Well the last point is true although the other ones are laughably false.
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Without going OT, I’ll have to say we have to disagree there.
Certainly not Christ. And yes I agree there are errors in the death penalty, that is why I am at best skeptical of it-like in Troy Davis’ case.
LOL, that is why as I’ve said I don’t agree with DADT.
America was founded by deists (an acceptable euphemism for atheists at the time) who wanted to overthrow the religious ideals of poverty and joylessness and replace them with the pursuit of freedom and property, two things opposed by faith, and the two things which made America great. Faith, Christian or otherwise, is not relevant to what made America what it is, despite the revisionist history put forth by the Republican anti-realists from the mid-70s to the present.
Yes, and back in the day, some people wanted to avoid conflicts in the Army due to the mistreatment of Blacks by Racists, so they banned blacks from the army… Was that okay?
The last point is not true. Faith by no means made America great; our founders were mostly deists and part of what made us as a nation so successful was a separation from puritanical and other religious values.
:rolleyes: Deists *are not *atheists. There were atheists at the time include Marquis de Sade and Baron d’Holbach.
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As I’ve said I do not support those arguments.
Nonsense. The Puritan colonies were the ones with the most advanced and participatory form of government in the US. Not to mention deism is still theism and this faith.
Deism is not faith in the general sense, but rather a rational understanding of the universe requiring no large leaps of logic.
And please, feel free to cite your sources in regards to the puritans being a successful democracy.
You couldn’t be more wrong. America was founded by deists and religionists of mostly the Christian stripe. Do you really not know this? And as has been pointed out to you already, desists are not the same as atheists.
And perhaps you can share a cite showing that the founders wanted to overthrow any religious ideals. And please come back with more than Jefferson’s bible.
The very ideal of “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” is opposed to Christian teaching (that life is a transitory, sin-cursed phase, that you must follow church doctrine, and that you are not worthy of happiness). What do you think the Enlightenment was revolting against?
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:rolleyes: Deists *are not *atheists. There were atheists at the time include Marquis de Sade and Baron d’Holbach.
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Tom Paine in The Age of Reason specifically said he was not an atheist - but most of the book attacks the Christian Bible as a pile of nonsense. However, the reason he believed in a Creator - the ordered structure of the solar system - can now be explained by reason alone, so I rather suspect that if he was living today he would be an atheist.
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:rolleyes: Deists *are not *atheists. There were atheists at the time include Marquis de Sade and Baron d’Holbach.
Why? There are deists today.
This statement requires proof. I assume that you can provide it. Right?
Slee
Yes, but they may not be deists for the same reason Tom Paine was a deist.
You don’t think killing people is evil? Especially innocent people?
Well, of course. That’s why it feels so good. :o
Huh?
Objective, physical fact: Life is transitory. There’s nothing explicitly Christian about that.
“Sin-cursed”: You have to be a Christian to think there’s such a thing as sin? Lots of people think the world is a dark and evil place. If you’ll read some newspapers and history books, you’ll discover that people have done some staggeringly evil things over the centuries, and even the best people sometimes behave monstrously. That seems like a pretty accurate description to me, and you don’t have to be a Christian or even a theist to see it that way.
“You must follow Church doctrine”: If you believe Christian doctrine and want salvation and eternal life, yes. If you don’t, the Church has no claim on you. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that theocracy is pretty much out of fashion in the Western world these days.
“Not worthy of happiness?” Where in the world did you get the idea that Christianity explicitly forbids happiness?
Yes, you do. Anyone can acknowledge evil, but “sin” is a Christian thing – not even Jews have quite the same concept of it as St. Augustine, and I doubt Muslims have either.
Meh. Variations on a theme, that’s all. If you want to talk about vicarious atonement of sin, or some other uniquely Christian doctrine about sin, that’s another thing altogether. My point still stands. The understanding that humans often commit evil deeds is pretty much universal.
Oh, really. Please share. A Nobel Prize and the Lucasian Chair await.
Also, Paine believed in an afterlife.
There is no Nobel Prize for History.