Peace on Earth?

Every single time I bring up a point you counter it with..."Uh, it ain't because of Christianity." For someone who doesn't believe in religion you sure don't seem to be a man who's moved by evidence either. FACT:Christian countries are much better off than others in terms of levels of poverty and education. FACT:You have many more rights as a person in these countries. FACTer capita Christians give more of their time and money, to the needy, than any other religion OR organization in the world. FACT:The UK may be "less" Christian than it once was. Statistically speaking it's still overwhelmingly Christian. FACT:Christian countries have higher rates of immigration to than other countries.

All that has to mean SOMETHING. Or it could all be a MIRACLE coincidence.

 

Thankyou BlackBillBlake for once again pointing out how true the Bible is.

You stated that Christianity is very rapidly dying our in Britain. The Bible states that one of the signs of Christ return will be just this very thing.
2 Thessalonians 2:3 Let no man deceieve you by any means: for that day (Christ Return) shall not come, EXCEPT THERE COME A FALLING AWAY FIRST, and that man of sin be revealed, son of perdition;

And I might add, this falling away could only take place when the Jews are back in Israel, and are in control of Jerusalem.

Even non believers proclaim the truth of the Bible.

 

During the reformation in England it was considered blasphemy not to attend church every sunday. To blaspheme brought social death and then the state executed the person. At that time it was THE manner in which the state promoted its propoganda and wishes to the people. They were told good christians obey the state.

Switch on your television sets at christmas and now you find a whole host of antinazi and anti communist sentiment. Capitalism is good - shopping is good. To offend against capitalism is to think for its alternative and that is bad. I even saw films about how anarchists are bad ! According to them, evil is anticapitalist. Mix that up with some religious imagery and things aint that much different from a theocracy - just the emphasis has changed but not the complicity of state and church - rid the hypocrisy from capitalism and end its theocratic crony now.

The perverse childlike naivete of believing in a god is there to entrap the foolish into a belief that its corrupt buddy, capitalism is as good as god.
we know its only as good as gold and whats that worth when it gets what it wants from exploitation of peoples entire lives

either the church should help end capitalism or the people should end the church

.

 

Yes, communism,Nazism and the like have been tremendous successes. Nothing like massive oppression. Are you serious? True capitalism isn't all it could be. Nazism though? There's little more evil than Nazism.

 

Because they had to be christians. The generation of our grandparents would have completely outcast any "blasphemers" from their society and the generation before that would have put them to death. Even today, most of my family doesn't know that I'm atheist, they could not deal with it, my mother is a sunday school teacher and brings my son to church.

 

No question that Capitalism can and has been abused and brought about all its own problems too.
Having said that,
The fact is that where nations turned christian - they usually turned towards democratic systems, capitalist-socialist and towards comprehensive justice systems.
Not because thats some political system Jesus recommends. Jesus recommended people changed their hearts - then the system changes from within.
Even with all my complaints I gotta tell you Im thankful to the first generations of Christians who had it in mind to build a 'christian' nation and pick the system that allowed the 'most' Christianity to shine through.
Even if Im not a Christian, I am standing on those shoulders, belief systems and the benefits of the ideology.
(even though half our politicians try their darndest to fuck that up.. but even then the christian leaders from before put in 'safeguards' for this purpose heh)

 

That's wrong. Europe was gradually Christianized by a variety of means over the first thousand years after Christ... the turn towards the reforms you mentioned happened as an effect of the church's loss of absolute power centuries later. Yes, some of the early New World was colonized by Christians...trying to get away from other Christians. A large part was forcefully occupied and subjugated by Christians seeking gold. When the foundational documents of the USA were drafted, the "safeguards" you mention were included to ensure that church and state would remain separate and no single religious system could gain absolute power, as the church had had in Europe.

The huge marxist revolution in early 20th century Russia came about as a popular revolt against the absolute power of the monarchy, church, and very wealthy upperclass and nobility...a backlash so powerful that religion was literally banned. There were definitely some hard feelings against the church involved.

