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"A Christian Manifesto" by Francis A. Schaeffer gives a reason why. Our creator inspires freedom and love. When we follow him we seek to spread freedom to not

"A Christian Manifesto" by Francis A. Schaeffer gives a reason why. Our creator inspires freedom and love. When we follow him we seek to spread freedom to not only ourselves but to others as well. A population willingly adopting the new testament Biblical principles will spread freedom willingly. The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force. America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms.

gnaritas 11y ago
> America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one. Fixed that for you. > The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force. No one has moral absolutes, they do not exist except in the minds of those who want to force their morality onto others who don't agree with them. Laws aren't about morals, they're about reason.
- c0achmcguirk 11y ago
  > America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one. lulz Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world. Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    I guess liquid water doesn't exist. I'm really unsure what point you're trying to make.
    - c0achmcguirk 11y ago
      It's an expression. Liquid water has mass and takes up space. It's material. It exists in a materialistic universe where the only things that exist are matter an energy. On the other hand, there's nothing physical about "laws." They lose their law-like properties and become conventions of thought rather than regulators of truth and rationality in a world where only matter and energy exist.
  - gnaritas 11y ago
    > Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world. And how do you suppose that? Materialism doesn't deny the existence of logic; you seem to not really know what materialism is. > Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then? Yea, you don't know what materialism is. I can't stub my toe on hacker news either, nor any website, but they clearly exist and they exist in way perfectly compatible with materialism as does your mind and the thing we call logic. They still all reduce down to patterns of matter in your brain or patterns of electrons in computer chips, it is all physical at the base level. To a materialist, mind is simply what the brain does, it's your operating system just as Windows is what your computer is probably doing. Perfectly compatible with materialism. Science and logic go hand in hand and scientists are virtually all materialists because so far as anyone can demonstrate with evidence, materialism is the nature of reality.
    - c0achmcguirk 11y ago
      > To a materialist, mind is simply what the brain does. You're adorable. If Charlie holds to different laws of logic than Bill...whose brain is right? Your view is that laws are just conventions of thought. Those aren't laws, then. I again assert: rationality is impossible without laws of logic. With conventions of logic, you just have strong opinions.
      - gnaritas 11y ago
        > You're adorable. And you're bad at this. > If Charlie holds to different laws of logic than Bill...whose brain is right? If they're using different forms of logic, then they're both right according to the form they're using, but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic. > Your view is that laws are just conventions of thought. Those aren't laws, then. It's not my view, it's simply the way it is. Different rules of logic exist [1]; such systems are axiomatic and obey their own rules. There is no one "correct" system of logic, there are many competing systems. The term law is meaningless, logic isn't a law in the sense you seem to think, it is merely a system of formalized thinking according to rules. > I again assert: rationality is impossible without laws of logic. With conventions of logic, you just have strong opinions. Logic is merely a branch of philosophy concerned with valid reasoning. Reasoning is not in opposition to materialism. Materialists do not argue that thoughts don't exist and logic is merely a formal method of thinking. You're objecting to materialism when it's quite clear you don't understand what it is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic#Types_of_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic#Types_of_logic
- ctlby 11y ago
  > Laws aren't about morals, they're about reason. Most contentious issues--marriage laws, universal healthcare, minimum wage, etc--are explicitly framed and argued (by both sides) with the language of justice. Moral preferences guide law; reason is just post-hoc rationalization. You might object that "law" is not the same as "contentious issues," but that changes nothing. The emotionally charged political process that drives these debates is the same one that produces legislation. It is almost structurally incapable of producing rational outcomes.
  - gnaritas 11y ago
    Justice is not necessarily a moral concept, it's quite a reasonable concept as well. Laws are about reason in the sense that they're things we can convince majorities to abide by; sometimes those justifications are moral, but being immoral is not a justification to be illegal as morals themselves are fluid and what is moral for one isn't for another. As there are no absolute morals, laws are thus based on reasoning between moral beings as to what they can agree to.
it_learnses 11y ago
wtf are you babbling about? this is hacker news, not reddit. stop posting made up stuff.
- dang 11y ago
  This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
fsloth 11y ago
"A population willingly adopting the new testament Biblical principles will spread freedom willingly." I think you need to specify which principles exactly one wants to adopt in a society. All the european states were devoutly christian for 2000 years and I would not call e.g. 15th century Spain the epitome of human rights and freedom. "America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms." At what point in time would you say america was more respectful of individual rights? It's not long ago it practiced genocidal policies towards the indigenous people of the continent - nor is it that long while ago it abolished slavery. If you go much back the colonies will not have been even established.
- code4life 11y ago
  Our founders did that hard work for us. The Bill of Rights and the constitution explain what freedoms we are granted and as well why we are granted them (inalienable rights from our Creator). Previously throughout history, rights were granted to people from their government, through laws. These concepts were flipped upside down, and if you study why, you'll see the reason is Biblical principles. All you have to do is read many founding documents to see this. John Adams wrote "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Why would he say this? Think about it. I'm not experienced enough to describe or explain why America has done bad things throughout history. We all make mistakes, and we are all unique. I'm sure corruption existed throughout our history. My personal feeling is that between 1900 and say now, Americans are more willing to reject the reasoning that gave it freedom to accept the reasoning that will take it away. This rejection starts not only at the bottom but at the top. Many Ivy League colleges were founded to educate and raise missionaries. Why? Perhaps to spread the message of freedom and liberty. What are they doing now? The exact opposite. Think about that. Many here will argue it's a good thing. So be it, but it doesn't make it anymore true than the message I'm sharing.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
gjm11 11y ago
If this account of things were correct, then we would expect to find that less-religious (or specifically less-Christian) nations have less freedom. It doesn't look to me as if this is true; for instance, the nations of Scandinavia are distinctly less Christian than the US (they often have established churches, but the rate of actual religious belief and commitment in the population is low) and they seem no less free than the US; and some notoriously un-free societies have been explicitly Christian (e.g., Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, Mussolini's Italy). We would also expect to see correlations between freedom and Christian belief and affiliation within nations on longer timescales. For instance, in Europe the Middle Ages are generally thought of as particularly religious; was that a specially free period of history? It doesn't seem so.
- triangleman 11y ago
  But the OP was not talking about "religion" per se, he was saying that freedom is a natural result of following Christ, specifically following the words of Christ as found in the Bible. Your example of the Middle Ages is a case in point: During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language (Latin). How could society develop an attitude towards freedom in such a climate of religious oppression?
  - gjm11 11y ago
    > not talking about "religion" per se [...] following the words of Christ as found in the Bible We're in some danger of getting no-true-Scotsmanned here, since it's by no means straightforward to determine who is and isn't actually "following the words of Christ as found in the Bible". Still, let's consider Uganda, where being (actively) homosexual is now punishable by life imprisonment thanks largely to the activism of Christians following the words they find in the Bible. (Not specifically "the words of Christ", but actually that's a bit you just made up; what code4life said was "the new testament Biblical principles".) Now, for all I know you may think this is a good law, and I'm not going to try to change your mind if so -- but what it obviously isn't is an improvement in freedom. Or consider the long and sad history of how Christians, following the principles they found in the Bible, have tried to prevent schoolteachers telling their pupils accurately about certain areas of science. Again, you might agree with the people who made the laws in question that, e.g., evolution is a damnable atheistic error, but these laws very plainly reduced people's freedom. (In more recent years, as a result of having one such measure after another struck down in the courts, antievolutionists have shifted tactics, and since roughly the 1990s their preferred legal measures haven't been particularly anti-freedom. But that's only because their attempts to get their way by impeding teachers' freedom stopped working.) > During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language I think that's a rather tendentious way of putting it. What happened, rather, was that Latin-as-vernacular largely died out but the prevailing Bible translations remained in Latin. Not a matter of scripture being taken away from the people, but of the people moving away from the language used for the scriptures. (And from written language in general; literacy was very low in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Providing vernacular bibles might not have done anyone much good.) So, anyway, it's true that mediaeval people generally didn't have Bibles. But they did go to church, where those clergy were supposed to expound on doctrines derived from the Bible, and they did have a culture saturated with Christian ideas. And, actually, it's not even so clear that they didn't have vernacular Bible translations. Take a look here (apologies for the outrageously long Google Books link): https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2pSGAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA178&lpg=PA178&dq=biblical+literacy+in+the+middle+ages&source=bl&ots=U9ZGs73z4T&sig=tn78hIkMxV8YKSk3nPvUWR_4qXY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAWoVChMIpP2V4aHoyAIVRhUPCh1wrARi#v=onepage&q=biblical%20literacy%20in%20the%20middle%20ages&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2pSGAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA178&lp... "To be sure, the Protestant Reformation did achieve a change in the way the Bible was read and the way it functioned within Christian spirituality, but this change was largely due to a long medieval tradition of lay access to biblical texts."
dang 11y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470922 and marked it off-topic.

