Just because there are no Bible passages that endorse democracy doesn’t mean the Bible is anti-democracy. And kings and rulers in the ancient and medieval world were often chosen by some form of voting among the aristocracy. Yes, mass democracy did not exist, but kings very often were chosen when the local notables gathered together and decided who should be the next king. This form of elective monarchy survives in the method of choosing the Pope, where the Cardinals choose the Pope by ballot.
Of course it is. It amounts to a natural-law argument, which is bullshit, but far less so than an argument based on purported divine revelation.
Just because somebody votes for someone, doesn’t make it a democracy; the key element is that the vote should come from the people. Vatican City is an absolute (though elective rather than hereditary) monarchy.
Seriously, I can’t think of anything that’s more of a model for the whole top-down (rather than bottom-up) approach to political (and other) power than the church; I mean, the basic tenet of religion is that there are more powerful people/beings/things above you. The word of law comes from above, and the people that are (in whatever way) the avatars of the higher power in this realm are the ones to distribute it; there’s just no room to put the ten commandments up to majority vote.
Bearded dudes on mountains distributing stone tablets isn’t really a basis for a democratic government. (:p)
That’s not entirely true. We need only consider the story of Rehoboam in 1 Kings 12. After Rehoboam inherited the kingship from his father Solomon, Jeroboam leads a group of Israelites to angrily demand that Rehoboam end the cruel and oppressive policies of his father. Rehoboam consults his advisers. One group of advisers tells him to become a servant of the people, while another urges him to brag about how cruel and powerful he’ll be. Rehoboam listens to the second group. (“My father disciplined you with whips, but I’ll discipline you with scorpions.”) In response, the people rise in revolt. Rehoboam sends a slave driver named Adoram to punish them, and the people stone Adoram to death. Most of Israel then breaks away from Rehoboam, and the country is divided from that point onwards.
This story clearly is based on the viewpoint that a king should be judged by how well he serves the people.
But whatever the reason, Bible still portrays most kings negatively, and in some cases extremely negatively. In this respect it is very different from records from other ancient civilizations. In reading ancient Roman records such as Plutarch, we can see a clear belief that power equates to goodness. Pagan authors praised kings such as Alexander, merely because those kings were good at leading and conquering. Alexander’s mass murders and enslavements simply didn’t strike them as something bad.
It is no surprise, then, that Christian thought of later centuries turned out to be much more willing to criticize kingship in general than their Pagan predecessors. Consider Augustine’s famous paragraph in The City of God:
Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”
Yes, kings don’t come off too well in the bible. That king of the Jews guy, they even nailed him to a cross! To this day, people brandish the symbol of that cross, with an inscription clearly emphasizing his kingly nature, in warning against all kings…
I’m a Christian and a monarchist, but I think it’s a huge stretch to claim that the Bible forbids democracy in all circumstances. What it forbids is rebellion against the established power, whether that power is democratic or non-democratic.
As usual, it seems, this discussion is turning on a binary position of absolutes. Fun, I suppose, but not very productive in discovering reality.
The actual history of human rights is not an either/or proposition in regard to religion. The (recent) notion of democracy almost certainly did not arise from the church. Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Voltaire, Rousseau all discussed (either in support of or in modified opposition to) the concept of the government belonging to the people, arising from the people, and being given legitimacy only through the consent of the governed.
On the other hand, opposition to slavery did begin within the Christian churches. The earliest (and rather tepid, influenced by politics) declaration was from Pope Eugene IV in 1435 against the enslavement of the natives of the Canary Islands. Pope Paul III followed in 1537 with a declaration against the enslavement of the American native peoples. Similar declarations followed, generally in opoposition to “race based” slavery. The first direct declarations against slavery, per se, began among the Christians of England and New England. Now, it may be coy to note that their teachings were not “biblical,” nevertheless, it was churchmen, not Enlightment figures who made those declarations. Among the pundits of the Enlightenment, only Thomas Paine actively spoke out against slavery.
Similarly, the rights of women were first espoused by religious-minded women. (There is some evidence that the human rights espoused in Enlightenment-influenced societies prompted the women to say “Hey! What about us?” nevertheless, you will not find support for women’s rights until Christian women began to assert them in the context of their beliefs.)
I doubt that either side should get to claim that all the good ideas originated only with them and I strongly suspect that the various ideas that arose within secular thought and within religious thought influenced each other.
