Eddie claims Christians who don’t believe the exact things he believes have to justify those beliefs now. Was he just squirting his usual squid ink?
But, @Eddie, you still oppose the granting of basic human and civil rights to everyone. Go figure.
But this raises a question for you, @Eddie - do you agree that there can be authentically Christian underpinnings to progressivism, that true Christians can birth a movement so diametrically opposed to your own inclinations and beliefs?
Probably not, I find it awkward at times to try to get a book-length answer into a couple sentences. I didn’t get that feeling.
So Eddie was wrong, Christians don’t have to justify their beliefs to anyone now. Got it.
I can’t speak for Eddie, I can only say that I have no need to justify my actions to anyone but God. If that is in conflict with the general moral values of the world, so be it. The reward for following Jesus is eternal life, which seems much more valuable than anything this world has to offer, even if it means spending the time here on earth in jail. Which is what all of the apostles did for their belief, even to horrible deaths.
That said, Jesus’ rules are much more strict than any of the human or civil rights offered by society today.
That is my understanding too. For some reason Eddie thinks we have to justify everything to Eddie.
In other news, it turns out that if the world were different from the way it is today, then it would be different from the way it is today.
I’ve never done so. Saying that a particular civil servant should not have to violate his religious conscience, in a state that supposedly defends the right of religious conscience, is not opposing rights. Another staff member is always available, or can be made available in acceptably short order, to perform whatever service that anyone has the right to. There is no motivation for forcing anyone to violate religious conscience, except the sheer joy that some secular humanists get out of forcing some religious people to knuckle under. It’s an expression of the will to domination, not any concern for anyone’s rights, that would cause anyone to support the violation of Christian conscience, when such violation is not necessary to give people access to their rights.
In answer to your question, yes, there are authentically Christian underpinning to many cherished modern secular beliefs, but those beliefs are not in themselves opposed to core Christian values. Freedom of religion, the abolition of slavery, loving rather than brutal treatment of women, elimination of rigid class structures, etc. are all compatible with Christianity and in most cases seem to be enjoined by it. What is opposed to core Christian values are not democracy, freedom of religion, social equality, etc. It is certain modern developments that go far beyond those Enlightenment or 19th-century gains and which Christians must oppose: gender-bending theories of sexuality, pagan worship of nature (which is different from respect for nature as God’s creation to be preserved) such as we see in the decision of the spaced-out flower children who run New Zealand to make a RIVER a legal person (!!!), the aggressive attacks of New Atheism on religious life (e.g., Dawkins saying that raising your kid in your religion is a form of child abuse), etc.
It’s true that some American Bible-based Christians have made bad judgments in this area. They don’t carefully enough distinguish between the virtuous and the vicious parts of modernity, and sometimes they seem to want to throw out the good with the bad. But that doesn’t count against Christianity, but against historically and philosophically uneducated Christianity, and against a certain kind of American romanticism about the past that causes some Americans to want to live in fossilized social forms as if they were best and final expression of true Christianity, rather than limited and imperfect forms of Christian life. But that fault of some American Christians doesn’t justify the almost universal habit of the atheists here of focusing on the very worst aspects of modern American Christianity and ignoring all the gems scattered throughout the Christian tradition, earlier in American history, and back into the history of Europe.
To listen to the atheists here, one would never know that “Christianity” included Jonathan Swift and Thomas More and Erasmus and the founders of the European universities and hospitals, and much of the music of J.S. Bach and Handel, and the almost supernatural beauty of medieval plainsong and the architecture of magnificent cathedrals and the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and so much else that is beautiful, uplifting, edifying, civilizing, mind-expanding, and heart-warming. One would never remember that Tolkien was a devout Catholic and that many of the greatest scientists from the 16th century onward were motivated by the desire to think God’s thoughts after him. The atheists here seem to repeatedly target the shallowest and most morally problematic examples of Christians and Christian history that they can find. The account is so one-sided that it can’t be taken seriously, by anyone with a deep knowledge of the history of Christianity, the history of Western civilization, and so on. And it would be laughed out of court in any undergrad history or religion program at any good university.
