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From: tmh@ihldt.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: re: Paul Dubuc's article
Message-ID: <1860@ihldt.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 11-Aug-83 13:14:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihldt.1860
Posted: Thu Aug 11 13:14:35 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Aug-83 19:35:16 EDT
Organization: BTL Naperville, Il.
Lines: 106


    I felt a need to reply to Paul Dubuc's rather long
article.  He seems to assume that our goverment has been
Christian in nature and based on Biblical guidance, well
that's BS.  Our goverment has virtually never based its
actions on Biblical stuff unless you want to take the
Bibilcal examples of the Romans toward the early
Christians with our government being Rome.  In fact our
government has always used the seperation of church and
state to its advantage so that it doesn't have to follow
the Christian mores and laws in its dealings with
others.  As an example take the goverments treatment of
the American Indian (there isn't a trace of Christianity
in any of that).
   Furthermore most of the mores we hold true are not
Biblical in origin, but Hellenistic.  If you write
enough words about people and their actions you can
prove anything and there are certainly enough words in
the Bible to do that and enough contadictions.  Yet the
true origin of Christianity as a mass religion is in
Greece not in Judea, which if you have studied early
church history is where the Apostles based themselves
after fleeing Judea.  (You should also remember that
Greek is the Ligua Franca of the Eastern Half of the
Roman Empire).  In fact Paul is a Greek.  I digress, at
any rate the early Christians being in a large part
Greek brought with them their own concept of how people
should act and imprinted it upon their new religion and
it fitted very well with the teachings of Christ (who
being raised in a Hellenistic envirionment would no
doubt have been influenced by Greek teachings).  This in
fact was one of the things  that helped the new religion
flourish, since the mythos that surrounded the Pantheon
(of the Greeks and Romans) did not match or support the
current mores and behaviors of the people (especially
the lower classes) who worshiped it (the Romans in the
several hundred years before Christ had also been
heavily Hellenized as most of their teachers were Greek
born).  Some small evidence of this is that the mores
expressed in the surviving works of the Athenian Dramtic
Festival written five hundred years before Christ fit in
pretty well with our own mores and behaviors, while the
mores associated with Muhammadanism (which is based on
Judism same as Christianity) don't jive with ours. 
In fact there is a great descrepancy between the God of
the Old Testament and the God of New Testament.  In the
Old Testament God is vengful and prompt to punish vis
40ty years in the desert for one gold cow or Sodum and
Gommorah or wiping out the Egyptian army, while in the
New Testament he virtually never does anything that
kills people or causes them to suffer.  Christ in fact
preaches an almost entirely different personality for
God the Father than the Old Testiment.
    Also the mores that people take as self evident and
use to guide their lives are not by in large a product
of religion, but of what their peers see as aceptable.
If you take a random group of American Atheists and
comapre their actions to a random group of American
Christians I'll bet you see the same amount of crooks
among the Christians as among the Athiests.  Atheism
does not mean that a person has no morals, it only means
that he doesn't belive in a God.  There is a good
portion of the world that is non-Christian yet they
still have morals.  Granted in many cases things that
Christianity condems are acceptable in these other
cultures, but there are things in Christianity that
Christians do that are condemed by them (i.e. Christians
can eat beef which a Hindu feels is wrong). 
Christianity cannot in fact be defined as a very good
guiding principle since it is in fact subject to so wide
an interpretation, as seen in the amount of schisms from
the Orthodox Church (the original Christian Church) to
Catholicism to Protestantism to Mormonism.  It has
always in fact relied on the culture surrounding it to
guide it's views of right and wrong.  Religions in
general have always been willing to bend their laws to
that of the government.  Examples are the removal of
permissable bygamy in the Mormon church so Utah could
become a state, the dispensations during wartime granted
by the Jewish and Catholic religions on food i.e. Jewish
soldiers were allowed to eat pork and Catholic soldiers
were allowed to eat meat on Fridays.  An aside to Paul
what I am trying to say here is that while you may feel
that you government parellels your views as a Christian
are you sure that it is not the other way around?
    I have always felt that Marxism (as proposed not as
practiced) parallels Christianity.  The object of
Marxism being that the individual give of himself, for
the good of the whole, without thought of compensation
other than what he needs.  This means that the Computer
Programmer and the Janitor should be paid the same wage
for what they do and in fact someone who can't work
should be paid the same wage as well.  Sort of like the
government collects the Net National Product and divides
it equally among its citizens.  Everyone in the country
would have the same amount of money there would be no
rich or poor i.e. only one class.  I don't know how this
seems to you, but it seems a very Christian concept to me. 
In fact it would be a great basis for a Theocracy.
Of course it is highly impractical and the current
socialist governments don't implement anything of the
sort.

				Well that's all folks,
					Tom Harris
					Bell Labs, Naperville
					ihldt!tmh