Benjamin Franklin

It seems that Benjamin Franklin, one of the lauded fathers of our country, found early America a place where men who thought critically about religion, instead of accepting unquestioningly the kind of education a person gets at a madrassa, roamed freely.

In his autobiography, published in 1789, Franklin writes of himself and his day of setting out on his own as a young man: ". . . I was rather inclin[e]d to leave Boston when I reflected that I had already made myself a little obnoxious to the governing part . . . and farther, that my indiscreet [sic] disputations about religion began to make me pointed at with horrir by good people as an infidel or atheist."

In the same book, Franklin describes a good friend who was also a doctor: "He . . . was ingenious, but much of an unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travest[y] the Bible in doggerel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt weak minds if his work had been published; but it never was." It's unclear from the context whether Franklin means the word "wicked" as a serious moral condemnation, or as a mere ironic or gently teasing acknowledgement that the book the doctor wrote would be considered naughty by some people.

He also describes a fellow printer: "At this time he did not profess any particular religion, but something of all on occasion."

That's three people during the founding of our country who think critically about religion, within a few pages of Ben Franklin's autobiography.

In light of this, it's simple to conclude that if Mike Huckabee doesn't become President, it's because Americans like freedom too much, and are too hesitant to take that kind of step towards being a Sharia-law-like autocracy.

Ken's Guide To The Bible: Misconceptions

Today's post is going to cover some points of Catholic or Christian tradition, the debunking of which doesn't necessarily undermine the purported validity of Christianity at all, but will shed light on some popular propaganda images that are used to enthrall us and keep us believing Christians.

* Carrying of the cross: In Christian prints or Christian movies, Jesus is often seen languidly carrying his cross on his shoulders, blood pouring out of his brow due to the crown of thorns. It's even become a figure of speech: to "carry a cross" evokes an image of a person suffering piously like Christ did on his way to his crucifixion, and once we hear the phrase uttered in a serious tone, we can hardly help but be persuaded by the speaker. And when we see the image of Christ carrying the cross, we feel sorry for the guy.

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus doesn't carry the cross a step of the way. An innocent bystander names Simon gets pressed into it by the Romans. Matthew 27:32; Mark 15:21; Luke 23:26.

Unfortunately, this is one of the instances in Ken's Guide where he is showing off how great he is and trying to look persuasive, at the expense of being informative. After listing a bunch of "misconceptions" about the crucifixion, supporting them with verses from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he merely states ". . . John disagrees on nearly all of the above points." Well, if there is some Biblical support for a detail, it's hardly a misconception to portray it as having happened. Maybe the other Gospel writers neglected to include it. But that does not mean that every inconsistency has to be the result of an innocent omission just because you might prefer that the Gospel writers weren't making stuff up. My bet is that some of these disagreements are inconsistencies like the one I wrote about yesterday concerning Judas' death- inconsistencies that should trouble Christians who believe the Bible is the unwavering Word of God (and, my purpose in these posts is nothing more than to get Christians to question whether the Bible is wholesale valid, or whether outside thought can contribute to our conception of what's moral, and individual stuff in the Bible can be disregarded as bunk). But it would be more helpful to the reader if the author point-by-point listed how the Gospel of John differs, instead of letting us jump to the conclusion that, because he didn't find support for the well-known details and images in Matthew, Mark, or Luke, they are scandalous lies. I will check out the Gospel of John for this point, and then update this post later tonight with what I find.

One more thing I should insert in here. Smith takes on a lot of tradtitions in his Guide to the Bible. But he is just looking at the Bible. In my opinion, when you look at all the inconsistencies and questionable things Smith collects, they should reinforce each other in terms of the doubts they introduce in your mind about Christian dogma. However, I would certainly allow the possibility that something that isn't in the Bible but that is part of Christian tradition is 100% true, but just came into Christian tradition by word of mouth rather than through being recorded in the Bible. In my own opinion, though, stories about Biblical events that have come into the Christian or Catholic tradition without a written Biblical source are far more likely to be specious legends that were made up somewhere along the way during Christianity's 2,000 year long tenure, and the Bible itself is a source that should be looked at in its details with skepticism.

