“Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilisation. To this day, we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”
- Jürgen Habermas (atheist philosopher)
4 comments:
"Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an auonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct heir of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk."
Your misquote rewrites Habermas's statement and changes its meaning.
And obviously Habermas says that there is no alternative to this legacy ("Erbe" in German) - not that we have no alternative to Christianity.
Before reading Gorth's comments, I assumed he had meant "we have no other options" to be a swipe at the practice of Christianity stifling all opposition, or that all new ideas must first be passed through the Christian litmus test (and eventually filter) for approval.
I expect that quote is out of context, but even if not, his "opinion" changes nothing.
Human morality has been proven to be the result of evolutionary behaviour.
We live in societies and so killing each other, stealing, raping and so on harm our survival. Helping others means there is a good chance others will help us and this aids survival.
Christian and religious morality corrupts evolved morality, harming survival. It causes (amongst other things) division and hatred, delusion and ignorance and these harm survival. A quick look at the modern world as well as history demonstrate this quite clearly.
From this we can only find one conclusion. Evolved morality is good for humanity, Christian morality is very bad for humanity indeed.
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