Continued from previous post....
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Fine then your complete failure to show anything but slander and generalize instead of providing specific examples/ facts is quite a mystery. Any luck finding an example to match the early Christians freeing their slaves 1900 years before Ingersoll started talking? (Which is about all he ever did)
Certainly. Freeing slaves was a common practice in ancient Rome. There was, in fact, an entire and very successful class of people of this stripe: Freedmen. They were often advisors to high state officials, including the emporers Claudius and Augustus, to name a few.
Read Suetonius, Tacitus, and Livy sometime.
I clearly said born again, NT savvy Christians. I don't blame the ignorant for not knowing what Jesus said and did.
I see the "no true scottsman" fallacy is out in full force today. Christians, you mean like 40-year slave traderslave ship captain John Newton who wrote "Amazing Grace" and didn't turn abolitionist until his fortune had been made? Ignorant non-new testament savvy christians like Jefferson Davis? Your contention is preposerous and betrays a thorough lack of knowledge of the history of the slave trade, its establishment, propogation, and respectibility by people of priestly and educated rank, believers of great erudition and spritual sophistocation. You are retrojecting your own post-enlightenment values onto the New Testament, where they never once appear. No writer in the new testament urges the freedom of slaves, except in one instance where Paul asks the Phillipian church (if memory serves) to receive a runaway slave as a free man. At every turn, both Jesus and Paul urge slaves to obey their masters, urge masters to beat slaves "none too harshly," and, 300 years after Stoics and Sophists were urging the end of slavery, never once mentioned that a slavery was a despicable institution.
HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA! What self-serving nonsense that is. The Methodists and Quakers did all the work of actually hiding slaves and getting them north.
They did, huh? All the work? You obviously have not read the article I linked you to, which lists a good number of Unitarians, Diests, Quakers, and Freethinkers who lead and organized the abolitionist movement. Nowhere did I say that Methodists or other Christians had no part in it. However, they were not the moving force, and the opposing side was made up nearly exclusively of New Testament savvy sincere , "born-again" type Christians (and, if there was a Unitarian, atheist, or freethinker among them, I have yet to find it. Even the diest Jefferson, who held slaves, was opposed to the practice.)
Hardly an unbeliever. OK you found one, although even your assertion about his beliefs is tenuous.
Fredrick Douglas was not a unitarian, he was an atheist. His journals are quite clear on this point - - they are public record, you may read them for yourself. Unitarians as a group are the theology I was describing: a marginally Christian denomination that denies the diety of Christ and the trinity. Hardly qualifies with your attempts to narrow the definition of Christian to "born again" in order to eliminate the less savory strains of Christianity.
Yada yada yada. Adams and Franklin, hardly slave holders, denounced him and not just for those reasons. You should step out of the skeptics.org library and listen to the whole story some time.
Adams and Franklin denounced Paine for a number of reasons having nothing to do with slavery - that's beside the point, as the monuments were not erected until after those men were dead. Stop resorting to slander and stay on point. Prevarication and rehtorical dodges don't work on me.
Prove they (apartheid South Africans -- Lokmer) were born again or even claimed to be, and yo might have an argument. My premise was quite clear and you pitiful slander and guilt by association tactics in lieu of facts aren't fooling anybody but cynics I'm sure.
Your premise *was* quite clear: That Christianity is the source of all that is good and pure in the modern world. No Europoean Chrsitain until the mid 20th century ever (to my knowledge) publically claimed to be "born again" because the term is a peculiarly American one from the mid 19th century. Your criteria on this score are vapid, meaningless, and transparently self-serving.
Now, we could have a hearty debate (as do many historians) over exactly how much of the Apartheid establishment both preceeding and postdating the Boer war was honestly religious and how much was religious used as a cover for economics, but that's a different discussion entirely. The fact remains that the establishment in South Africa was founded on Dutch Reformed Protestant Christianity, that the charismatic, pentacostal, and evangelical church plants into the country up through the early 1990s all explicitly supported the apartheid regime. Christian opposition for apartheid came from within the ranks of black South African Christianity, from white atheist and humanist activists in the white establishment, and from western social gospel christians and secular liberals.
Oh sorry man. Wrong again The Stantons were converts of Charles Finney, the best known evangelist of his time, who supported suffrage with more thna his mouth.
Never once did I imply that Finney was anti-sufferage. While acknowledging contributions to women's rights from some arenas, I qualified with:
Lokmer said:
But, when we do, we should also point out that this is the same religion that opposed women's right to vote in both the U.S. and Britain, and also singlehandedly defeated the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, insuring that women are still legally second class citizens, to this day, in America. Let's also not forget that this is the religion that legislated the "Rule of Thumb" during the 16th century, which stated that men may beat their wives so long as they used a stick no thicker than their thumb.
You are attempting to manufacture error where none exists. It's dishonest and embarassing.
You mean you can. I just asked you for some facts and all you can fiind is one example of one single Christian who didn't believe in the divinity of Christ. Big deal.
Wrong, I've produced a lot more than that.
Now, a lesson on logic...
