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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg or e who wrote (17588)	7/3/2001 1:42:59 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

OK, so for hundreds of years, good bible believing Christians, following a moral code that came from their best possible interpretation of scripture, kept slaves and saw nothing wrong with toasting those who disagreed with them. Then one day, suddenly, Christians realized that these things are NOT permitted by the bible, and that they are in fact sinful. What changed? Certainly not the bible. Obviously, the Christians changed. They had, it seems, a revelation. Did it come from God? Perhaps, although it seems hardly coincidental that this revelation occurred just as secular moralists were redefining the old codes of human conduct. Secular morality, while apparently relative, is actually, in many cases, far more rigorous than scriptural morality. Secular moralists have to weigh their conclusions against reason and eternal questioning. Religious moralists just have to re-interpret scripture and they can do anything they want - over the years this outlet has been used to all sorts of bizarre purposes. Look what happened when "thou shalt not kill" was thought to be overly restrictive by bible-based moralists who really wanted to kill some other people. They decided that what it actually meant was "thou shalt not murder". That of course is infinitely flexible: all you have to do is tickle the definition of murder, and you can do all sorts of things to those you dislike. Very convenient. Religious moralists have frequently used scripture to justify the divine right of kings, colonialism, manifest destiny, inquisitions, and all kinds of massacres. The truth is that God removed those people from the land as an act of judgement on them for among other things sacrificing children to idols. How about the Philistines? God didn't slay them, the Israelites did. Did they do it because God told them to do it? Actually, no, they did it because their priests said that God told them to do it, and because they wanted the land. Did God really tell them to steal that land and kill all the people who lived there? Hard to say. Remember that the people who wrote the only surviving account had every reason to justify their own actions by claiming divine support. You said that "treating Human beings, (created in the image of God) with disrespect and unjustified malice was, and is, wrong". Didn't the Israelites treat the Philistines with unjustified malice and disrespect? Did wrong become right because the priest (who probably wanted the land as much as anyone; the offerings must have been pretty skinny out in the desert) said that God said it was ok? The last centuries since the so called enlightenment have been the most bloody in History. I didn't say they weren't bloody, I said that a huge amount of progress has been made. Progress is often bloody, largely because it frequently meets violent opposition from people who think it violates some revealed rule of conduct. What sort of progress? Slavery exists in only a few isolated corners of the world. Colonialism is gone. Kings and Queens are relics of the past; powerless in the few places where they exist. Democracy has gone from being a radical idea to a goal that most of the world strives to achieve. More people have access to health care, education, and other things that were once restricted to the elite than ever before. The idea of human rights is known around the world, and the reality is actively being pursued. Women have, in large parts of the world, attained at least legal equality; the parts of the world that were left behind are fast catching up. We are beginning to acknowledge homosexuals as people not unlike us, not as ready subjects for persecution. I could go on, of course. Perfection? Far from it. Progress? Absolutely. Anybody who thinks that things were once better than they are now in insufficiently familiar with history.