* Immaculate conception: A well-known concept in Catholicism is the Immaculate Conception. Catholic Doctrine holds that all humans, innocent though they may seem to our reason, are actually born with the sin of Eve from the garden (disobeying God's command to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge) and this is called "original sin." Original sin, in Catholic tradition, is removed by baptism into the Catholic church. However, Mary the mother of Jesus was never baptised, and since she is such a hero in the Catholic view (Protestants, more conservative in almost all things, are a little more misogynistic, and don't so easily stomach the idea of revering a woman), the view of her bearing original sin or dying with original sin is unpalatable. So, a 12th-century European thought up the idea that Mary, through divine intervention, had skipped out on being marked with original sin when she was conceived (the word "immaculate," by the way, means clean). To be totally clear, the immaculate conception refers to Mary's conception, not Jesus' (although I'm sure Catholic priests would probably also say that Jesus was not born with original sin). There is no support in the Bible for Mary being born without original sin.

* Shroud of Turin: Another popular image in Catholicism that we were all told about when we were little kids and seemed a real spooky bit of proof that God was real is the Shroud of Turin. This was either a burial shroud that was used on Christ's body or a cloth used to clean him after her died by a woman named Veronica. Supposedly Christ's image miraculously stayed on the cloth. It was called the Shroud of Turin because, for a long time, it was kept in Turino, Italy.

There is no record in the Bible of any woman named Veronica, or of the incident that supposedly created the Shroud.

Ken's Guide To The Bible: Judas Iscariot

Everyone is familiar with the version of Judas' fate, found in Matthew 27:3-5, in which he hangs himself. But, another book of the Bible totally contradicts that. In Acts 1:18, Judas lives long enough to buy a field with his 30 pieces of silver, but God apparently explodes Judas in the middle of the field.

So which is it? Why wouldn't the Apostles know what Judas' fate was? Certainly, there can be an innocent explanation for there being two inconsistent accounts of his death in the Bible (but, even if there is an innocent explanation, remember-- at least one account still has to be wrong). However, it at least tends to make it less likely that Judas' died either by suicide or by God's revenge if these are two clearly inconsistent accounts of his death in the Bible. That is, it makes it more likely that the story of Judas suffering an "unhappy fate" is something just made up by the Apostles.

One thing I should not neglect to mention is that the Gospels were written down many years after Christ's death, and while two were written by two of his apostles, the other two were not. Why were they written? Perhaps the writers found that writing down the story was a good way to make money or to promote their nascent churches and themselves. The epistles- such as Acts- were written closer, chronologically, to Jesus' death, so they may be more accurate for that reason. Matthew, unlike Acts, is one of the Gospels and was written much later after Jesus' death.

Child-killing

In my last post about child-killing in the Bible, I wrote that all the instances of child-killing were in the Old Testament. This is wrong. According to Matthew 2:16 (a Gospel of the New Testament) Herod sought to kill the newborn Messiah, but when Jesus' family gave him the slip, many other innocent children were killed as a result (in a scene reminiscent of God's killing all the first-born Egyptian males in Exodus, just to make sure he killed the Pharaoh's heir).

One other thing I'd like to mention is my thoughts about the following: many Christianity-promoters (especially pro-lifers) or Judaism-promoters may argue that we shouldn't take too much from the fact that there is so much child-killing in the Bible. For one thing, just because God sees fit to kill children in particular instances does not mean that it is not wrong for us to abort children on our own volition. But I think this is failing to give the child-killing references all the weight they deserve. Sure, in a rhetorical "vacuum," where we are only dealing with the text of the Bible, and no argument has been made about it, we really can't say that the Bible says that generically, child-killing is permissible or is holy, simply based on the few instances recorded in the Bible. But I still think it takes away from the weight of the claims about the wrongness of abortion, or the sanctity of human lives or children's lives, when we are not arguing over the text of the Bible only, but are also dealing with the pro-lifers making those kinds of claims (which they state or let-be-assumed are amply backed up in the Bible).

Especially in light of all the Biblical instances of child-killing, if there is a God who really thought abortion was wrong, I think He would make it really clear in the Old Testament that it is taboo, and the writers would give us a hint of it nearby to some of the references to child-killing. Another thing is Matthews's Gospel verse I described in my first paragraph of this post- what, God and Matthew don't think it's wrong at all that all those innocent kids had to die? God couldn't protect them? If their lives are so inviolable and precious, it seems their "murders" despoil the entry of Christ into our world as a human. On the contrary, there is not even an explanation in the Bible of why their deaths were necessary.

