As Christianity wanes, immoral behavior increases

Tell that to women and blacks in the post WWII era, or gays, or working people today who are quietly being persecuted. Tell all the countries who we have installed rulers that were friendly to us and not to their own population.
We aren't fair and reasonable. We are stealthy and covert.

 

As he would say of you, no doubt.

 

Everything is relative. To abuse an old adage, nature abhors a vacuum. If we hadn't adopted Christianity, would we have countries split into a dozen pagan cults with wildly differing ideologies? What if instead we had adopted Zoroastrianism or Islam? I rather think such a society would be even less fair and reasonable.

That said, I think we are approaching a point where it should be possible to move on from religion entirely.

 

Columbus, or those that followed him, stopped this:

"For the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs reported that they sacrificed about 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days, though there were probably far fewer sacrifices. According to Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony.[41] The higher estimate would average 14 sacrifices per minute during the four-day consecration. (As a comparison, the Auschwitz concentration camp, working 24 hours a day with modern technology, approached but did not equal this pace: it murdered about 19,200 a day at its peak.)" Wikipedia

You act like Columbus introduced warfare to the Western Hemisphere.

What genocide, and why are Indians still here if that was our policy?

Slavery wasn't unique to Christianity, what was unique was the movement to end it sprang from Christianity and nowhere else.

I do think radical Islam is evil, do you?

What teachings of Jesus Christ were they following? You don't judge a philosophy by its misuse. I could say atheism has justified lots of atrocites, many more than Christianity has.

 

I dunno if he would be so blunt about it, but yeah, we all say and do stupid things at time. My friend, the laser physicist, once tried to do a flaming sambuca in a plastic cup. I'm sure the prof has earned his title but in this case he really is talking through a hole in his backside. I won't pretend I have never done the same.

 

But he didn't say anything the 'old atheists' didn't say.

 

Agreed, this thread isn't about the truth of Christianity, although I think it to be true.

We have been described as a 'cut-flower' society, living off our Christian heritage while severing the roots.

 

Whichever 'old atheists' might have said that the entirety of western civilization would vanish if we abandoned Christianity was acting just as nutty as the professor. Being an atheist doesn't make you immune from saying completely bonkers things.

 

Columbus left Hispaniola with zero of its indigenous people remaining. None. This recorded by him and his men, and all in the name of God.
The genocide of the Native American was very effective, though squeezing them into almost uninhabitable reservations became the end game.
Slavery was justified by Christians for hundreds of years.
The "Axis of Evil" rhetoric was intended as a message to W's evangelical base. I think combatting evil with evil is misguided. Do you?
The teaching that often supported these horrors was that no one comes to God except through Christ.

 

Nonsense, the decimation of the Taino people by smallbox was an enormous tragedy, but in no sense was it a crime. Did anyone even know about germs back then?

Except there was no genocide plan. The settlers did fight back, in response to things like this: http://www.reclinercommentaries.com/2011/04/fate-worse-than-death.html

It was ended by Christians, not secular humanists.

I think Iran, Iraq under Saddam, and North Korea were evil regimes. Do you? How about the axis powers in WWII? Is it that hard for a moral relativists to answer?

It should be combatted with force.

Through their own freewill. Jesus never harmed anyone, and when His disciples wanted some who rejected them killed, Jesus rebuked them.

 

The Akawaks didn't die from disease. They were murdered and taken as slaves. Five hundred slaves left on one trip alone. Only three hundred survived the trip.
And so on....

 

Answer #1: Oh well, that makes it all right then.
Answer #2: It's kinda hard for an organisation to end slavery when it won't exist for another 68 years.

 

There weren't God-haters around then?

 

That is nonsense.. People have been flawed since the beginning of time. Read your OT.

 

It certainly will if conservatives have their way. They'd rather see the country burned to the ground than give any credit to the @#$%$ in the White House.

 

Your bigotry is showing.

 

Being enslaved to mine for gold, being killed for the least offense against their oppressors, and having girls as young as 9 or 10 taken as sex slaves were among some of the horrors visited upon the Arawaks on Hispaniola. Smallpox wasn't the only depredation they suffered.

Christians who had to ignore the parts of their own scripture wherein YHWH endorses slavery.

 

Did the gold go to Political leaders, the King, (in the Institution of Law and Order), or to the Pope (as as head of the Institution of Religion)?

Is there another text before the OT which pleads perservence AND mercy to slaves?

 

Does it (*)(*)(*)(*)ing matter who the gold went to? Men, women, and children were forced into gold mines and had to mine a certain amount of gold or they would have their hands cut off for failing to pay their Spanish masters. Who cares where the gold goes to? It's irrelevant.

YHWH told the Israelites to take virgin girls as "wives", which would translate into sex slaves, essentially. There's no real way to say there's any mercy there.

 

Any Spaniard who enslaved someone was going agains their own church teaching. That's all you've got? In 1537 Pope Paul III issued three decrees against New World slavery. The second of these decrees invoked the penalty of excommunication on anyone who engaged in slavery, regardless of their "dignity, state, condition or grade." Because these decrees were for the most part ignored regarding the African slave trade, Pope Urban VII in 1639 issued another decree reaffirming Paul III excommunication for thoe engaged in the practice. If they were excommunicated, how can you blame the church, much less Jesus Christ?

Unfortunately, as is the case with contemporary issues like abortion and homosexuality, not all Catholics obeyed.

No it doesn't, it means wife. What would you propose happen to a woman whose husband was killed in war? Was she supposed to go have a career?

- - - Updated - - -

Funny coming from you.

 

I'd be interested to know what it was I said that you feel is bigoted. Always looking for ways to improve myself.

 

All we have, my uneducated friend, are the very transcripts from Columbus and the writings of his men, along with clergy that arrived in Hispaniola that record the atrocities with either glee or horror.
Two native boys were seen with parrots. Columbus' men took the birds and beheaded the boys. His men are recorded as checking the sharpness of their knives by taking hacks out of the natives. The slaves sent back and the deaths on board are a matter of record, blessed by the royal patrons.
What have you got?

 

So where did Jesus say to do that? If I'm responsibe for that, you're responsible for your fellow atheist Stalin killing 30,000 a week.

I'm glad Columbus stopped this, are you?

"For the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs reported that they sacrificed about 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days, though there were probably far fewer sacrifices. According to Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony.[41] The higher estimate would average 14 sacrifices per minute during the four-day consecration. (As a comparison, the Auschwitz concentration camp, working 24 hours a day with modern technology, approached but did not equal this pace: it murdered about 19,200 a day at its peak.)"

Wikipedia

 

Sorry man. I'm not an atheist. That doesn't work on me.
Columbus had to stop. He ran out of natives to kill or enslave. He left zero remnants of the aborigines on the island. None. There are none there now.
He also used his God to justify his actions, which were considered valid by the royalty at home.
What is the relevance of the Atecs to our conversation?

 

Yes, it was a tragedy but not a crime. Disease did most of them in.

And the guy who shot Reagan did it for Jodie Foster, does that make it her fault? Jesus harmed nobody.

Because you only seem to be bothered by dead Indians when it is Europeans doing it, rather than fellow Indians sacrificing 14 per minute. There is a reason the Spanish defeated the Aztecs relatively easily, it was because they had neighboring Indian allies who were tired of being abused by the Aztecs.