Agnostic75 said:
You are talking about achievements, but what about motives, and desires? What I mean is that today, many non-Christians have the motives, and the desires, to accomplish things not only equal to what some Christians have accomplished, but much greater things. Many Olympic athletes who win gold medals have less desire than other athletes who have less physical abilities.
1robin said:
Motives are only as reliable as the persons claims. They claimed to be doing their Christian duty. Lincoln and John Brown went on and on about it. Modern society can't even decide what wrong actually is many times much less die for it. I am a veteran and many soldiers are there for reasons that have nothing to do with morality or gain for others. I am not complaining about modern soldiers but we do not have to live on green corn and march for 500 hundred miles with no shoes and stand in lines and kill each other for hours at a time. They were of a different sort back then.
But what of moral importance has any Christian done that no non-Christian would have done if they had had the opportunity, and the means to do so?
I am talking about individual non-Christians, not groups of non-Christians. It doesn't make any difference how many Christians were willing to give their lives as long as just one non-Christian would have done the same thing if they had had the opportunity, and the means to do so. Every day, many non-Christians give their lives for causes that they believe in.
You did the same thing regarding homosexuality when you said that all homosexuals should practice abstinence. Some homosexuals are exceptionally committed to monogamy, and have been monogamous for over 20 years. Similarly, some non-Christians are exceptionally committed to serving in the military, or to being philanthropists, or to being kind, loving, and forgiving.
If a God did not inspire the Bible, then the reasons why Christians have accomplished a lot of good things can be explained by entirely secular factors.
If Christianity had not come along, sooner or later, slaves would have been freed, and women would have been considered to be equal to men. That is easy to justify since, for example, Hammurabi's Code was remarkable for its time period, and since
Buddha gave the world a version of the Golden Rule centuries before Christ. The writers of the New Testament merely improved upon already existing advances in morality, and of course, they never said anything about freeing slaves.
Wikipedia says:
"Slavery in China has taken various forms throughout history. Never as pronounced as the
American or
Arab models, Chinese slavery still often viewed its objects as 'half-man, half-object.' Slavery was repeatedly abolished as a legally-recognized institution, including in a 1909 law fully enacted in 1910, although the practice continued until at least 1949."
So slave owners in ancient China treated their slaves better than early Americans, or early Arabs did.
For all we know, the first man who was willing to give his life to free slaves was not a Christian. In fact, it might be probable that that was the case.