So: while I think it's right that the instances of child-killing don't necessarily mean that abortion is permissible from a Christian or Judaic point of view, or that child-killing is not a particularly heinous form of murder, (1) I think the opposite can't be said to be necessarily true either, based on the Bible, (2) more clear condemnations of child-killing and abortion are an outstanding omission in the Bible in light of the pro-lifers' claims, and (3) it makes sense to show these Bible references to the pro-lifers and say, "Account for this."

Ken's Guide To The Bible: Slavery And Judeo-Christian Sources For Violent Religious War

As I alluded to in this earlier post, the ancient Israelites certainly participated in a lot of bloodshed and massacre (according to the Bible). Representative of this, I posted this quote from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah: "A curse on him who is lax in doing the Lord's work! A curse on him who keeps his sword from bloodshed!" -Jeremiah 48:10. So if you want a precedent for the Muslims- and no one else- being ultra-religious barbarians, the Bible isn't it. I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about their Jewish or Christian heritage/history by pointing out all of this crazy or silly stuff in the Bible, by the way. I think that when you look to the Bible as a source of the history of your people to be proud of, you just have to be discriminating to sort out the wheat from the chaff. And if you think being aggressive in warfare is praiseworthy or that it's quaint or something like that when ancient barbarians are doing it, I'm not criticizing that point of view. But I would like to make people aware that a lot of the war and the violence found in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, fits in the "wouldn't be considered acceptable among non-barbarians in modern times" category, or would fit right in among the Al Qaeda set if it was encouraged or practiced today.

Similarly, according to Ken's Guide To The Bible, Jesus never condemned the institution of slavery- at least not that the Bible recorded. And, Paul and Peter encouraged slaves to be obedient to their masters. Ephesians 6:5-7; I Peter 2:18. It seems like if Jesus and the Apostles were really concerned with human's well-being, they would have thought to condemn the institution of slavery- it's enough to make one wonder whether Jesus condemned slavery during his life at all, or if his Apostles neglected to mention it in their writings, so as not to offend potential (slave holding) converts. Surely, Jesus doesn't have to condemn every kind of evil people commit in order to "not be for it," but it's still an outstanding omission, especially in light of his apostles' acceptance of slavery.

As I mentioned in my first post on Ken's Guide To The Bible, Christianity did (at least over time) establish a new norm of humanitarianism and respect for human dignity in the Western world. Christianity and arguments based on Christianity had a hell of a lot to do with mustering and solidifying opposition to slavery in the Western world, prior tp slavery's eventual legal abolition. A great example of this (maybe the earliest example) is St. Patrick's influence on the Irish. The pagan Irish practiced white slavery, similar to how Native Americans or aboriginal Africans kept enemies captured in war as slaves. Mostly, the Irish were taking other Irish people as slaves. They also captured foreigners, but it's unlikely the pagan Irish ever owned any African slaves, unless they captured them in attacks on Roman colonies in Britain. Contemporaneous with his conversion of the Irish to Christianity, the Irish abandoned slavery (Indeed, although Irish Americans have come to have, among some, a little reputation as racists in America, before the Irish came to America in large numbers and were indoctrinated into the American culture of African slavery and racism, the Irish in Ireland were organizing opposition to American slavery!! A source for this is the book How The Irish Became White, a history of discrimination against Irish people.). It's a little-known fact that St. Patrick was actually not ethnically Irish, but was a prisoner the Irish captured in a raid on a Roman colony when Patrick was a little boy. But Patrick eventually escaped, became a priest, and then returned to Ireland in an amazing act of courage to convert his former captors. Patrick has been revered in Ireland for ages, and I think the Irish opposition to slavery, and the protests against Bush when he visited Ireland, are better representatives of the Irish national character than Irish slaveholding and racism in America. I digressed to mention all this to give credit where credit is due to Christian efforts against slavery, but, though those efforts might be considered the logical outgrowth of Jesus' humanitarian teachings, there is nothing recorded of Jesus or his Apostles' words that is against slavery.

One more similar fact: the phrase "God is love" doesn't appear in the Bible until very near the end of the Old Testament (I John 4:8). This is in an epistle (letters from an apostle to his gentile followers included as chapters of the New Testament are commonly called "epistles"- which is just an antiquated word for a letter) written by the apostle John- as far as is recorded, Jesus never said "God is love"!!

Consider this your dose of how Christianity and Judaism are not that different from so-called "Islamo-fascism."

