Quote: (04-19-2015 02:52 PM)VolandoVengoVolandoVoy Wrote:
Quote: (04-19-2015 02:25 PM)Disco_Volante Wrote:
The rules of christianity created a great social fabric.
Family unit, individual property rights, hard work, not fucking over your fellow man.
You had to go back 600 years in christianity to find violence comparable to what modern muslims do virtually every day.
Please, prove me wrong. Buy a plane ticket to mogadishu then do a video blog from there about how christianity is the real problem.
The rules of Christianity had nothing to do with the development of respect of property rights and the family unit. In fact, it was secular humanism and the development of a body of common law that did so.
The Church was a vicious organization that plundered the people at every opportunity. It was a driving force behind pillage, rape, torture, mass murder, confiscation, and extortionate taxes.
I don't think it's as clear-cut as that, although large-scale, long-term societal developments are hard to trace objectively.
Although I am an atheist, I do think that there is an important parallel in the early Christian belief that every person has a soul, and has equal standing in some ways in the eyes of God--to the later modern social contract thinking where we are all born equal and people should not be compelled to do things they didn't agree to.
All born equal in the eye of gods to all born equal and free without gods is just a further step in cosmological understanding of Physics, that the amazing mess that is the universe is unlikely, but unlikelier still is that there is some amazing mind that controls it all.
How corrupt the Catholic church was/is is sort of a moot point if you're an atheist-- they never had anything to do with god because god was never there. They were at some point just a bunch of thugs that hijacked a decent idea for its time and milked it like sociopaths. Just like people did and do with Socialism, by which I mean that we can all do better if we help each other than if we presume ill will in each other.