Comment by nobodyCloak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nobodyCloak | Hacker News Reader

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I think you may be missing the point of the essay. I don’t think it meant to say that Christianity is perfect nor that Christianity is the supreme religion. Of course Christianity has been used to justify hateful conduct (just like most other religions at some point) but regardless it more than anything else is responsible for how “Western Civilization” developed, and by extension our understanding of human rights. Yes Christianity was used to defend slavery, but it was also used to condemn it. Regardless, the point was that Christianity is a driving force behind Western thought/morality and ignoring that is dangerous.

Are there other religions that teach the same values of human rights? Of course! But how many of them directly influenced Western life and the Western definition of those same rights, specifically in the founding of the US (which became the blueprint for so many other countries after it)?

Also, I feel like Judaism is implicitly included to some degree in this because Jesus was a Jew and the author specifically mentions he (the author) was Jewish.

Greece and Rome's civic and philosophical development was the source of how Western Civilization developed. Christianity was then transplanted on top of Western Civilization; it wasn't the source. The author is either mistaken or arguing in bad faith, and makes numerous factually incorrect statements. He argues the Locke "assumed" God given rights, and states that there are no other legitimate sources, despite there being a large body of work in the 3rd century BCE that made logical arguments for treating all of humanity equally. Similarly, in his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius argues that gods or atoms, your first responsibility is to the human race.

The author would have us forget that much of the Enlightenment came from the rediscovery of Greek and Roman knowledge.

The whole article reads as an attempt to convince atheists that they're not really atheist, that all their ideas came from religion and are worthless without religion, completely ignoring the role philosophy had in creating those ideas, long before Christianity was on the scene.

At least in the context of this essay this point seems moot to me. Whether the author argues that only Christianity provided such theories or not, the vast majority of the US founders cite the Christian God as the source of a lot of things, human rights among them. They don’t cite some Greek philosopher because that’s not what they pulled that aspect of their argument from.

Maybe this is just more cut snd dry for me because I’ve studied US history for years and I’m imposing a lot of that into the essay, but I don’t think the author is being disingenuous at all for rightly pointing out the reaching effect of Christianity on our modern understanding of human rights (see Locke’s “Reasonableness of Christianity” for some fun reading).

Many writings of the founders were absolutely rife with references to antiquity and classical authors, it was a common practice of the time to write under a Roman republic era pseudonym, and off the top of my head, Jefferson and Adams knew Latin, Madison knew Greek and Latin, and they all were definitely well versed in the classics.

Maybe we're talking past each other, but the essay seemed to be arguing that Christianity was both the source and only legitimate basis for modern human rights, and I don't think the historical record supports that argument at all.

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