Over at Glenn’s place, Mark Tapscott makes an excellent point, [1] posted here in its entirety because a clip simply isn’t going to do it.
Here’s a fact about Paul the Apostle that is not often discussed. For decades during his four missionary trips around the ancient world, he was in constant danger, often impoverished, whipped several times, run out of town at least twice, sick, trapped and nearly killed by rioters, scorned by the intellectual and political elite of his day, and often hungry.
Despite it all, he never stopped claiming that he had seen and talked to the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, or that the encounter changed him from determined persecutor of Christians into their greatest missionary.
If he was a liar, he was one of the most determined in history. To dismiss him as deluded is speculative. What we cannot do is ignore him or his message because without him, it’s difficult to see the development of western civilization generally and the American constitutional perspective on government and individual liberty specifically.
Well look, I’ve been saying for years now, that America would never have been founded absent the judeo-christian ethic.
Every great culture in history has had a religion at its philosophical center. Every single one. Yet, notice please that none of the other major religions have the emphasis on the value of the individual. Islam, the pantheistic religions, atheism, none of them teach about the value of the individual, a concept which was passed down from St Paul to Martin Luther, about whom I said years ago…
As I have said elsewhere, Luther’s biggest contribution to the Catholic church, and ultimately to the world, was the concept that he opened the Bible and the understanding of it up to the average parishioner. Most of the people of that day who called themselves Christian, really didn’t understand the religion they claimed as their own. That’s because the majority of them couldn’t read, And even if they read English, they couldn’t read Latin, and were therefore utterly dependent on what the priest told them the book said.
So it was, that up until the time that the printing press came along, that intimate understanding, that study, was pretty much limited to the clergy, and even there, to the upper levels thereof. I’m willing to bet that’s the case in Islam… who steadfastly refuses, for example, to provide education for it’s women.Along comes Luther with his printing press, who teaches them how to read the Bible for themselves, and gain the needed understanding of it… who tells them that a personal relationship with God is necessary, and with that personal understanding comes the reform of tolerance, which over hundreds more years becomes the church we know today.
In the end it’s these teachings that our founders drew the concept of individual freedom from. Individual responsibility. The value of the individual.
So, yes, Mark, spot on.