= = =
As to the OP, I have never heard a Muslim declaration that human rights are a “Christian” imposition, although I could see that happening in a few of the more backward states, such as Saudi Arabia, in regards to women’s rights.
Despite my jabs in this thread, I agree with the tone of your post, but I’m curious who you’re thinking of here. Personally, when I think of the first significant modern woman’s rights activists, I think of women like Mary Wollstonecraft and her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, who certainly wasn’t terribly ‘religious-minded’, and of Olympe de Gouge and her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, who I also wouldn’t know to be especially religious. And of course women’s rights were a huge issue in the French Revolution.
Then there’s also the fact that even today, from my perception, churches don’t seem to be exactly a paragon of gender equality. If the origin of women’s rights thus lay in Christian thinking, you’d expect them to lead, rather than lag, in this department.
I’d say it is a bit more circuitous in the United States at least. The Great Awakenings somewhat disproportionately recruited women into church activism and church activism led to increased political awareness in general. The “radical” factions of evangelicals in particular, if it came to a test, valued what they considered good Christian behavior over the tradition of the passive, subservient women. Early Abolitionism for example very much grew out of ( or at least heavily involved ) grassroots “radical” church goers, many of them women. So did the Temperance movement. And as women became more involved in what they saw as these righteous Christian causes, they became more cognizant and resentful of their second-class standing in society in general.
I admit I know essentially nothing about Puritans.
Abigail Adams, Lucretia Mott (and a number of other participants at the Seneca Falls Convention), Elizabeth Stanton, (who came to reject religion, but who was brought up in a religious environment and whose education was shaped by religious friends), and a few others.
There is no question that churches tend to be bastions of conservatism. However, it remains true that many people who led the fight for various human rights have been raised in Christian homes. Several of them (Stanton, Susan B. Anthony), turned from religion after encountering that conservative resistance to their message from churches. However, pretty much all of them began their efforts before they turned from religion.
Again, that’s nearly inevitable in a overwhelmingly Christian society. You could replace “led the fight for various human rights” with everything from “eats spaghetti” to “became a serial killer” and it would be equally true.
Which does nothing to establish that Christianity had nothing to do with the various developments. The ideas arose from somewhere and it was often the most religious people who led those movements.
As I have already noted, aside from Thomas Paine, there are no serious protests, (or, often, any protests), against slavery among Enlightenment authors. Attributing all human rights developments to Enlightenment thinking when the Enlightenment thinkers studiously avoided the topic, and then dismissing Christian influence against slavery or for women’s rights–in which the voices against it were nearly uniformly Christian–requires more than your prejudices against religion for support.
But were those forms of government prompted by their religious beliefs, or by the Dutch example ? Or, more saliently, by the various Italian ones, most notably Venice, a democratic (well, pseudo-democratic really, but then so were the early US, and the Netherlands) state founded in deeply, *deeply *Catholic ground.
Also rhetorical because naturally any Occidental event will feature a majority of Christians of one stripe or another on either side.
A more interesting question, perhaps, might be how human rights, rule of law and democracy fare and fared in places more or less untouched by Judeo-Christian morality (and I’d throw Islam in there, because it’s really more of the same, if a bit more progressive at the time of its founding). So China, India, Japan, pre-Columbian America, pre-colonies Australia & New Zealand etc…
[QUOTE=Deeg]
No group did more for the abolition of slavery than Christians.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, those priest-hanging French unilaterally abolished slavery much earlier than the US (or England, Spain…) - part of the Revolution, y’see.
OK, so Napoleon partly reinstated it (quite bloodily) in 1802 when he figured he needed the financial edge to kickstart his empire, but he re-abolished it in 1815 so that’s all good :o.
Not sure one couldn’t quibble about these examples—as you say, Stanton rejected religion, Mott was a Quaker, who I’m not sure I would count unequivocally as ‘Christian’ (though I frankly don’t know much about the issue, and don’t know anything about how it was back then), and even Abigail Adams seems to have harbored some unorthodox views; but this is really rather nitpicking, and I acknowledge that these are notable women’s rights activists coming from a religious background.
This argument, however, is a bit of a red herring. Of course many people in the fight for human rights have been raised in Christian homes: it was really difficult not to be at that time (and still is, today—I was raised in a nominally Christian home, but seeing in this responsibility for any of my views would simply be disingenuous). If you want to argue that Christianity is at least a contributing cause to the emergence of the various rights movement, you would have to show that being Christian increases the likelihood of holding these particular views; that is, that within those supportive of the associated causes, a greater proportion was Christian than among those opposed to them.
