Are modern values Christian in origin?

[Haven]

On another thread, historia wrote:

..... That much I understood. And I appreciate the fact that you don't care that you are judging Christianity according to values that you ultimately inherited from Christianity itself. Feelings don't need to be rational. ....

Debate question: Are modern ethical values (right to life and liberty, equality under the law, bodily autonomy, fairness, helping those less fortunate) a product of Christianity, or do they have a secular basis?

[2ndpillar2]

On another thread, historia wrote:

..... That much I understood. And I appreciate the fact that you don't care that you are judging Christianity according to values that you ultimately inherited from Christianity itself. Feelings don't need to be rational. ....

Debate question: Are modern ethical values (right to life and liberty, equality under the law, bodily autonomy, fairness, helping those less fortunate) a product of Christianity, or do they have a secular basis?

The crux of the law is do unto others as you would have them do to you. That is the same message that can be culled from Hindus, Jews, Zorroasters, Buddhist and Confucianism. Secularist, along with progressive "Christian" tares, make their own rules, which includes theft (forced socialism) and murder (abortion/body autonomy). While many secularist self abort, commit suicide, that portion is much less than the abortion of 60 million innocents in the U.S. since 1973.

[1213]

People, especially leaders, seem to be quite evil nowadays, if they have some values, they seem to be opposite of what God said is good.

Trump and Putin certainly fit the bill, but it is unreasonable to tar all leaders with the same brush.

In my opinion the other leaders are eviller, because they seem to be more against freedom and rights of people. By what i see, Trump and Putin seek peace and the other leaders seek war and incite hate and violence.

[Haven]

First, I would like to ask, we agree that the values come from someone’s teachings and are not automatically instantly right after person is born?

It's not that simple. Values are, of course, strongly influenced by training, but there is strong evidence that at least some are inborn (1, 2). Furthermore, we know that people with high levels of psychopathy are incapable of understanding or applying moral rules (3), implying that moral values have some root in biology. This is not to discount the important role of upbringing. Both nature and nurture matter when it comes to morality.

(1) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10 ... 08.00072.x
(2) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/artic ... ne.0025148
(3) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380- ... sychopathy.

Because values seem to be taught, not automatically adopted, there must be some first person who gave the teachings. ...

Even assuming a value set that is 100% taught and learned, it would still not imply a "first person." Values arise in a communal setting, spontaneously, through discourse and association. There wouldn't be one person inventing all values and then teaching those values to everyone else, with no input from them. Instead, values would arise spontaneously at the human (or human-like, really any highly intelligent animal) communal level, and would be based on principles that aid group cooperation and ultimately survival.

And, if we agree that humans don’t have them automatically, the source must be someone else.

This is not self-evident, especially considering the fact that values are communally generated. You must provide evidence of this being true.

Because the values are written in the Bible, and the credit is given to God, not to man, I think it is logical to believe that God is ultimately the source. If they would come from a man, that man would demand recognition of his sayings. Humans don’t give credit for their own achievements to others. If you disagree with that, please show one example.

How is it logical? Do you have any evidence that the Bible's values were invented by a god? Is there any evidence that they predate all other sets of values? Is there any evidence that the Bible is even reliably true?

Also, perhaps it is wrong to say modern people have any good values left. People, especially leaders, seem to be quite evil nowadays, if they have some values, they seem to be opposite of what God said is good.

Do you have any evidence of this? Crime (4), sexual assault, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, speciesism, and bullying have all decreased in the last 50 years.

(4) https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ne/477408/

[brunumb]

Crime (4), sexual assault, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, speciesism, and bullying have all decreased in the last 50 years.

I wonder if that correlates with the decline of Christianity in many places?

[Haven]

I wonder if that correlates with the decline of Christianity in many places?

It does. Of course, correlation is not equivalent to causation.

[1213]

…Furthermore, we know that people with high levels of psychopathy are incapable of understanding or applying moral rules…

I don’t believe that the are incapable of that, if they are able to understand other logical things.

How is it logical? Do you have any evidence that the Bible's values were invented by a god? Is there any evidence that they predate all other sets of values? Is there any evidence that the Bible is even reliably true?

Evidence for God to invent them is the Bible. If Bible says for example it is good to love your neighbor as yourself, what do you think would be evidence for that it is reliably true?