If you insist that everyone who I name as a black mark on Christianity be a "Born-again, New Testament Savvy" Christian, and insist ad nauseum on those points, you cannot then go and claim that Unitarians (who deny both the trinity and the divninty of Christ) are Christians.
He fed a billion people himself at his own expense? Let's see an independent link to back that up and show he alone deserves the honor. My guess is that Christian missionaries are doing far more teaching people how to grow food. I personally know one who is doing just that.
More misrepresentations and demagoguerey. I did not say he fed a billion people at his own expense, I said:
Lokmer said:
Norman Bourlog, a freethinker, bears that honor, having saved more than a billion lives with his work, at his own expense, in poor countries. He won the nobel prize in the mid '70s and **invented** (by bioengineering and hybridization) most of the food you and other people around the world eat today.
In other words, he traveled at his own expense to places (beginning in Mexico, then moving to India and Africa and China) where famine was either a problem or a danger, engaged his research, and was then able to obtain grants and other things to keep going. The point of my statement was that he put his fortune and life on the line to help people in a major, long-lasting way, and that his efforts, according to the 1970 Nobel Prize commission, had saved over a billion lives **TO THAT DATE** (he's still working now, 35 years later).
BTW, mea culpa - it was 1970 he won the Nobel Prize in, not the mid 70s.
That's not true either. The Quakers were devout, literal, fundamentalist believers in the NT at that time, as were the Methodists. (They both later became more "liberal." Not)
I fail to see where Methodists come into the discussion, yet you keep bringing them up.
The Quakers, under their founder George Fox, were mystics and spritualists, believing that guidance comes from "the Inner Light" over and above scripture or tradition, encouraging and advocating mystical experience, and disclaiming baptism and doctrinaire salvation. As time went on, they grew more conservative and literalist. Regardless, you continue to commit the fallacy of retrojecting current values onto past circumstances.
The Quakers always have been liberal believers with an abstract ethicist approach to scripture. That what they were in the 18th century after pulling back from their roots a bit looks to us today like ultra fundamentalism speaks to the liberalization of culture with the intervening centuries, not the social realities at the time. The Quakers were, and remained, heretics and heterodox - - enough so that the evangelical revolution in the 70s has caused a sizable divide in their internal politics as well as major doctrinal disputes.
I never said "orthodox" Christians did anything right, did I?
You can't get away with moving the goalposts based on your own caprice. If you are indeed arguing along the lines of Peter L. Berger (The Heretical Imperative) that the truth is maintained and sought only by the heretics, you need to say so right out front, rather than hiding behind your screen of "born-again"ness
Well all you found was Douglas, a Christian who did not believe in the trinity (you claim). Can you prove he would have been so inspired without Christian teaching?
Douglass was an atheist and an escaped slave. Get your facts straight.
Your assertion that I prove he would have been so without Christian teaching is both laughable and idiotic - his every journal describes his contempt for the Christian teaching he did receive as a slave. It is very simple to prove that he would not have been so inspired without an education, as it was the mistake of a master's daughter teaching him to read that gave him access to the words of people like Jefferson and Franklin that gave him the courage to run away.
Yes I agree. Fred Douglas and wild claims about one man feeding a billion people at his own expense- vs Finney, the Stantons, Oberlin College, The Red Cross, the Christian Commission, twenty major Christian chatities, a thouand self-less missionaries, the YMCA, 500 private hospitals, the Quakers and the Methodists. (For starters)
Douglass (the name is spelled with two "s"s): Atheist
Bourlog: proven, despite your feeble attempt to mischaracterize my words
The Red Cross: Founded by Clara Barton, a Unitarian.
The Quakers: Heretics and agitators for secualrism from day one (despite their being devout believers after their own fashion).
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: I can't find a reference to her involvement with Finney, could you please provide one? Everything I can find on her indicates that she was anti-religious, but that her husband was a believer. However, if you can furnish evidence to your end, I will happily concede the point.
Other freethinkers, secularists, unitarians, and humanists from whom humanity has benefited substantially:
Albert Einstein
Susan B. Anthony
Thomas Edison
Charles Darwin (of special note, Darwin himself opposed racism and eugenics, even though his theory was advanced towards those ends by his brother and other followers)
Margret Sanger, atheist who helped establish the right of a woman to artificial birth control and started Planned Parenthood (was also, to her shame, a eugenicist and a rather nasty person, nevertheless the benefit she bequeathed is well worth noting)
Andrew Carnegie, atheist and philanthropist to educational causes
Sigmund Freud, who was desperately wrong about most things but nevertheless pioneered the study of psychology.
Adam Smith, who codified the economic philosophy of capitalism, which (despite its terrible crimes and abuses) has done more to better the living standards of more of the world's population than any other economic or social movement in history.
Judge Thomas Hartell, who introduced the first American law giving married women property rights in 1836
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), diest (and later anti-theist) whose cultural contribution was primarily literary, but nonetheless greatly enriched the world by his presence.
I go by relative amounts of hot air.
In that case, do let me know when you next step into a baloon so that I may help clear the skies above you of any passing spacecraft.
-Lokmer
