Let's Give The Muslims A Day Off

[Mudhammam]

You see, Huggy, I don't shame you for writing goofy things because you're a Christian and so you have the excuse of being at least mildly brainwashed. 

Again, I'll repeat why asserting that Enlightenment comes from Christianity is fallacious:

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc Fallacy:
1. "Sir Issac Newton believed in alchemy."
2. "Sir Issac Newton made great discoveries in physics."
3. "Ergo, Sir Issac Newton's belief in alchemy enabled his discoveries in physics."

Now replace  "alchemy" with "Christianity" and the fallacy is the same. I pointed this out and yet he still continues to claim that because some scientists and other thinkers of the Enlightenment were Christian, that Christianity is what led to the Enlightenment. If he his mind was addled by Christianity, I could understand this behavior. I don't know what his excuse is. 

It's kind of like how you wouldn't blame someone who lived in the Dark Ages for being a geocentrist. You also wouldn't blame a four year old for being a geocentrist. But if a grown man in today's age is a geocentrist and he's been educated but still insists on a different conclusion from remedial science, that's not a difference of opinion. That's shameful. 

It's also like how saying "Elvis is still alive" is not a matter of personal opinion. 






It's not that freethinkers can't have different opinions. It's that we don't have the excuse of our minds being addled by religious indoctrination. 

I didn't say that it was Newton's---or anyone's---belief in Christianity that led to their scientific discoveries, or that "Enlightenment comes from Christianity." Stop lying. You've already debased yourself enough. What I actually said was that "secular values were by and large borne out of Christian values," which I then elaborated upon (had you been paying better attention) by pointing out that certain "secular values" (as I take them to include), such as human equality and separation of church and state, were developed in the West in part by ideas that have a long tradition in Christian morality. My point about Christian thinkers that were pivotal in setting the ground and shaping the Enlightenment---philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, Descartes, and Pascal, and scientists such as Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, and Newton, to name only a handful---is that they were influenced by their Christian faith in the idea that Reason reigns supreme and reveals a divine order in the cosmos, because the Creator would do nothing without a perfect or reasonable plan.

Moreover, I also meant by my original statement that this notion that there is a universal morality defined by objective goods, which was one of the projects that Enlightenment thinkers such as Bentham and Kant sought to rationalize in their formal ethical systems, preceded them as part of the Christian cultures that secular progress grew out of. I then conceded that "maybe I slightly overstated things" because I thought Pyrrho and some others made some fair points about the rediscovery of Greek culture and the goal of Enlightenment efforts to overthrow traditional and authoritarian-based faiths. I still might wonder what the Enlightenment would have looked like without the Reformation and the Renaissance, much of which Christian influence can hardly be denied. I'm not above being corrected and I think it's a legitimate debate worth having as cause and effect in historical reconstruction is notoriously difficult to untangle.

What I don't understand is your childish tendency to personalize every disagreement you have or the tactic you and others seem fond of employing by reducing every contrary view as mere claims of Christian apologists. Your inability to engage without resorting to simplistic false dichotomies and insults is anemic to healthy debate, and counterproductive to the progress that self-styled "freethinkers" such as yourself claim to adore. And I might ask what your excuse is, as the only thing I'm able to conceive is that you are literally are a child or that your mindset is still stuck in whatever dogmatism you were brought up in, but I don't really care either way. I think Huggy is absolutely right for once---there is a "groupthink" mentality on this forum, minus many who regularly offer truly appreciated insight. Sadly, I haven't seen much of anything insightful from you in a while.

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I feel stupid asking this but what is the point of this argument? Min posted about some Christian terrorist groups. Those groups obviously exist.  Nestor seems to be arguing that Islam is more violent than Christianity. Modern day Islamic extremism is violent. Is the debate about whether Christianity could be as violent as Muslim extremism?

My original point was that there is a direct line between the Qur'an, which every Muslim reveres, the history of Islamic conquests, and the violence of Islamists witnessed in the world today. I don't exclude the West and Christian or secular culture from similar criticism in the least bit, but my contention was that it's a false equivalence to compare basic Christian teachings as outlined in the New Testament with jihad in the Qur'an and hadiths and claim that they can both be equally invoked to justify terrorism.