Dr. No
A little out of order, but I'll get to the first at the end.
I don’t understand. Please elaborate. Thanks.
The original issue:
However, I would ask you to think twice about attributing what happens at a certain time to the people who were around by default of convenience.
A very simple analogy is to watch politicians inconsistently argue who is responsible for what. When it's convenient to assign a history to a figure, they do. When it's inconvenient, they find a way around it. Watch them fight over who's responsible for good or bad economy, or whose administration failed. The rule for determining who is responsible for what is how your determination will affect your own Q-rating.
Thus, some things attributed to Christianity came about despite the institutions and faith. Take Newton, for instance. Yeah, he made some invaluable calculations about the Universe, and all in pursuit of God, but in order to do so he had to redefine God to the degree that there is even a "
Newtonian" theology. In the twentieth century, of course, the Pope retracted bits about medieval scientists and decided that Darwin wasn't a threat to Biblical inerrancy. Now, think for a moment of the occasional propaganda site where you can find a creationist listing "scientists who believe in God." Well, most of their work is accomplished
despite the existence of the theology of the creationist. Very little, comparatively--if any at all--is accomplished in pursuit of a creationist science.
It may be a post-Christian society that owes much to its historical Christian mores that accomplishes a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's, but right now that research is taking place over the objections of many Christians.
The development of the separation between church and state may find its seeds in the Bible, but in the end, what we know in its positive form as a wall of separation took place over the objections of Christianity. Now, this might say more about Christians than it does about Biblical Christianity, but it's not so simple as "render unto Caesar" = "separation of church & state". It's more a matter of recognition and acknowledgment of reality, and a
political denial of the divine right of the emperor.
People don’t call it the Golden Rule for nothing. Doing unto others doesn’t necessarily require actual invasiveness. Sometimes the best thing to do is to leave people alone. Which is why Hillel’s version is not so different: “ What I will NOT DO is NOT advise you NOT to say the F word in front of 3 year olds ”.
I find your end example a little odd. It would speak strangely of your personal priorities.
No, the Golden Rule as it is commonly recited doesn't
require invasiveness. However, as I noted, it does
license invasiveness. Ask yourself,
How did the Inquisitions come about? Or
What happened at Salem?
In both cases, there is evidence of economic motivations; Salem reads like a property fight carried into the next world. Similarly to a tough twentieth-century debate in which some German Christians asked themselves how they missed, allowed, or failed to resist the Holocaust, one might pause to wonder how it is that things got so out of hand during the Inquisitions that more than one village in the Bishopric of Trier was left with only a single childbearing female inhabitant apiece.
But think of a time when the Devil was as "real" to people as a Toyota might be to you or me. How does the "Golden Rule" factor into torture, theft, and murder?
Quite simply:
• The Devil is real
• People's souls are endangered
• We would want others to save us from damnation, therefore we will save others in order to do unto Him (
see Matthew 25)
One must choose to acknowledge Matthew 25 as well as other Biblical verses in some form either distorted or not in order to follow that chain. But phrased with the rule of "do
not do unto others," the process looks a little different:
• The Devil is real
• People's souls are endangered
• We would want ... well ... what happens if we call a legitimate act of the Lord's will by other terms? Would I want someone committing the unforgivable sin in order to intrude on what might be my glorious epiphany and steal the Word of God from my heart?
In the modern equivalent, I'm a fan of knocking the "interventionist 80s." I'm quite serious about the result I noted in my prior post.
We would want others to save us from our errors; thus we save others from theirs. But we don't actually
know that certain things are errors. That's a problem.
Not knowing that certain things are errors is still a problem if we do not do unto others, but the condition of not doing unto others allows more apparent alternatives than what history has shown for the process of doing unto others.
Your italicized example, drawn unfortunately from irrationality, does serve to illustrate the problems of leaving things to people's interpretations.
I would not want others to teach my child to cuss, so I shouldn't teach others' children to cuss. The common Golden Rule encourages proactivity; the inverse encourages reflection prior to action. I admit it's a small difference, but sometimes the little things make all the difference in the world.
We are talking about religion here. Richard’s Almanac is not a religious book and that Richard guy had probably been raised proverbs reading Christian for all you know. And the guy was probably born more than a thousand years after Proverbs & Ecclesiastes was written down.
It's a matter of commonsense and functionality.
Poor Richard's Almanac is heavily-influenced by Christianity. But it's more applicable in day-to-day practice. Of course, that depends on what one's goals are. But PRA's aphorisms read a bit like
Proverbs By The Pint. (And, of course, beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.)
Are you referring to Islam? Islam has limited religious tolerance (for abrahamic religions alone). Religious liberty is way above religious tolerance.
Tolerance/liberty is a distinction learned by Christians at great cost. And the idea still doesn't run through and through. Take away the superficial sparkling veneer of America--that is, strip away so many of the things that we take for granted that others around the world don't have--and suddenly Americans of all stripes (not just Christian or Muslim) will be ready to take up arms in order to solve their problems. Compared to the demands of life, civility is a
luxury.
In 1649, the Maryland colony passed a religious tolerance act. The
Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 . . . well, strangely, this
just-over-500-word-rant by a writer I've never heard of or paid attention to before actually explains the situation quite nicely.
We might well have hit the twenty-first century with anti-witchcraft laws on the books in the United States. I'm trying to find a later article than August, 1999, but at that time, at least, it was illegal to read tarot cards, among other things, in ... get this ... two-thirds of North Carolina. Seriously,
have a chuckle at the article, but we
don't have religious freedom in this country. In fact, there are places in the US where you must profess faith in God before you can hold public office.
99% of Christians interpret the former as a metaphor, not to be followed literally.
How interesting. I wouldn't know where to begin .... Well, how about this: try me. I'd love to hear one of these metaphors. I have a few, myself, but I doubt they're agreeable because they largely equal removed degrees of literalism. At some point, your faith in God
must come before your family, or something like that. It's something interesting about Americans and Christianity--in the US Christians identified against Communism, yet both Communism and the Bible recognize the obstacles posed by the sentiments of family.
Christianity is a changing religion. Whether or not it is declining does not change any of my points.
Fair enough. But the dynamism and flexibility does undermine the timelessness. You're right on the border where Christianity becomes inane enough that I stop paying attention to it because it ceases being threatening. For instance, I doubt you're looking forward to the end of the world. Of course, I could be wrong about that.
If only a great empire made that as the state religion
Well ... I'm of the opinion that being the state or predominant religion of any mighty empire pretty much screws any religion. I know Buddhist students who have something against the Dalai Lama. He's too political, don'tchaknow?
Hell, one of them even went on to start his own freaking religion.
I suppose it's one of those occasions that we're best to say, "No matter the cause." After all, his mind is brought to us by one of the many branches of Christianity. And a whacked one, at that.
Easy for you to say but each & every one of those items are the common denominators in almost every christian sect. That makes them the elements of true Christianity whether you like it or not.
Obviously I disagree as to what makes it true Christianity. I've known Southern Baptists to whom gender equality looks much more like what we criticize in other cultures.
At the core of Christianity is a defusing of a human being's presumed inherent right to judge another on a moral basis. That's the element of true Christianity that nearly, if not outright every, sect lacks.
