(January 14, 2015 at 11:13 pm)Grasshopper Wrote: Oh and to the others- Islam WOULD develop without Jesus, just 1 less prophet. They're thing's not based on the new testament.
That's irrelevant. Without Christianity, monotheism would not have spread to the Tigris-Euphrates valley with such powerful influence, inspiring Mohammed to create a monotheistic religion for Arabic speakers (which coincidentally placed them as the true 'chosen people'). The region would either have remained polytheistic, like their distant neighbors in India, or - if they did adopt monotheism - they would have adopted the Zoroastrian model rather than the Judeo-Christian one.
As for what we would do if Christianity vanished overnight, I just got home from a very enlightening meeting of local Skeptics. They do volunteer community work, simply because it's the human thing to do. One of the people there is an ex-Pastor, and he told us about a pastor's conference he attended years ago in which he confessed to having lost his faith - only to discover that at least half the pastors at the conference were in the same boat. Today he runs a nationwide group of pastors who are either faithless or are borderline agnostic at best.
It seems that the drive to make the world a better place is not at all dependent on faith. Volunteers at soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and so on would keep on volunteering regardless of faith or the lack of it. They do it because it's the right thing to do, not because "god" told them to. Lots and lots of people are good without god.
So where would we be without religious conviction telling people to go against their better judgement? Not at war in Iraq, for one thing.
