First the negative:

AJ,
1. The great disproven/discredited debate. I said the deity can’t be disproven (or proven). Since that is axiomatically correct you try to rebut by claiming it can be discredited, which I sort of agree with, up to appoint. But you did try to change the debate…it’s in black and white, but we all know that you continue to argue that black is white because of reasons. Discredit is a subjective term. Disproven is objective term. Which is why you prefer to discredit rather than disprove.

2. “You tried it on with my pointing out of fallacies, until it became abundantly clear that you were getting nowhere with it.”
Au contraire my lad. I got everywhere with it. After I started pointing out the illogicality and dishonesty of you use of ‘fallacies’, you went from barely being able to write a post with resort to some reference to your myriad fallacies, to not using them at all. How long has it been since you’ve resorted to the fallacy rule-book? Indeed I was more than a little surprised at just how easy it was to manipulate you out of one of your go-to memes.

3. I wrote: “A whiff of paranoia there, AJ?”

You replied …”No, I was just wondering which, if any, of your accusations were directed at me, “
Which is completely different to paranoia…..</sarc>

4. “There is at least evidence for those other things you mention. There is no evidence for deities. Your analogy is flawed.”
We’ve been here before. There is no evidence, there are theories. They aren’t the same thing. These things (DM/DE, Big Bang etc) exist in models used to explain how the universe works given our limited understanding. But theories/models aren’t evidence. I doubt you’ll understand this…the last time we were on this path your assertion was that the evidence was that many scientists believe it. I didn’t bother following up since that was too ridiculous for words.

/cont

/cont

Davidf,

1. “Then disaster struck. With the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire the Dark Ages rapidly followed.”
That is just ambiguous enough to leave me unsure of the meaning. Does David assert that Christianity caused the fall of Rome and the Dark Ages? I leave him to advise.
But rapidly? There were a couple of hundred years between these events. It’s a common error of those who haven’t study history and especially ancient history, to compress time-scales. From a distance things look very different.
Try this…the Seven Years War came to an end and WW1 rapidly followed.

2. davidf to NNS: “ You claim that what you believe is true and what others who don't believe what you do are in error.”
Whereas David’s thinking is much more evolved because he thinks that what he believes is true and what others who don’t believe what he does are in error.
Worlds apart dontcha know

And the positive…:

I could go on about the ways the Christian church preserved the Greco-Roman inheritance in The Middle Ages. I could mention the fact that the churches created the first universities. I could talk about how the church acted as a brake on the tyrannical power of the state. I could talk about how the Reformation unleashed the power of the west in ways never before seen in human history. But if I did that AJ/david would concentrate on those things rather than my main point…so I won’t mention them. :)
And the main point?
Christianity enables liberty. At its core it advocates a one-on-one relationship between man and God. (Christ in the desert communing with JHWH, “two or three gathered in my name” ie no need for authorities, and multitudinous other examples). Islam eg requires authorities. Indeed the average mohamedian can’t understand their sacred texts without authorities to guide. But the Christian texts are accessible to all who are literate. That’s why the Reformation so rapidly (that word again) followed Gutenberg.
From this it follows that Christianity enables the notion of the equality of man and that man has God given rights. It still recognises hierarchy (render to Caesar) but all men have access to God by their own hand. The Magna Carta happened in a Christian country and could only have happened in a Christian country. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” would only make sense in a Christian country.
Clearly this didn’t make a significant difference in the first millennium of Christianity. But the Reformation, partially unleashed by the democratising of access to the Bible, unleashed pent up forces. Liberty expanded. Nations freed themselves from Rome. Peoples also. Such things could have unleashed chaos and descent into violence (French Revolution) but the common belief in the Christ held it together. The great thinkers were, to a man, Christian and they used the new circumstances, relatively unhindered by their religion, to delve into all aspects of existence.

