Youth Violence = Deprived OF Christian Values = Aggressive Secularism.

[DeaconS]

Premise 1:

A history check will show what societies were like before christianity, Roman society entertainment of gladiators and people being fed to wild beasts for example and all societies before the Christianity you will find very inhumane and barbaric lifestyles.

Support for Premise 1:

The Moral World Before Christianity

For centuries pagan societies have tried to lift themselves up to this God or Gods and put themselves in there place.

That's another thing what makes Christianity so unique, man does not go up to God, but that God comes down to man. He reveals himself, slowly through the prophets of the old testament and fully revealing himself in Christ.

Premise 2:

Part 1) The whole western society was built on christian values which is rapidly being torn away by aggressive secularism.

Support for premise 2 - Part 1:

a) Well, it is not debatable that western society was built on Christian values. That is a given.

b) Take Iceland not respecting Christian values of respecting life and dignity of life:

(I)Where there is an epidemic of depression

(II) and humanity is treated as disposable such as there are no more down syndrome children because they're all aborted.

(III) and lastly the elderly or lame are euthanized.

Part 2) Look at all the violence and evil acts committed a) by our youth today and b) the many millions of people killed by atheistic communism, when we deprive them from our Christian values on respecting life and the dignity of life.

Support for premise 2 - Part 2:

a) Well the violence, crime and killings being done by teenagers.

b) many millions of people were massacred in atheistic communists societies were there was a ban on religion, old Soviet union for one example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist%E ... st_atheism

Conclusion:

Thus, Christian values of respecting life and dignity of life are the common denominators in both premises. Christian values were not even there in the barbaric practices of pagan societies and with ever-increasing secularization today, Christian values are down going and crime going up.

[Nick_A]

DeaconS

Thus, Christian values of respecting life and dignity of life are the common denominators in both premises. Christian values were not even there in the barbaric practices of pagan societies and with ever-increasing secularization today, Christian values are down going and crime going up.

As the attractions of secularism increase, Christian values become associated with weakness and escapism. Of course this isn't true. Worldly values such as wealth, power, pleasure, revenge, fame, vanity and status offer the alternative to weakness and escapism in the minds of the young. Secularism by definition denies the connection of Man's being with its source. Without this connection, Man and society becomes the source. Under these circumstances only prestige becomes important and worldly values offer the means for acquiring prestige.

My question to you is what would you say to an eighteen year old who sincerely asks why not fight for worldly values for the sake of prestige? Why be weak and practice escapism when the wold offers so much?

This isn't a gotcha question. I am convinced many adults calling themselves Christian are incapable of answering this question in a way that satisfies the inner needs of a young person.

[-1-]

My question to you is what would you say to an eighteen year old who sincerely asks why not fight for worldly values for the sake of prestige? Why be weak and practice escapism when the wold offers so much?

This isn't a gotcha question. I am convinced many adults calling themselves Christian are incapable of answering this question in a way that satisfies the inner needs of a young person.

I don't get this, Nick_A. You are demanding to answer a question not with the TRUTH, but with what will satisfy the inner needs of a young person.

Isn't this an example of... whatchamacallit... in-doctrina-shon? selling false knowledge on the expense of truth.

You've sank to an all-time low of elaborate self-contradiction and reflexive vindication.

[Nick_A]

My question to you is what would you say to an eighteen year old who sincerely asks why not fight for worldly values for the sake of prestige? Why be weak and practice escapism when the wold offers so much?

This isn't a gotcha question. I am convinced many adults calling themselves Christian are incapable of answering this question in a way that satisfies the inner needs of a young person.

I don't get this, Nick_A. You are demanding to answer a question not with the TRUTH, but with what will satisfy the inner needs of a young person.

Isn't this an example of... whatchamacallit... in-doctrina-shon? selling false knowledge on the expense of truth.

You've sank to an all-time low of elaborate self-contradiction and reflexive vindication.

The inner needs of the young are only satisfied with the truth. A person becomes inwardly disappointed when they have experienced that worldly pursuits still leave a hole in the heart so to speak. It cannot be covered up with masks, drugs, video games, rap, violence and other methods for hiding the self. When the truth is experienced it has an entirely different effect impossible to explain. If you can feel what Simone Weil offers in the following you will understand what I am referring to

"To believe in God is not a decision we can make. All we can do is decide not to give our love to false gods. In the first place, we can decide not to believe that the future contains for us an all-sufficient good. The future is made of the same stuff as the present....

