The Republican Nomination For President: The Race For The Race For The White House

I am sure you could start a more interesting thread which would attract a rapt audience clinging to your every word. Try it. Have you ever started a thread?

Did he say which values? If he's talking about Kindness and Charity and Compassion and things like that, then those aren't "christian" values, those are just good behavior. Christianity doesn't get to claim ownership of good behavior just because their book talks about them.

ros is, once again, trying to trick you all using word magic. Amateur word magic. He is using the term "good behaviour" in the individual sense and applying it, here's the trick, to mass "good behaviour" which is what Christianity is addressing.

He thinks that because an atheist helps a little old lady across the street it is proof that atheists are safe hands into which we may confidently entrust out banking system. And our educational system. And all our other systems.

He cannot point to any mass good behaviour even being thought about anywhere before the advent of the Christian era despite many acts of individual kindnesses presumably taking place in them. Our own mass behaviour might not be so hot but at least we think about the matter. The Samaritan offering comfort to a hobo must have been unusual for it to be worth reporting.

The Church formalised and codified and recorded for posterity the canons of good behaviour. Good behaviour was not to be left to individuals occasionally getting a thrill out of being wonderful persons. It was an onerous duty and not a random, whimsical indulgence of patronage.

Christianity can claim ownership of mass good behaviour. And it is of no consequence how much bad behaviour was, or is, performed in the process of discovering what "good behaviour" is, formalising, codifying, recording and promoting it.

Obviously what Spendius is trying to tell you dumb atheists...although the lot of you appear unable to understand, is that when you atheists lead a few crusades and slaughter people who are not like you...and burn some witches...

The Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their ilk were not attracted to eugenics because they briefly forgot their leftwing principles. The harder truth is that they were drawn to eugenics for what were then good, leftwing reasons.

They believed in science and progress, and nothing was more cutting edge and modern than social Darwinism. Man now had the ability to intervene in his own evolution. Instead of natural selection and the law of the jungle, there would be planned selection. And what could be more socialist than planning, the Fabian faith that the gentlemen in Whitehall really did know best? If the state was going to plan the production of motor cars in the national interest, why should it not do the same for the production of babies? The aim was to do what was best for society, and society would clearly be better off if there were more of the strong to carry fewer of the weak.

What was missing was any value placed on individual freedom, even the most basic freedom of a human being to have a child. The middle class and privileged felt quite ready to remove that right from those they deemed unworthy of it.

Eugenics went into steep decline after 1945. Most recoiled from it once they saw where it led – to the gates of Auschwitz. The infatuation with an idea horribly close to nazism was steadily forgotten.

Interesting article in yesterday's Guardian about the left/liberal's dirty little secret, eugenics. It's quite easy blaming religion for what is in effect a rather nasty side to human nature. If you think that nasty side will just disappear if you get rid of all religion, you're living in a fantasy land. It's not a great leap to go from Darwinism to Social Darwinism to Eugenics to the Holocaust.

The class system isn't the same as eugenics, if it was, we wouldn't have a bunch of inbreds who look like horses sitting on the throne.

I do not think the world would be a more decent place if religion disappeared--but I also do not think it would be a less decent place.

Why can't you damn atheists open up your minds enough to let that bit of brilliance shine through?

The Pope and Mr Santorum are in nobody's bed who doesn't choose them to be. They are simple saying that we would be a lot happier without contraception. Nobody need take any notice.