" This is not God's perspective but one we have arrived at ourselves." What an ignorant and arrogant piece of bulldust from Steelredux. Where does he think the good thoughts came from in the first place?

ttbn,

How about you tell us? Because it certainly wasn't your god or Christianity.

<<Where does he think the good thoughts came from in the first place?>>

It took a country founded on freedom 245 years to realise that slavery is wrong because the Bible says it's right. That some Christians found a way to interpret their holy book such that they could justify a realisation they obviously came to without it, is not a credit to Christianity

Slavery has been around since the dawn of civilisation and probably long before that.

Depending on how you define 'civilisation' its been around for somewhere between 5 and 10 thousand years in almost every part of the planet (except Australia...just saying). And in that time there have been literally thousands of new and different civilisations rise and fall.

Out of all those myriad civilisations, one (just one) decided that slavery was abhorrent and something to be actively opposed and suppressed.

That one civilisation was based on liberal judeo-christian values. Not Confucian values or Islamic values or Mesoamerican values.

A civilisation born of the marriage (!) between liberal ideas, Greek philosophy and science and Christian notions of the individuals place in the world. A civilisation that changed forever the way the world works and man's trajectory.

That that civilisation was Christian in thought and tradition isn't the sole reason for its unique decision to eradicate slavery. But to pretend that it, Christianity, played no part is to simply misunderstand the last 300 years.

Why did the industrial revolution originate in that civilisation?
Why did liberalism originate in that civilisation?
Why did the very notion of human rights originate in that civilisation?

Christianity isn't the whole story but it is a large part of the story.

AJ,

There may be no gods, but there have been strong beliefs in all manner of gods and what powers they are believed to have, in comparison to the ignorance and powerlessness of ordinary humans. Illusory of course, but spurs to the imagination, for good and ill, I'm sure you would agree. As a twentieth-century atheist, I've never understood the need for gods, but I also believe that many of our ethical and social concepts spring from the tortuous cogitations of thousands of believers in the past struggling towards some understanding - off on tracks in all wrong directions.

After all, our ideas, yours and mine, don't spring fully-formed like Venus out of our heads, although you may indeed be far more brilliant than me, granted. But we all build on earlier ideas, which almost by definition, are less-formed, less accurate and, if we go far back enough, downright wrong, suffused with beliefs in the bounty of an all-powerful deity, if only as a means to explain the unknown. Many of those earlier cogitators, misguided as they were, were indeed giants on whose shoulders others have stood, so that we can stand others, pure and atheist, and really, really virtuous, the final consummations of humanity.

So give credit where it's due, AJ.

Joe

when you look at Marxist/feminist dogma you realise how stuffed we are. Compared to the teachings of Scripture they are manure.

Sorry, that should have read:

"Many of those earlier cogitators, misguided as they were, were indeed giants on whose shoulders others have stood, so that we can finally stand on the shoulders of those others, pure and atheist, and really, really virtuous, the final consummations of humanity."

Joe