Ok?..
Where do corrective surgeries and neuropsychological treatment fit into that statement?
Theyâre wrong. This can be demonstrated from Scripture and tradition without difficulty. But even though they are wrong, religious congregations are private organizations and voluntary ones. They should certainly have the right to ban interracial couples from church activities if that is stipulated in their churchâs publicly stated rules. But they have no right to stop those couples from getting married in a civil marriage, or in another church. And in fact they have no power, other than moral suasion, to stop the interracial couples from living together, raising a family, or doing anything that they want to do in civil society. Thus, no constitutional right is violated by the churchâs rules, no matter how odious they are. The couple can just leave and find another church that is more tolerant, without incurring any civil penalty. There isnât a constitutional issue there. Thereâs an intra-Christianity issue, i.e., there are differences among Christians regarding interracial marriage. But the state should completely ignore such intra-religious quarrels as long as no oneâs civil rights are violated.
Of course, some religious people might want to discourage interracial marriage for a variety of purely secular reasons, but they shouldnât pretend they have the authorization of Christianity to back up their social, political, or cultural preferences. They should just admit they donât personally like the idea of interracial marriage, and leave God out of it.
âTheirâ religious conscience isnât at stake. The only religious conscience that is relevant is the religious conscience of the women, who have to decide whether their religion allows them to drive and vote. If they decide that yes, it allows them to drive and vote, and if they want to drive and vote, then they should apply for licenses and go out and vote. Of course, they might choose not to drive or vote in order to please their husbands, but if they do that, it doesnât take away their civil right to do those things; it just means they are momentarily not exercising it. The men who donât want their wives to have those rights should simply be ignored by the state authorities. (Oh, and by the way, there is no Christian theological basis for saying that women shouldnât be able to vote or drive cars. People who think there is, are just plain wrong, and this is easily demonstrable.)
Are those legally and morally questioned by either side?
Irrelevant. You said we shouldnât interfere with Godâs Will. If God made a child in the womb with a cleft palate or autism, who are we to correct those things? Who are we to think these are mistakes that need to be fixed?
Well said, I think you just made my point.
Okay, so no more fixing cleft palates and helping children with autism. Iâd rather have an âeternal deathâ as you put it, than see a child suffer. We are done here.
I did follow it. Your defense of your position seemed to be not legal but ontological. If it had been legal, you simply would have given the legal definition, and stopped. But you chose to give a dubious ontological reason:
So the ambiguity was your own fault. Try thinking before you write for once. 
So, better to kill the child before born? Not sure I get your reasoning. I trust that God is sovereign and gives scientists and doctors the ability to understand and cure and healâŚkilling a fetus because it is not wanted is a clearly different moral conversation.
Where in the hell did I say that? I clearly said Iâm agnostic about abortion.
Because you donât seem to understand what Iâm talking about.
How do we know itâs his will for doctors to cure em? God created them that way. How do we know we arenât interfering with Godâs will?
You said abortion would be interfering with Godâs will. But that opens up the possibility that many of our actions are doing so. Even actions where we believe we are doing a good thing.
I guess I need to sit on my hands and stop my work. Canât afford to roll the dice and possibly mess with Godâs will.
Those questions are all good ones. The answers are in the bible. Donât stop your work. Thanks for the conversation, time to sleep.
Romans 12:2 - And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Sleep well
Ideals !!! Does killing a perfectly sane baby in the womb until the last day of pregnancy count as an ideal?
And your conclusion does not logically follow from the evidence you present. I said clearly that later developments followed from some parts of Christianity, not all parts, so the existence of parts that donât fit doesnât disprove my claim. I gave the example of the medical book to help you see this, but you must have missed it, or not seen the application. Further, I spoke of Christianity, which transcends the Old Testament. To a Christian, the Old Testament is recontextualized by the New. One should not expect the full Christian teaching to be visible in the Old Testament. The fact that the Old Testament falls short does not prove that Christianity falls short. For example, the morality of the Sermon on the Mount appears quite different from the Old Testament passages you have in mind. And by the way, âpervasive sentimentâ is over the top; there is plenty of warm humanity in the Old Testament.
Used, by people who were theologically illiterate, for the most part, and probably not a single one of whom could read the original Hebrew text. Find me some of the writings of the era where the argument for slavery was made, and Iâll show you in detail why the arguments fail, even on the basis of the Old Testament alone, let alone the revised reading of the Old in light of the New. It was really intellectually low-class theology, but of course, in political matters, academic scrupulousness is rarely observed.
Did I ever say that Trump or his policies represented the aspects of modern Western civilization that was inspired by the best parts of Christianity? Does Donald Trump even go to church? Is he even a Christian? No rational reading of what Iâve written could produce the inference that I like Trump or that I think the religious views of the people who voted for him are exemplary of Christianity at its best.
Which in the Bible applied only to the kings of Israel, not to other nations, and not after the fall of the Israelite kingdoms. The application of the idea in Europe was a misuse, and not one of the things I admire about Western Christian civilization.
