Christianity

Please keep the civility in this debate like I have done. We are imperfect because God gave us free will. It would not be the same if God was some puppet master and made us worship him. Humans need to determine their own destiny to rule over the earth. What are you trying to prove anyways? Christianity is not evil and has done good in our world Christ's teachings on love and compassion and doing unto others what you would have others do unto you are central to an understanding of how his people have been such agents for change. His teachings coupled, with the Judeo-Christian belief of man created in the image of God have revolutionized thinking in the world as we know it. For example, infanticide and abortion were common in the Greco-Roman culture and many other ancient cultures. Both of these were condemned by early Christian literature and Bishop Basil of Caesarea outlawed infanticide in 374. Pedophilia was unashamedly practiced by both the Greek and Roman cultures. Today, we call that child molestation, widely due to the influence of Christ's followers. The Roman gladiatorial games were spectacles of horrible brutality. Most people, whether Christian or not, would recoil at watching them today. That is due to the idea of the sacredness of human life, which lead later emperors to ban these once popular games. Also, the concept of the eating of human flesh and human sacrifice was once widespread in many pagan cultures. Now it is almost completely a thing of the past due to the value that Christianity has placed on human beings created in Gods image. The status of women has also been elevated because of the Christian world view. In ancient times, women were little more than property. Wives were not allowed to speak in public in ancient Greece. Baby girls were expendable and often killed or left to die. The New Testament concept of all being one in Christ, as well as the concept of husband and wife being a picture of Christ and His Church have forever altered man's view of woman. Nowhere else, before the Christian Scriptures, would you find the concept of sacrificially loving your wife. Because of the teachings of Christ and how he treated women with respect, he raised the dignity of women to heights previously not thought of. Christ befriended women and even talked with them in public. This was not acceptable for the Jewish man to do. The early church gave women freedoms unheard of in the Jewish and Roman cultures surrounding them. I have already mentioned the early Jerusalem Church and its giving to the poor, widows and sick. But that has continued to this day. The Romans thought that helping the sick was a sign of weakness. The early Christians saw it as doing it to Christ Himself. And they saw the saving of lives as another way to save souls as well. By the 6th century A.D. most of the larger cities of Christendom had hospitals. And they were the first known voluntary charitable institutions. Later in history, the first Protestant hospital was built at Kaiserwerth in Germany. It is at this institution that Florence Nightingale received her training. The story of Florence Nightingale is still, to this day, an inspiration to any person who would pursue the noble profession of nursing. John Henry Dunant was a Christian, who with four associates, founded the American Red Cross in 1864. Dunant also negotiated the Geneva convention for the care and treatment of wounded soldiers and was the co-winner of the first Nobel Prize for Peace in 1901. Other Bible believing Christians in the 18th and 19th centuries were responsible for much good. They tackled a wide variety of social issues such as illiteracy, the abolition of slavery, adult education, treatment of alcoholics and prison reform. It was in 1844 that the Young Men's Christian Association was formed, followed by the YWCA ten years later. And in 1865 a London minister, William Booth left his pastorate to take his message to the streets to reach the poor, the homeless , the destitute and the hungry. Today the Salvation Army is in 106 nations around the world. Jesus was not discriminatory in who he taught. Both men and women came under his instruction. And later in history it was bishops who taught things like doctrine, rhetoric, logic, math, geometry, music, grammar and astronomy. During the Reformation men like Luther and Calvin advocated, universal state sponsored education. It was Luther who told authorities that children should be compelled to attend school. Now the Western world has this concept in their laws. Benedictine monks were the people who started the universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. And some of the most respected universities in the world today began as Christian institutions: Harvard and Yale for example. The interesting thing is that all the way up through 1932, out of 182 colleges in the United states, 168 of them were founded by Christian denominations. It is very interesting that modern Science as we know it today would not be possible if not for the the Christian world view and yet many people who espouse atheistic evolutionary philosophy want to use Science to destroy religion. For 1500 years Aristotle's thinking was dominant among philosophers and Scientists. He believed that true knowledge was only acquired through the deductive process of the mind. He felt that the inductive method, used by Science today, required manual work in a lower realm. It was Christian philosophers that linked rationality with the empirical, inductive method. It was their belief that predictability and order could only be achieved in a universe made and ordered by a rational Being. Also, if you look at the pagan world, earlier in history, they believed that there were spirits living in and through nature, controlling it. The Christian view is that God created the universe and is separate from it. They also, took their understanding from the Genesis account of creation that man was given dominion over creation and were Gods representatives to care for the world. All of this lead to the distinctively Christian approach to reality that allowed for the Scientific community to develop Scientific laws. If the universe is governed rationally and predictably, then there must be laws man can discover. The early church in Jerusalem appointed deacons and elders to care for widows and the sick (Acts 6:1, James 5:13), and churches still do this today. In the Middle Ages, the monasteries created hospitals. Burgeoning numbers of pilgrims to the Holy Land were cared for by the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. The noble nursing reformer Florence Nightingale received her training at the first Protestant hospital " at Kaiserwerth in Germany. Swiss humanitarian and Bible-believer Henri Dunant was planning the Red Cross and negotiating the Geneva convention for the care and treatment of wounded soldiers. Dunant was co-winner of the first Nobel Prize for Peace in 1901, and his inspiring Red Cross committee later won the award three times. It was the Bible-believing Christians in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries " not the government of the day " who tackled the illiteracy problem, adult education, abolition of slavery, prison reform, and treatment for alcoholics. The Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) was formed in 1844, the YWCA a decade later, and the Salvation Army launched its multinational welfare organization based on Christian ethics.