Christianity and Human Values

An yet strangely that logic is not being apply to the Islam !!!!!!

That's something the Christian Bible, since it includes the books of the Old Testament, describes as being the norm 3000 years ago. I seriously doubt you could show me a passage in which Jesus demands death for gaiety.

Another issue is the contrast between Jesus and Muhammad.
There are no known accounts of Jesus ever doing harm to anyone. He is portrayed almost as the embodiment of compassion and love.

Muhammad, on the other hand, sounds more like a powercrazed sosiopath who led armies, laid siege to cities, killed and enslaved those who resisted Allah. A murderer and a rapist. There is historical data to support this.

OH he was supposed to had whipped the poor money changers out of the temple and that sure the hell sound like assault to me.

The money changers who was changing Roman coins into coins that the temple could accept to keep the temple running!

In any case comparing a fairy tale to a real life historic person is a little crazy.

Who cares as Jesus did not void all the other words of "god" from the bible otherwise Christians should just throw the the old testament out instead of quotings from it all the damn time.

If that is your reasoning, you must not think much of the Jewish religion. Moses (the founder of the Jewish nation according to the Bible) started his reign by an act of barbarism, a mass killing of civilians including children. From God ordering the deaths of young girls for being unable to prove their virginity, to mass killings of women and children that Joshua and others committed at Jehovah's bidding. The Jewish Bible (which Christians also claim) easily matches anything in the Koran.

If you really think that Christianity is superior to Judaism or Islam for this reason, that is your choice. But it seems to me that the number of horrible acts that were done in the name of Jesus since this point make this a meaningless line of argument.

I don't. All those religions are cause for worry for rational and spiritually aware human beings. Not for what their prophets and holy men did, but for what they teach in the world today.

I am sure I can find stories of god commanding his followers to kill unbelievers, gays and all sorts of people who fall outside the accepted norms in all religions.
But contemporary muslims have been known to stone people to death for adultery and to kill people for speaking inappropriately about the god or the prophet. Contemporary christians have done some nasty stuff too from motives of faith.
But the difference is that those christians are the nutty minority, and they act alone or in small groups. There is no place on earth where christian laws and god's word outweigh a nation's secular laws that are based on justice and equality for all.
Stonings and executions for blasphemy is prescribed by islamic law, and this law is the highest authority in areas ruled by Islam. And those areas are entire nations. I am not claiming that all nations ruled by islamic law are practicing these particular aspects of it. But it is a part of the same set of laws that govern everything else, which makes the practice of stonings and death sentence for blasphemy a matter of the discretion of the religious leaders, which is very worrying.

Even if most muslims reject the more extreme commands of their faith, the fact that there are places in the world where these commands are considered the law means that even though extremist muslims may be a minority, they have "legal" authority to do as they do. That should be unacceptable. To reasonable and conscientious muslims most of all.

The issue here is your prejudice.

Look at this discussion as a whole, pretty much every point you make either is completely disproven... or it comes down to a matter of degree.

And every time I show you that your current line of argument is bogus, you come up with another. This is never ending with you, is it.

Let's take your latest post.

1. Christians, acting through government, do kill people for disobeying the Bible. Uganda just passed a bill to kill homosexuals. This bill was written and pushed through by Christians based on the Bible. This is an example of Christian based government acting with brutality. Other recent examples (which you keep ignoring) are the Serbian genocide and the Rwandan genocide, both of which were committed by Christians in the government.

2. The vast majority of Muslims don't stone people for religious reasons. The majority of Muslim countries don't allow people to be stoned for religious reasons.

3. The real issue here is bigotry. Your whole point is to paint the Muslim religion (and the millions of people who follow it) as something inferior, evil and not worth of the same respect as other religions.

You are trying to come up with excuses for bigotry.

But there is no justification for bigotry.






There is at least one Christian country that

The Serbian government

Yes. Predjudice against the unworthy, inhumane and cruel treatment of others. But it turns out that some of my comments are plain stupid. I guess I just have to eat that.

