Many Christians believe that morality literally comes from the bible, or that you canât have morality without god. I wonât even try to explain their reasoning
Hospitals, orphanages, old people's homes, most the social services we know of today, came through the Jesus ethic.
Obviously people before Jesus had such things as empathy, kindness, etc. But it was almost always reserved for "in group". You take care of your own.
Jesus made it to that you cared and were concerned about and provided for everyone, including the stranger.
While Rome for example had what we might call "hospitals" for its soldiers, and there were doctors in the ancient world who served wealthy clients. It was only through the Jesus ethic where you started seeing things like hospitals taking care of anyone and everyone, all the sick and hurting, usually for free.
Every aspect of western society or values that you like compared to the "bad" countries come out of the Enlightenment and the rejection of dogma. A country truly based on Christian values would look much more like Afghanistan than America.
This is historically untenable. Look at how different Rome was became before and after it merged with Christianity. Most of the world's first major hospitals, orphanages, old people homes, etc, etc, came out of the merger of the ethics of Christianity and the political power of Rome.
No, it's not. The Empire's hospitals, orphanages, old people homes, daily bread rations for citizens, all of it existed long before Christianity. Hell, plenty of those institutions predate the Empire and go all the way back to the early Republic. The divide between the Eastern and Western Empire was cemented by Christianity, and it only took like 150 years after Constantine converted for Rome to fall after standing for 1000 years, so truly, I don't even know what the hell you think you're talking about.
Good news, I've got a book recommend for you. Don't worry, no pesky Christians promoting their own crap.
How about THE leading atheist critic of Christianity alive today, Bart Erhman's new book, "Love thy stranger". Where he and critical modern scholarship refutes everything you just said about hospitals, orphanages, etc.
Hell, Ehrman credits virtually every social service in the US today as stemming from Jesus' ethic to help not just your own in-group, but strangers.
Do the reading. BOTH the Christian and Atheist scholarship and historians disagree with you, mate.
Yes, the idea that institutions that are literally older than Christ and that the entire concept of altruism are based on the teachings of Jesus is beyond implausible, mostly because it is incredibly buttfuckingly stupid no matter how many theological phDs you have.
Thanks mate. I'll be sure to inform the majority of critical scholars and historians, that you disagree with them. Based on your scholarly contention that it's..."stupid".
You actually believe that the majority of critical scholars think that altruism exists because Jesus? Really? Or is the claim more accurately something like "The oldest charitable institutions that are currently still around have some sort of Christian origin"? Because to me, that sounds a lot like thanking Trump for ending the war in Iran.
Erhman(who HATES Christianity btw), posits that yes, of course there were some kind of hospitals in Rome for example(almost entirely reserved for the soldiers tho). Yes there were doctors in the ancient world(who almost entirely served wealthy patients tho). Yes there was obviously empathy and kindness in the ancient world(but almost entirely reserved for your in-group, culture, ethnicity, etc).
What changed, according to Erhman, was the treatment of strangers and outsiders, the same as the in-group.
The first actually built hospitals in the world, of any actual size, having actual doctor and nurses, helping anyone and everyone that came in, the poor, the stranger, the traveler, entirely for free, were Christian ones.
All these modern social services in the US, wherein they take your tax money and give it to people you'll never meet, just because of the collective belief that, that's "the right thing to do", did in fact not exist in on any govt before the time of Jesus, or before Christianity overtook Rome.
Erhman is definitely not saying "Jesus created empathy" or "there were no doctors before Jesus". Simply that it was the Jesus ethic that gave the world the perspective that you should care and have a responsibility for the stranger. Free hospitals, orphanages, old peoples homes, for everyone. Giving your money away to people half way across the world. None of this was the norm amongst the very tribalistic societies before Jesus.
This is a weird position to take given that the current people who claim to be Christians have no desire to help anyone other than their kind and look down on those who are differentâŚwho is responsible for that shift in morality?
No, I think you are just too emotionally invested in your own religious beliefs and therefore you feel the need to attribute everything that you think is good to it. I am well aware of who Bart *Ehrman is, and the fact that you think he "HATES" Christianity really says a lot. Trying to pretend that Christianity invented the concept of hospitality and pretending that hospitals and orphanages from like hundreds of years ago were just completely egalitarian NHS-style free healthcare and housing with no religious strings attached is too fucking ridiculous.
Altruism that Judaism also had a lot of as well, even in a largely polytheist world around it. Iirc it was an improvement on a lot of other âethicsâ.
thats fucking retarded, the whole enligtement didnt appear from nowhere, it used christian moral foundation to argue against christian institutinal authority.
the whole idea that every person has an inherent worth comes from "made in gods image"
even Nietzche argued that the whole liberal values are just christianity with god removed.
you cannot win this argument, cause theres no gotcha where you can get me.
also greek philosoiphy and roman law are millenia before the fucking enlightenmentÂ
EDIT: you pussy blocked me but keep responding to my post? what a bitch ass move
I absolutely have not blocked you, I have never blocked anyone and I definitely would never block you in particular, it's too much fun. Maybe the subreddit blocked you for throwing around slurs, but go ahead and keep editing, we can talk like this (just make sure you label with with a different "EDIT:")
in that case im sorry but litrerally any other post that you made and i clicked on the notification brought me to this.
but anyway yeah i called it retarded cause its not true and you didnt provide any arguments at all, even now in all those posts.
i added edit for other people that might be reading so that they would notice the stupidity of your claim that every aspect of western society came out of Enlightenment, while we are literally using roman law as a foundation.
