radorth said:
Doesn't matter. We'll use a different example. We all know what you guys do.
Translation: "I lost that round, but I'm going to pretend that my loss is actually a win and showboat on it."
If a bad person says they are a Christian you presume they are. If a "freethinker" like Frederick Douglas says we should worship Jesus and says nascent Christianity is "holy and good" you say he's an atheist anyway.
He did not say we should worship Jesus. He did say that a primitivist version of Christianity was holy and good...you know, kind of like Thomas Jefferson did.
It's totally subjective, and yet you rationalize away all the logical problems. And I love every minute of it too.
Totally subjective? The only subjectivism I see creeping in here is your attempt to construe "bad guys" as antichristian and "good guys" as all on your side. A few points of reality checks here:
1) You're a calvanist, you believe in predestined salvation by grace, the evidence of which is shown through faith. As such, there is no guarrantee of salvation this side of judgement day, but as a rule of thumb people who maintain a faith commitment are considered to be part of the elect. This leaves you no wiggle room on people like Hitler, whose faith commitment never seems to have wavered. He may have been evil and done evil things, but so was Calvin (smaller body count, but similar style of fascist police state in Geneva), Luther (anti-semetic in the extreme, prostituted his theological influence for protection, participated in the burning of heretics after he himself was a heretic and should have known better), Moses (the genocidal wars against the natives of Palestine, if the conquest narratives are to be believed), and many other heros of Christianity and Judaism.
2) There are many, many people - the majority of non-Christians in the post-enlightenment west, I'd wager - who don't believe a word of Christian doctrine and yet see great value in some of its moral teachings, or see great beauty in its stories, and thus encourage those who can believe to be earnest in their faith.
Jefferson and Douglass were both of the second stripe, as even a cursory look at their writings makes clear. Contrary to your assertion that I "say he's an atheist anyway," I made it quite clear that some of his writings impute a possible diestic belief system, but that there isn't enough to make a firm judgement.
Here are some quotes from Fredrick Douglass that are fairly damning for your position:
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"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs."
"Where I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me...I...hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land." (from "After The Escape")
"The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors.... For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done!" (from "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro")
"Once, in a heated controversy over the wisdom of giving the
Bible to slaves, he asserted that it would be 'infinitely
better to send them a pocket compass and a pistol.'" (Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass)
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By the way, when are you going to back up your assertion he was an atheist? I assume all those who talk about supporting assertions are waiting for your link. But maybe you've realized by now that all these atheist claims we should back up assertions which contradict Douglass himself do not apply to you.
Care to retract your slander now?
HA! Man you are making my day here. Yeah it means Hitler is a Christian because he says so. How incredibly convenient. But then you automatically make void every atheist judgement of Christians who don't act like Jesus did. Hitler hated Jews and Jesus called them his brethren, but what do you care. Right?
This is fairly incoherent, and I don't see how it relates (mostly because it's muddy and seems to slide across three or four points). Would you care to clarify?
Ah but the point you are evading is that I don't believe everyone who says they are a Christian is one. I have to see Christlike behavior, at least from those who have access to the Bible.
In addition to the really good things that he said and did, Christ publically insulted his mother, committed acts of terrorism in the temple, committed a capitol offence (Sabbath breaking) because he believed that the needs of men are higher than the law of God, lied to his brothers, demanded abject servitude from his disciples, encouraged vagrancy, and validated slavery. It seems that the definition of Christlike, as given in the gospels, is consierably wider than your operational definition.
And, once again, Medeival Catholic theologians and clergy *DID* have access to the Bible --- not that that should matter if the Holy Spirit bears witness of what is right to the heart of the elect.
-Lokmer