I was recently browsing through Secular Right, to which I was directed from Taki's Magazine, where I linked to from this article (it's not called a web for nothing). As I looked at the bottom of Taki's, the website's list of blogs and sites has been categorized into "Right," "Left," "Libertarian," "International" and "God." Looking under "God", I was surprised the atheist "conservative" Secular Right was not listed there. It is apparently more appropriate to put it under "Right." I disagree, but it's not my website.
Anyway, Heather MacDonald, who's a contributor at Secular Right, and whose strange discourse on morality set off my (mild) anger here, is now at it again.
She writes at this post:
Conservative pundits occasionally imply that other-directed human virtues, such as charity, compassion, and mercy, came on the scene only thanks to Christianity. No one has ever shown hospitality to a stranger or helped survivors of an earthquake in other cultures, it would seem.This is a vindictive piece of writing. I have never seen conservative writers imply this. In fact, many write about zakat or charity, one of the five pillars of Islam, with respect.
But, never mind that. For an esteemed journalist, who is a contributing editor at City Journal and is also a Manhattan Institute felow, this is a shoddy piece of writing.
She is saying that the moral codes that Christians adhere to started at the inception of Christianity, which is a mere 2,000 ago. So according to Christianity, there was no charity before that at all, period. Of course this is absurd. It is the whole Bible that Christians look to for moral codes, and not just the New and much more recent Testament. And since we say that the Bible starts from the beginning of time, then that is when our moral codes started. So yes, there was no "other-directed human virtues" before that, because there was no world before that.
Either MacDonald is so negative about Christianity that she cannot think straight, or she is willing to say anything that comes to her head to discredit the Christians and Christianity that she apparently hates so much.
