Jesus and Prostitutes

[Paleophyte]

I disagree with the notion that Christianity influences compassion toward prostitutes in contemporary times.

You could easily disprove the claim that Christianity has increased compassion to prostitution by finding a pre-Christian claim that prostitutes deserve any compassion at all. Contemporary attitudes have deep roots.

For example, if you could point us to a passage in Aristotle saying that porne and pornos are capable of having as much arete as a man with the leisure to live a contemplative life. Or, more to the point, that a person with no arete at all has as much worth as someone who has it. 

I acknowledge that Christians have always fallen short of having the compassion that Jesus demands for them. But the fact that we have any sympathy at all for such people originates, in the West, in Christianity. 

Again: prove me wrong by finding a non-Christian source urging compassion for such people, before the 20th century. Or demonstrate that compassion for prostitutes and other "low" people would be as great as it is in our time, without the roots of Christianity. In what source, uninfluenced by Christian thought, did it originate?

Find me a church that had sacred prostitutes and I'll entertain your notion that this misogynistic patriarchy paid prostitutes anything more than lip service. The fact that Jesus mentions them in the same breath with the universally hated Roman tax collectors tells you pretty much everything you need to know even before you read the passage in context and realize that Jesus is using prostitutes and tax collectors to insult a temple priest. He's literally saying that the priest is lower than scum in the eyes of his dear and fluffy lord.

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My band will be named Jesus and the Lip Service. I leave the album covers to your imaginations.