I think in any case those are matters of belief. There is no way to prove anything that happened in history.

Do you have any evidence of this? Crime (4), sexual assault, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, speciesism, and bullying have all decreased in the last 50 years.

Unfortunately, I don’t see that to be true. It is difficult to believe bullying has decreased, if we look for example the BLM riots. But, I meant especially world leaders in my last post. And what is perhaps the saddest thing is that big countries bully smaller to obey them, for example what USA has done in Syria and Libya. Also, China seems to do the same and also leading European countries. And then there is those social media companies and the cancel-mob that are against certain people. It seems to me that totalitarianism is rising fast, as for example the dealing with Covid shows. World leaders are against freedom and rights of the people, and I think that is very evil.

[historia]

Are modern ethical values (right to life and liberty, equality under the law, bodily autonomy, fairness, helping those less fortunate) a product of Christianity, or do they have a secular basis?

This possess a false dichotomy, as modern values can derive from multiple sources.

But, for an entertaining treatment of this topic, consider Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (2019), by the popular historian Tom Holland (himself an atheist).

The dusk jacket summarizes his essential thesis neatly:

Today, the West is utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. Close-up, the division between a skeptic and a believer may seem unbridgeable. Widen the focus, though, and Christianity's enduring impact can be seen in the emergence of much that has been cast as its nemesis: science, secularism, and even atheism. Christianity is the principle reason why, today, we think it nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering; why we assume every human life to be of equal value.

Some other provocative points from pg. 496 & 538, respectively:

That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident a truth. A Roman would have laughed at it.

To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth.

The origins of this principle -- as Neitzsche had so contemptuously pointed out -- lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.

The primary dogma of humanism -- "that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others" -- found no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated. The wellspring of humanist values lay not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history.

Indeed, one of the more vivid ways to see how clearly Christianity has influenced Western society is to look at the writings of Neitzsche and especially his later Nazi admirers, like Himmler, as they explicitly wanted to reject Christian morality, with its concern for the weak and oppressed, and replace it with an older, pre-Christian ethic that favored the powerful -- killing millions of people as a direct result.

At the end of the book (pgs. 541-42), Holland observers:

Crucifixion was not merely a punishment. It was a means to achieving dominance: a dominance felt as a dread in the guts of the subdued. Terror of power was the index of power. That was how it had always been, and always would be. It was the way of the world.

For two thousand years, though, Christians have disputed this.

Many of them, over the course of this time, have themselves become agents of terror. They have put the weak in their shadow; they have brought suffering, and persecution, and slavery in their wake.

Yet the standards by which they stand condemned for this are themselves Christian; nor, even if churches across the West continue to empty, does it seem likely that these standards will quickly change.

"God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong" (1 Cor. 1:27). This is the myth that we in the West still persist in clinging to. Christendom, in that sense, remains Christendom still.

[Athetotheist]

That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident a truth. A Roman would have laughed at it.

A Buddhist wouldn't have laughed at it. A Taoist wouldn't have laughed at it. Thus, Holland's depiction of Christianity as uniquely noble is a hasty generalization made from an inadequate number of instances.

[2ndpillar2]

On another thread, historia wrote:

..... That much I understood. And I appreciate the fact that you don't care that you are judging Christianity according to values that you ultimately inherited from Christianity itself. Feelings don't need to be rational. ....

Debate question: Are modern ethical values (right to life and liberty, equality under the law, bodily autonomy, fairness, helping those less fortunate) a product of Christianity, or do they have a secular basis?

The "fairness"/equity doctrine is new age secular. The American doctrine is equality under the law. The "helping those less fortunate", as in taking from Peter to give Paul, is a godless Marxist strategy. Helping one's neighbors is a message from Yeshua, and is found throughout international religions. The "bodily autonomy" doctrine is a recent secular platform, which sacrifices the innocent for the pleasures of the immoral. It ends in destruction as was the burning of children to Bel by the Jews.

[Athetotheist]

The "helping those less fortunate", as in taking from Peter to give Paul, is a godless Marxist strategy.

The economic program laid out in Acts 4:32-35 is clearly geared for "helping those less fortunate". The Christian apostles don't seem to have minded that it was Marxist [long before Marx], and since they were the ones running it, it could hardly be defined as godless.