In most Western countries, if a person is convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but goes insane between the moment of sentencing and the moment of execution, he is kept alive until he regains his sanity and only then is he executed. The reason for this unusual proviso is entirely theological: Only if the man is sane can he make a good confession, receive forgiveness for his sins, and hope to save his soul. Cases like this have led legal scholar Harold Berman to observe that modern Western legal systems “are a secular residue of religious attitudes and assumptions which historically found expression first in the liturgy and rituals and doctrine of the church and thereafter in the institutions and concepts and values of the law. When these historical roots are not understood, many parts of the law appear to lack any underlying source of validity.”‘

Professor Berman’s scholarly work, particularly his magisterial Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, has documented the influence of the Church on the development of Western law. “Western concepts of law,” he argues, “are in their origins, and therefore in their nature, intimately bound up with distinctively Western theological and liturgical concepts of the atonement and of the sacraments.”

It’s probably too big a subject to neatly encapsulate, but here are some other snippets –

The twelfth century began to change all that. The key treatise of canon law was the work of the monk Gratian, called A Concordance of Discordant Canons (also known as the Decretum Gratiani, or simply the Decretum), written around 1140. It is an enormous work, both in size and scope. It also constituted a historic milestone. According to Berman, it was “the first comprehensive and systematic legal treatise in the history of the West, and perhaps in the history of mankind if by `comprehensive’ is meant the attempt to embrace virtually the entire law of a given polity, and if by `systematic’ is meant the express effort to present that law as a single body, in which all the parts are viewed as interacting to form a whole.”

” In a world in which custom rather than statutory law ruled so much of both the ecclesiastical and secular domains, Gratian and other canonists developed criteria, based on reason and conscience, for determining the validity of given customs, and held up the idea of a pre-political natural law to which any legitimate custom had to conform. Scholars of Church law showed the barbarized West how to take a patchwork of custom, statutory law, and countless other sources, and produce from them a coherent legal order whose structure was internally consistent and in which previously existing contradictions were synthesized or otherwise resolved.

Law is one of the important areas of Western civilization in which we are deeply indebted to the ancient Romans. But where the Church did not innovate she restored-a contribution often equally important-and her own canon law, with its rules of evidence and rational procedures, recalled the best of the Roman legal order in a milieu in which innocence and guilt were determined all too often by means of superstition.

The canon law of marriage held that a valid marriage required the free consent of both the man and the woman, and that a marriage could be held invalid if it took place under duress or if one of the parties entered into the marriage on the basis of a mistake regarding either the identity or some important quality of the other person. “Here,” writes Berman, “were the foundations not only of the modern law of marriage but also of certain basic elements of modern contract law, namely, the concept of free will and related concepts of mistake, duress, and fraud.”‘ And by implementing these crucial principles in law, Catholic jurists were at last able to overcome the common practice of infant marriage that owed its origins to barbarian custom.8 Barbarian practice thus gave way to Catholic principle.

Through the codification and promulgation of a systematic body of law, the salutary principles of Catholic belief were able to make their way into the daily practices of European peoples who had adopted Catholicism but who had all too often failed to draw out all its implications. These principles remain central to the modern legal orders under which Westerners, and more and more non-Westerners, continue to live.

Thomas E. Woods. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Kindle Locations 1878-1886). Kindle Edition.

That should be enough to get you started.

Today Greek Constantinople is Turkish Istanbul.One of the greatest Christian buildings of the ancient world, Hagia Sophia, became a mosque and 70 million Turks are awaiting membership of the EU.

It is immoral to surrender to invasion.

Christianity bypasses moral relativism by allowing us to position ourselves within the context of a divine personality who represents absolute righteousness.

Christianity promotes relativism surely. One only needs to look at the debate over usury, slavery, alcohol or homosexuality, to name some of the most well known examples, to realise that different christian groups have, and have had, different opinions on what their God thinks. By trying to base their morality on a book which contradicts itself, and which had been extensively modified by scribes moreover, they remove any need to think deeply about the moral issues involved and instead reduce their debates to surface scraps over what this or that passage might mean.

If only a minority support imposing a religious morality on others through law – then there is no moral majority and the term is meaningless. There is often a religious moral minority that tries to maintain or establish a law imposing their morality on others.

The fact is in a democracy a majority decides the law. Labelling the majority as moral or immoral based is something people do but means nothing. What is the term for those who try to impose their morality on others and if they fail they see it as others trying to impose an immoral majority point of view on them?

If you are claiming that morality is only defined by the Gods of our religions well –

1. If one wishes to claim there is knowledge of God by reading a book, and define morality based on what the book said, there are others who read different books saying what God said too.

