Philosophy Now Forum

Theism did not create secularism, atheism did. In fact, theists banned the first secular political tracts in Europe.

IC: My earlier comment did not post. Protestant Christians were the ones in the early states, in the USA, who established state theocracies that sent people to prison for blasphemy, who denied atheists the right to testify in court (because they could not swear on the Bible), and who denied Catholics the right to hold state offices. Martin Luther, the guy who started the protestant movement wrote a book calling for the mass murder of all Jews. Go check out real history, and you'll find numerous examples of protestant Christians being scum.

IC: Were the Southern Baptists, who established their church to support slavery of blacks in the American south, were they Catholics? Or were they protestants?

Science Fan wrote: ↑Thu Jun 22, 2017 5:42 pm Theism did not create secularism, atheism did. In fact, theists banned the first secular political tracts in Europe.

Check again:

sec·u·lar /ˈsekyələr/ adjective

adjective: secular

1. denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis.
"secular buildings"

synonyms: nonreligious, areligious, lay, temporal, worldly, earthly, profane; formallaic
"secular music"

antonyms: holy, religious

2. Christian Church
(of clergy) not subject to or bound by religious rule; not belonging to or living in a monastic or other order.

3. Astronomy
of or denoting slow changes in the motion of the sun or planets.

4. Economics
(of a fluctuation or trend) occurring or persisting over an indefinitely long period.
"there is evidence that the slump is not cyclical but secular"


5. occurring once every century or similarly long period (used especially in reference to celebratory games in ancient Rome).

noun

noun: secular; plural noun: seculars

1. a secular priest.

Origin

Middle English: sense 1 of the adjective and sense 2 of the adjective from Old French seculer, from Latin saecularis, from saeculum ‘generation, age,’ used in Christian Latin to mean ‘the world’ (as opposed to the Church); sense 3 of the adjective, sense 4 of the adjective, and sense 5 of the adjective (early 19th century) from Latin saecularis ‘relating to an age or period.’

Science Fan wrote: ↑Thu Jun 22, 2017 5:43 pm IC: My earlier comment did not post. Protestant Christians were the ones in the early states, in the USA, who established state theocracies that sent people to prison for blasphemy, who denied atheists the right to testify in court (because they could not swear on the Bible), and who denied Catholics the right to hold state offices.

Church and state are constitutionally separate in the US.

So you can be quite sure that whatever was done was not done because of churches.

Martin Luther, the guy who started the protestant movement wrote a book calling for the mass murder of all Jews.

Yes, he did. He also said, "burn their synagogues." He was not an entirely good man, for sure. But both the Protestants and the freethinker movements owe some of their freedom to him, because he broke the power of the Catholic Church in Europe, essentially.

Meanwhile, it's a good thing Protestants don't have saints and popes; they don't have to regard Martin Luther as in any way authoritative, and so don't have to follow his lead into anti-Semitism. We can take the good, but leave the bad.

So in short: who cares? Luther spoke only for himself.

Science Fan wrote: ↑Thu Jun 22, 2017 5:45 pm IC: Were the Southern Baptists, who established their church to support slavery of blacks in the American south, were they Catholics? Or were they protestants?

I don't answer for the Southern Baptists, actually. Any more than I acquire virtue from the evangelicals generally.

https://studiesinamericanhistory.wordpr ... istianity/

Immanuel Can wrote:

Well, the form of democracy (equality-based, human-rights-based) that we have in the West actually depends on Judeo-Christian moral foundations. Nietzsche knew that, and that's why he was no advocate of democracy. Ironically, secularism was also a religious sort of word (from "saeculum," worldly, the complement of "sacred"...both being words applied to different aspects of the same person's life.) Muslims, for example, have no sacred-secular distinction...they regard all matters of life as being, in principle, religious matters. So secularism, ironically, is a Christian artifact.

