Welcome to the Blogosphere

A new blogger, The Prickly Pear, poses a very interesting article What Christianity has Wrought, which raises some very interesting points:

Too often, I pick up a newspaper and read a letter to the editor attacking Christianity. Almost always the letter writer incorrectly blames Christianity for slavery, the holocaust, and any other ill the writer can think of. Everyone, it seems, is an expert on what Christianity has done wrong. I have yet to read a letter listing the incredible good Christians have done for the world. I will attempt to list some of the accomplishments of Christians and Christianity here.

Thousands of years before Christianity, men of all races and religions practiced slavery. No one stopped it until Christians created a movement that ended the practice.

The civil rights movement was started by a Christian, a Baptist minister, and the movement’s political vocabulary was religious.

Christians helped facilitate a cease-fire between the Columbian government and a brutal paramilitary group.

For centuries, Christians established hospitals and ran them. The first hospital in England was founded by the Archbishop of Canterbury. By the 1920's, Catholics had founded more than five hundred hospitals in America alone. Christians established havens for the deaf, blind, and mentally ill.

Christians brought about literacy on the American frontier. (The first schools were founded, because their parents wanted them to know how to read the Bible.)

Christians established leper houses and risked their own health to care for the lepers.

In his post Freedom he says: I was a democrat, a liberal, who lived in an area where only left-wing liberals lived. Everything was hunky-dory until I questioned a couple of leftwing viewpoints. By the reaction I received, you'd think I'd committed murder. The responses to my questions were so hostile that after awhile I became afraid to express myself honestly. I realized if I did, I would be ostracized from my associates and friends. Instead I just repeated the usual liberal mantras and kept the peace. I wonder if there are other liberals who do the same thing?

I'm a new Republican now, and the thing that amazes me is that liberals and democrats can disagree with Republicans to their faces, and the Republicans will argue policy with them, sometimes passionately. But they never seem to attack on a personal level. Or behave in a way that makes the liberal shut up. As a Republican, I feel like I have my freedom back. I'd lost it. Not like the people in the Middle East, of course. But in a way, my experience differs only in the matter of degree.

Welcome to the Blogosphere, Prickly Pear