David ,
I think your rabid hatred of the Church has obscured your vision.

Dear Sells,

I don't think I have a rabid hatred of the church. I think you prefer to call someone else a hater rather than consider what they said. It is apparently easier to call names. I have said nothing that isn't true. You prefer to ignore it and call me a hater.

It is easier to be self-righteous. Jesus advised one to examine the beam in their own eye rather than the mote in their neighbours. It is easier to call another person names than to do that. I thought you were better than that.

Dear Sells,

The Inquisition, the Wars of the Reformation, the Crusades and the Holocaust all happened. They are not my imagination. In the foregoing Christianity played a determinant or prominent role. If you want to take credit for Christianity's contributions to civilisation you must also take blame for the Inquisition, the Wars of the Reformation, the Crusades and the Holocaust. It is not rabid hatred to recognise that. It is being fair.

Sells, there are many of us out there in the real world who have grown up in the Christian tradition, but we have taken off our rose coloured glasses and seen the many fallacies that we had thrust upon us as children. As a grown man with some considerable intellect you need to do the same.
As an aside, I wonder what your take is on the recent discovery of humanoid remains in Africa. Those who assert that god made man in his own image may have to rethink that proposition. If He did, then it is apparent that He had a few tries before He got it right. Eg, The latest find and Neanderthals and a few others to boot.

David

Dear Peter,

Rather than be angry with me for pointing out the horrors caused by and associated with Christianity you might ask yourself what there is in Christianity that produced the horrors.

I can assure you that I have read enough church history not to see with rose tinted glasses. The church has been used by evil men. That does not mean that its essence is evil or anti-life. My problem with anti-Christian posts on this thread is that there is an unwillingness to look deeper at what the church is. At its heart is the gentle Galilean. To despise Christianity because of what evil men have done in its name is shallow. All history requires interpretation. If that interpretation does not look deeper than the superficial events then we continue to miss the point. Worse, it is prejudice.

It is like the Liberal party crumbling about Labour's dept and deficit while brushing over the fact of the GFC. Propaganda insists on recognising some things and ignoring others so that our position is established.

Hence anti-Christian writers ignore the birth of Western Civilisation in the destruction of paganism brought about by the Church. If we would go back to paganism we would have to make most of our population into non-humans. That would include all women, servants, workers, children and slaves. It was Christianity that broke this whole tradition of natural inequality and produced the individual and the view of the equalitarian society. Should we go back to that?

If not, where else could we derived the society that we are now proud of?

The problem is that Christianity took up all of the space leaving nothing outside of itself. Now, with its withdrawal, it leaves a vacuum in which people believe in nothing i.e.. in nihilism. All is about individual choice and we can see where that is leading.