Happy New Year to everyone.
To summarize, I am an agnostic and I am using using logic to argue for faith, and that the concept of good God is necessary for a predictable morality with good results. By good results I mean now, as exemplified by the US, not the middle ages! I tried to put the evil religion has done in perspective by pointing out that the number of people murdered in the inquisition in 4 centuries was in the tens of thousands, whereas secular ideology has murdered about 100 million in the 20th century alone. Also, I am not saying it’s great in all cases, just better than the alternative.
What is the alternative? In the quote below, FlippyShark made a pretty good case for it: Enlightened Self Interest (ESI) as exemplified by Scandinavian countries who have not attacked others as he has pointed out. He is right, really all of Western Europe (WE) has become secular. Most LOT folks and about half of the US sees that as a better and more evolved value system than the JudeoChristian (JC) one our country was founded upon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by flippyshark
...Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot are always brought up by religious apologists to rub in the faces of the secular... These abusive regimes are a long way away from secular liberal democracies, which currently seem to be exterminating hardly anyone in Scandinavian countries, for instance.
|
My response is this: looking at a map of the world, I see a lot more Cambodias than Swedens, and when one goes up against the other the Cambodias will prevail because the Swedens have neither the ability nor the will to defend their value system, partly because they don’t have a strong sense of what it is.
They don't need to keep an army to defend themselves because they are part of NATO which means they will be defended by the US military, whose armies defended them against Nazism, and whose missiles defended them against Communism, yet they did not speak out against either. In fact, Sweden and Switzerland made a big point of being neutral instead of helping to defeat these threats. A more recent example is German soldiers' rules of engagement in Afganistan: only fire at the enemy in self defense. I have heard it said that Germany took the wrong lesson from WWII: Instead of learning to fight evil, they learned it was evil to fight.
Now partly due to this very attitude and their commitment to ZPG (in fact, their population continues to decrease), a third threat is emerging to this secular culture - the growing Islamic population, who is very committed to their own culture and values, and willing to fight for them. I am not saying they are a necessarily a physical threat (although more than a hundred thousand cars were burned in France by Muslim protestors in 2006). But if current trends continue, they certainly will supplant a culture whose primary value is tolerance of other cultures.
Although WE are not a threat to other good societies, the problem is they are not a threat to bad ones either. WE has the same pacifism problem as Buddhism, where secular forces (who have apparently disregarded ESI) have slaughtered and consumed Myanmar and Tibet, who were never a threat to them.
While ESI seems to make sense theoretically, it doesn’t seem to play out reliably in the real world from either a biological or logical sense. Both people and societies benefit often from stealing and murdering. Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe benefitted by murdering their opponents and Arafat stole more than $1 billion to personal accounts in France and was revered as a hero by many. We hear about people who steal in corporations because they get arrogant careless and get caught, but how many more will we never know about?
We know from WWII accounts that Jews in danger would first go to the house of a priest or nun as they were more likely to be hidden than if they knocked on the door of a lawyer or professor. The neutral secular countries don’t have the same record of putting themselves at risk, and it seems that there are sound logical and biological reasons for it.
I leave you with a graphic of the US stamp honoring the 4 chaplains (2 ministers, a priest and a rabbi) who drowned because they gave their life vests to sailors when the SS Dorchester was sunk. Seems like their JC ideology trumped their biological imperative for survival or the logical one which would argue that 4 sailors out of hundreds would be more expendable than the few chaplains who were there to give sustenance to many.