Ken's Guide To The Bible: More child-killing

Following up on my last post, I just wanted to point out (if it matters to you at all- it doesn't matter to me, but I'm sure there must be some significance to it) that all those child-killing and womb-ripping-open references I pointed out in the last post were in the Old Testament (pre-Jesus), not in the New Testament (section dealing with Jesus) of the Bible.

Perhaps since the Jews were conquered people during all of the time of the New Testament, they had less opportunity for violence, or, perhaps Jesus found blood-and-guts less palatable to the Jews of his time than the prophets of old did to theirs.

The main significance of any of this, though, is that it's not what you'd expect to find anywhere in the Bible, if you're only listening to promoters of Christianity or Judaism.

For anyone who wants to look them up, or to prove them to disbelieving friends and relatives, here are the Bible verse containing references to women's wombs being ripped open and child-killing:

Women's Wombs Being Ripped Open

II Kings 8:12
II Kings 15:16
Hosea 13:16
Amos 1:13

Children Being Murdered

Numbers 31:17
Deuteronomy 2:34
Deuteronomy 3:6
II Kings 8:12
Psalms 137:9
Isaiah 13:16
Hosea 10:14
Hosea 13:16
Nahum 3:10
Matthew 2:16

Ken's Guide To The Bible: Abortion

If the Bible is a source for the wrongness or repugnance of killing children (I am not claiming it is), it is certainly a source for the opposite position, as well.

When David sleeps with Bathsheba, as a punishment, God kills their innocent baby.

During the Passover story, God kills all the "first-born males" of the Egyptians, including the first-born males of all their animals.

In the back of his book, Ken includes Bible citations to four references to pregnant women being ripped open, and citations to ten references to children being murdered.

Six of the ten instances of children being murdered are with God's approval, including one of the two references to Israelite children being killed!!

All of this is perfectly in keeping with the Bible's depiction of the Old Testament Jews, who are more like any pre-Christian barbarians- Celts, or Goths, or North American Indians, or Aztecs, or Vandals- you may have read about than they are like any Jews you may meet today. A great sum-up is the following quote from Jeremiah, an Old Testament prophet, who states, "A curse on him who is lax in doing the Lord's work! A curse on him who keeps his sword from bloodshed!" -Jeremiah 48:10. It's more like something from the movie Conan the Barbarian than what you would expect the Old Testament to be like, if you've never read it.

Ken's Guide To The Bible

I got Ken’s Guide To The Bible the other day, a great book, and one I’ve read before, years ago. Here’s a bit from the intro:

Do people who pray to bleeding statues give you the willies? Do Darwin-bashing school boards and doctor-badgering right-to-lifers make your skin crawl?

Then perhaps you’ll understand what drove me to write Ken’s Guide To The Bible.

As I noted in a comment on The Carpetbagger Report the other day, I am going to be highlighting a few points from this book, if I have reactions to them, in short posts on this blog about every day or so. I think it’s important when religion plays such a role in our politics as it does today and, as Ken Smith’s book so deftly points out, that religion is so commonly misunderstood. But first, some criticism.

The author strikes me as an example of the numerous underachiever liberals who are very smart, so much so that they inevitably get around to the point of realizing they should do something with their lives (Why do so many liberals think something horrible will have happened if there is one more liberal lawyer, doctor, corporation executive, or professor in the world? Whatever it is, plenty of liberals end up as “[Liberal’s name], B.A.,” or worse-- “[Liberal’s name], no B.A.” for a terribly long time before they realize that reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Ayn Rand over and over again, and learning to paint, and dawdling with their meretricious, similarly-minded liberal girlfriend or boyfriend, or whatever it is they are doing, is really not the super-highway to attainment, achievement, and enlightenment). I think after he ended his journeys, and figured out he could write this book, and wrote this book, he may have been a little too impressed with himself for presenting to us a view of the Bible coming from someone with a lot of sense who is not trying to deceive us about anything. That’s not to knock the novelty or the value of the book, however.

