Christianity is a force for good in the world.

INTRODUCTION: My opponent no doubt thinks his atheism is a noble belief - but then why such ignoble means and unbridled mockery? Why the prerogative oversimplification of Christianity? What we have here is not someone well versed in the nuances of Christian belief, but rather someone who wields a cursory knowledge of religion with dangerous self-confidence. We have someone who stridently builds a moral case against Christianity with feet firmly planted in midair*! My opponent has made the claim that Christianity has caused more harm than Good. We are immediately at an enormous hurdle. Though my opponent has defined good, he has given us no objective means by which we may quantify it. In fact, what is "good" becomes a matter of personal preference. It reminds me of Ravi Zacharias' suggested response to the bumbling Bertrand Russell in a debate versus Fredrick Copleston, "Mr. Russell, in some cultures they love their neighbors; in other cultures they eat them. Do you have a personal preference, and if so, what is it? (1)" Zacharias is highlighting a fundamental problem inherent within any non-transcendent, subjective system of morality. There is no physical or metaphysical difference in value between the two listed cultures, and both cultures view their practices as good. By what objective moral standard do we insist that the former culture is acting morally and the other is acting at the height of depravity? CHRISTIANITY: WHAT IS IT A FORCE FOR? A very important distinction to make is that whether or not Christianity has caused great harm or great good is really inconsequential to the resolution - insofar as Christianity is not defined by its results. So what then is Christianity? I will be defining Christianity as it is defended in C.S. Lewis' classic, Mere Christianity. The elan vital of Christianity is Christ. Jesus teaches that we are to be people who love our neighbors (2) and enemies (3). We are to feed the hungry (4), give to the poor (5) and be people known by our good deeds (6). Christian scriptures teach that God is the sole proprietor of what is good and righteous (7). It is quite clear the Christianity IS a force for good in world. What my opponent intends to argue, is that Christianity is an ineffective force for good (though without any means to judge between two competing ideas of good, this point cannot stand). RELIGION MISREPRESENTS REALITY This is a red herring. Religion =/= Christianity. Moreover, one does not need to have an accurate, scientific understanding of the origins of our universe in order to enact good in the world. Furthermore, Christianity is not much concerned with HOW God created (as it is definitely not clear the creation account intends to be taken literally) (8). In fact, mostly all of this is completely irrelevant. Killing people is something that Christianity neither condones nor can itself commit. Whether or not those things exist in the Old Testament is insignificant, as it is not a moral lesson of Christ or a doctrine of Christianity. Furthermore, my opponent has not given us any reason for believing that the things listed are wrong. Given that there are 700,000 slaves being trafficked across international borders every year, there is a significant portion of the civilized world that sees no moral repugnancy in the possession of slaves (9). National Geographic reported that "there are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. (10)" How do we determine which of these preferences are morally superior? DOGMAS OF CHRISTIANITY ARE HARMFUL: This point is emotionally constructed on assertion. Who cares whether or not people believe in an afterlife. In fact, scientific research has confirmed that religious individuals are both happier (11) and sexually more satisfied than non-believers (12). So far from individuals being "content" with their "misery," they are actually statistically more likely to be happy if they believe in an afterlife. There is no evidence that a belief in the afterlife is causing Christian individuals to neglect the future of other generations. There is also no evidence that Christians are trying to immanentize the eschaton. My opponent presupposes what is good and therefore deems whatever is in friction with his presupposition as bad. If the majority of people disagree with my opponent's assessment of social progress, by what metric do we decipher good from bad? Furthermore, he forgets that according to Sam Harris (the primary source of his argument), Buddhism is a form of atheism, insofar as they have no deity (13). This means that those historically CHRISTIAN nations listed in the Human Development Report (2005) are not actually the top atheistic countries. No, instead it would be Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Laos, and Vietnam. These nations, on the other hand, rank VERY low on the Human Development Index rank (14). Furthermore, it is actually the religious United States that has the best 5 year cancer survival rate - 81 percent higher than some European countries and 22.5 percent higher than the Dutch health care system (15). Moreover, it is actually the US that has the best prenatal healthcare system in the world (16). The reason the other countries have less infant mortality is because live births below 3.3 pounds are not registered and consequently do not show up on the statistic (17). Far from "atheistic" nations having overall better health and etc, it is the religious United States that is the victor. CHRISTIANITY PROMOTES INTOLERANCE AND OPPRESSION Not only have Christians operated under the mandate of Jesus Christ to heal the sick and feed the hungry since the Crucifixion, but to this day, relief work around the world is dominated by Christians (18). The fact that the name "Red Cross" is synonymous with disaster relief is not exactly a coincidence (19). So the same people you hold responsible for major atrocities are ironically the same people bound to mitigate them. Also, It was the Bible-believing Christians in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — not the nonreligious of the day — who tackled the illiteracy problem (20), adult education (21), abolition of slavery (22), prison reform (23), and treatment for alcoholics (24). Also, the YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) was formed in 1844, the YWCA a decade later, and the Salvation Army launched its multinational welfare organization based on Christian ethics (25). The Bible does not BLAME the Jews for Jesus crucifixion (Jesus himself and all his immediate followers were Jews), but rather the Pharisees. CONCLUSION: My opponent most prove that: 1. It is the religion that is responsible and not the person of the religion. 2. The net sum of bad must outweighs the net sum of good 3. There is an objective, binding and obligatory metric by which we may decipher good from bad. 4. Christianity is defined by its results. So far as I can tell. given that religious faiths combined only account for 3.23 percent of humanity's wars (26), and Atheists, per capita, have a much higher probability of incarceration (27), the problem here is not Christianity. That's while you'll find there are no Skeptics' or rationalists' hospitals, charities, or aged-care homes, no atheists' orphanages, welfare agencies, or relief agencies, or any other life-improving institutions such as those founded and funded by Christians who have followed Jesus' teachings. Instead you'll find a statistical proclivity for those operating under a material atheistic argument for the nonexistence of God to destroy religious art and architecture (28) and kill tens of millions of people (29). Citations and Additions: http://www.debate.org...