RGacky3
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1. The same could be said about the early US - that it wasn't a true democracy - since only propertied white males had the right to vote. Jefferson's DOI was the first time, that I know of, where the idea that all men were created equal was proffered, and Jefferson was hardly Christian.
2. If they are found explicitly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, you'd have no problem referencing them? But they aren't in the Judeo-Christian tradition, rather in the philosophical tradition.
3. As I pointed out above, it was Jefferson, a non-Christian, who proposed that all men were created equal. In its soaring language, the DOI was a philosophical tract.
Saying "Judeo-Christian tradition" casts an extremely wide net, for proposals which, imo, would be better described as being within philosophical traditions, because there's no basis for philosophical thought within the Bible. Biblically, the tree of knowledge was the "forbidden fruit".
1. Oh absolutely, but the seeds of Democracy were there, in greek Democracy it wasn't about the equality of man, it was about the polis. Jefferson was not really a hard core CHristian, no, but his Whole worldview was shaped by Christianity, and he drew on European thinkers, whose thought was fundementally Christian.
2. Read Thomas Aquantis, Augustine, and so on, the Philosophical tradition in Europe was historically generally Christian, Kantian ethics (for example) were alwasy grounded in a CHristian worldview.
3. Jefferson did'nt invent that phrase ... and Jefferson drew from Christian tradition and.
IT does cast a wide net.
The "forbidden fruit" was the knowledge of good and evil, i.e. moral independance, which was how theology has historically understood it.