RE: Decline of religion
March 22, 2025 at 10:45 am
(This post was last modified: March 22, 2025 at 10:47 am by Fake Messiah.)
(March 22, 2025 at 8:45 am)Hippea Fly Guy Wrote: How can a democracy, based on religious mores and ethics, from a culture based on religious mores and ethics evolving from human society, itself based on religious mores and ethics act in opposition to it's own self interests?
Democracy is not based on religious mores and ethics.
Take the Bible itself, which is written almost with the specific intent of keeping the humanity from the values the vast majority of us embrace today.
The Bible is against democracy where we don't entrust power and authority to one man.
You will also discover that the Bible is against our pluralist society where everyone is free to worship or not as they see fit. The notion of equality for women and the LGBTQ communities.
The right to privacy. Sexual Freedom. Freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. The right to publish. Questioning of authority. - none of these things you will find in the Bible.
For more than a thousand years, Christianity demanded that the authority of the church and its leaders be respected almost entirely without question. Needless to say that our values today are the opposite of that.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
