Talking about another conflict in the world does not clarify the conflict SPECIFICALLY in question. If you (and Telemark and thelurkinghorror) are all too stupid to talk about one issue without making comparison, then you really shouldn’t hijack a thread with your opinions. Sure, comparisons COULD be made, as comparing to gay marriage to polygamy COULD be made, but it’s a worthless hijack that makes the thread useless especially pertaining to the question.
So yeah, I can ORDER people where to go. They can also choose not to listen and carry on with their weak points.
I also can choose to bid you a fuckin’ adieu too. And I will. So fuck you.
Analogies are a valid method of answering your question, stupid as said question was. And OPs have no power over their threads, if you want that, get a blog.
Or to put it in terms you might understand:
Tom was right and you were wrong.
I would think that a charter member would understand the difference between a forum and a blog. Even in GQ, the OP doesn’t have control of the discussion.
Which says a lot about the rise of the blog format.
Second: this atheist did learn something from the comparison to Northern Ireland. That’s another struggle I’ve thought of in religious terms (I am admittedly not very knowledgeable about either war), and Tom’s point about no fights over transubstantiation made me realize that there’s a definitional aspect to the question. Namely: what, exactly, is a religious war?
I can see a few possibilities.
A religious war may be a war in which people are killing one another over matters of religious doctrine. The European Wars of Religion qualify.
A religious war may be a war in which religious leaders exhort the faithful to go forth and spread their religion or accomplish another goal. The Crusades qualify.
A religious war may be a war in which members of different religions kill each other over issues that may or may not be explicitly religious–but each faction in the war primarily belongs to one of the different religions. I think the Palestine/Israel conflict qualifies.
The comparison to Northern Ireland helped make these comparisons clear.
Naah, I don’t think this fits - “religious” is a qualifier of “war”, not “combatants”, if the cause of the war is in the main unrelated to religion, it’s not a religious war. The Jewish rebellions against the Romans, for instance, weren’t religious wars even though one side were the very type specimen of religious zealots.
As a point of clarification, I will use my Mad Mod Powers to reply to this closed thread:
Regardless of the values (or lack of values) of any arguments, Original Posters do not own threads and have no authority to order other posters to refrain from posting or to post only in particular ways. (If it a serious issue of hijacking, one may Report the offending posts and ask a Moderator to take steps to control the hijack.)
Demands that a poster go elsewhere (accompanied by claims of threadshitting) are not appropriate, hence the Mod Note.