I agree that our personal and political ethics in the West arise from Judeo- Christian morality. How can anyone think that our political ethics in the West arose de novo? That insight into how Christianity, but not Islam, reshapes itself as secularism is interesting and I guess correct

IC: When you refer to "Judeo-Christian" values, you are once again, ignoring actual history. In the USA, when the federal Constitution was ratified, many state legislatures opposed the provision about there being no religious test to hold federal office. Why? Because as many of these Christian legislatures publicly stated in the debates, they did not want to see a Jew as president of the USA. Many of the state theocracies banned Jews from holding state public office. Keep in mind the federal Constitutional protections did not originally apply to the state governments. In the USA, the protestant Christians actively discriminated against Jews, but now, we are to believe that there was some "Judeo-Christian" morality that the USA was founded upon? This is another example of Christians rewriting history to make themselves look better than they actually behaved.

IC: You can't claim that you don't answer for the protestant Southern Baptists, while previously claiming that protestant Christianity was always a force for good, and it was only the Catholics who committed atrocities.

IC: Here is the thing --- when we look at the actual facts of history, we see the atheists in the USA, as part of the free-thinker movement having fought to end slavery, allow women the right to vote, provide equal rights for religious minorities, and even to this day, the atheist community in the USA is at the forefront in fighting for the rights of gays and transgenders. On the other hand, we see throughout history that theists were largely lined up fighting against extending rights to minority groups. Even to the point where the women's right's movement, fighting for the right of women to vote, had a falling out with their religious members, for undermining their fight.

When one looks at the actual facts of history, one sees atheists doing a much better job fighting for individual liberty than their religious counterparts. This is one reason state school boards in the USA, dominated by Christians, refuse to allow real history to be written in high-school history books ---- it makes Christians look like assholes.

Science Fan wrote: ↑Thu Jun 22, 2017 6:23 pm it makes Christians look like assholes.

Which makes it all the more important that you, as a representative of the atheists, make more effort not to look like one.

Science Fan wrote: ↑Thu Jun 22, 2017 6:23 pm IC: Here is the thing...

Okay, SF...I'll tell you what. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

I'll answer for the Southern Baptists if you'll answer for Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin and Kim Jong il.

Fair enough?

IC: That's easy. Mao and company never killed anyone in the name of atheism, but in the name of communism. I'm not a communist. The Southern Baptists, on the other hand, did persecute blacks based on their theism.

In fact, Marxism is a religion, it even has its own supernatural claims, including a god of its own --- Hegel's. What do you think Marx was referring to when he claimed that capitalism had a historical role? That's not science, and it's certainly not atheism. Marx believed that there was a supernatural force guiding human civilization and directing it towards a specific end-goal. That's religious theism, not atheism. So, do you really want to bring up communists in an argument against atheists? Not a smart move. While Marx was certainly against the Christian god, he was not against supernatural beliefs in a god.

Science Fan wrote: ↑Thu Jun 22, 2017 6:50 pm IC: That's easy. Mao and company never killed anyone in the name of atheism, but in the name of communism.

Then why did he kill and lock up all the religious folks? And why did he follow Marx, who claimed that "the criticism of religion is the first of all critiques?"

Not so easy after all.

Here's what Atheism actually does: it creates a vacuum of existential meaning. Why? Because it posits a meaningless, accidental universe, the impossibility of morality and the ultimate futility of existing. That's why Camus could say the first question of all philosophy had become suicide -- why go on living with such absurdity?

So mankind goes looking for meaning. And they find it. Having rejected God, they embrace folly. They cleave to Marxism, to Fascism, to Leftism, to Eco-Worship, to Nationalism, to Globalism, to Social Darwinism, to Technocratic Determinism, to Consumerism or even to Raw Totalitarianism: to any project an ideologue can invent to restore some sense of meaning or purpose to the universe.

Thus, Atheism itself may not always be the disease that kills the patient; but it's certainly the disease that destroys the immune system of the patient, and leaves him vulnerable to everything.

That story was played out again and again in the 20th Century.

I'm not a communist. The Southern Baptists, on the other hand, did persecute blacks based on their theism.

Theism didn't ask them to do that. And I'm not a Southern Baptist. Next?

Harbal wrote: ↑Thu Jun 22, 2017 5:39 pm
This notion you've got that dead bodies can speak doesn't do a lot for your credibility.

So? Their head boy made a long speech two days after they buried him.