Has Christianity made people more civilized?

[M.Dancer]

You really expect to see numbers of deaths/abortions from illegal abortions? How do you start to get the numbers?

http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/economics.html

Mind you with a name like National Abortion Federation, it's strange saying it.

Notice no figures for how many deaths...that's what makes it a slogans

[GostHacked]

Notice no figures for how many deaths...that's what makes it a slogans

Black market guns kill people. Thing is those in charge really don't give two shits about these types of stats. Maybe you can ponder beyond the slogan.

[wyly]

My question is broader. Has Christianity made our world more civilized? I think so.

Without Christianity, our world today would be nastier.

your opinion is based on where you live and who you live with....if you were a Hindu in India, a Muslim in Oman, an Animist Kung of SW Africa, a Bhuddist in Thailand or an Atheist in Sweden you'd see things differently...regardless of personal philosphical belief people everywhere live their lives the same way just as we did before the invention of religion...for pure civilized behaviour if you're talking about being peaceful and caring the Animist Kung are far ahead of Christians...if you were referring about civilization in general/technology...that has nothing to do with religion....

[Oleg Bach]

Yes - the better parts of Christianity that did not get destroyed by religion and state - did make the world better - I love you is much better than I wanna off you...Even though the movement has been preverted - Christianity still has the best logic - and was the first form of free will socialism - not enforced socialism.

[sharkman]

your opinion is based on where you live and who you live with....if you were a Hindu in India, a Muslim in Oman, an Animist Kung of SW Africa, a Bhuddist in Thailand or an Atheist in Sweden you'd see things differently...regardless of personal philosphical belief people everywhere live their lives the same way just as we did before the invention of religion...for pure civilized behaviour if you're talking about being peaceful and caring the Animist Kung are far ahead of Christians...if you were referring about civilization in general/technology...that has nothing to do with religion....

And personal perspectives can't always be trusted, can they. So let's throw them all out, yours included.

[WIP]

A good slogan but fails the acid test. Try finding a reputable source that gives a stat on how many, how often etc etc ...

Who cares what the numbers were, since no reliable statistics were kept for such things years ago. The fact is that during the age before birth control and widespread condom use, many women -- some may have been prostitutes, others were just single girls who moved to big cities from small towns and farms, and were talked in to going to bed with guys they met in bars.

As an anecdote, I am personally aware of one such case that occured when I was young, and abortion was still a crime,(though the full story wasn't explained to me as I was 7 years old at the time) -- a girl that my oldest brother liked, who lived down the street, ran away from home when she was 16 and was working the streets as a prostitute. She died from a septic infection from a botched abortion performed over the River in Niagara Falls N.Y., that her pimp had taken her to. Her family took care of burial arrangements, but never had a funeral for her, and wouldn't speak of her afterward.....that's the way these things were handled in the good old days when life was "sacred!"

[WIP]

And personal perspectives can't always be trusted, can they. So let's throw them all out, yours included.

Yeah, that made a lot of sense!

[Oleg Bach]

Yeah, that made a lot of sense!

It made a lot of sense praying to monkey gods and sacred cows - look where it got them after 3000 years - not one step forward - poverty and sectarian violence- I would say Jesus - was the king of goodness and logic - but - people hate to be proven wrong - even if there is a history of failure. They stick to tradition even if that tradition brings forth the worst and not the best - religious habitualism... is the isms of the world - new a guy that used to be a type of finacial adviser for India - a total corrupt crook - but he said one thing - that rang true " I have traveled the world and seen all the isms - and it is not a pretty sight".

[WIP]

Kuwait Times

My question is broader. Has Christianity made our world more civilized? I think so.

Without Christianity, our world today would be nastier.

It just dawned on me that you cited a speech by the pope attacking the principles of secularism as an argument that this oppressive religious philosophy somehow has made the world civilized! I guess somehow you missed the fact that Mother Church caused the fall of the Roman Empire and plunged most of Europe into a thousand-year dark age by their book-burning and rejection of new knowledge that threatened their absolute power and control over the people.

Recently, I discovered this German site (with English and other translations) Concordat Watch that explains these insidious agreements that are pushed by the Catholic Church to gain more power in the nations where they operate:

What are Concordats?

http://www.concordatwatch.eu/showtopic.php...b_header_id=822

These church-state accords generally give the Church massive state subsidies and other privileges. They also permit Church employees to be hounded about their private lives. Yet as "international treaties", concordats bypass the democratic process, making parliaments powerless to modify, let alone revoke them..................

and remember that partnership between Reagan and John Paul, that ended the Cold War by bringing down the Soviet Empire? Apparently it had some blowback and secondary effects that are the source of today's wars:

Religious fronts against the Soviet empire: Evangelisation and Jihad

http://www.concordatwatch.eu/showsite.php?org_id=872

The war in Afghanistan is now threatening to destabilise Pakistan: how did this disastrous conflict begin? It appears to have originated with “a secret initiative that some believed altered the course of the Cold War” — a US-Vatican partnership to use religious zeal to weaken the Soviet Union. This was a pincer movement which encouraged Catholic dissidents on the empire's western flank and Islamic fundamentalists on its southern one. Today the Vatican is happy to take credit for the first, but doesn't seem to mention the second....

...................Brzezinski’s brainwave of harnessing religious zeal to beat communism had two extreme though opposite effects. The force of Christianity was a major factor in undermining Soviet communist domination of East Europe. Its lands turned around to embrace democratic change, a pro-Western orientation and a market economy in a still-evolving process. In Asia and the Middle East, Carter’s national security adviser resorted to fundamentalist Islam to defeat communism. The CIA-supported Mujahideen did indeed drive the Red Army out of Afghanistan. But this same religious weapon eventually became a boomerang against America. It spawned Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, the Islamic jihadist terrorist movement dedicated to destroying the West and its values.