"...It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him."
-- Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©

[Greta]

Indeed, boys are much more quiet and manageable after priests have given them some "loving religious discipline", demonstrating to them how the holy spirit penetrates us all.

As things stand, Christian values have never been more promoted or in the public eye. Theists every day are shouting for their values to be heard - those being:

- no Muslims
- no fags
- no abortionists
- no women's libbers.

So the Christian values that are BY FAR the most talked about and worried about are now well-embedded in the public psyche. The church's message is being hear loud and clear by all - and the result is for all to see. If you preach hate, you foster hate.

The situation would be very different if churches actually spoke about the values of Jesus - love for one another, kindness, mercy, helping the poor etc - instead of their patriarchal fetishes.

[Skip]

Something I wonder about:
Why do Christians so much more frequently quote the Old Testament, with special emphasis on the ten commandments, that they do the New testament, wherein their professed savior said "I give you a new commandment"; and for that matter, why, if they do quote the New Testament, it's from the correspondence of Paul, who wasn't there, or the fever dreams of John, who wasn't anywhere, rather than the books chronicling the vaunted central figure and foundation of their faith?

As to violent youth, Muslim extremists know the same solution Christian extremists have always known: send them on a hopeless crusade.

[Nick_A]

Four Christian values:

Belief in God
Respect all people
Be humble
Be honest


Greta’s interpretation of Christian values

-no Muslims
- no fags
- no abortionists
- no women's libbers.

The results of progressive education.

[Skip]

Judge ye them by the deeds that they do, not by the words of their mouth.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

The OP must be satirical
Christianity has been a violent, terrorist organisation since its inception. Christians of the ancient world make modern-day muslim 'extremists' look like gentle secularists. No parent in their right mind wants their children to grow up with ''christian values''.
I'm assuming the writer of the OP is American, judging by the illiteracy, so I will use, as one example of youth brought up with christian values, the fact that the US prison population is made up of mostly christians (and they are probably the more likable examples of American christian values at work).


''Christians became known as those “who move that which should not be moved.” Their appeal to have-nots at the bottom of the pile, both free and unfree, meant that bishops had a citizen-army of pumped-up, undereducated young men ready to rid the world of sin. Enter the parabalini, sometime stretcher-bearers, sometime assassins, who viciously flayed alive the brilliant Alexandrian mathematician and pagan philosopher Hypatia. Or the circumcellions (feared even by other Christians), who invented a kind of chemical weapon using caustic lime soda and vinegar so they could carry out acid attacks on priests who didn’t share their beliefs.

In Harran, the locals refused to convert. They were dismembered, their limbs hung along the town’s main street. In Alexandria, zealots pulled the elderly philosopher-mathematician Hypatia from her chariot and flayed her to death with shards of broken pottery. Not long before, their fellow Christians had invaded the city’s greatest temple and razed it—smashing its world-famous statues and destroying all that was left of Alexandria’s Great Library.
Today, we refer to Christianity’s conquest of the West as a “triumph.” But this victory entailed an orgy of destruction in which Jesus’s followers attacked and suppressed classical culture, helping to pitch Western civilization into a thousand-year-long decline. Just one percent of Latin literature would survive the purge; countless antiquities, artworks, and ancient traditions were lost forever.

Evidence of early Christians’ campaign of terror has been hiding in plain sight: in the palimpsests and shattered statues proudly displayed in churches and museums the world over. In The Darkening Age, Nixey resurrects this lost history, offering a wrenching account of the rise of Christianity and its terrible cost.

In short, Christianity caused the “Dark Ages” by systematically destroying the classical world. Driven by a hatred of science, Christians burned down the Great Library of Alexandria, and they brutally murdered the revered philosopher and scientist Hypatia of Alexandria.''

[Arising_uk]

Premise 1:

A history check will show what societies were like before christianity, Roman society entertainment of gladiators and people being fed to wild beasts for example and all societies before the Christianity you will find very inhumane and barbaric lifestyles. …

Still, they had baths long before the smelly Christians and nice roads.