/cont

/cont
Sure there were pockets where the Church held on and delayed further understanding, but there were always other pockets where the Church encouraged it.
Because the relationship between man and God was personal and the communication personal, it followed that man might and should try to understand his God. When Newton examined the heavens he thought that by doing so he would get closer to the mind of his God. By contrast, as Bernard Lewis pointed out, science in Islam withered because they had no concept of understanding their God. It was pointed out that a Christian scientist wants to know why a certain chemical reaction occurs whereas to a mohamedian it occurs because Allah wills it and it won’t occur tomorrow if Allah wills that instead. So there is no reason to search the nature of the world because it exists at the whim of Allah.
This to me is how Christianity, in alliance with the legacies from Greece and Rome created the greatest civilisation the world has known. But as others (eg Arnold Toynbee) have feared, as we lose that Christianity we lose the link to personal liberty. And the civilisation, at least as we know it, will not survive that. Hence why we need the NNS of the world.
NOW:

Why was it that the only civilisation in the whole history of man to actively work to eliminate slavery was Christian?
Why was it that the only civilisation in the whole history of man to even conceive of human rights was Christian?
Why was it that the Industrial Revolution occurred in the Christian West?
Why, when Guttenberg democratised knowledge, the Christian west allowed and encourage that opening of knowledge whereas other cultures (Islam, China) worked to monopolise knowledge?
Why did democracy arise in the Christian west?

Over the past 10000 years there have been innumerable civilisations. The Christian West stands out from all of them both in terms of the advance human rights and scientific advancement. On what basis can we simply dismiss Christianity’s roll in that development

mhaze,

I already explained that “disproved” is more appropriate than “discredited”.

<<I said the deity can’t be disproven ... you try to rebut by claiming it can be discredited …>>

No, I have rebutted you by saying that the god can be disproved (as I had also said to o sung wu). You take careless wording and cling to it for dear life in your slanderous attempts at character assassination. It's pathetic.

<<But you did try to change the debate…it’s in black and white>>

No, I didn’t. Read my initial response. Why would I try to change the debate when ‘disproved’ is better ‘discredited’?

<<Discredit is a subjective term. Disproven is objective term. Which is why you prefer to discredit rather than disprove.>>

No, I prefer “disproved” because an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent god can be objectively disproved in a world where evil and suffering exist.

<<After I started pointing out the illogicality and dishonesty of you use of ‘fallacies’, you went from barely being able to write a post with resort to some reference to your myriad fallacies, to not using them at all.>>

I still point fallacies out all the time. Why, I pointed one out earlier in this thread.

Your accusations, with regards to my pointing out of fallacies, were false, and your inability to provide an example of me misapplying or misidentifying them was evidence of that. Care to give it a crack now?

<<How long has it been since you’ve resorted to the fallacy rule-book?>>

Twenty-two hours. (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=8106#252037)

<<You replied … Which is completely different to paranoia…..</sarc>>>

Paranoia is characterised by feelings of obsessive anxiety, an emotion I hardly displayed. Still don’t have the balls to say to whom your accusations applied, do you?

<<There is no evidence [for dark matter] …>>

Yes, there is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evidence

<<… the last time we were on this path your assertion was that the evidence was that many scientists believe it.>>

Was it really now? Please, tell me where? The last two times dark matter was mentioned in our debates:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=7832#241946
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=14814#255819

The lies don't stop, do they mhaze?

mhaze wrote: Why was it that the only civilisation in the whole history of man to actively work to eliminate slavery was Christian?

Let us consider that claim? Human concern with slavery predates Christianity. I visited Greece a few years ago and was at ancient Delphi. There were many buildings around with writing on them. Many of the writings proclaimed that the person doing the writing had freed his slaves.

People questioned slavery before Christianity. The Jewish Bible put limitations on slavery, there is nothing in the New Testament, the defining document of Christianity, condemning slavery.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_slavery tells of the great diversity of Christian views on slavery. " In several Pauline epistles, and the First Epistle of Peter, slaves are admonished to obey their masters, as to the Lord, and not to men. Masters were also told to serve their slaves in obedience to God by "giving up threatening". The basic principle was "you have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality." There will be pie in the sky bye and bye.

Not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did opposition to slavery develop a following. Although some Christians such as William Wilberforce condemned and fought against slavery many Christians supported it. The main issue in the Civil War in the USA was slavery. The Confederacy fought vigorously for slavery. The part of the USA that was the Confederacy is still the most Christian part of the USA. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the USA split off from the other Baptists because it supported slavery.

If I ignored the Inquisition, the support of authoritarian rule by the divine right of kings, the Dark Ages (Church opposition to independent thought made them dark), the Wars of the Reformation, the Crusades, the inquisition, the centuries of hatred which made fertile soil for the Nazi Holocaust and other atrocities I might have a positive view of Christianity.