Thank you so much for replacing a rational, evil enemy with irrational, evil enemies!

I suppose that we can be thankful that the theocrats do not have the power in the West that Muslim theocrats enjoy, thanks to the Reformation and the Enlightenment - which were based on HUMANIST values, not the Christian ones that are trying to drag us back into the pit of subjection to religious authority!

[WIP]

It made a lot of sense praying to monkey gods and sacred cows - look where it got them after 3000 years - not one step forward - poverty and sectarian violence- I would say Jesus - was the king of goodness and logic - but - people hate to be proven wrong - even if there is a history of failure. They stick to tradition even if that tradition brings forth the worst and not the best - religious habitualism... is the isms of the world - new a guy that used to be a type of finacial adviser for India - a total corrupt crook - but he said one thing - that rang true " I have traveled the world and seen all the isms - and it is not a pretty sight".

I don't object to people who want to pray to monkey gods and sacred cows, as long as they don't make sweeping declarations about how their monkey-god/sacred cow values are the foundation of our laws and democratic system of government. As soon as we let that one slide by, along come the demands that we need more monkey-god values in government, the schools, and as the source of our legal principles. Then we end up with monkey-god and sacred cow evangelists consulting with the President on a bi-weekly basis, where they inform him of the their growing list of demands to enable continued support from the monkey-god/sacred cow worshippers.......at least Obama's got one thing right -- keeping the televangelists at arms length and away from the Whitehouse!

[Molly]

Who cares what the numbers were, since no reliable statistics were kept for such things years ago. The fact is that during the age before birth control and widespread condom use, many women -- some may have been prostitutes, others were just single girls who moved to big cities from small towns and farms, and were talked in to going to bed with guys they met in bars.

And some (lots) were married women, who had too many kids or not enough money, and too little control over their own circumstances to prevent a pregnancy.

[wyly]

And personal perspectives can't always be trusted, can they. So let's throw them all out, yours included.

WHOOOSSH!!....the sound a post makes when it's way over your head...

[WIP]

And some (lots) were married women, who had too many kids or not enough money, and too little control over their own circumstances to prevent a pregnancy.

More than likely! I was looking for some further information on the era when abortion was a criminal offense, and came across a link to an interesting book written about how women tried to get rid of unwanted pregnancies in the days before legal abortion. I was reminded again about the age-old self-abortion potions that many women ingested, that could cause death or serious injury. The review from the Library Journal points out that there may have been as many as 2 million abortions performed annually in America back at the turn of the 20th Century! It kind of drives the stake through anti-abortion arguments about protecting the unborn -- just like drug laws don't prevent the use of drugs.

When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (Paperback)by Leslie J. Reagan

From Publishers Weekly

In 1900, women attempted to induce abortions by inserting knitting needles, crochet hooks, hairpins, scissors, chicken feathers and cotton balls into their uteruses. In 1917, black women "pinned their faith on... [the] ingestion of... starch or gunpowder and whiskey." Reagan, an assistant professor of history, medicine and women's studies at the University of Illinois, dedicates her disturbing work on abortion in America before Roe v. Wade to "the lives of... women who died trying to control their reproduction." She chronicles the covert efforts and subsequent prosecution of doctors and midwives, and of unmarried women and their lovers (while married women made up the majority of clientele and were accused of "race suicide," they were pursued less often). Reagan has her work cut out for her: Though the law forbade abortions, she writes, "some late-nineteenth-century doctors believed there were two million abortions [performed] every year." And then, as now, debate raged: though some doctors disagreed, the Journal of the American Medical Association declared itself against abortion in the case of rape since "pregnancy is rare after real rape." For those who take legal abortion for granted, Reagan's work is an eye-opener.

Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This book brings to life both the medical and the legal history of abortion in the United States by using newspaper articles, transcripts of trials and inquests, and other archival sources to show readers how people were affected by the criminalization of private activities. Reagan (history, medicine, and women's studies, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) demonstrates that abortion has always been available to women, whether or not it was legal. The documentation here points out the use of physicians as police and moral authorities, the correlation of economic depression with the need for abortion, the discrimination against unmarried women and midwives, and the paternalism of the medical profession. These factors have, until Roe v. Wade, placed many obstacles in the path of women seeking abortion. The current backlash against abortion threatens a return to the difficult times of the past. This fascinating history, with its extensive bibliography, is an essential purchase for academic medical, legal, and women's studies collections. Highly recommended for public libraries as well.

I wonder if part of the current backlash against abortion, generated by non-stop religious propaganda, would fade away when the cold hard realities of re-criminalizing abortion were once again put in place.

A while back when I was looking for information on this subject, I came across a comment on the NARAL site from a nurse who worked at an abortion clinic somewhere deep in the Bible Belt, where she is harassed on an almost daily basis by anti-abortion protesters - mention that on two occasions she has had two young women who often took stood with the protesters, actually come in to have abortions performed. One of the girls was not seen again on the protest line, while the other one was back holding signs and chanting with the anti-abortion protesters a week after she had her abortion performed! Some people can't think through the consequences of their actions.

[Oleg Bach]

You have to realize that religion and state are the same damned thing - there has never been a seperation of these two institutions - no where in the world are they seperated - and not here either. Abortion is the control of the breeding population and a form of slick eugenics - people who think it's some relgious group that is countering abortion rights do not get it - firstly - these so-called religious people are not holy nor do they come close to being godly - There whole premise about abortion is EXACTLY the same as the states approach - TO CONTROL others - If so-called church goers were so damned holy - their grand fathers and mothers would never have sent away their pregnant daughters to deliver children and then hide them as if it never happened - they abandoned their own family members - out of religous pride - they are no different than abortionist - the may have let the children live - but they were disposed of non- the less.