No, this bit is beyond parody - and a Godwin!

Wow. Just wow.

Reason is not a "concept" to be "given". Reason is reason. Evidence is evidence. One plus one is two. I'd say the same about morality - it's not a concept invented by religions and philosophers but a human truth (of which the specifics can be debated). That's a whole other question. But reason? And The Bible??

The whole argument of The Bible is that there's something noble and moral in believing without reason - having faith - and you will be rewarded by going to heaven. Religion is the antithesis of reason. And if I'm stating the obvious, that's an index of how stupid Mel Phillips is.

In fact, religion is immoral, if you want to put it that way.

The highest level of moral decision making is that which derives from principle. The lowest is simple obedience to avoid punishment. Which does the old testament tell us is God's way?

In fact a lot of christians will tell you that god sets out the principles by which we should make moral decisions, but this is only partly true, done by Jesus (who presumably isn't a big hero of Mel's) and done in the form of allusion and parable. The ten commandments and the necessity for blind obedience also still remain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg

'It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible that gave us our concepts of reason, progress and an orderly world-the foundations of science and modernity.'

Many prominent scientists and thinkers in Europe were of course, christian - Newton and Darwin amongst them - but scientific and intellectual development in Christian Europe only took off when they re-discovered the achievements of pagan Greece and Rome, and drew on the advances in Asia, principally but not exclusively the Muslim world. Reason, progress and 'an orderly world' were hard to detect during the centuries of the church's unchallenged power from the 5-15th centureis.

I'd be careful with throwing that one around fella, while never a certified atheist, Darwin certainly was not a Christian by the time he had published anything of note.

There are many renowned agnostics and atheists who were once religious, Richard Dawkins used to be a believer, and I'm fairly sure no one would ever call him a Christian by merit of it being something he once was.

'I'd be careful with throwing that one around fella, while never a certified atheist, Darwin certainly was not a Christian by the time he had published anything of note.'

Right, you've totally missed my point here, which wasn't a debate over Darwin's personal beliefs but an acknowledgment of the fact that many prominent scientists were christian; this is hardly surprising in Europe before the 19th century, but their achivements can't be attributed to a generic 'christianity' since this background had produced very little progress before 1500.

You don't suppose that could be down to the Renaissance, Reformation and Age of Reason?

Another reason to be careful of asserting people's Christianity in previous eras is that most people had no choice than to profess their Christianity, given the dire consequences if one was thought to be atheist. To pick just one example, Shelley was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 for daring to write and have published the treatese The Necessity of Atheism.

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"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
Voltaire

'You don't suppose that could be down to the Renaissance, Reformation and Age of Reason?'

Almost certainly.

'Another reason to be careful of asserting people's Christianity in previous eras is that most people had no choice than to profess their Christianity'

Of course, but what i'm trying to do here is to anticipate the argument that religious apologists would make to support their claims that scientific progress is a consequence of faith. It's easy to find scientists who were believers, including those who were enemies of the established Church, but there's no evidence that their faith produced their achievements.

I've never seen that argument made - have you?

Here, for example, particularly in the section about the Earth and Sun:

http://www.bede.org.uk/sciencehistory.htm

Only by Mad Mel. I dare say Hitchens would sign up to it too, but that would be no surpise.

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

Well, Hitchens lacks original ideas, he merely parrots already-existing right-wing memes, and his aplogies for religion have been made before by far better writers. This was something I noticed after his 'anti-depressants cause spree killing' claim, which I'd never heard of before the events in cumbria, but after doing a little research found out was a common claim in the US where it was linked to the gun lobby. I've had the misfortune to read a fair whack of his The Rage Against God[i],[/i] and it's essentially no more than the 'atheism causes Stalinism' (he, rather sensibly, ignores Hitler given the record of the German churches in 1933-45) claim that conservative christians have been making for the past century.

I'd never seen that, and I'd hazard that the vast and overwhelming majority of humanity hadn't, either.