[Sir-Sister-of-Suck]

A history check will show what societies were like before christianity, Roman society entertainment of gladiators and people being fed to wild beasts for example and all societies before the Christianity you will find very inhumane and barbaric lifestyles

It wasn't secularism, though. Even at face value, your desire to brush this all under 'secularism' makes little sense, because the Romans still had their own religion. What makes your behavior ironic, is that this is actually a tactic these Romans would use themselves. They didn't even want Christianity to be considered anywhere in the same ball-park as what they believed, so they apparently classified it as a form of 'atheism' to deflect any relation.

In the wake of the Republic's collapse, state religion had adapted to support the new regime of the emperors. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, justified the novelty of one-man rule with a vast program of religious revivalism and reform. Public vows formerly made for the security of the republic now were directed at the well-being of the emperor. So-called "emperor worship" expanded on a grand scale the traditional Roman veneration of the ancestral dead and of the Genius, the divine tutelary of every individual. The Imperial cult became one of the major ways in which Rome advertised its presence in the provinces and cultivated shared cultural identity and loyalty throughout the Empire. Rejection of the state religion was tantamount to treason. This was the context for Rome's conflict with Christianity, which Romans variously regarded as a form of atheism and novel superstitio. Ultimately, Roman polytheism was brought to an end with the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the empire.

That's another thing what makes Christianity so unique, man does not go up to God, but that God comes down to man. He reveals himself, slowly through the prophets of the old testament and fully revealing himself in Christ.

I think you need to expand what you mean by this. I'm pretty sure you can literally look at any of the Judaeo-Christian religions, and they all have that concept in common. In fact it's after that point that they mostly start to diverge from each other.

Premise 2:

Part 1) The whole western society was built on christian values which is rapidly being torn away by aggressive secularism.

Christians values that had already been filtered through by the age of enlightenment, thanks to 'secular' reformation. If Christianity had remained more aligned with the catholic church, I think we can both agree the western society we see today would have been a very different place.

What mainly irks me about this line of thinking, is that one there's no real evidence given to this idea that an irreligious state would lead to moral decay. Its usually just based on what we have currently, and the fact that it's generally good; That's not at all to say our society would be any worse without religion. While you do go on to list off some things that would probably be different like our views on euthanasia and abortion, those are just things which are more or less only bad because of christian beliefs, so they're not good examples.

That, and we could replace Christianity with another conservative religion like 'Judaism' and that would have resulted in a very similar western culture. I grant you that I would not want to live in an America that was raised under Catholic or Islamic tenets, though.

I think other people have given a sufficient response to the 'communist' thing. If your goal was to show that an ideology which has been involved in violence in the past is barbaric, I think there's an elephant for Christianity you should have addressed right off the bat.

Thus, Christian values of respecting life and dignity of life are the common denominators in both premises. Christian values were not even there in the barbaric practices of pagan societies and with ever-increasing secularization today, Christian values are down going and crime going up.

Your argument is fundamentally flawed, because we can't assume that christian values are right in order to show how christian values are right, as I think you were attempting to do in Premise 2: Part 1 b)

[Sir-Sister-of-Suck]

Christians of the ancient world make modern-day muslim 'extremists' look like gentle secularists.

No.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Christians of the ancient world make modern-day muslim 'extremists' look like gentle secularists.

No.

Yes.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

''Because it is written in the Gospel of John that Jesus had told Peter to put down his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane (John 18:11), the Circumcellions avoided bladed weapons and used clubs, which they called "Israelites". Using their "Israelites", the Circumcellions would attack random travelers on the road, while shouting "Laudate Deum!"The object of these random beatings was to provoke the victim to kill them, thereby becoming "martyrs".''

Idiots then, and idiots now.

[Sir-Sister-of-Suck]

Christians of the ancient world make modern-day muslim 'extremists' look like gentle secularists.

No.

Yes.

If you're trying to say that the average christian was as bad as a terrorist (if that's what you mean by an 'extremist') then still no. There is no point in history where the collective of any religion has never been as bad as ISIS. Posting a bible verse describing a group that were themselves considered extremists at the time, does not do that.

But maybe I misunderstood what you meant by an 'extremist'. You know how I misunderstand you, like, all the time.