 

So what you are agreeing with me is that nations that became 'Christian' tended towards reforms, social nets, equality and so on.
Yes, I think I was trying to say that.

The New World was not just 'kinda sorta' pioneered by a Christian mindset - it certainly was.
Not to take away from hoardes of secularism and otherwise jamming in there too but the new world was largely a 'christian invention' at least in idealism.
You mention 'separation of church and state' as if that mitigates something.
No sir.
Separation of Church and State is a driving force of Christian thinking and while it protects every religion - it was a Christian concept, put there by christians to protect christian thinking.
Im not sure why you think non-christian thinking had anything to do with that but it sure does not.

Religion was never banned in Russia or the USSR.
Mind you, Stalin sure did murder a whole lot of Clergy and we all saw how well an atheistic government turned out there.
But seriously, religion was never banned.

 

This is more utter nonsense. The bible doesn't mention Britain, just as it doesn't mention America.

 

If you look at Europe during the middle ages, which was the peak of xtian influence,(since then it's been a steady decline) it was a totally stagnant and totalitarian type of system. The average person had no rights and lived out their short lives in conditions of fear and repression. That was xtian culture.
With the renaissance, things began to change only because of the rediscovery of pagan classical ideas etc.
Every single social advance in the west has been a result of secularism.
Advances in scientific knowledge too have come despite the church rather than because if it's pernicious influence.

 

The reanaisannce artists had no choice but to paint religious topics - that's how they earned their bread and butter. The best paintings though, even of Raphael, are the more sensuous and purely secular or classically themed works. My own favourie reanaisannce painting. Boticelli's 'Rite of Spring' shows absolutely no xtian influence.

Some of the muck produced as religious art in the late Italian renaisannce by mannerists imitating Raphael etc is about the most trite and corny art ever produced in the west.

The forms of renaisannce art though have very little to do with xtian influence. Medieval xtian art is flat and depressing by comparison, because it was only by taking forms from classical art produced by the pagan Romans and Greeks, that the art of the renaisannce was possible. And that's true in literature too. Dante's Divine Comedy for example could not have been written if Dante had never studied classical verse. Nothing produced under earlier purely xtian influence comes anywhere near it.

It is also worth noting that many of the great Italian masters were not exactly exemplars of xtian morality. Michael Angelo and Da Vinci were both Gay, Raphael died 'on the job' so to speak with his favourite mistress.

Europe in 1000 A.D. was a primitive hole compared to many other regions of the world, including America, before the xtians got their greedy hands on it. China, India and even parts of the Middle East were far more civilized and had a far richer culture. Europe was rules over by cruel and bloodthirsty xtian kings and barons who spent the time mainly in unceasing warfare. The average person was held to be no more than a chatell of his feudal lord.
Contrast this with the civilization of the the Pagans of Ancient Greece, and all you will see is a terrible regression.
Britain, which is the case I inow most about, underwent a brief period of civilization under the Roman Empire. This was wiped out by barbarians as the emipre crumbled, partly at least due to the influence of c/anity. It wasn't until the secular and scientific revolutions of the 17 -18th centuries that any comprable level of culture was attained.
The epoch of xtian dominanace of europe has steadily declined since the late middle ages, and as it declined, so progress became more and more possible.
Still, even into the 20th century, the masses were still brainwashed and held down by this perfidious cult and the imperialist establishment it spawned.
'Fight for god, king and country' was the rallying cry on both sides in world war 1. And millions of 'sheep' eagerly marched off to be machine gunned down at age 17 for what? God, king and country...

C/anity has always been the hand maiden of those who hold power since the days of Constantine. It is an establishment cult, a bit of official bullshit, nothing more than that. It only continues to surprise me that so called intelligent people can support what any study of history undertaken without the xtian blinkers will reveal - c/anity has failed to bring peace, freedom, love or any of the other things it is supposed to achieve. Instead, it has led to the empowerment of vicious power heirarchies when it had political influence, and any progress the west has seen is due to quite other factors.

