“If these guidelines for social interaction hadn’t been given to us by divine commandment, human beings would need to invent them.”

Cough, splutter, guffaw. ROTFLOL. Brilliant. That would have them in the aisles on the logicians version of ‘Last Comic Standing’.

Render unto Caesar, that which is Caesar’s. As fine a list as it may be, only Moses claimed God gave the Commandments. We only know that Moses carried the Tablets down from the Mountain (Phenomenally valuable Tablets one might imagine, which seem to have been ‘lost’ !!). Did anyone check his pockets for a chilsel? Not likely as he was in a foul mood from the moment he arrived back at camp.

“In the case of a minority of fanatics, the sin of self-righteousness drives them to aggression against those who don’t share their religious sense. This is because the limited human mind is incapable of fully comprehending the Deity.”

Uhhh ? Really?

I fail to see the causal connection indicated by the ‘because’. Maybe ‘because’ there isn’t one. My own very limited human mind is incapable of fully comprehending the Deity, I am pretty sure, yet I don’t seem to have the supposedly consequent self-righteousness driving me to aggression against those who don’t share my religious sense. But just in case I am sublimating an denied urge, step outside and say that again.

Moses, too, had just spent (according to him) a few hours chatting to God and getting a better and first hand comprehension of the Deity, and yet demanded many of his own troops ’step outside’.

In the short essay above, it is almost by the by that the Christian message overturned Mosaic Law. Moses certainly didn’t practice what he preached and showed a slight tendancy toward the very self-righteous aggression you declaim. He was an eye for an eye sort of fellow (except when it came to Jerico and its inhabitants and various other sundry tribes which he set his Hebrews on with sword and flame).

Jesus on the other hand said ‘Be nice to one another. Turn the cheek. Love your enemy’. Now that was a step forward and although one likes to consider Christ as the Son of God, he was quite definitely a chap. It would seem that his human part was quite at odds with God’s (according to Moses) more vigorous approach.

Defending Christian ethic, morality and value is not helped by appeal to a non-Christian, pre-Christian heritage, nor by ‘cherry picking’ one lot of archaic philosophies as opposed to another, nor by appeals to dodgy authority.

C- Dr Mark.

(PS. I hope you are a better Economist)

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That’s pretty much what many of the Founding Fathers were saying when they said our *inalienable rights* were the gift of God, not the mercy of man.

“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”

-Thomas Jefferson

The argument that monotheism leads to violence is nonsense, and fits with feminism’s assertion that monotheism is essentially paternalistic.

Violence has been part of the fabric of human history since we emerged from the apes. Monotheism is precisely the solution to rapacious human violence, because it is the very thing that separates humanity from its animal origins.

In my view the whole of Marxist/Nihilist theory has either a conscious or unconscious appeal to infantile Bacchanalism.

The ongoing battle between monotheism and paganism pits the collective human psyche against itself like a cosmic battle between the forces of Apollo and Dionysus.