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Originally Posted by cyrnel
Eh? Greek democracies (ala polis) date from ~500BC. These are the ones we know about.
Arguments about all society's good originating with Christianity remind me of Chekov. "Everything was invented in Russia!"
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First, I never said all of society's goods originating with Christianity. That would be an absurd claim, and I try not to make absurd claims. Second, there is a huge difference between the Greek democracies and modern democracies, the first being that the Greek democracies weren't democracies. They were oligarchies; rule by a single class (land-owning males) over the others. This, in itself, doesn't save my claim. After all, many modern democracies started out the same way. But another difference is in the rhetoric. From the beginning, modern democracies proclaimed the rights of all people, and this led relatively quickly to all people having, at least on paper, the same right. Think about it this way -- in the US, it only took 150 years for all citizens to have the vote (again, at least on paper), and only 200 for more or less equal rights for all to be inaugurated. Not only did this never happen in a Greek 'democracy', there was nowhere even the slightest hint from
any side that slaves or women should have the vote. That's a huge difference. At the beginning of modern democracy, it may have been unequal, but there was a nascent equality in principle that has led towards an increasing recognition of 'human rights'. And this equality in principle of all people comes from scripture, and, I'm maintaining, nowhere else.
Why nowhere else? Well, it's really pretty obvious that the statement "all people are equal" is false, or at best meaningless. Are you as good as me at math? Am I as good as you at singing? And how would we ever add up all these things, properly weighted, to find that we are, at the end of it, equal? But Christianity teaches that "In Christ there is no slave nor free, no male nor female [...] for all are one in Christ Jesus."