Smith’s book is a really good effort, and maybe he was the best person to write a book like this at the time he wrote it, and maybe this was the best thing for him personally to be doing at the time he wrote it. But despite its accessibility, brevity, readability, and remarkably good attempt at comprehensiveness, the “B.A.” after his name on the cover of the book seemed to come back to haunt me as I read the book, like: “Maybe Ken shouldn’t have been so smart-alecky as to tout his B.A. on the cover of the book, because while he has the zeal and discipline to research and point out a bunch of funny, corny, and pointless stuff from the Bible, as well as exposing tons of misconceptions, he doesn’t seem to have the consideration to make it clear where his sincere, empirical expose takes a breather and his comedic talents assume center-stage for a moment, nor does he have the consideration or discipline to examine his own (implicit) arguments with the same scrutiny he applies to those of religious fundamentalists or to the text of the Bible, and indeed he brings the large amount of quality work in his book down a notch by making some unfair implicit arguments.” One quick example is Smith’s examination of St. Paul; Smith’s excerpts (on pp. 128-129, “The REALLY Weird Beliefs of Paul”), which to him are clear-as-day examples of lunacy and fanaticism, all seemed to me to be examples of poetic (as in metaphoric) or off-the-cuff (imprecise) language, and indeed would appear that way to many people. It would be easy to take to task a great many people by always interpreting them absolutely literally, even in contexts where it doesn’t at all make sense to. Another quick example of an imprecise stroke I found was early on in the book, in Smith’s list of things that aren’t in the Bible.

THINGS THAT AREN’T IN THE BIBLE

One example of an error I found in his book is an item in the neat list of “Things That Aren’t In The Bible.” Some of the items on the list are things that any reasonably well-educated person should be able to figure out on their own aren’t in the Bible (e.g., Moses breaking the heart of his Pharaoh dad, Black Jesus, Jesus and Mary Magdalene having an affair, or Saint Peter standing at the pearly gates of heaven), but, since most people nowadays stop to think critically about almost nothing they hear (unless it’s related to how their car is running, how their kids are behaving, how their week’s schedule is going to sort out, and so on), it’s probably good to point out the few things he does in his list. But, shortly after reading the list for the first time since getting my new copy of the book, I was checking out Revelations (this is the chapter that is sometimes called Apocalypse) in the Bible I have lying around to see if the kooky things Smith points out from that chapter were at all exaggerated by him (they weren’t). I am sorry to say that I happened to notice that in verse 1 of chapter 10 of Revelations, John relates a vision of “a mighty angel . . . with a halo around his head,” despite Smith’s listing halos as one of the things that aren’t in the Bible in a lengthy bullet-point on page 16 aimed at images and rituals from Catholicism. So, although Smith includes “[a]ny condemnation of abortion” on the list, and (later on in the book) refers us to a bunch of instances in the Bible where either women have their wombs ripped open, children are killed, or children are killed with God’s approval (including Israelite children), I think whenever some religious fundie claims to have or know of some verse from the Bible that supports abortion, you still have to ask him/her to actually provide the verse, and argue about how fair that interpretation of the verse is, instead of just confidently falling back on Smith’s list of things that aren’t in the Bible.

CHOOSING YOUR BIBLE

Another feature early on in the book that is helpful is the introduction, which includes the sections “Which Bible?” and “Ken’s Bible-Buying Guide”. Here Smith ostensibly is trying to prove his impartiality by showing you he used more than one Bible in preparing his book, and that he should do this because Bibles differ. But his real purpose is a sly joke, to show you how Bible aficionados finagle the translations to get the Bible to say what they’d like it to say. He also reinforces the main point of the book, that there is a lot of stuff in the Bible you wouldn’t expect is in there, based on the parochial and irrational morality many promoters of Christianity try to sell to us.

Smith compares a verse from Ezekial to show us how the translations differ among the four Bibles he used to prepare his work:

New International Bible: “There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were
like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.”

. . .

King James Bible: “She dotes upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.”

Good News Bible: “She was filled with lust for oversexed men who had all the lustfullness of donkeys or stallions.”

Which Bible should you read? Based on this, if you have to ask me, it’s the New International Bible. Doesn’t the Good News Bible sound like it was written by some prudish, self-deluded guy who was so disappointed that he found some XXX-stuff in the Bible, that he turned the verse into some kind of racist lash-out, instead of writing what the verse really said? Doesn’t it seem like a racist white guy who was in charge of translating that could have assumed that men with big genitals must be African men, and then (to make the passage less explicit) turned the men into “oversexed men who had all the lustfullness of donkeys or stallions”- another racist characterization? In an intellectual endeavor, especially in one the proponents claim to lay such moment upon, it’s sad to see such dishonesty, if that’s indeed what it is. It’s hard to fathom what else could explain such a discrepancy and creative license as compared to the three other Bibles Smith quotes for the passage.

