JamesBannon

Christians lay claim to just about everything that is seen as good from forgiveness and tolerance to social justice. This of course sweeps aside centuries of pre-Christian history but what the hell.

Elehzya

Hahaha! Trust me, I know how you feel! Imagine how it is to live with one

Every now and then one of my sisters comes up with something so entirely wacky that it's rather difficult not to laugh in their faces. This is one of those times. Poor Athenians!

Eldarion Lathria

I well aware the Greek democracies escaped the burden of an official priesthood, with all the oppression that implies. But these people (some of them anyway) believed in those gods and goddesses, which makes more likely that Zeus and the rest of the pantheon inspired democracy, than a belief system that called people livestock and knew few other non-family relationships between man and man but master-slave.

It's barely more likely, but more likely.

Eldarion Lathria

EthnAlln

Well said. I should think that goes without saying. The Hebrew Bible was written by clerics who were fiercely nationalistic and pious. They were much like the Puritans in Massachusetts, who didn't regard tolerance as any kind of virtue. God was their ruler, and his word was revealed by his priests.

In the New Testament, we have the literature of a group of people living in a large pagan empire, people utterly devoid of any influence on the government and eager to show that they aren't any threat to the government. The result is a set of absolutist doctrines asserting that "all power is of God" and that "he beareth not the sword in vain." Even the Founders of the United States, the authors of the Constitution, didn't really trust The People. I believe it was Samuel Adams who said, "The People is a great beast." It may have been Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Paine.

EthnAlln

That is ridiculous on the face of it. Acts 1:23--26....

That ain't a vote, folks. That's divination.

hasselhoff

Watch some Fox News. You'll see guys claiming that Christianity is the basis of all science, that Christians single-handedly abolished slavery (and apparently were never slave owners), that the US Constitution is based on their bible, and so on. There's something like 40-50 million fundamentalist Christians in the US. They are hardly rare, and they say whack shit like in the OP all the time.

Kassiana

We import our fundamentalist Christians from the land known as Dementia 13, where they're taught to believe that everything that jibes with conservative Republicanism is literally true in the Bible. We also import lutefisk from D-13. I don't think that's a coincidence.

EthnAlln

I've posted on this on other threads. In Listen America Jerry Falwell said "God led in the development of [the American Constitution], and we have had 204 years of freedom as a result." (This was written in 1980.) He went on to say that, whether they know it or not, judges and politicians are in their positions by the will of God. And on and on in that vein. Of course, Falwell is a moron, but he's a moron with millions of supporters.

lpetrich

What EthnAlln said would account for parts of the New Testament like Romans 13, which claims that all government has been created by the Xian God and is endorsed by that entity. Which is rather odd when one considers what the Roman Empire's official religion was; early Xians had been persecuted for refusing to worship the Empire's official gods.

It would also explain such things as "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's."

This pro-Roman slant may account for how Pontius Pilate was pictured as being pushed into executing Jesus Christ. The other two sources on him, Philo and Josephus, agree that he was a rather ruthless leader even by Roman standards.

Also, Jesus Christ was depicted as fulfulling messianic prophecies. The Messiah was supposed to be a good king, a successor of King David who would restore the rule of the Davidic dynasty and who would lead the rebuilding and liberating of the nation of Israel. And the writers of Matthew and Luke accordingly presented genealogies for him tracing his ancestry back to King David -- two completely different ones.


The closest thing to a legislative assembly anywhere in the Bible is the Sanhedrin in the New Testament, a council of Jewish high priests. But its name comes from a Greek word for "council".

Ancient Greek city-states often had such assemblies, and ancient Rome had its Senate; the US Senate was named after the ancient Roman one. The composers of the US Constitution had an interest in ancient Greek and Roman political forms and political thought; this is evident in Polybius and the Founding Fathers: the separation of powers.

Malachi151

Oh boy. Democracy comes to us from the Greeks, no it wasn't divinely inspired among them either, first of all because the Greeks didn't even beleive in divine revelation, and secondly, Greek democracy developed during a period of natural philosophy and humanism, when philosophers were attacking the traditional religious beliefs of the Greeks.

To add, Democritus and Epicurus, the two most atheistic of the Greek philosophers were staunch supporters of Democracy, while Plato a highly "religious" philosopher was opposed to it.

Democracy was not at all "divinely inspired" or even approved of by the religious authorities.

Some suggested reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy#Ancient_origins

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar...mmandments.htm

Here is something that I had written for a presentation: