totally meaningless that nearly every adult was a Christian; that in no way had any meaningful impact on the country: socially, politically, or religiously.

does this accurately convey your position?

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You are correct, but its not free of religion. But that secularism has become its own religion.

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Yep, absolutely. It's not passive and neutral.

And it's led, ironically, to the very thing that was feared in 1789: The establishment of a national religion by elites which has targeted any and every local public expression of Christianity. The goal is to push Christianity (as a rival religion with a competing set of values) completely into 'private' sphere.

Strongly disagree. Secularism is a political belief, not a religious one. There are, for example, plenty of Christian secularists. I feel like you're equating all secularism with secular humanism, which is certainly closer to being a religion. I personally wouldn't characterize it as such, but I can understand why others would.

The base issue being addressed is how do we create a government which doesn't elevate or prioritize one religion over others. I'd argue secularism is the best answer to that question, even if it isn't a perfect one.

Because plenty of people are more likely to change their religious views to align with their political views than the opposite. That fact is clearly evident in our society.

Rocag said:

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Because plenty of people are more likely to change their religious views to align with their political views than the opposite. That fact is clearly evident in our society.

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Clearly evident to you, maybe. I don't see that at all.

Can you provide me some of examples of that evidence? I'm not trying to be snarky, I just honestly see the exact opposite. The majority of Christians and the abortion issue come to mind.

Are you purposefully misunderstanding my words to try and make some strange point and allege I think whatever it is your last post contained? Is the smiling face emoticon indicative of sarcasm? I'm not sure how to respond to that.

Now, to be fair to your view point, progressive "Christians" change their religion to match their politics, but the underlying reason for that is progressive "Christians" combine a healthy dose of marxism into their religious world view, which ultimately proves the point that politics is downstream of religion.

You're mixing issues. Infant exposure isn't abortion and the arguments for and against both are pretty different. Yes, some early Christian writings were explicitly against abortion. But fewer compared the practice to murder in the way modern Christian arguments about it do. It was more that abortion was associated with other sexual sins and viewed in that light. Figures such as Augustine didn't think it was comparable to murder because because fetuses earlier in development didn't have souls yet.

Skipping ahead to American views, my previous post was accurate. American Christians, especially Protestants, were not strongly against abortion. Plenty of polls, articles, and resolutions from churches and denominations that back that up.

For example, the notoriously conservative Southern Baptist Convention approved a resolution in 1971 that said "Be it further RESOLVED, That we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother". Can you even imagine that happening today?

Kind of like slavery. Now every Christian will call it a sin. How about in 1850? We find lots of disagreement there.

I wasn't confusing the two issues, but mentioning them in conjunction to highlight the early Christians extreme tendency to value life in contrast to contemporary Roman culture.

As for slavery, the entire human race participated in that horrid institution until Christians expended a considerable amount of blood and treasure ending it.

Rocag said:

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You're mixing issues. Infant exposure isn't abortion and the arguments for and against both are pretty different. Yes, some early Christian writings were explicitly against abortion. But fewer compared the practice to murder in the way modern Christian arguments about it do.

What does this even mean? Yes there are early church writings against abortion and also exposure and yes they are wildly different than the pagan worldview, but this doesn't fit my modern understanding about the death penalty so all of these writings can be thrown out and we can consider Christians as basically not having this bedrock opinion about the sanctity of life?

Is that the point you're trying to make here?

It was more that abortion was associated with other sexual sins and viewed in that light. Figures such as Augustine didn't think it was comparable to murder because because fetuses earlier in development didn't have souls yet.

You, as a nonchristian, modern secularist, are going to try to educate a wide variety of devout catholic and orthodox about their own church father's teachings on the sanctity of life? Even if I take your pontification at face value, it can be both. The church fathers can view abortion has both A) murder and taking a life and B) a corruption of the sanctity of marriage and an abdication of God's command-blessing to be fruitful and multiply.

Do you not realize that devout satanist view abortion as a central part of their religion because it is murder and child sacrifice? And that these sacrifices are ultimately what the demons ask of them for their transactional request for material wealth? To the point that satanist tried to argue that you can't ban abortion under religious freedom? This is the team your on?

Skipping ahead to American views, my previous post was accurate. American Christians, especially Protestants, were not strongly against abortion. Plenty of polls, articles, and resolutions from churches and denominations that back that up.

Your view of protestants were not against abortion until the 1970s rings hollow because A) Protestantism accepts secular thought more deeply than church teachings. Secularism came about in the 1500s. Protestants, especially the southern baptist you point out, don't even come on the scene until the 1800s as the newest, lowest common denominator marketplace offering of what Christianity even is or its expectations on its adherents.

And why the 1970s did this become a big deal? Because of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. You might as well ask, why didn't the church weigh in on trans-kids until the 2020s? What took them so long. Because technology is enabling secularism to push frontiers that were not thought possible before.

For example, the notoriously conservative Southern Baptist Convention approved a resolution in 1971 that said "Be it further RESOLVED, That we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother". Can you even imagine that happening today?

Bud, I can assure you that the southern baptist only look notoriously conservative because you have not been exposed to what levels of conservatism exist in catholic and orthodox churches. Churches are like corporations, over a long enough time frame the corporation gets the type of employee it deserves. In this own thread, its obvious that SBC resolution 1971 would not hold up against an early church father's view that all lives are sacred and gifts from God and that we are not remove them from this earth before their time in their age of innocence. There is conservative thought that is so conservative it doesn't even map onto the modern political spectrum. Thats the average position at my church's mens group.

Kind of like slavery. Now every Christian will call it a sin. How about in 1850? We find lots of disagreement there.

Again, what a dumb statement. 'Some christians wrongly believed that slavery is to be endorsed, so we can shrug our shoulders and claim Christians didn't really care at all about slavery.' Christians were and are the only force on this earth that abolished slavery. Christian nations went to war against muslim slavers. The pagan world ran on slavery. The muslim world still does. The reason slavery stuck around for so long is because the modern inventions of debt and the industrial revolution hadn't happened yet. But from the initial spread of Christianity it immediately freed millions.

Historically, there was no concept of uncollateralized debt or easy to obtain collateralized debt. You just sold yourself into slavery to pay off your debts or give yourself access to some meager rations and shelter of the none you were getting being free and alone.

And again, looking at what the protestants were doing with solo-scriptura in the 1850s as central moral authority of christianity is just bouncing right off catholics and orthodox alike.

This whole post is the Simpsons meme of dragging Homer up the mountain.

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Rocag said:

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What you describe isn't secularism. It's not even secular humanism. It's some strange creation of your own mind that you apparently insist others believe in despite the absolute absence of anyone claiming to actually believe those things. I'm sure it works from the religious framework you've built for yourself, but outside of that it's pure drivel. You can have your delusion, I'm not really interested in pretending it has anything to do with reality.

What I have described is not some strange drivel. This is pretty open and shut academic understanding of:

-What is secularism and where does it come from?
-How the world was ordered in the three major phases: Paganism, Christendom, Secularism

Would you like to offer an alternative version of history that answers these questions?

I further disagree with your first paragraph which basically boils down to all beliefs are religion. You've broadened the definition of religion so widely that it's almost unrecognizable. I find this to be a common tactic among Christians, though I'm not sure exactly why you think it benefits you. I've got to laugh at the insistence that politics must be downstream from religion. That's not really how it works in the real world, or do you think it's just a happy coincidence that so many people find a religion that just happens to perfectly mesh with their pre-existing political biases? Give me a political belief and I'll find you a religious justification for it.

Rocag, lets flip the tables for a bit. You got taken to task for that abortion of an argument you just gave on the sanctity of life. You give me your political beliefs and where your moral reasoning for those beliefs come from.

You can do this at home, don't even have to reply. Ask yourself, 'Why?' about any particular belief you have. You will very quickly, within one to three why's arrive at some version of a religious belief that is informing your politics.

'Why's' move your thinking up the causal chain. 'How's' move it down. Pretty straightforward that your religious beliefs inform your political belief. Because what even is a political belief? Its the 'how' of aligning your wills with government.

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Kind of like slavery. Now every Christian will call it a sin.

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I don't call it a sin. Stealing men and selling them into slavery is a sin, but slavery itself is not. I'm grateful that my ancestors entered into slavery so they could come to America. One of them was sold twice.

Zobel said:

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Christian teaching has always been clear for as long as we have it that abortions are impermissible and there's an overwhelming amount of affirmative evidence to this.

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So at what point is the U.S. not a Christian nation then? Because 30 states allow abortion, along with over half the population, some up to full term.

i think, using the definition i put out of "being a people who have Christianity as our common religious and moral framework" that isn't necessarily proof against it.

the government of the nation is not the nation. we could have been conquered and ruled by a godless atheist tyrant with a totally un-Christian state apparatus in 1850 and still have continued as a Christian nation. the nation is the people.

the point where the US ceases to be a Christian nation is when the people in it aren't predominantly Christians, and no longer have that as their common religious and moral framework. so, to your point, things aren't looking good. it is likely that unless things change, the US will cease to be what it once was, what it was at its founding, and become something different.

My apologies if you thought my intent there was to argue there were a bunch of Christians arguing in favor or exposure or abortion, that's not what I meant. I'm more interested here in the intersection of the political and religious ideas and how one takes precedence over the other, especially in governments that are or claim to be Christian. The America abortion example is relevant here because I think there is good historical evidence of different ideas within Christianity about the severity of the sin and furthermore how that translates into the legal aspect of it from a governmental standpoint. To reiterate, abortion as a major political and religious issue is a relatively modern thing in American politics even though it the practice has existed for thousands of years. The question is how did it so rapidly become what many consider the most important political topic or why wasn't it always? Politics informs religion just as much as the reverse.

Slavery is perhaps the more interesting example. Historically, there is plenty of differing opinions from influential Christians on if slavery was to be allowed. That's not even a controversial statement. Even if you wanted to limit this to the Catholic Church, it's still there. So modern claims or moral clarity on the issue from a religious perspective fall flat. The point is that there is far more to how a person's outlook is shaped than just religion. Politics and culture are often even stronger influence and they in turn affect how people view religion.

Zobel said:

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i think, using the definition i put out of "being a people who have Christianity as our common religious and moral framework" that isn't necessarily proof against it.

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Can you say a people who are 60% for abortion, 40% against have a common moral framework? Is it Christianity?

I think the Christian moral framework is much broader than abortion. I also think people can be deceived so that the basic teaching can be affirmed (ie sanctity of human life) while the perversion or lie is also affirmed (life in the womb is not sacred). But I would think it's an indicator of the problem.

Zobel said:

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I think the Christian moral framework is much broader than abortion. I also think people can be deceived so that the basic teaching can be affirmed (ie sanctity of human life) while the perversion or lie is also affirmed (life in the womb is not sacred). But I would think it's an indicator of the problem.

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Blasphemy? Working on Sunday? 62% think homosexuality is morally acceptable. 40% changing your gender. Would the church of the past identify us as a Christian nation?

There's a lot there and I'm not really interested in arguing it line by line. There are some interesting pieces in there that do make me question what is going on in your outlook.

For instance, the "devout satanists" bit. I wonder who exactly you're referring to there. It almost sounds like a reference to the Satanic Temple but with a vast misunderstanding of what they actually believe. They're nontheistic and don't actually believe in Satan or demons but they do characterize abortion as a religious rite. This is done for explicitly political reasons similar to people professing belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster to challenge the teaching of creationism.

Abortion existed long before the sexual revolution. And was actually probably more common than you would expect.

Breaking down all of history into Paganism, Christendom, and Secularism is not how any serious historian looks at it. Maybe that's how the Church wants to teach history, but I have no interest in that. History is far more varied and complex to fit into those three simple buckets.

Again, secularism is a question of how to structure governments. Specifically, in a nation in which citizens hold a wide variety of different religious views how can we best avoid the government itself from favoring one over another?

My moral and political views have not been a set thing throughout my life. They've evolved with my own life experiences and exposure to different ideas. For most people, whatever their family raised them to believe is probably one of the strongest influences. That could be religious in nature, but it doesn't have to be.

Remember, describing how people actually act (as reasons to believe they are acting correctly) is a low level moral claim. It is called descriptive ethics. You cannot take the sum total of descriptive claims and squeeze them into a claim about what should be done. Because moral truth is independent of the number of adherents to it. If 99% of people think that abortion is okay, that does not change the moral nature of the act, nor the moral truths about the sanctity of life that inform christian ethical opinions on abortion. The concept of surmising a moral framework that can answer for where the shoulds of this world come from is called normative ethics.

This thread has a lot of descriptive ethical reasoning. "America is polling 40-50%, or even 60-70% clearly in a non christian manner on topic X, ipso facto, america is not a christian country and should not have christian rules attached to its societally.'

Need to hold our horses here. Where does moral authority rest in law creation? Does a law's popularity have any bearing on if a law is good, or that it protects goodness? And this is the central play of democracy. Law creation in a democracy is a short circuit between the moral norms of its people and its government. But if the people are no longer moral, then law creation is neither. And other forms of government, like your traditional king can have higher highs and lower lows than democracy depending on how it holds out against or embraces the moral decay the people want.

And secondly, if we can clear this hurdle we have a different hurdle now. Christendom was fractured in 1054 and then again in 1500s and now a new denomination springs up every 3 months. (4 new denominations a year is a measurable fact). ' Christianity' can have any basically any opinion on any subject because anyone can call themselves christian now and join any group of thought. So there is this huge struggle within christianity to pull christians either A) back to historical authority structures like catholicism and orthodoxy or B) towards independent structures like evangelicalism.

Historically, what can be the only uniting factors here that can stop internal squabbling and create a temporary return to enforcing broad christian norms, ethics, and laws?

Invaders.

But america is so fractured, and has become a land of people who share no historical roots with america or christianity that there is nothing to gather around, and call a truce and lay down arms against one another and fight a common enemy.

So the only real place from here is civil war ultimately. If not in my lifetime it will be in my childrens. It will be a ragtag group of people who believe either A) america should be a european ETHNIC country or B) a Christian ETHIC country. Against a coalition that wants a we-are-the-world, secularized society alongside cultures who don't share european nor christian roots. So secularists and islamists and hindus. Strange bedfollows. And guess what happens to the secularists if their allies win? They lose the internal battle for power. The next iteration of america won't even give them what they're fighting Christians for because they can't see their secularized world as actually being connected to Christian society in the first place.

Rocag said:

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There's a lot there and I'm not really interested in arguing it line by line. There are some interesting pieces in there that do make me question what is going on in your outlook.

For instance, the "devout satanists" bit. I wonder who exactly you're referring to there. It almost sounds like a reference to the Satanic Temple but with a vast misunderstanding of what they actually believe. They're nontheistic and don't actually believe in Satan or demons but they do characterize abortion as a religious rite. This is done for explicitly political reasons similar to people professing belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster to challenge the teaching of creationism.

This is not reddit. There are real satanists out there. Here is the conversion story of one. He's performed thousands of abortions when he was a satanic high priest. You thinking every satanist is an edgy redditor and not someone who actually seeks out spiritual power is having your head in the sand. The spiritual realm is real, demons are real. They will provide you with knowledge, power and wealth in exchange for doing what they want (the destruction of man).



Abortion existed long before the sexual revolution. And was actually probably more common than you would expect.

Breaking down all of history into Paganism, Christendom, and Secularism is not how any serious historian looks at it. Maybe that's how the Church wants to teach history, but I have no interest in that. History is far more varied and complex to fit into those three simple buckets.

You undersell just how radical Christianity has changed this world. Dominion by Tom Holland is the exact serious historian that you think scoffs at christian history, but here's his book showing just how incredible Christ was/is and how it completely changed the world from a pagan society to a christian one. He's was a pretty hardlined atheist before researching this book.

Dominion by Tom Holland
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dominio-tom-holland/1139397222?ean=9788417743512

Again, secularism is a question of how to structure governments. Specifically, in a nation in which citizens hold a wide variety of different religious views how can we best avoid the government itself from favoring one over another?

It is not merely a structure of government. You know this. I've explained to you the historical reasoning why secularism came about and that it came about from Christendom splintering and europeans deciding to kill each other over it. Secularism is just christian ethics with God removed. It worked for a few centuries because everyone could agree they were reading the Christian God as animating the moral framework behind whatever secular document they agreed upon. It is falling apart partially because the west has opened itself up to cultures that do not read the Christian God into american governing documents. The Bill of Rights is not a hindu document. You can't get hindus to agree all men are created equal because A) They believe in castes that are purposefully unequal punishments they are due from their previous lives and B) they don't have Christ incarnating as man proving that humans form is God's form and to be revered and all considered equal. (This is also an important distinction that rabbinic judiasm and islam also do not affirm all men are created equal.)

My moral and political views have not been a set thing throughout my life. They've evolved with my own life experiences and exposure to different ideas. For most people, whatever their family raised them to believe is probably one of the strongest influences. That could be religious in nature, but it doesn't have to be.

Okay so you're already admitting that your political believes are subservient to your life experiences and family values. Are you not making my point? Inside Rocag is a very very tiny black box that produces moral opinions. They flow outwards as political actions. Where did that black box come from? What informs it?

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