They were both influenced by both. The Renaissance was nominally a recovery of the Classical wisdom, and it was partly that, but it was more than that. Biblical themes, albeit transformed, permeate Renaissance writing, especially Italian and German. The Enlightenment was obviously partly inspired by Greek ideas of reason, but its proponents were steeped in Biblical learning; the pre-Enlightenment basis for the Enlightenment, in Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke, was saturated in Biblical study; Rousseau bounced back and forth between Protestantism and Catholicism; Lessing was well-versed in the theological tradition and wrote about it with passion; Kant made use of Genesis 1-11 in a famous essay, and Hegelâs early theological writings were also Bible-focused. To be sure, all of these thinkers transformed the Bible in various ways; but the point is that they were no mere continuers of the Greek approach. They did philosophy as men steeped learning regarding revealed religion. The fideistic account of religion in Kant is nothing like what one sees in Plato or the Stoics or even Aquinas. Kantâs background was, I believe, Pietist. Western civilization is partly Greek, and partly Roman, but it has also been heavily Biblical and Christian throughout most of its history, with the Biblical/Christian part less overt and more underground in 18th-19th century thought. Again, all of this has been known for decades to historians of ideas, no matter how strange it sounds to people trained in the sciences. And again, I recommend reading books such as Peter Bergerâs The Sacred Canopy to get the feel of how influences are subtly passed on as Western society secularized.
I did, and should probably have included it in my quote. My apologies. But just because you dismiss the very visible entanglement between the British Establishment and the Church of England as âthe formal shell of an established Churchâ, does not mean that British Secular Humanists are required to see it that way.
Are you telling me that Jewish students, Hindu students, etc. in Britain have to listen daily to Christian prayers?My understanding is that (some) religious minorities have what are termed Voluntary Controlled Schools (I know they exist for some Christian denominations, Muslims and Orthodox Jews, I don't know about Hindus), which are funded by the government but run by a charity or foundation.
I was refering to schools under more direct control of the state.
From Wikipedia:
In the United Kingdom, Catholic, Church of England (in England) and Jewish schools have long been supported within the state system, with all other state-funded schools having a duty to provide compulsory religious education. Until the introduction of the National Curriculum, religious education was the only compulsory subject in state schools. State school religious education is non-proselytising and covers a variety of faiths, although the legislation requires it to include more Christian content than other faithsYou're welcome to investigate this further, if you wish. I only know about it because there's been recently efforts to reform the system. However, not living in the UK, I only hear snippets of information on the subject.
You can find aout about collective worship here: Collective worship in schools - Wikipedia
First, Iâm told that only something like 6 to 10 percent of Britons attend church weekly. So even if your Conservatives attend more often than others, they donât represent a big chunk of the population, do they?That depends on if you're talking about Conservative voters, Conservative activists or Conservative MPs. I would not be surprised if there was considerable overlap between the local Conservative Party Constituency committee and the local Anglican Parish Council -- what's refered to as 'God and Country Conservatism'. The same would go for MPs. With an established religion, you don't need a high level of participation by the wider public for the religion to retain considerable influence.
But since most of those Bishops had nebulous commitments to historical Christian faith, and spent more time flirting with theological and moral liberalism than reading Hooker and Cranmer and Augustine, it made no difference to the religious tone of the country.Ah they weren't 'The Right Type of Christian'. I've run into this problem before. I wish this forum would provide a formal definition of 'The Right Type of Christian' so I don't make this mistake again. But more seriously:
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I doubt whether British Secular Humanists care whether you consider these bishops to be the Right Type or not.
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Anglicanism is hardly a homogeneous denomination, and has Evangelical and Anglcatholic wings as well as Liberal.
For all your slighting of liberal Christians, I cannot help but think that, although they donât take the Bible literally, many of them are more concerned about taking the Beatitudes and similar teachings seriously than many Biblical Literalists, particularly those that take Salvation through Grace Alone as an excuse to pay lip services to such teachings. This goes to what I said about the Bible being a a sort of Rorschach Inkblot Test.
I cannot help but note that Jesus chose for his Parable of the Good Samaritan, a Samaritan, i.e. âNot the Right Type of Jewâ, and that his parable extolled this characterâs kindness rather than condemning his lack of religious orthodoxy.
And in fact the undergraduate university years of Dawkins and Atkins, if they are 80 now, would have been in the late 1950s to early 1960s, a very liberal period of British culture, when â as is quite obvious if you watch the films or listen to the music of the time â the Church certainly exerted very little repressive power over what filmmakers and artists said or did. Comedies about adultery, for example, where quite common.This may have been true of British popular culture of that era, I don't think it was true of British political culture and the British establishment, which was far more reactionary, even into the 1970s.
Cool story bro. I find it hilarious that Christians are trying to claim credit for the very rights they oppose. How are you not collapsing into a black hole of irony and cognitive dissonance?
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And I said clearly that the Bible is sufficiently ambiguous and ambivalent that it constituted a Rorschach Inkblot Test, from which you could read nearly anything.