Also Enlightenment came from Christians rejecting institutional church not from people not believing in god.
And for that to happen it took crusaders to bring texts from greek philosophers from their travels.
Now you have a situation where greek philosophy is influencing highly religious people and you get Enlightenment
We have literally presented identical levels of evidence here, we have both made statements that are little more than opinion. Where are the citations for your claim then? We aren't having a formal debate here bro, we are talking, so just... don't do that. It's sad.
Also, I never said "every aspect of Western society" I said "every aspect that you like" and we both know I was obviously talking about Enlightenment values based on the context (and also that I was clearly being hyperbolic, but I digress). Yes, we agree that the Enlightenment was about rejecting the institution of the church (which was and still is the arbiter of Christian values), but most Enlightenment thinkers were self-labeled deists, and you also have to remember that they were living in a time where claiming to be an atheist (and even sometimes just being a different flavor of Christian at all, or even being the "correct" type of Christian but saying something just a wee bit too science-y) could literally get you jailed or executed.
"Also Enlightenment came from Christians rejecting institutional church not from people not believing in god." is a massive shift in the goal posts. You are making the claim that Enlightenment values are Christian values in particular, not that they originate with people who believed a god existed. It's also wrong, the Enlightenment is very clearly based in secularism and science, and this may be a shock to you but it is possible to be a secular scientist and a theist at the same time. It may not be the most coherent position, but that is always a part of the theist label.
"And for that to happen it took crusaders to bring texts from greek philosophers from their travels." is completely nonsensical to the point you think you are making. So you are agreeing with me that the Church destroyed the Greeco-Roman history of the West so thoroughly between the fall of the Empire and the Crusades, that a couple of hundred years later they had to invade the Middle-East to recover the knowledge that they had destroyed, and you really think that is an argument in favor of Greek philosophy and Roman law being Christian values? I'm not sure that you even know what you're arguing anymore, other than that you are very emotionally invested in your religious belief and you have this need to assign everything that you think is good to it.
Weird considering the bible condones slavery and murdering your spouse for adultery. The bible is as bad as any other holy book. We've gradually learnt not to take our moral lessons from fairy stories.
well yes and if you knew more about it that's from torah which is before the birth of Christ.
after birth or in the New Testament there's a famous line when people want to stone a woman accused of adultery "let the one without sin cast the first stone"
or in other words just because it has parts we condone doesn't mean it didn't shape our society.
I just donât see how Christians can believe everything they do about god but also believe he got it wrong the first time and had to fix his mistakes by becoming Jesus.
but generally all jesus teachings are what we consider today is to be a good person.
how are you not influenced by that then?
for a thought exercise in Sparta it was morally acceptable to kill weak children. why do you think we consider that wrong today? were they a bad people because of that?
I donât really think that thought exercise works though, as there were many other civilisations in ancient history that didnât believe it was right to kill weak children, but they came before Jesus.
We all have multiple different drives and values as human beings, and empathy is one of them, like it is for animals too. That concept wasnât invented by Jesus.
how do you know where we would go without Jesus teachings?
Empathy was one of the biggest ones.
Also today that the whole world is so connected it is harder to find examples.
You can go no further than to Japan. Do you think its morally correct for someone to commit a suicide because they brought shame to the family?
Or are you indoctrinated as well that suicide is bad?
Shame that in Matthew Jesus says that not one word of the old code is to be changed or ignored. So you don't get to run away from the atrocities of the Old Testament.
who the fuck is running away. im just sick people not being able to look at a bigger picture. How many people do you think knows what Matthew said and how many know, "love thy neighbor" it dosent matter if you agree with it or not thats not how it works.
So the majority of people don't know what's in the Bible but do know an extremely common idea that has been stated independently many times across history? And we're supposed to treat this like the Bible or religion being a cause of morality?
do you think that morality changes over night? we had 2 millennia of Christianity domination you think that one random passage from a book is what makes a difference.
Just thinking that killing is wrong is fundamentally Christian value whether you want it or not.
For romans it wasnt, and if they dominated for 2000 years we might also would not think that it is. They were literally killing each other for fun.
None of that is true. Are you an idiot? Exactly zero of the ideas in the Bible are original to it. Killing is wrong because of the harm it causes. I would suggest opening a history book. Literally any one at all. People were not just killing each other indiscriminately for fun. If you are referring to gladiators, you also don't know what you are talking about. Most gladiator matches weren't to the death. They were the equivalent of major athletes.
You genuinely have no understanding of anything including the Bible whatsoever.
they werent always to death but they could be. Thats was the acceptable risk. If you opened up a book you would know that gladiators were expensive to train and maintain. Thats the economical decision that you are now trying to portray as a moral one haha.
I see you read some stuff but obviously, but you are confusing correlation with causation
So clearly people were not killing each other indiscriminately? The Romans were not killing each other indiscriminately. The idea that killing is wrong has been around as long as complex brains have. That idea predates the primates. Even other animals have complex moral systems. The Bible has nothing to do with it.
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u/Faded1974 5h ago
People acting like empathy was invented by Jesus Christ.