Too late for that…
All that is being “forced” is the civil servant is being required to do they work they agreed to do when they took the job. If the civil servant later decides it violates his/her conscience then they find a new job. Keeping your word and keeping the promises made when you started taking the paycheck isn’t that difficult for most people. It’s the same principle a business owner agrees to when they apply and are granted a state issued business license. The business licence requires you treat all members of the public equally and fairly. You can’t decided later serving gay couples or interracial couples hurts your religious feelings so those groups are banned from your business.
Here again is the question you keep dodging Eddie:
What’s to stop a Christian from ignoring any laws he/she doesn’t like by claiming they violate his/her “Christian principles”?
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You don’t see what is wrong with killing an innocent human being?
Interracial marriage does not violate any principle of the Christian religion. Next question.
I can’t even remember what this example was about, but owning a driver’s license is not against the Christian religion. 
A fetus isn’t a person. It has the potential to grow and develop into a person but that is not the same thing.
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Are you speaking legally, or ontologically? If legally, then it’s purely a matter of definition according to contemporary law. If ontologically, the truth of the statement is far from obvious, and of course many first-rate minds have taken the opposite position.
Some Christians think it does. There was even a church in the news in Alabama a few years back which refused to allow interracial couples into its congregation. Why shouldn’t their religious beliefs let them ignore laws against racial discrimination? Why do you want to deny their right to exercise their religious conscience?
Some Christians still think women shouldn’t be allowed to drive or even vote. Why do you want to deny their right to exercise their religious conscience?
Oh, you ducked this question for the fifth time. Really scary question eh? 
What’s to stop a Christian from ignoring any laws he/she doesn’t like by claiming they violate his/her “Christian principles”?
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The question was about legal abortions. Try to follow the conversation for once.
Your what-aboutism is beside the point. My point were that these things undercut your claim that post-Christian movement towards liberty had its basis in Christian sentiment, when the Old Testament has a pervasive sentiment of tribalism and of inhumane brutality and barbarity.
These sentiments are also more germane than those of their “rough equivalents”, because they were used, in the not so distant past, as justification for Slavery and Segregation in the US.
And where is the Sermon on the Mount (and particularly the Beatitudes) in Trump’s Evangelical base’s support for his inhumane polices, such as separating families, putting children in cages, and not bothering to increase testing for COVID19, because at the time it was only affecting Blue States?
I don’t think you were here when we had a similar discussion many months ago, but as I pointed out to someone then, “democracy” as it existed in ancient Greece (mainly in Athens) was not “liberal democracy” of the modern type.Even a "not 'liberal democracy'" is an improvement over the Divine Right of Kings, which is the biblical tradition, whose religious aspect was reinforced by generally having a bishop crown the king.
I would also suggest that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were more influenced by Ancient Greece than by the intervening millennium of Christianity.
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Even if it was that doesn’t mean it has a right to life. Too much time is spent on personhood when the real question should be, “does the fetus have a right to life that outweighs the mother’s right to bodily autonomy?” And my answer right now is 
Roll Tide. I’m From Alabama. I don’t recall that one
Clearly.
Uhhhhhh, some Christians are serial killers…what’s the point? Some (choose any identifying term) believe (choose any lame idea). However, a Christian serial killer is absolutely a hypocrite. So is a Christian racist, or a Christian anti-feminist…they are opposite ideals to following Christ and therefore hypocritical.
Did you do the reading?
To a Christian that understands scripture, God knows us before we are born, therefore we shouldn’t mess with His will or His plan. But that doesn’t apply to a secular humanist, so go ahead and roll the dice…whatever feels good, right?
Jeremiah 1:4 Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying:
5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you;
Before you were born I sanctified[a] you;
I [b]ordained you a prophet to the nations.”