said of Christians:
"Christians are like men huddled in the dark, shouting to lend comfort to one another"
I want my religion to show me the way to freedom, not to enslave me with fear and doctrine, along with a debt for the blood sacrifice of Jesus that can never be re-paid.
Thank you very much.
Once, in San Francisco at famed Grace Cathedral, after a Christmas service, Buddhist monks silently handed an orange to some of the congregation as they were leaving. This is pure giving without an agenda, without expectation of reciprocation. The orange was just a symbol.
The problem, you see, is one of insecurity. Because it is a belief -based system, more members means greater security. Unfortunately, conversion is via fear of hellfire, or the receipt of some heavenly reward. That is how the system of Reward and Punishment works.
Alan Watts once said of Christians:
"Christians are like men huddled in the dark, shouting to lend comfort to one another"
I want my religion to show me the way to freedom, not to enslave me with fear and doctrine, along with a debt for the blood sacrifice of Jesus that can never be re-paid.
Thank you very much.
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stvdv
Veteran Member: I Share (not Debate) my POV
25 jun 2018 stvdv 012 61
Thanks. I was also brought up Christian, know the feeling. Perfectly phrased. Buddha was my first Love after; silent+non-violent [No hidden agenda]
Thanks. I was also brought up Christian, know the feeling. Perfectly phrased. Buddha was my first Love after; silent+non-violent [No hidden agenda]
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pik48
New Member
The golden rule from the secular stand point from others, were always a negative aspect and were just self serving. Christ's example "do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' Was a mandate from God which expresses love for someone even if they do not return it in return. That is really how God loves. If so called Christians were only looking for acknowledgment in humanitarian views, then they are not really Christians. After Christ's temptation in the desert, he came saying "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near" As a christian you are mandated to be an ambassador, preach the gospel, not good works. The gospel has power to save. The only acknowledgement Christianity should have is Jesus. This earth is ruled by another at the present time. The Gospel is all about Christ, from Genesis to Revelation.
godnotgod
Thou art That
True Christians do not do this, your are confusing people who say they are Christian with those who are Christian. I will quote the Bible here because clearly you have no idea of it's content:
Mathew 6 (KJV)
1:Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
2:Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
3:But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
4:That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
stvdv
Veteran Member: I Share (not Debate) my POV
stvdv
Veteran Member: I Share (not Debate) my POV
25 jun 2018 stvdv 012 73
Thank you for clarifying this. Very important information [except the part where you falsely accuse/misjudge @godnotgod IMHO.]
A little deduction teaches me that "total amount of christians is just reduced to 1 or 2 or so, but definitely not billions"
Thank you for clarifying this. Very important information [except the part where you falsely accuse/misjudge @godnotgod IMHO.]
A little deduction teaches me that "total amount of christians is just reduced to 1 or 2 or so, but definitely not billions"
Augustus
…
This is a fair point, but the net impact should be compared to that of the average historical society not compared to some form of anachronistic modern reference point that assumes the average society would have been composed of educated, egalitarian Secular Humanists had it not been for religion.
Don't you think that Christian Europe seems to have far outperformed the 'average' human society throughout history and is thus a net benefit even if there are many things that could have theoretically been better?
While the Church and religious orders did acquire great wealth and power, and certainly didn't use all of this in an altruistic and beneficial manner, the fact remains that it did use a significant proportion of this for education and opened up access to education to people beyond the traditional elites.
In line with net effects, why should we assume that the alternative would have been more favourable to promoting education? It certainly wasn't in the majority of other societies.
Perhaps the centralised power of the church and its great wealth were beneficial, albeit highly inefficient, ways of democratising access to knowledge? The 'default' of human society is not mass, unfettered access to free enquiry funded by someone else.
Some scholarly views:
A widespread myth that refuses to die...maintains that consistent opposition of the Christian church to rational thought in general and the natural sciences in particular, throughout the patristic and medieval periods, retarded the development of a viable scientific tradition, thereby delaying the Scientific Revolution and the origins of modern science by more than a millennium.
