There is nothing appealing about their worldview or their character that is worth emulating.

The very idea of replacing the wonders of our universe with Bronze Age ignorance, the tolerance and progress of our times with the bigotry of centuries ago, and useful debate with dogmatic parrot squawks is such a regression of intellect and human achievement, I wonder why they bother.

Blasphemy against christianity was a crime in England until last year. In Scotland, open atheism carried the death penalty until 1825, and John Gott served 9 months hard labour in England for blasphemy as recently as 1921.

Your reference to James I is bizarre and nonsensical – he explicitly believed that monarchs were a higher kind of being than ordinary people, and published this in ‘The True Law of Free Monarchies’.

Abolition of the slave trade was a widespread movement that certainly did not depend on christianity. The Haitian Revolution was in fact led by a Voodoo priest, and the most vocal European opposition came from Enlightenment thinkers, Diderot, Voltaire and of course Thomas Paine – all of whom were famously critical of christianity.

James Vl of Scotland (& 1st of England) wanted to put the bible in the hands of ordinary folk, so he commissioned the Authorised version which became known as the King James Bible. Less than 200 years later, English monarchs had lost the ‘divine right of kings’ as enjoyed by James himself, and Christian parliamentarians had legislation passed that effectively ended the slave trade. The will of the people in a Christian country had prevailed, not Christian dictators.

In fact, by the time Christianity became a religion (actually a rather bizarre cult of Judaism at that time) in 100 – 200 AD, all vestiges of democracy in Greece and Rome had long-since vanished. Christianity was born in a world of dictatorships.

Christianity out-grew its cult status in the West by being spread through Europe following Emperor Constantine’s conversion in the 4th Century CE. Constantine was, of course, a dictator (the word Emperor gives it away…) and certainly no lover of democracy.

So no link between democracy and Christianity there, I’m afraid.

The idea that Christianity was responsible for the rise of democracy in Europe is so absurd it is laughable, in the US even more so.

Many of the early Christians were Greek (Luke for eg.). The idea of Democracy began in ancient Greece, and probably spread throughout Europe along with Christianity, though it took quite a while for these ideas to blossom into the Freedom & Democracy that exist in parts of the world today. And yeah, they have only been around for a brief moment, and are under constant threat.

Btw, I never want to see the barmaid, I have a perfect mental picture of her, it gives me the horn.