Incidentally, later in the book, the racism of modern white Bible translators seems to be exposed again. Chasing down the apparently unsubstantiated belief that the queen of Sheba was black, Smith tells us of a passage in Song of Songs (sometimes denominated Canticle of Canticles) where the unnamed bride twice refers to herself as “black.” But other modern versions, writes Smith, “these references have been changed . . . to ‘dark,’ ‘very dark,’ ‘tanned,’ and ‘swarthy.’” While something other than racism could explain it, you never know- after all, black people are not really known as “tanned” or “swarthy,” they are known as black, and if you are disappointed that a Bible character is described as black, and/or you doubt that the character really is supposed to be ethnically African, one thing you might do to blunt that impression among people who read your version of the Bible is to use another word besides black.

JESUS V. BUDDHA

In a sarcastic reference to secular or non-Christian-centric praise of Jesus, Smith describes him as “The first man in recorded history to preach selflessness as the key to spirituality (if you ignore Buddha).” This betrays a misunderstanding of the selflessness taught either by Jesus or by the Buddha, which in English may both be expressed by the same word, but in fact are quite different. Jesus’ “selflessness” was about virtuous, benevolent, and empathetic relation to members of one’s own community. The “selflessness” that Jesus taught was about loving your neighbor, and about putting compassion for your fellow man first. Jesus is innovative because while previous religions put a premium on pleasing a selfish or proud God with some material prize placed on an offering place or altar, Jesus made humanistic cooperation with one’s community the premium and tied to the utmost obedience to God. Buddha’s selflessness on the other hand, to put it blandly, has to do with using rationalizations to diminish the immediacy of physical pain or the desires of the ego. It’s coming to know your aspect as part of a total universe, as a grain of sand among grains of sand, instead of as a differentiated, individual personality with wants that only seem to you like the most important things in the world, but are in fact personal realities limited to some extent by the four corners of your own skin or own brain. That’s not to say that Buddhism doesn’t explicitly teach virtue (it does), but Buddhism is not at all about virtue and humanitarianism, it’s about not getting hung up on your psyche and the a priori illusions that were hardwired into the human brain/body by evolution to give us the will to survive, but that are, unfortunately, sometimes a major drag.

This kind of reactionary, immature sophistry reminds me of something that peeves me about when some liberals talk about religion or secular humanism, which I notice a lot. Smith’s line about Jesus and Buddha isn’t at all original, and it serves to minimize Jesus’ contribution on the western heritage. At the same time, liberals who minimize or discount Jesus get their own approach to morality from secular humanism (more immediately via thinkers like Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, or Corliss Lamont) or they at least tout secular humanism. But secular humanism actually comes from Christian humanism. If it wasn’t for Jesus’ humanitarianism, we wouldn’t have the Western liberal individualism of the 1700s’ British writers and philosophers, and you would have never had, for example, the Red Cross and the human rights movement we have today. So people who just discount Jesus followers or believers, and at best, treat them as people we have to patronize because religious tolerance is a value we unfortunately have to respect, just try my patience. If there’s a way for atheists to attack Jesus, I think it’s by suggesting that he and his followers may have been a bunch of clever con-men, creating the conditions for a bunch of people to support them as rabbis and backing up each other’s fake miraculous healings and other miracles. If you want to allege that, go ahead. But the essence of Christian morality includes some pretty noble teachings, and the idea that modern humanism comes not from this source but from other source- a fantasy that smart men just had to reject church or crown-begotten evil in order to come up with the golden jewel of humanism- is just historically wrong and a misunderstanding of the context, I think. The whole of Christian western civilization were not ethical vagabonds or ethical fools, and the Christian mercy and humanitarianism (that existed right alongside well-documented abuses and corruption) history has seen endless examples of can’t be erased just because some modern liberal would like to believe that no one has ever had an admirable sentiment except for them and their buddies. Modern liberals would be a lot ethically/philosophically stronger if they just acknowledged what is praiseworthy about Christianity and the influence it has rightly had on our intellectual tradition instead of trying to come up with a kind of ethics and history that defies it.

Too liberal?!?

I normally don't complain or state that things are too liberal, but one thing I just thought of is my pre-high school history / social studies education-- in that we just kept spending time on the pre-Columbian Native American Indians. After a while it got boring, and it convinced me we were never going to learn about any of the stuff that really struck me as interesting (medieval Europe, post-1776 American history, Ancient Greece, WWII, etc.) in history.

More Hillary

Find my defense of Hillary's candidacy here throughout the comments.