And even then, I think there still needs to be an argument that the Christianity of those is not merely incidental, but that they held their views because they follow from their Christianity—that is, that Christianity isn’t to human rights as falling barometers are to rainstorms. And it seems to me that the ongoing marginalization of women in the churches is rather good evidence that many Christians don’t feel that gender equality is a direct consequence of their religion.
Likewise, one would expect a weaker religiosity in the Confederation than in the Union, if abolitionism is a Christian idea; but at least today, this is the exact other way around: the former Confederation is nearly exactly congruent with today’s ‘bible belt’. If Christianity is correlated with abolitionism, this would seem to be in need of explanation: did all the Christians move there after the civil war? Did the loss of the war inspire a religious awakening?
And then of course, there’s the issue of human rights today. The biggest current human rights issue certainly is LGBT rights, and I sincerely doubt that anybody will argue that those are a particularly Christian idea (not yet, at least). So at least the idea that Christianity is somehow aligned with human rights in general seems to be somewhat wanting on that front.
How about Diderot and D’Alembert, who published a most scathing critique of it in their controversial Encyclopédie quoted here, in French I’m afraid but the very first sentence goes “Having studied the history of slavery, we are about to prove that it harms the freedom of man, that it is contrary to both natural and civil laws, that it mars the nature of even the best forms of government, and finally that it is inherently useless.”
Both were emphatically not Christians, like most French philosophers of the era.
Montesquieu, Rousseau strongly opposed slavery as well.
How many times have I said to you that each person has her own path to follow and that that includes atheists? I not only tolerate other faiths, I explore them. I find nothing evil about being an atheist. And “live and let live” attitudes within Christianity are growing.
A person cannot be logical when they paint large numbers of people with a broad brush. There are amazing differences in beliefs from denomination to denomination, from church to church, and from individual Christians to any other Christian.
Do you really think that all Christians believe the same thing and insist that others must believe exactly as they do? Please use factual information when making a claim. I don’t think that I know of any posters at the Dope whose words are as filled with hatred and misconception for a branch of religion as your posts.
You have the potential to be more reasonable and accurate.
Notice that nowhere in this post do I claim that all Christians are without mean-spiritedness themselves at times.
Where did you get that notion from? Slavery was a major topic in enlightenment philosophy, and many of its foremost thinkers wrote about it, almost universally calling for its abolishment. Kant produced an argument that slavery can never be a lawful contract, because by entering the contract, slaves would sign away their right to enter contracts (in the Metaphysics of Morals), and thus, no lawful slavery is possible. Voltaire, in the Candide, remarked that all human beings are cousins, and with regard to slavery, that “no one could treat their relatives more horribly” (although he was arguably not very enlightened on the whole race issue in general). Rousseau touches on the issue at several points in the Social Contract, writing that
[QUOTE=Rousseau]
Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.
[…]
The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: “I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish.”
[/QUOTE]
Likewise, Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws, wrote
[QUOTE=Montesquieu]
Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune. The state of slavery is in its own nature bad. It is neither useful to the master nor to the slave; not to the slave, because he can do nothing through a motive of virtue; nor to the master, because by having an unlimited authority over his slaves he insensibly accustoms himself to the want of all moral virtues, and thence becomes fierce, hasty, severe, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel. … where it is of the utmost importance that human nature should not be debased or dispirited, there ought to be no slavery.
[/QUOTE]
Locke’s Second Treatise contains a passage On Slavery, the aforementioned Olympe de Gouges wrote Reflections on Negroes, Condorcet wrote Reflections on Negro Slavery, universally disparaging the practice. Etc., etc. So I don’t really think that Thomas Paine was alone in considering the issue, nor alone in considering it ‘seriously’.
Which is another way of saying that Christianity is weakening severely. In a society where Christianity was fully in power, you yourself would be punished or killed for what you have just admitted in your post. As demonstrated by history.
That’s actually pretty clever. Circular, absurd, clever. I likes it very much.
You could even say he was a bit of a two-faced son of a bitch about it all, really. Patronizing racism and rabid antisemitism aside, he himself certainly made a lot of cash trading in slaves regardless of any purported principles he might have held - but then, he always did have a thing about money. Count it first, repent later, if you will.
He also considered it a genuine good deed to be taking negroes away from Africa, to work in and for civilized society. So, really, Voltaire wasn’t against slavery at all, although he might have been against the mistreatment of slaves.