Historical scholarship of the past half-century demonstrates that the truth is otherwise.
David C Lindberg in the Cambridge companion to science and religion
No institution or cultural force of the patristic period offered more encouragement for the investigation of nature than did the
Christian church. Contemporary pagan culture was no more favorable to disinterested speculation about the cosmos than was Christian culture. It follows that the presence of the Christian church enhanced, rather than damaged, the development of the natural sciences.
Michael H. Shank Ch2 in Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion - Harvard University Press
Historians have observed that Christian churches were for a crucial millennium leading patrons of natural philosophy and science, in that they supported theorizing, experimentation, observation, exploration, documentation, and publication. Noah J Efron
No account of Catholic involvement with science could be complete without mention of the Jesuits (officially called the Society of Jesus). Formally established in 1540, the society placed such special emphasis on education that by 1625 they had founded nearly 450 colleges in Europe and elsewhere... It is clear from the historical record that the Catholic church has been probably the largest single and longest- term patron of science in history, that many contributors to the Scientific Revolution were themselves Catholic, and that several Catholic institutions and perspectives were key influences upon the rise of modern science. Margaret J Osler
Except, like most of the canonical body of New Atheist material that shows the hostility of the Church to science, it's not actually true according to modern academic historians.
Human dissection does not seem to have been practiced with any regularity before the end of the thirteenth century in either pagan, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim cultures. The only exception was a brief period in the fourth to third century B.C.E., when Herophilus and Erasistratus, two Greek medical scholars working in the Egyptian city of Alexan- dria, made a series of studies of the human body based on dissection.3 While the Greek and Roman avoidance of human dissection seems to have had roots in the belief that corpses were ritually unclean, early Christian culture broke definitively with the idea of corpse pollution, embracing tombs as holy places and the bodies of the dead as objects of veneration and potential sources of magical and healing power.4 Although the church did not prohibit human dissection in the early Middle Ages, there is no evidence of its practice...
In the late thirteenth century we find the first evidence of the opening of human bodies on the part of medical men, in connec- tion with municipally mandated autopsies to determine cause of death in the interests of criminal justice or public health. The ap-pearance of human dissection—the opening of corpses in the service of medical teaching and research, continuous with modern academic practices—took place around 1300 in the Italian city of Bologna, home of what was arguably the greatest medical faculty of the day. Inspired by renewed interest in the works of the Greek medical writer Galen (ca. 129–ca. 200) and his Arabic followers, none of whom are known to have dissected human beings, medical teachers and students at Bologna began to open human bo ies, and Mondino de’ Liuzzi (ca. 1275–1326) produced the first known anatomy textbook based on human dissection, which remained a staple of university medical instruction through the early sixteenth century. Initially, dissection was confined to Ital- ian universities and colleges of physicians or surgeons, a number of which adopted it as an annual requirement, and to the south- ern French university of Montpellier. In the late fifteenth century, however, the practice spread to medical faculties in northern Eu- rope, and by the sixteenth century it was widely performed in universities and medical colleges in both Catholic and Protestant areas.6
The official practice of human dissection in late medieval Italian universities obviously calls into question the two official ec- clesiastical prohibitions of dissection cited by White and other proponents of the myth. The first such prohibition, The church abhors the shedding of blood, which White described as promulgated at the Council of Le Mans in 1248, was shown forty years ago to be a “literary ghost,” produced by an inept eighteenth- century French historian.
Myth 5: That the medieval church prohibited human dissection - Katharine Park (all above quotes from Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion)
Augustus
…
The Orthodox Church also deserve a hat tip for this, with an accidental assist from the Turks for conquering Constantinople leading to an exodus of Greek Christian scholars and texts from Byzantium to Western Europe.
Epic Beard Man
Bearded Philosopher
More white people are on welfare and utilize affirmative action more than any person of color though....
Hard to imagine what the world would have been like without Christianity. Better worse, just speculation.
Of the religions which were suppressed, would any have done better?