 

What I said, as a generalization, was that a Europe that was largely under the domination of the Roman Church for 1000 years moved toward reforms with the loss of the Church's absolute power after the Protestant Reformation and the gradual advent of secular governments thereafter. The nations involved had been "Christian" for many centuries at the time the the Reformation was initiated by Luther.

I don't see a coincidence in the fact that the Bill of Rights, which contains the clauses regarding separation of church and state and prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments, was drafted as a single document, and approved as law on the same day.

The Founders knew their history well...sure, it was Christian-based thinking by at least nominally Christian men. In 1791, they weren't anticipating a mass immigration of Hindu high-tech experts from India. They were protecting all Christians in America, and by implication whoever else might have been on hand, against the possible development of a theocracy, run by a Christian Mafia. The great longterm effect, certainly unanticipated at that time, has been that the USA is truly the most religiously-free nation on earth.

OK, if my statement that religion was banned in the USSR was incorrect in fact, it was certainly correct regarding practice and implementation.

You're right...the totalitarian/atheistic way of government didn't work...it was an unprecedentedly huge failure and tragedy in human and economic cost. On an individual level, both seeking to connect with a higher power and to function as a self determining entity are natural impulses of the human species...these can't be legislated away or bred out.

 

Sorry BlackBillBlake, but the Bible speaks of America in no less than three chapters. Two in the Old Testament, and one chapter in the New Testament.
And it really requires a reading of both the New and the Old to understand who they are speaking of. The Bible rarely gives names but always gives descriptions. That is why you will never see the name Jesus Christ in the Old Testament, yet you will see 300 prophecies that describe everything about Him.

The Bible speaks about America, and these are some of the descriptions given to describe her.

1. She is a nation that dwells on many waters and has abudant treasures.
2. She is a nation that has her own sea.
3. She is a nation that has a destroying mountain.
4. She is a land filled with people from other lands and is a land of mingled people.
5. She is a land that speaks with a great voice.
6. She is a land that has the ability to mount up into heavens.
7. She is a land that has made the merchants of the earth wealthy.
8. She is a land that is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia.
9. She is a land that glorifies herself, and God calls her arrogant.
10. All the nations of the world stream to her.
11. She is a land that will have an enemy to her north that will attack her and set her cities on fire, and will destroy her mountain of war, and all of this will happen in one hours time.
12. She is a land that has a large number of Jews living in her.
13. And this nation will exist when the Jew are back in Israel, and are in control of Jerusalem.

 

Sounds like India to me.

 

Much respect for your well thought out reply Spook.
Cheers and well taken.

 

Thanks, appreciate the good word.

 

I'll step up to the plate here:

 

JDFU, I actually do find myself intrigued in the 'Hal Lindsey' school of thought when it comes to prophetic interpretations.
I really do give credit where its due and some of these passages appear to be describing The British Empire and its 'Children' (USA, Canada, Oz, etc)
However,
I have to say that the above conditions.. mmmmm.... yes I could see the USA but then again others.
Russia would be a good example or someone mentioned India.

Another thing we want to watch out for here is seeing what is intended for 'all times' in just our own short moment of time.
Yes, since the 40's the USA has experienced its 'glory days' and was the rising star in the new world.
Ok.
But in the big picture thats a just 70 years.
Japan wasnt much left in 1940s and grew into the most astonishing place on the planet in a very short time.
In a mere 50 years from now we might well see the USA being far less signifigant and (for example) The EU and maybe say Germany the astonishing world superpower.
China has the potential to be the 'It' nation on Earth, with the largest economy, space programs and a phenominal cultural exposion, including some of the most exciting Christian movements on the planet right now.
Russia is quickly renewing itself as a spectacular world superpower.

So I do find these passages pretty intriguing and yes, it does seem like they could well be refering to a USA.
But,
So far I cant see reason why it 'should be' or be the 'best explanation' to pick.