2. If it was moral to kill off Canaanites man women and child, is it moral to kill off Palestinians man woman and child?

3. Is it moral of jihad to involve righteous martyrdom in the cause of killing of others who are unarmed?

PS (as to 2 and 3) it was not, and it is not. And no I do not need a book claiming to be the word of God to say that. Nor were the Crusades moral because the Pope of the time supported them (Jews and Moslems in Jerusalem were massacred by Christians).

PS 2 – I will not swear on bibles, because it is not a true account and because the bible says not to swear an outh. No wonder we get politicians that lie.

Many of the laws we have are based on Biblical principles from way back.

Such as?

We can only guess and speculate using our own reasoning as to what constitutes a moral or immoral act. Christianity bypasses moral relativism by allowing us to position ourselves within the context of a divine personality who represents absolute righteousness.

If there is no God, then no man is in a position to force his opinion of morality upon another. One man’s subjective view of morality is equal to another man’s equally subjective view of morality. Thus, there is no reason to believe in any morality just because another man tells you that it is good.

It would take an authority that was above having only a subjective view of morality to legislate that morality. God’s view of morality is objective, not subjective.

When we throw a person in jail because he has robbed a house, he is being imprisoned because of another man’s opinion that stealing is wrong. Once again, the opinion in question concerns a subjective reality and is, therefore, purely subjective and a matter of preference. Our entire justice system becomes illusory. In order for our justice system to have credibility, it has to be based on an authority that exceeds the mere opinion of men. But with a God who establishes morality as an objective reality, we are no longer dealing with the opinions of man’s preference, but the opinions of men concerning God’s preference.

That’s why we get people to swear on a Bible when they testify in court, or (in the USA at least) are sworn in as president. It is supposed to be the upholding of the principles and laws of God in the Bible. Many of the laws we have are based on Biblical principles from way back.

Government law is a relative (majority) matter, it is thus a social construct.

Life may begin at conception but that doesn’t imply that person-hood does. A zygote doesn’t always develop into a person. Sometimes it may develop into two, or only half, or it may develop into a tumorous mass rather than an embryo.

Each individuals body parts share the **same** genetic code.

Nope. The genetic code varies. Different cells in your body mah differ genetically. This is now well established.

An unborn child has a unique genetic code distinct from the cells of the mother or the father. ot the case. Every cell of even an embryo is genetically distinct from every cell in its mother’s body.

What does genetic uniqueness have to do this with this?

….”I thought you had to have the child to get the dpb…”…..

Don’t go confusing the religious & bewildered with facts…..it’s all about morals….and God.

And incidentally a major contributor to the DPB which costs we taxpayers millions of dollars every year.

Run that by me again??

I thought you had to have the child to get the dpb…

I saw her a month later when she requested counselling. I saw before me the most unhappiest young woman you could ever see. She was miserable, incredibly stressed and was hearing voices.
I was able to pray for her and lead her to Jesus. The transformation in her was amazing! Saw her at church on Christmas day. A totally different girl, a smile on her face and light in her eyes. God is good.

Females are a funny breed though. You’ll get one dominant one and all of sudden you’ll have funny memes going around like; (it’s just a collection of cells.)
It’s all gone too far in some respects. At the moment it’s left to the conscience of the woman and whichever hairy legged feminist has influenced the media over the heinous male and how poor widdle women shouldn;t be made to feel bad. We’re women. We were born to feel bad. that’s why we take it out on males. Have an abortion, don’t have an abortion but it’s cheapening the value of human life to say it’s just a collection of cells or to try and shut down debate with hairy leg tactics.

A fallacy.
As Fulton Sheen said in 1953 –

“Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.”

I’ve used this example before, but what if Hitler had won the war and imposed his own Aryan brand of morality on the whole world? That blacks and Jews should be killed and only blonde, blue-eyed children left to survive etc? And that initially the world protested, but those who disagreed were killed or jailed and that eventually the whole world subscribed to his brand of morality. Would you say this was Moral? Would you be OK with that? As long as you were following what the whole crowd believed it would be OK?

Or what about when slavery was still legal? You would have been OK to follow along with that too, because you went along with the majority.

If morality is relative, then morality can only be a subject reality. In other words, morality is reduced to opinion. When we legislate any morality, we are actually forcing other people to live by our opinions. Majority rule is an ad populum fallacy; so is rule by force, because might does not make right.

There is a 43-year-old woman, born in Texas, who should be dead right now. In fact, she should have never been born. Forty years ago, the Supreme Court decided that the Texas law that prevented Jane Roe from ending the life of her unborn daughter was unconstitutional. But by the time the Supreme Court issued its decision in 1973, she had already been born and adopted by a family—likely not knowing that all that ink spilled in Roe v. Wade was about her.

