Catholics are making it up.

So you think the Biblical admonitions to kill your bad kids, to beat your slaves just right, etc., were instructions to the nation of Israel, not individuals?"Both these reasons..." Christ fulfilled the old law, and adulterers don't have to be stoned. I assume he didn't liquidate the Ten Commandments, and clearly you don't think that the instruction to see other people as abominations has been lifted. And the eye-for-an-eye death penalty remains imperative, despite the deaths of innocents: somehow the recipients of human justice were grandfathered out of God's new law of mercy and forgiveness...unless she's a county clerk in Kentucky It's enough to confuse an ex-Baptist farm boy, for sure.As you peruse Leviticus et al., how do you choose?

I've read those passages, and they seem clearly addressed to parents and slaveowners, not a national authority. But I suppose there may have been special authorizing warrants from the state of Israel that are lost to history. "Eye for eye" is the philosophy of our penal system: that's why we kill some prisoners, including some innocent ones. That's why I, and many other opponents of the death penalty, refer to folks like you as Old Testament Christians. You love your Jesus, but you love your vengeance more.But isn't it irrelevant whether "eye for eye" causes deaths? Many OT injunctions from God caused deaths. Wasn't the eye-for-eye injunction fulfilled by Christ and replaced with his loving mercy? Okay, you got me there: the act of homosexuality is described as an abomination, not the homosexuals. That's why Christians speak so lovingly of them.Again, Ms. Davis, since her 2011 conversion, believes holy matrimony cannot be dissolved. Her fourth marriage, in 2008, was before that, so I guess there's some paper cover there. But she didn''t repent of her sinful mockery of marriage and leave that sin behind, and she knowingly issued marriage licenses to divorced people, apparently without any pangs to her religious conscience.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.Edited by Omnivorous, : after-->before: sorry for confusion

I'm following your exchange with Tangle with considerable interest. I try to stay out of interesting one-on-one exchanges (with only partial success, as you can see), but I'm curious about your statement above.I looked at summaries of contemporary Catholic doctrine and catechism, and while it certainly differs from the Protestant take on original sin, the notion of a fallen human state which gives supernatural evil greater power over humans still seems clear enough.But I don't generally follow developments in religious doctrine. Was there some explicit doctrinal reinterpretation decades ago?

Early on, I inferred that "original sin" must be a challenge. I did my best.

If we want to thank anyone for founding early Western universities, we'd have to thank the popes--according to you, Faith, no true Christians at all. Instead, the roots of universal education reach to the Enlightenment, particularly its American inheritors.Those early European universities weren't founded to train pastors in the common, Protestant sense of the word, but priests, monastic scholars, etc. Without the infusion of early science and math from the Middle East, they would have had little to teach except the Bible and Aristotle, and even so, in the Medieval period, were chained to doctrine and contributed little beyond such empty doctrinal exercises as scholastic philosophy.So the creation of a tradition of knowledge and evidence-based learning in universities largely hinged on the ancient pagan Greeks and more recent Muslim contributions. The history of scholarly glory for western universities began with and paralleled their growing independence from religious authority.Christianity was involved in nearly every "advance" in European history because the Catholic Church held so much secular power; Christian doctrine and persecution of heretics considerably retarded real scholarly progress for centuries.Whether on balance learning in the West was more hurt or hindered by Christianity is an open question, but I lean towards the hurt. Even when Christians appeared to promote learning, they were anxious to keep it in shackles.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

Or perhaps we'd have had them sooner and better--we can't re-run history to see.

Goodness. We were talking about the founding of universities in the West and whether Christianity was a help or a hindrance to that end. That doesn't make me a chearleader for Islamic empire--I like what we've got.Anyway, if Islam had won the West, my specific hodge-podge pedigree of Welsh, German, Sicilian and a soupon of native American would probably never have quickened. So no Omni in that fight...Centers of learning rise in every civilization, and existed in China and India, for example, long before there was a Christian church in Europe. The ranking of the "first university" is a bit of artifice, really, because it hinges definitionally on things like set courses of study and degrees/diplomas, excluding earlier courts, great monasteries and libraries (east and west), and even master/apprentice based academies.The human mind yearns to grow in understanding. We can see that when a civilization reaches the necessary size, wealth and complexity, centers of learning emerge. Nowhere else in the world was Christianity required for the creation of centers of learning; the RCC retarded progress for centuries in the name of doctrine. On the other hand, it is a fair question to ask what other imperial center would have commanded the size, wealth and complexity to build universities; but it is also fair to imagine how different the centuries could have been had the church welcomed the early scientists.So, like I said, I dunno: we can't run history back and try a pagan or Islamic modernity in the West. My impression is that the RCC more inhibited than promoted progress, but that demonstration is a scholarly effort, and beyond me.Edited by Omnivorous, : get my soupon rightEdited by Omnivorous, :

They stood on the shoulders of Greek giants, and the Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers who rescued those thinkers from the church, as well as the contributions of Islamic scholars. What the scientists you named most enjoyed was a lack of suppression from religious authority.By the broadest imprimatur you give Christianity, we must also hold them responsible for every bad idea and ideology that emerged in the West.

Most, sir, most.

Any sentence-length summary does. But that begs the question of whether "strong Christian convictions" uniquely motivate great science.Scientists of many faiths do brilliant work, and I'm sure many of them will describe their passion for knowledge in spiritual or near-spiritual terms; members of your list, as men of their time and place, would have spoken in Christian terms.Now, more than ever, science is international and cosmopolitan. I see no reason to believe that Christian scientists out-achieve those of other faiths or atheists. All successful scientists have strong convictions which motivate them to do science. Even if you demonstrate the scientists on your list had strong Christian convictions, you won't have demonstrated that those motivations were the sine qua non of their achievements.Of course, atheists have their lists, too. This is the first one I found on Google:

quote:

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Neils Bohr - physicist
Francis Crick - co-discoverer of DNA
Thomas Edison - inventor
Paul Erdos - mathematician
Richard Feynman - physicist
Sigmund Freud - founder of psychoanalysis
Edmond Halley - astronomer
Peter Higgs - postulated existence of the Higgs boson
Alfred Kinsey - sex researcher
Joseph Lagrange - mathematician
Ernst Mach - physicist
J. Robert Oppenheimer - physicist and "father of the atom bomb"
Linus Pauling - co-discoverer of DNA
Carl Sagan - astronomer
Erwin Schrdinger - physicist
Alan Turing - mathematician and "father of computer science"

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This is a silly game, played out of parochial pride, and unworthy of the labors and sacrifices of all great thinkers, Christians or not. I'll not play it further.Edited by Omnivorous, : too many "sentence"s