The situation in Uganda doesn't make the islamic law that can potentially allow for stonings and executions for trivial matters any more acceptable. It just makes for two messed up situations. And I would be a fool to deny that it happens, just as you would be a fool to deny that people still get sentenced to death by stoning.

You are entirely right about the futility of this fingerpointing. But do you not see your own role in making that happen?
I made a post in the context of islam, and you respond by copying the post exactly, only swapping out islam for christianity. Fair point, the question asked is relevant for christianity too, but instead of addressing the question asked, you act in such a way as to make it a conflict between christianity and islam. It is not unreasonable to make islam the context of the question, since there exists the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and then there exists the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam.

No Cyracuz,

My point, all along, is that Christianity and Islam and Judaism and Buddhism are equal. They should have equal status in a modern Democratic society, and proponents of each should be judged by the lives they lead as individuals.

That is it. If someone ever makes a post trying to argue that Christianity is worse than Islam I will have the same reaction.

If you can agree that these religions are morally equal, then we have no beef.

I can agree that they are equal in that they are all morally inferior to the capacity of a free thinking, conscientious human being to determine right and wrong.
It's logical really. A christian reads the bible. A muslim reads the quran. A person who has no adherence to either is free to appreciate the wisdom of both and will therefore stand a better chance of understanding the universal message without the cultural contamination it has picked up though the centuries.

In the sense that all religions function as manifestations of social control and psychological palliatives with respect "the void" they are equal. Use of the word "respect" in this matter is ludicrous. The very nature of the manifestations is tribal. Tolerance is all we can hope for as cognate primates with inherited tribal tendencies.

BTW. Let the advocate of "equality of human values" cast the first stone by renouncing his claim to twenty five times the earth's resources relative to its poorest inhabitants.

Why judge Christianity for what happened thousands or hundreds of years ago?
We don´t judge a nation for what they did hundreds of years ago. We judge a nation for what it is today and when it has improved.
Christianity has improved over the centuries and that is what counts.
Historically it is interesting what happened, but to drag it up as if it is now speaks more of the person´s prejudice than anything else.
Do you think my employer is interested in my bad grades in school or what I have accomplished since then?

That last is not a very good analogy, because a prospective employer is very likely going to be interested in both your performance in school as well as your recent work history. In the case of organized religion, past history matters if an adherent is using a straw man fallacy such as that christians are loving and compassionate, while regimes such as that of Stalin were atheistic and murderous.

However, this entire thread is an exercise in an extended straw man fallacy, in that it ascribes some rather simple-minded, global characteristics to what is essentially a significantly varied community. I've not responded so far, also, because this is a derivative thread--it derives from another thread in which Islam is the whiipping boy. So the author of the thread is being dishonest to begin with.

I don´t think a future employer is interested in how a person performs in grade school if they have a good grade from a college or university.

You're quibbling now, because you didn't specify grade school in your original statement, nor did you specify having good grades in university.

But don't get lost in pettifogging details. The point i was making is that this thread is a response to another thread, and on that basis doesn't deserve to be taken seriously on the merits of its purported argument; and, furthermore, that the argument upon which it is based is an extended straw man fallacy.

Perhaps it might be fair at this point to state that the resources you are mostly referring to would be worthless to anyone if it was not for the technology and the science developed by the West in th last two hundreds years.

Christianity had not improved one little bit and that faith would cheerfully go back to the killings and the other misdeeds of the past but for the surrounding western culture having evolute to control it.

For proof of that see the postings concerning how major elements of that faith had gone to Africa and try to get the killings started in the name of Jesus once more.

Only the non-religion and sane Western culture intervening strongly stop the Christians from doing so.

Most wars which have taken place in the Western world in the last few centuries have been about politics, land and power and not about religion.
WW1, WW2, Russian revolution, the German-French war, The Spanish war, Prussia-Denmark1 and 2, Napoleon, Sweden against Denmark and Russia, Sweden and Russia and many more.

Religion and culture are usually so intergrated that the one developed hand in hand with the other one. You will notice it in music, art, litteratur and traditions,
which are enjoyed by non Christians as well as atheists as well as Christians.