gnaritas 11y ago

> America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one. Fixed that for you. > The humanist world view on the other hand has no moral absolutes and must enforce the popular or elected rules onto the majority by force. No one has moral absolutes, they do not exist except in the minds of those who want to force their morality onto others who don't agree with them. Laws aren't about morals, they're about reason.

c0achmcguirk 11y ago
> America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one. lulz Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world. Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  I guess liquid water doesn't exist. I'm really unsure what point you're trying to make.
  - c0achmcguirk 11y ago
    It's an expression. Liquid water has mass and takes up space. It's material. It exists in a materialistic universe where the only things that exist are matter an energy. On the other hand, there's nothing physical about "laws." They lose their law-like properties and become conventions of thought rather than regulators of truth and rationality in a world where only matter and energy exist.
- gnaritas 11y ago
  > Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world. And how do you suppose that? Materialism doesn't deny the existence of logic; you seem to not really know what materialism is. > Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then? Yea, you don't know what materialism is. I can't stub my toe on hacker news either, nor any website, but they clearly exist and they exist in way perfectly compatible with materialism as does your mind and the thing we call logic. They still all reduce down to patterns of matter in your brain or patterns of electrons in computer chips, it is all physical at the base level. To a materialist, mind is simply what the brain does, it's your operating system just as Windows is what your computer is probably doing. Perfectly compatible with materialism. Science and logic go hand in hand and scientists are virtually all materialists because so far as anyone can demonstrate with evidence, materialism is the nature of reality.
  - c0achmcguirk 11y ago
    > To a materialist, mind is simply what the brain does. You're adorable. If Charlie holds to different laws of logic than Bill...whose brain is right? Your view is that laws are just conventions of thought. Those aren't laws, then. I again assert: rationality is impossible without laws of logic. With conventions of logic, you just have strong opinions.
    - gnaritas 11y ago
      > You're adorable. And you're bad at this. > If Charlie holds to different laws of logic than Bill...whose brain is right? If they're using different forms of logic, then they're both right according to the form they're using, but they can't be compared to each other unless they're using the same kind of logic. > Your view is that laws are just conventions of thought. Those aren't laws, then. It's not my view, it's simply the way it is. Different rules of logic exist [1]; such systems are axiomatic and obey their own rules. There is no one "correct" system of logic, there are many competing systems. The term law is meaningless, logic isn't a law in the sense you seem to think, it is merely a system of formalized thinking according to rules. > I again assert: rationality is impossible without laws of logic. With conventions of logic, you just have strong opinions. Logic is merely a branch of philosophy concerned with valid reasoning. Reasoning is not in opposition to materialism. Materialists do not argue that thoughts don't exist and logic is merely a formal method of thinking. You're objecting to materialism when it's quite clear you don't understand what it is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic#Types_of_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic#Types_of_logic
ctlby 11y ago
> Laws aren't about morals, they're about reason. Most contentious issues--marriage laws, universal healthcare, minimum wage, etc--are explicitly framed and argued (by both sides) with the language of justice. Moral preferences guide law; reason is just post-hoc rationalization. You might object that "law" is not the same as "contentious issues," but that changes nothing. The emotionally charged political process that drives these debates is the same one that produces legislation. It is almost structurally incapable of producing rational outcomes.
- gnaritas 11y ago
  Justice is not necessarily a moral concept, it's quite a reasonable concept as well. Laws are about reason in the sense that they're things we can convince majorities to abide by; sometimes those justifications are moral, but being immoral is not a justification to be illegal as morals themselves are fluid and what is moral for one isn't for another. As there are no absolute morals, laws are thus based on reasoning between moral beings as to what they can agree to.

it_learnses 11y ago

wtf are you babbling about? this is hacker news, not reddit. stop posting made up stuff.

dang 11y ago
This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

fsloth 11y ago

"A population willingly adopting the new testament Biblical principles will spread freedom willingly." I think you need to specify which principles exactly one wants to adopt in a society. All the european states were devoutly christian for 2000 years and I would not call e.g. 15th century Spain the epitome of human rights and freedom. "America has been slowly transitioning from a Bible believing nation to a humanist world view. The result is predictable, the loss of individual freedom and the increase in the use of force to preserve the lack of these freedoms." At what point in time would you say america was more respectful of individual rights? It's not long ago it practiced genocidal policies towards the indigenous people of the continent - nor is it that long while ago it abolished slavery. If you go much back the colonies will not have been even established.