Norma McCorvey is “Jane Roe.” She claimed then that her pregnancy was the result of a rape, although for over a decade now she has been outspokenly pro-life and publicly admitted that this, and virtually every fact on which her case was built, was a lie. Both McCorvey and Sandra Cano, the Doe of Doe v. Bolton—Roe’s companion case from Georgia decided the same day—are now outspoken pro-life advocates who have sworn that their cases are built on lies.

http://www.lifenews.com/2013/01/28/jane-roe-of-roe-v-wade-never-had-an-abortion-her-daughter-is-43/

Not at all surprised….

In the story, these pre-teens are afraid when the white truck drives around (like a dog-catcher truck) in case their parents don’t want them. The child becomes a person after 13 because it is capable of algebra. Before that it has no soul.

Here are some choice quotes –

Congress had inaugurated a simple test to determine the approximate age at
which the soul entered the body: the ability to formulate higher math like
algebra. Up to then, it was only body, animal instincts and body, animal
reflexes and responses to stimuli. Like Pavlov’s dogs when they saw a little
water seep in under the door of the Leningrad laboratory; they “knew” but
were not human.

[...]

Why is it, he wondered, that the more helpless a creature, the easier it was
for some people to snuff it? Like a baby in the womb; the original abortions,
“pre-partums,” or “pre-persons” they were called now. How could they
defend themselves? Who would speak for them? All those lives, a hundred
by each doctor a day. . . and all helpless and silent and then just dead. The
fuckers, he thought. That’s why they do it; they know they can do it; they get
off on their macho power. And so a little thing that wanted to see the light of
day is vacuumed out in less than two minutes. And the doctor goes on to the
next chick.

[...]

Tim’s father Ed Gantro said, “You are insane. This postpartum abortion
scheme and the abortion laws before it where the unborn child had no legal
rights — it was removed like a tumor. Look what it’s come to. If an unborn
child can be killed without due process, why not a born one? What I see in
common in both cases is their helplessness; the organism that is killed had
no chance, no ability, to protect itself.

[...]

“Listen, Walt, let me lay something on you.” He took a big, long drink of
Scotch and milk. “The name of all this is, kill me. Kill them when they’re the
size of a fingernail, or a baseball, or later on, if you haven’t done it already,
suck the air out of the lungs of a ten-year-old boy and let him die. It’s a
certain kind of woman advocating this all. They used to call them ‘castrating
females.’ Maybe that was once the right term, except that these women,
these hard cold women, didn’t just want to — well, they want to do in the
whole boy or man, make all of them dead, not just the part that makes him a
man.

“It’s not just a hatred for the helpless,” Ian Best said. “More is involved.
Hatred of what? Of everything that grows?” You blight them, he thought,
before they grow big enough to have muscle and the tactics and skill for
fight — big like I am in relation to you, with my fully developed musculature
and weight. So much easier when the other person — I should say pre-person
– is floating and dreaming in the amniotic fluid and knows nothing about
how to nor the need to hit back.

Where did the motherly virtues go to? he asked himself. When mothers
especially protected what was small and weak and defenseless?
Our competitive society, he decided. The survival of the strong. Not the fit,
he thought; just those who hold the power. And are not going to surrender it
to the next generation: it is the powerful and evil old against the helpless and
gentle new.

[...]

The whole mistake of the pro-abortion people from the start, he said to
himself, was the arbitrary line they drew. An embryo is not entitled to
American Constitutional rights and can be killed, legally, by a doctor. But a
fetus was a “person,” with rights, at least for a while; and then the proabortion
crowd decided that even a seven-month fetus was not “human” and
could be killed, legally, by a licensed doctor. And, one day, a newborn baby -
- it is a vegetable; it can’t focus its eyes, it understands nothing, nor talks. . .
the pro-abortion lobby argued in court, and won, with their contention that a
newborn baby was only a fetus expelled by accident or organic processes
from the womb. But, even then, where was the line to be drawn finally?
When the baby smiled its first smile? When it spoke its first word or reached
for its initial time for a toy it enjoyed? The legal line was relentlessly
pushed back and back. And now the most savage and arbitrary definition of
all: when it could perform “higher math.”

The whole story is available to read online in various places if you Google it.

It’s exactly my point that it is absurd to pinpoint the time in which a embryo becomes a human being. We do know that a newborn certainly is a baby – but if we regress through earlier developing stages there is no obvious jumping off point. That is why reason and science inform us that life begins at conception.

Nonsense. It is exactly science and reason that informs us that such a view is purely an ideological stance.

The fact that you cannot pinpoint an exact time does not conclude that you have to go to the extremes. By the same point you would have to say you cannot pinpoint when someone becomes an adult therefore it has to be at birth.

Your stance has nothing to do with science and reason, it has more to do with the fact that you have made a conclusion and now are trying to rationalise it.

The fact that human development is continuous and it is not any easy question to answer at which point an abortion is permissible does not conclude that the only answer is at the extremes. In fact such a stance is intellectually lazy and dishonest and more to the point driven purely by ideological than science and reason.