You therefore need to do more than point to some vague similarity between some cherry-picked passages in the Bible, to demonstrate that Christianity had any influence.
Where was the influence of the Sermon on the Mount in Medician Florence? The two worldviews seem to be somewhat antithetical.
While many Enlightenment figures were influenced by their religious roots, they were also profoundly influenced by the negative example of religious conflicts, and particularly the Thirty Years War. This led to a distrust of established religion and religious orthodoxy, and led many Enlightenment thinkers to reject theism for deism and sometimes even the seeds of atheism.
As to influence that some have purported of the Bible on the American Constitution, I have been informed that not only does the Constitution make no mention of the Bible or Christianity, but neither do the Federalist Papers that promoted it. Additionally, the Constitutionâs endorsement of religious pluralism is a clear rejection of biblical teachings.
I gave the example of the medical book to help you see this, but you must have missed it, or not seen the application.No, you gave what I considered to be a bad analogy. I do not accept that a significant proportion of the Bible "contained strikingly modern ... insights" foreshadowing liberal social innovations. The Ten Commandments explicitly rejects religious pluralism, and the New Testament talks of submission to authority rather than self-rule and democracy. I would consider religious pluralism and democracy to be two essential aspects of modern culture, so I am not willing to accept that these innovations had a significant biblical basis.
Used, by people who were theologically illiterate ...Ah, more of not 'The Right Kind of Christians.' I would note that your 'theological illiterates' would include the entire Southern Baptist Convention at the time of its split from Northern Baptists, and many (most?) white Evangelicals of the early and middle 20th Century. How popular was Loving v. Virginia when it was handed down? Not particularly, and Alabama continued to enforce Anti-miscegenation until the Nixon era. When did Bob Jones University finally allow mixed-race dating? The year 2000.
Did I ever say that Trump or his policies represented the aspects of modern Western civilization that was inspired by the best parts of Christianity?Ah, his Evangelical base is yet more of not 'The Right Type of Christians'? Unfortunately if we exclude liberal non-literalists and Trump's largely biblically-literalist base, it's getting more and more difficult to infer who 'The Right Type of Christians' are.
Which in the Bible applied only to the kings of Israel ...But given that the Bible does not offer any alternative basis for nation-scale government for non-Israelite nations, it is not unreasonable that this was taken as the biblical basis for rule.
They were both influenced by both. The Renaissance was nominally a recovery of the Classical wisdom, and it was partly that, but it was more than that. Biblical themes, albeit transformed, permeate Renaissance writing, especially Italian and German.Then it would seem to be more reasonable to attribute the innovation to the process of transformation and synthesis (including in a few important aspects antithesis), than to Christian doctrine itself.
Returning to an earlier comment of yours:
Christianity is hardly the enemy of [tolerance, freedom, and equality], but has been their parent.I don't see why it cannot be both enemy and parent. Spain's enslavement of much of the Americas, the Slave Trade, slavery in the US, the US's treatment of Native Americans (especially the Trail of Tears), many colonial wars and brutal colonial regimes, the Opium Wars, various European and Latin American dictatorships of the 20th century would seem to be evidence to the contrary. You may dismiss all these as mere aberrations, but they are sufficiently widespread, to be a feature, rather than isolated aberrations, of Christian culture of those eras.
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Ah, slavery. Eddie has missed out a few relevant facts.
First, taking seriously the words of Jesus and other biblical statements leads to the perpetuation of slavery, not its abolition. Jesus compares slavemasters to God and slaves to humans, and while his parables refer to slaves having their debts cancelled, at no time does he speak out against slavery. Paul exhorted slaves to obey their masters and master to treat their slaves fairly, and (unlike the Quakers who worked on the Underground Railroad) returned a runaway slave to his master. Meanwhile, the OT provides guidelines for procuring and treating slaves.
Second, the other other side of the ledger is that those who opposed abolition and tried to retain slavery were also Christians - Baptists and Presbyterians and Methodists. Crediting Christianity for abolition is like saying Europe won at Waterloo.
Finally, slavery ended in Britain centuries before there were Anglicans or Quakers (zealous or otherwise), and the Quakers also pressed for the end of slavery in the US, which ceased to be a British colony long before emancipation.
Genuine Christian doctrine includes slavery. In this case, substituting the worship of ones own culture was commendable.
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Given that Eddie seems to be busy dismissing significant biblical themes, and political trends in modern Christian-dominated nations that have been antithetical to âtolerance, freedom, and equalityâ, as being somehow unrepresentative of Christianity, I thought Iâd bring up the fact that the number of prominent secular humanists is far, far, larger than the handful of vocally antitheistic secular humanists he has mentioned. Hereâs Wikipediaâs list: List of secular humanists - Wikipedia
Is the proportion of prominent secular humanists who offer an antitheistic âcommon motif in [their] writing and public presentationâ greater than the proportion of conservative Christians who offer a similarly anti-atheist motif? I have to wonder.
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