code4life 11y ago
Our founders did that hard work for us. The Bill of Rights and the constitution explain what freedoms we are granted and as well why we are granted them (inalienable rights from our Creator). Previously throughout history, rights were granted to people from their government, through laws. These concepts were flipped upside down, and if you study why, you'll see the reason is Biblical principles. All you have to do is read many founding documents to see this. John Adams wrote "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Why would he say this? Think about it. I'm not experienced enough to describe or explain why America has done bad things throughout history. We all make mistakes, and we are all unique. I'm sure corruption existed throughout our history. My personal feeling is that between 1900 and say now, Americans are more willing to reject the reasoning that gave it freedom to accept the reasoning that will take it away. This rejection starts not only at the bottom but at the top. Many Ivy League colleges were founded to educate and raise missionaries. Why? Perhaps to spread the message of freedom and liberty. What are they doing now? The exact opposite. Think about that. Many here will argue it's a good thing. So be it, but it doesn't make it anymore true than the message I'm sharing.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

gjm11 11y ago

If this account of things were correct, then we would expect to find that less-religious (or specifically less-Christian) nations have less freedom. It doesn't look to me as if this is true; for instance, the nations of Scandinavia are distinctly less Christian than the US (they often have established churches, but the rate of actual religious belief and commitment in the population is low) and they seem no less free than the US; and some notoriously un-free societies have been explicitly Christian (e.g., Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, Mussolini's Italy). We would also expect to see correlations between freedom and Christian belief and affiliation within nations on longer timescales. For instance, in Europe the Middle Ages are generally thought of as particularly religious; was that a specially free period of history? It doesn't seem so.

triangleman 11y ago
But the OP was not talking about "religion" per se, he was saying that freedom is a natural result of following Christ, specifically following the words of Christ as found in the Bible. Your example of the Middle Ages is a case in point: During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language (Latin). How could society develop an attitude towards freedom in such a climate of religious oppression?
- gjm11 11y ago
  > not talking about "religion" per se [...] following the words of Christ as found in the Bible We're in some danger of getting no-true-Scotsmanned here, since it's by no means straightforward to determine who is and isn't actually "following the words of Christ as found in the Bible". Still, let's consider Uganda, where being (actively) homosexual is now punishable by life imprisonment thanks largely to the activism of Christians following the words they find in the Bible. (Not specifically "the words of Christ", but actually that's a bit you just made up; what code4life said was "the new testament Biblical principles".) Now, for all I know you may think this is a good law, and I'm not going to try to change your mind if so -- but what it obviously isn't is an improvement in freedom. Or consider the long and sad history of how Christians, following the principles they found in the Bible, have tried to prevent schoolteachers telling their pupils accurately about certain areas of science. Again, you might agree with the people who made the laws in question that, e.g., evolution is a damnable atheistic error, but these laws very plainly reduced people's freedom. (In more recent years, as a result of having one such measure after another struck down in the courts, antievolutionists have shifted tactics, and since roughly the 1990s their preferred legal measures haven't been particularly anti-freedom. But that's only because their attempts to get their way by impeding teachers' freedom stopped working.) > During this time, scripture was taken away from the people and mainly transmitted between clergy in a dead language I think that's a rather tendentious way of putting it. What happened, rather, was that Latin-as-vernacular largely died out but the prevailing Bible translations remained in Latin. Not a matter of scripture being taken away from the people, but of the people moving away from the language used for the scriptures. (And from written language in general; literacy was very low in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Providing vernacular bibles might not have done anyone much good.) So, anyway, it's true that mediaeval people generally didn't have Bibles. But they did go to church, where those clergy were supposed to expound on doctrines derived from the Bible, and they did have a culture saturated with Christian ideas. And, actually, it's not even so clear that they didn't have vernacular Bible translations. Take a look here (apologies for the outrageously long Google Books link): https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2pSGAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA178&lpg=PA178&dq=biblical+literacy+in+the+middle+ages&source=bl&ots=U9ZGs73z4T&sig=tn78hIkMxV8YKSk3nPvUWR_4qXY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAWoVChMIpP2V4aHoyAIVRhUPCh1wrARi#v=onepage&q=biblical%20literacy%20in%20the%20middle%20ages&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2pSGAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA178&lp... "To be sure, the Protestant Reformation did achieve a change in the way the Bible was read and the way it functioned within Christian spirituality, but this change was largely due to a long medieval tradition of lay access to biblical texts."

dang 11y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470922 and marked it off-topic.