[Dr. Bobsky]

Originally Posted by Frank777 Oh come on. That's like saying that cavemen taught their kids, so Christians didn't pioneer the public education system in North America. The Roman system of health care was largely reserved for the well-off, and mostly took place in personal homes. Christians started what we now recognize as hospitals, during an epidemic.

This argument is specious. Just as the rest. You're trying to beg a uniqueness to Christians, assign them the full measure of advancement in a prodigious amount of advancements, and then imply this was because of their religion. When in point of fact, Christians killed off competing ideologies that were arguably more advanced, and allowed no other belief systems to exist.

And yet still even with that historical cultural dominance in European history (and NOWHERE else), you forget that the earliest General hospital was actually a Muslim invention, based upon hospitals for antiquity. You can choose to have your limited definition of hospital to suit your needs, but it is clear to EVERYONE that you're scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

There was truly a plethora of indefensible stupidity within Christianity around the origins and propagation of the African slave trade. But I would point out that for 1500 years after the Resurrection of Jesus, Christians went far and wide across the Earth, preaching to all who would listen that all the children of Adam had been redeemed by the Blood of the Lamb. The New Testament catalogues the Apostles' journeys and archeology and historical evidence showcase their zeal to take the Gospel all across the known world.

oh and blood libel (murderous rampages against Jews in europe were all the rage until, well today, supported by Christians), and indoctrination of indigenous people, and elimination of native knowledge of plants and history. All because of the Cultural Ego you display here. Christianity is one religion amongst a plethora, it is no more true than the rest, and it is one of the more violent ones in its written fabric building out a story of purpose around a religious war at the end of times.

Ideas that the Bible's Book of Genesis was only myth, amidst the Age of Rationalism/Reason/Enlightenment cemented the notion that there were different races of mankind - an idea foreign to the Bible's historical take. That cultural lie penetrated the North American Church, and even split whole denominations. But faithful Christians held out, challenged and worked to eventually overthrow the slave trade.

The stories of genesis (and there are two versions of the story within the old testament that do not line up perfectly) are non-literal allegories written by a population with its first encounter with a writing system in an attempt to record its oral history -- prior to this it was telephone tag, so your faith in this written word as literal truth is sad. How many awesome allegorical histories do you think Christians killed off in their preaching to, or killing if that didn't work, indigenous populations the world over? Thousands? Millions? How many?

Just because you don't know what goes on inside a church doesn't mean stuff doesn't happen.

Just because you are a member of one church doesn't give you insight into the function of any other church. Particularly ones build on Christian Capitalism and the Money Gospel.

My phrasing was careful. Not all churches run all of those outreaches themselves, but they still support and use them. Local food and clothing banks might be community based, but almost every church runs collections that are dropped off monthly. Ditto for Crisis Pregnancy Centres, where a church might drop off used toys, diapers and formula. A city doesn't need 58 crisis pregnancy centres.

Your phrasing and argument are specious. Plenty of secular organisations do this as well and other religious organisations do too. And the government as a secular organisation does this even better than the Church on a scale no Church or group of Churches could possibly. So sure, these things are great. But you cannot blame Christianity for something every single human group does, even ISIS.

We have a nagging tendency to show up first in war zones and other distressed areas and leave after everybody else. Ask almost any foreign war correspondent. Or Charles Darwin.

No you have a nagging tendency to claim to be showing up first in war zones, when in point of fact you're most often part of the warring groups.

Call me when you have a progressive NGO that can accomplish even a fraction of that, while still focusing on their primary mission.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Carter Foundation. But this argument is again specious -- you're trying to suggest that Christians do this uniquely. And they don't. And your argument is that you can exclude government from this because of reasons? Government particularly our modern secular democratic governments exist because the Church as a whole and in part is incapable of doing 1/100 of the amount needed for communities to survive. The catholic church once attempted to run Europe. It didn't work out so well.

If that was true, one would need to ask: When was the last time a fictional person had that kind of impact across an entire planet for thousands of years?

This isn't at all the question you need to ask. There are plenty of fictional person's that have had the same effect. The entirety of the old testament is chock-a-block full of them, whose impacts have been even more significant. Your question is more about why Chritianity developed out of a Jewish-Roman cult into the obnoxious, arrogant, swaggering-until-it-is-dead religious bullshit it is today. And this has fuck-all to do with a handful of myths written about a non-existent person two-millenia ago, and much more to do with the machinations of the Catholic church integrating itself into power structures in Rome and other European capitals as history developed. Without the desire to be close to power, Christianity would have died off like so many other Jewish Cults...