Western civilization and it's values isn't founded on Christian concepts, you nitwits. It's founded on the pluralism and rejection of spiritualism that started with the Reformation and the Renaissance and culminated with Darwin and cosmology.
Despite Christianity, Western civilization has prevailed.
Here are some Muslim reactions to the shootings:
http://www.onislam.net/english/shariah/s...st-cartoon.htmlNot seeing this on Fox, lads?
Now I remember why I don't come to this board. I always come away feeling like I have stepped in incorporeal dog shit and spend the next hour trying to wipe it off my psyche.
G-man and Pariah both already responded to this, but I feel a need to respond further.
I'm just stunned by the arrogance and sweeping assumptions of your above remarks, and your declaration of moral superiority without any facts on your side, while dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as "dog shit" that you have to spend an hour scraping off your shoe, or psyche, or whatever.
You make an idiot of yourself, without any help from us, when you post absurdity like that.
Christianity is the basis for Western Culture. Pat Buchanan went into that in
Death Of The West and several of his other books. Christianity answered the social problems that emerged with the collapse of the Roman Empire, and bred the trust that allowed a merchant system and capitalism to emerge, and (as Pariah and G-men mentioned) uniquely gave us the concept of "free will", where someone can not be a Christian and yet not be killed. A concept that is diametrically opposed to what's going on in Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan, and really
ANY country where muslims dominate, or even have a significant and inherently violent minority.
As I've cited before, Christianity gave us the first orphanages, when Roman women would abandon infants in the snow so they didn't have to care for them. Christian families would adopt and raise them, and then created orphanages, when there were just too many to raise them all.
Christianity gave us the Red Cross.
Christianity and the Bible spread literacy worldwide, and most of the greatest universities in the world, such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, began as Bible learning centers.
Much of the classic art and architecture of Europe, such as Michaelangelo's work, was a product of Christians.
And Western Democracy, as created by the United States. The concepts of free will and basic human rights are uniquely Christian. The contract government between a people and its leaders reflects the Old Testament and New Testament contract between God and Man.
Dinesh D'Souza points out, in his book
What's So Great About America, that China created gunpowder, the compass, and wind-sailing ships with a ballast rudder for long-distance sailing, and had them for hundreds of years before Europeans learned of them through trade with China.
Yet it was Europeans, because of something unique in Western culture, that used these inventions to explore and colonize virtually the entire world by the early 20th century. That unique mindset is arguably Christianity.
Columbus initially began his explorations, paid for by the monarch of Spain, to find a trade route to the West Indies, and planned to use the profits of that trade to fund final victory of Spain against their Moor invaders. But much of the exploration that resulted, to the four corners of the world, was missionaries, with the desire to share the gospel (or "good news") to improve the lives of other cultures worldwide. It was the product of a Europe that deeply believed in the value of their culture, and wanted to share it with the world.
As D'Souza further details in
What's So Great About America, European colonization expunged a lot of the bad cultural practices that were keeping non-European cultures down.
Such as, in his native India, burning the widowed wives alive on a funeral pyre after the death of their husbands. Abolishing cannibalism and human sacrifice. Taking natives away from a hunter-gatherer culture where they were barely surviving, and teaching them farming, education, health-care, and the workings of a modern industrial economy.
In his native India (in a chapter titled "Two Cheers for Colonialism") D'Souza argues that for all the bad things that occurred under 150 years of British colonization, and the resentment of Britain that endures in India, colonization was a net gain for India, and its Parliament, court system, universities, stock market, military hierarchy, and even their business clothing still reflects that of the British.
If these things were bad for India, they would have been abolished the moment colonization ended in 1947. But quite the contrary, because they are good for India they remain, and have made India the emerging superpower that they are today.
Further, if Christianity is bad for the world, why is it that Christianity is actually far more prevalent and strong among the former European colonies (Brazil, latin America, the Phillipines, Africa, South Korea...) than it is in Europe itself?
The strength of Christianity outside of Europe was partly the pressure within the Catholic church that resulted in selecting a Pope from Argentina. Again, if Christianity were bad for liberated former colonials, these liberated countries would have abandoned it.
Finally, your notion that Western Culture has moved beyond Christianity to a more "enlightened" culture of secularism of "Darwin and cosmology". In the examples of Nazism, Soviet/Chinese communism and their by-product, secularism has arguably killed and held back far more people than Christianity.
Nazism was social Darwinism in full practice. How'd that work out?
Communism, according to one site I posted here 2 or 3 years back, an online museum of godless Communism's atrocities, lists the personal horror stories of people from nations worldwide who lost their countries and their murdered families to communism, and as a whole on its front page cites numbers in excess of 150 million worldwide attributable to communism.
And the next generation of re-packaged socialist/humanist/atheism,
cultural Marxism, the religion of Barack Obama, Dilma in Brazi, Hugo Cavez and his successors, of the Arab Spring, and of race-centric identity-politics culture-rifting revolutions worldwide, is positioning itself in the next few decades to tear apart both the West and the developing world into manufactured ethnocentric chaos and revolution. Communism and its destructive byproduct, by any other name.
You like to spout crap with nothing to back it up, and have a hissy-fit when anyone here confronts you with the facts. I remember, over 10 years ago, when you would participate in debates and we would have a dialogue, where both perspectives were voiced. Now you just want an echo-chamber of people who agree with your dug-in political views, and don't want to be challenged with any facts that contradict your views.
And when you ARE challenged with dissenting conservative views, label anyone who disagrees with you as a hater, refuse to even listen to opposing views, compare us (pretentiously) to shit on your psyche, and just want to take your ball and go home.
